.

Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes protruding
through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth grinned, revealed by the
livid, drawn-back lips, and how she knew him again in such a orful styte
she couldn't tell you--not if you offered her pounds and pounds to say----

She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted with the
stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the look of a young
woman who had risen above herself into the keen and piercing atmosphere of
High Tragedy.

"Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin throat swelled visibly
before the scream came: "'Cos 'e belongs to me! 'Ain't that enough?
Then--I belongs to 'im! Dead or livin'--oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!"

The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not
heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of
semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare. _Had been_, one was tempted
to say, in regard to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to
a sympathetic bystander, "the chap has had a tremendous wipe over the head
with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face
besides. There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his near
nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a
kind o' miracle happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving
of time to carry him straight to the Cemetery."

"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But
Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head
upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly,
dropping on her knees beside it:

"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one
word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore
darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----"

It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and
shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back
from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true
love.

It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids
quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner
flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:

"Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pass?"

"Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to