ed a group of five. The
chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped
and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.

"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a
cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't
take the odds you're not as bad?"

"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a
look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted
from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the
champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels
before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning.
Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from
Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier
tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up
to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth
having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"

"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a
cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved
passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a
moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin'
North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for--you
know what!"

Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must
be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance--demure as my
grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call
themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses
and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud,
or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw
material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in
among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women
say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel,
masquerading in Service kit.

Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his
dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude
regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his
darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical
Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident
Surgeon talked eag