ulled the lever, a return bullet sheared a piece off
his boot-heel, and painfully jarred his ankle-bone.

No one else was shooting at the big rooinek now. It was understood that
Father Noah had a prior claim. And the old man peered hopefully up to see
the result of his shot, and rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was
standing, voor den donder! standing as he emptied his magazine, and the
bullets sang about Father Noah as viciously as hornets roused to anger by
the stripping of a decayed thatch. The magazine of the repeating-rifle
emptied, Saxham calmly refilled it, causing the puzzled patriarch to waste
many cartridges in wild shooting at that erect, indifferent mark, and
finally to abandon the level-headed caution to which he owed his venerable
years, and climb a tree to obtain a better view of the tactics of the
enemy.

Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air about him. The
battered solar helmet he wore was pierced through the hinder brim, and he
was bleeding from a bullet-graze upon the knuckle of the second finger of
his left hand. Since that Sunday afternoon beside the river, when he
learned the madness of his hope and the hopelessness of his madness, he
had taken risks like this daily, not in the deliberate desire of death,
but as a man consulting Fate negatively.

Father Noah would decide, one way or the other: the issue of their
protracted duel should determine things for Saxham. If he sent the old man
in, then there was Hope, if the superannuated, short-stocked Martini, with
that steady old finger on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at the
backsight, ended by accounting for Saxham, then there would be an end to
this burning torment for ever. Strangely, he did not believe that he could
be killed by any other hand than Father Noah's. Doubtless the long
overstrain was telling upon him mentally, though physically the man seemed
of wrought steel.

"To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day----"

As the thought passed through his mind, and he brought the sights into
line with the mark, a scrap of white, fluttering some twenty inches lower
down, caught his eye. He dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight to
the bottom of the backsight's V, and knew, almost before the shot rang
out, and an ownerless Martini tumbled out of the tree-crotch, that Fate
had decided for Saxham.

Then he went back to the Hospital, grim-jawed and inscrutable as ever. A
dirty white rag was being hoiste