e he expected it. He had a right to count upon
pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin,
"because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily
meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."

"Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?" Mild
astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and
the other sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that
the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.

"I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the dull voice
heavily, "by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He
suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his
bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had
started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and
brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah."

The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line
marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive
nausea as he says:

"You--you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?"

"Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered
aloud. "And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!"

"And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief
and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and
the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through the
town, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron
gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer
"Certainly, War."

"Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen
professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other
Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been
dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and
lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a
touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.

"I am perfectly well. It was--the way in which you spoke just now that
rather--rather----"

"Revolted you, eh?" says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile.
"Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be
one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice,
don't you? Prove to a man that there is something