uch precious long odds over the others."

"All the more reason why we should do our level best to pull the
backward ones up to us," answered the American.

The words struck into the ears of Dol--that youngster listening with a
soberness of attention seldom seen in his flash-light eyes.

A few years afterwards, when Neal Farrar was a newly blown lieutenant in
his Queen's Twelfth Lancers, as full of heroic impulses and enthusiasms
as a modern young officer may be,--while his half-fledged ambitions were
hanging on the chances of active service, and the golden, remote
possibility of his one day being a V.C.,--there was a peaceful honor
which clung to him unsought.

During his first year of army life, he became the paragon of every poor
private and raw recruit struggling with the miseries of goose-step, with
whom he came even into momentary contact. For sometimes through a word
or act, sometimes through a flash of the eye, or a look about the mouth,
during the brief interchange of a military salute, these "backward ones"
saw that the progressive young officer looked on them, not as
men-machines, but as brothers, as important in the great schemes of the
nation and the world as he was himself; that he was proud to serve with
them, and would be prouder still to help them if he could.

It was an understanding which inspired many a tempted or newly joined
fellow to drill himself morally as his sergeant drilled him physically,
with a determination to become as fine a soldier and forward a man as
his paragon.

But only one American friend of Lieutenant Farrar's, who has let out the
secret to the writer, knows that the binding truth of human brotherhood
was first born into him when, on Katahdin's side, he helped to bury a
thieving half-Indian.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"KEEPING THINGS EVEN."

"Now, you musn't be moping, boys, because of this day's work that you
took a hand in, and that wasn't in your play-bill when you come to these
woods. We'll have to try and even things up to-morrow with some big
sport. You look kind o' wilted."

So said Herb when the tired party were half-way back to camp, doing the
descent of the mountain in a silence clouded by the scene which they had
been through.

The woodsman seemed troubled with a rasping in his throat. He cleared it
twice and spat before he could open a passage for a decently cheerful
voice in which to suggest a rise of spirits. But Herb was too faithful
a guide to bear the t