adventurous holiday, or perhaps a soldier of fortune who
held his life cheaply and was ready to give it for the brief joy of a
battle. Now I stood by one of those little black patches, by the first
still outpost which marked the fight down the road.

Had the horse which I had bought from a dealer in Ellasona been four or
five years younger, I might never have noticed my friend as he lay
there by the ruined shrine. In the ride out from Larissa, on the day
before, I had found the animal a very unsteady framework on which to
load two hundred pounds. At the first gallop I put him to he went down
on his knees and rolled over on me, so that thereafter I had to content
myself with going more cautiously, keeping as close as I could to the
cloud of dust raised by the general staff. So it happened that I was
ambling along at a gait regulated only by my beast's vagrant will, when
Asaf's exclamation checked me.

I stood now, gazing stupidly at the figure beneath me. He lay so still
that I thought him dead. Then his fingers tightened on the water-flask
and his arm trembled as he tried to draw it to him.

This was no time to stand idly by, wondering how and why he had come to
this useless sacrifice. It was enough that he was here and living. I
knelt at his side, and though my surgery was rough, it stopped the flow
in which his life was draining away; his parched lips drank the
proffered water, and when his head was on my knees he turned his face
from the light and clasped his hands almost with contentment. He
seemed to know that a friend was with him. The friend who had bound
his wound and given him drink would find him a better bed than these
rough stones and a kinder shelter than this bit of shadow, swept by the
dust of endless pack-trains.

In such a place a friend could avail little. We carried him back from
the turmoil of the road into the trampled wheat and there made him a
rude tent of my blanket and a pillow of my saddle. Then I looked about
me for help. The pack-trains clattered along the road and through them
wounded men were threading their way, painfully hobbling to the
field-hospital, miles away. Of ambulances there were none. I knew
that when night came they would stagger back from the fighting front
with their loads of wounded, and that so few were they in numbers the
chance of finding a place in them was of the smallest. The Turk does
not trouble much with the wounded. When a man is hit and he can