woman who had come through the zone of fire was Al'mah. She had no
right to be where she was. As a nurse her place was not the
battle-field; but she had had a premonition of Stafford's tragedy, and
in the night had concealed herself in the blankets of an ambulance and
had been carried across the veld to that outer circle of battle where
wait those who gather up the wreckage, who provide the salvage of war.
When she was discovered there was no other course but to allow her to
remain; and so it was that as the battle moved on she made her way to
where the wounded and dead lay.

A sorely wounded officer, able with the help of a slightly injured
gunner to get out of the furnace of fire, had brought word of
Stafford's death but with the instinct of those to whom there come
whisperings, visions of things, Al'mah felt she must go and find the
man with whose fate, in a way, her own had been linked; who, like
herself, had been a derelict upon the sea of life; the grip of whose
hand, the look of whose eyes the last time she saw him, told her that
as a brother loves so he loved her.

Hundreds saw the two make their way across the veld, across the
lead-swept plain; but such things in the hour of battle are
commonplaces; they are taken as part of the awful game. Neither mauser
nor shrapnel nor maxim brought them down as they made their way to the
abandoned gun beside which Stafford lay. Yet only one reached
Stafford's side, where he was stretched among his dead comrades. The
surgeon stayed his course at three-quarters of the distance to care for
a gunner whose mutilations were robbed of half their horror by a
courage and a humour which brought quick tears to Al'mah's eyes. With
both legs gone the stricken fellow asked first for a match to light his
cutty pipe and then remarked: "The saint's own luck that there it was
with the stem unbroke to give me aise whin I wanted it!

"Shure, I thought I was dead," he added as the surgeon stooped over
him, "till I waked up and give meself the lie, and got a grip o' me
pipe, glory be!"

With great difficulty Al'mah dragged Stafford under the horseless gun,
left behind when the battery moved on. Both forces had thought that
nothing could live in that gray-brown veld, and no effort at first was
made to rescue or take it. By every law of probability Al'mah and the
young surgeon ought to be lying dead with the others who had died, some
with as many as twenty bullet wounds in their bodies, while