ame up, still fondling his trophy
and dilating on its splendor. Then he smiled again and again as
he moved behind him to and fro on the deck, watching him in the
pitiless firing. He smiled moreover when he moved up to the gun;
he was revising the gunlayer's work now and then, so far as I
could make out his movements. He smiled afterwards when the
Intelligence Officer made such sanguine estimates of the
slaughter we had dealt out to forts and trenches. They were
talking together, he and his comrade of the Maxim gun, discussing
whether the bag was really a big one, the former as glib with the
pros as the latter was with the cons. The tall listener smiled
rather wistfully as he heard them. After the last round from the
six-pounder had been fired, before we went to lunch, he came up
and said farewell to me. 'But I shall see you again on board,
shan't I?' I asked. 'We shan't put you off at the Bay till nearly
sunset, shall we?' 'I may be getting off long before then,' he
said, but he did not explain how. My prayer book had fallen on
the deck, and he picked it up and gave it to me. 'Mind you keep
to your own line,' he said. 'I like that prayer in your prayer
book about Saint Michael. Doubtless he's covered not a few
people's heads in this day of battle, not all of them on the one
side. It's likely enough he has unearthly notions about war, as
he's an unearthly being. Perhaps the dragon he makes war on, war
to the death, is neither England nor Germany, but just the
scrapping between them.'

'What do you mean?' I asked, rather puzzled. Yet he only smiled,
he was not very explicit.

'Oh, by the way,' he said. 'They tell me you've promised to build
a mission church to Saint Michael if you get back to the south
safe and sound.' I wondered afterwards who they were that had
told him.

'Yes, I said, 'and if I don't, the building of it's endowed in my
will.'

'Why not take the shell-cases,' he said, 'if they offer you some?
You needn't use them in your church as altar-vases. They'd
make a splendid trophy under Saint Michael's feet, a gleaming,
sleek-barreled serpent of slaughter, just the sort of dragon for
him to tread, and delight in treading. Good-bye.'

He was gone amongst the sailors, just as the steward called me up
to the cold soup. I saw no more of him on the voyage, nor have I
seen him since that September day. The one or two I asked about
him seemed not to know whom I meant. I have often wondered who he
was since t