hard as iron.

"All my kit ready, Tarry Barrel?" enquired Wilmshurst as he sipped his
tea.

"All ready, sah; Sergeant Bela Moshi him lib for tell fatigue party
mighty quick. No need worry, sah."

Dismissing his servant the subaltern "tubbed" and dressed. They start
the day early on the Coast, getting through most of the routine before
nine, since the intense heat of the tropical sun makes strenuous
exertion not only unpleasant but highly dangerous.

But to-day was of a different order. The regiment was to embark at
eight o'clock on board the transport _Zungeru_ for active service in
the vast stretch of country known as "German East," where the Huns with
their well-trained Askaris, or native levies, were putting up a stiff
resistance against the Imperial and Colonial troops of the British
Empire.

On his way to the mess Wilmshurst ran up against Barkley, the P.M.O. of
the garrison.

"Hullo there!" exclaimed the doctor. "How goes it? Fit?"

"Absolutely," replied the subaltern.

The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He knew perfectly well
that no officer warned for active service would reply otherwise.

"Buzzing all gone?"

"Practically," replied Wilmshurst.

"All right; stick to five grains of quinine during the whole of the
voyage--and don't be afraid to let me know if you aren't up to the
mark. Suppose you've heard nothing further of your brother?"

Wilmshurst shook his head.

"Not since the letter written just before the war, and that took nearly
twelve months before it reached me. It's just possible that Rupert is
in the thick of it with the Rhodesian crush."

Barkley made no comment. He was an old college chum of Rupert
Wilmshurst, who was fifteen years older than his brother Dudley. The
elder Wilmshurst was a proverbial rolling stone. Almost as soon as he
left Oxford he went abroad and, after long wanderings in the interior
of China, Siberia, and Manchuria, where his adventures merely
stimulated the craving for wandering on the desolate parts of the
earth, he went to the Cape, working his way up country until he made a
temporary settlement on the northern Rhodesian shores of Lake
Tanganyika.

It was thence that he wrote to his brother Dudley, who had just taken
up a Crown appointment on the Coast, mentioning that he had penetrated
into the territory known as German East.

The subaltern remembered the letter almost by heart.

"There'll be trouble out here before very long,"