the world like one o' those
open sheep you see outside a butcher's shop. He was ripped up from
stomach to throat. The sight knocked all the fight out of the other
spalpeens, and they took to their heels as hard as they could run.
I took the dead man's knife away, and the sergeant sold me his for a few
rupees, so there they are. Not much to make a story of, but it was
intheresting to see. I'd have bet five to three on the chief."

"Bad discipline, very bad," Baumser remarked. "To break the ranks and
run mit knives would make my old Unter-offizier Kritzer very mad
indeed." The German had served his time in the Prussian Army, and was
still mindful of his training.

"Your stiff-backed Pickelhaubes would have had a poor chance in the
passes," answered the major. "It was ivery man for himself there.
You might lie, or stand, or do what you liked as long as you didn't run.
Discipline goes to pieces in a war of that sort."

"Dat is what you call gorilla warfare," said Von Baumser, with a proud
consciousness of having mastered an English idiom. "For all dat,
discipline is a very fine thing--very good indeed. I vell remember in
the great krieg--the war with Austria--we had made a mine and were about
to fire it. A sentry had been placed just over this, and after the
match was lit it was forgotten to withdraw the man. He knew well that
the powder beneath him would presently him into the air lift, but since
he had not been dismissed in right form he remained until the ausbruch
had exploded. He was never seen no more, and, indeed, dat he had ever
been dere might well have been forgotten, had it not been dat his
nadelgewehr was dere found. Dat was a proper soldier, I think, to be
placed in command had he lived."

"To be placed in a lunatic asylum if he lived," said the Irishman
testily. "Hullo, what's this?"

The "this" was the appearance of the boarding-house slavey with a very
neat pink envelope upon a tray, addressed, in the most elegant of female
hands, to "Major Tobias Clutterbuck, late of Her Majesty's Hundred and
Nineteenth."

"Ah!" cried Von Baumser, laughing in his red beard, "it is from a woman.
You are what the English call a sly hog, a very sly hog--or, I should
say, dog, though it is much the same."

"It's for you as well as for me. See here. 'Mrs. Lavinia Scully
presints her compliments to Major Tobias Clutterbuck and to his friend,
Mr. Sigismund von Baumser, and trusts that they may be able to fav