aith and patience, knew the woman he loved had
broken with him and put him out of her life. Appalled at this
calamity, he proceeded to get drunk in earnest.

The night was very hot and the humidity very heavy, and at Las Palmas
inside the bungalow that served as a police-station the lamps on either
side of the lieutenant's desk burned like tiny furnaces. Between them,
panting in the moist heat and with the sweat from his forehead and hand
dripping upon an otherwise immaculate report, sat Standish. Two weeks
before, the chief had made him one of his six lieutenants. With the
force the promotion had been most popular.

Since his promotion Standish had been in charge of the police-station
at Las Palmas and daily had seen Aintree as, on his way down the hill
from the barracks to the railroad, the hero of Batangas passed the door
of the station-house. Also, on the morning Aintree had jumped his
horse over the embankment, Standish had seen him carried up the hill on
a stretcher. At the sight the lieutenant of police had taken from his
pocket a notebook, and on a flyleaf made a cross. On the flyleaf were
many other dates and opposite each a cross. It was Aintree's record
and as the number of black crosses grew, the greater had grown the
resentment of Standish, the more greatly it had increased his anger
against the man who had put this affront upon the army, the greater
became his desire to punish.

In police circles the night had been quiet, the cells in the yard were
empty, the telephone at his elbow had remained silent, and Standish,
alone in the station-house, had employed himself in cramming "Moss's
Manual for Subalterns." He found it a fascinating exercise. The hope
that soon he might himself be a subaltern always burned brightly, and
to be prepared seemed to make the coming of that day more certain. It
was ten o'clock and Las Palmas lay sunk in slumber, and after the down
train which was now due had passed, there was nothing likely to disturb
her slumber until at sunrise the great army of dirt-diggers with
shrieks of whistles, with roars of dynamite, with the rumbling of
dirt-trains and steam-shovels, again sprang to the attack. Down the
hill, a hundred yards below Standish, the night train halted at the
station, with creakings and groanings continued toward Colon, and again
Las Palmas returned to sleep.

And, then, quickly and viciously, like the crack of a mule-whip, came
the reports of a pistol; and