figure dashed up to
him in another yellow overcoat, but unbuttoned and flying behind him.

"Hullo, Barker!" said the draper. "Any of our summer articles? You're
too late. Factory Acts, Barker. Humanity and progress, my boy."

"Oh, don't chatter," cried Barker, stamping. "We've been beaten."

"Beaten--by what?" asked Buck, mystified.

"By Wayne."

Buck looked at Barker's fierce white face for the first time, as it
gleamed in the lamplight.

"Come and have a drink," he said.

They adjourned to a cushioned and glaring buffet, and Buck established
himself slowly and lazily in a seat, and pulled out his cigar-case.

"Have a smoke," he said.

Barker was still standing, and on the fret, but after a moment's
hesitation, he sat down as if he might spring up again the next
minute. They ordered drinks in silence.

"How did it happen?" asked Buck, turning his big bold eyes on him.

"How the devil do I know?" cried Barker. "It happened like--like a
dream. How can two hundred men beat six hundred? How can they?"

"Well," said Buck, coolly, "how did they? You ought to know."

"I don't know; I can't describe," said the other, drumming on the
table. "It seemed like this. We were six hundred, and marched with
those damned poleaxes of Auberon's--the only weapons we've got. We
marched two abreast. We went up Holland Walk, between the high palings
which seemed to me to go straight as an arrow for Pump Street. I was
near the tail of the line, and it was a long one. When the end of it
was still between the high palings, the head of the line was already
crossing Holland Park Avenue. Then the head plunged into the
network of narrow streets on the other side, and the tail and myself
came out on the great crossing. When we also had reached the northern
side and turned up a small street that points, crookedly as it were,
towards Pump Street, the whole thing felt different. The streets
dodged and bent so much that the head of our line seemed lost
altogether: it might as well have been in North America. And all this
time we hadn't seen a soul."

[Illustration: Map of the SEAT of WAR.]

Buck, who was idly dabbing the ash of his cigar on the ash-tray, began
to move it deliberately over the table, making feathery grey lines, a
kind of map.

"But though the little streets were all deserted (which got a trifle
on my nerves), as we got deeper and deeper into them, a thing began to
happen that I couldn't understand. Sometimes a long way