o rest in the locks of sunshiny hair which straggled
out from beneath her crisp white cap.

"Cooee!" he said huskily, as he took her hand. Then, for the first
time in all those terrible hours since the battle, his lips had
quivered, and two big, boyish tears had rolled out across his
cheeks.

Already the fight seemed to him to be months old. From the first, it
had been the Captain's wish that Weldon should go with him to the
hospital, and Weldon would have allowed no other man to go in his
place. Wounded and weak from loss of blood, nevertheless he forgot
his own weakness as he saw the leg, shattered by two bullets,
explosive bullets such as are denied to warfare of any but barbarous
nations. Young though he was, Weldon had seen many a man wounded
before now. He was not slow to realize the nature of the
alternatives which lay before the man who was at once his hero and
his friend. Mercifully, he had as yet no knowledge how soon the one
alternative must be taken from him.

The case was too grave a one for the surgeons of the field hospital.
In after years, that ambulance journey into Kroonstad seemed branded
upon Weldon's memory: the baking heat of the February sun, the
interminable miles of dusty road stretching away between other
interminable miles of grassy veldt, scarred and seamed here and
there with ridges of naked rock. And at last the ambulance had
jogged into Kroonstad, only to find that no help lay in the hospital
there, that the journey must be dragged onward through a night ride
to Johannesburg.

If the jolting, crawling ambulance had been bad, the jarring train
was infinitely worse. The Captain made no complaints; he was
grateful for every slight attention; he even forced himself to joke
a little now and then. Nevertheless, Weldon, sitting beside him and
occasionally laying his own fingers across the steady hand on the
blanket, was maddened by the noise of the engine, by the ceaseless
thud, thud as the wheels took every new rail, by the roar, and the
rush, and the dust which filtered in upon them. There was nothing he
could do. He merely sat there beside his friend, and thought.
Occasionally, he thought of Ethel; but, for the most part, his mind
was on the man before him, the man whose active career all at once
had been cut in two. Now and then he thought of the one who had
chosen to fire those bullets, taboo of all but the most brutal
warfare. At such times, he rose and fell to pacing restlessly up an