To himself he said--'Now they're blooded I can
give 'em responsible work. It's as well that they got what they did.
'Teach 'em more than half-a-dozen rifle flirtations, that
will--later--run alone and bite. Poor old Colonel, though.'

All that afternoon the heliograph winked and flickered on the hills,
striving to tell the good news to a mountain forty miles away. And in
the evening there arrived, dusty, sweating, and sore, a misguided
Correspondent, who had gone out to assist at a trumpery
village-burning, and who had read off the message from afar, cursing
his luck the while.

'Let's have the details somehow--as full as ever you can, please. It's
the first time I've ever been left this campaign,' said the
Correspondent to the Brigadier; and the Brigadier, nothing loath, told
him how an Army of Communication had been crumpled up, destroyed, and
all but annihilated, by the craft, strategy, wisdom, and foresight of
the Brigadier.

But some say, and among these be the Gurkhas who watched on the
hillside, that that battle was won by Jakin and Lew, whose little
bodies were borne up just in time to fit two gaps at the head of the
big ditch-grave for the dead under the heights of Jagai.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

THE MAN WHO WAS

The Earth gave up her dead that tide,
Into our camp he came,
And said his say, and went his way,
And left our hearts aflame.

Keep tally--on the gun-butt score
The vengeance we must take,
When God shall bring full reckoning,
For our dead comrade's sake.

_Ballad._

Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person
till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only
when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western
peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes a
racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows
which side of his nature is going to turn up next.

Dirkovitch was a Russian--a Russian of the Russians--who appeared to
get his bread by serving the Czar as an officer in a Cossack regiment,
and corresponding for a Russian newspaper with a name that was never
twice alike. He was a handsome young Oriental, fond of wandering
through unexplored portions of the earth, and he arrived in India from
nowhere in particular. At least no living man could ascertain whether
it was by way of Balkh, Badakshan, Chitral, Beluchi