a dream. "I should like to see it all."

He leaned on his crutches in the crowd and watched the glitter of the
passing pageant. Now and then he glanced at Marco, who watched also
with a steady eye which, The Rat saw, nothing would escape: How
absorbed he always was in the Game! How impossible it was for him to
forget it or to remember it only as a boy would! Often it seemed that
he was not a boy at all. And the Game, The Rat knew in these days, was
a game no more but a thing of deep and deadly earnest--a thing which
touched kings and thrones, and concerned the ruling and swaying of
great countries. And they--two lads pushed about by the crowd as they
stood and stared at the soldiers--carried with them that which was even
now lighting the Lamp. The blood in The Rat's veins ran quickly and
made him feel hot as he remembered certain thoughts which had forced
themselves into his mind during the past weeks. As his brain had the
trick of "working things out," it had, during the last fortnight at
least, been following a wonderful even if rather fantastic and feverish
fancy. A mere trifle had set it at work, but, its labor once begun,
things which might have once seemed to be trifles appeared so no
longer. When Marco was asleep, The Rat lay awake through thrilled and
sometimes almost breathless midnight hours, looking backward and
recalling every detail of their lives since they had known each other.
Sometimes it seemed to him that almost everything he remembered--the
Game from first to last above all--had pointed to but one thing. And
then again he would all at once feel that he was a fool and had better
keep his head steady. Marco, he knew, had no wild fancies. He had
learned too much and his mind was too well balanced. He did not try to
"work out things." He only thought of what he was under orders to do.

"But," said The Rat more than once in these midnight hours, "if it ever
comes to a draw whether he is to be saved or I am, he is the one that
must come to no harm. Killing can't take long--and his father sent me
with him."

This thought passed through his mind as the tramping feet went by. As
a sudden splendid burst of approaching music broke upon his ear, a
queer look twisted his face. He realized the contrast between this day
and that first morning behind the churchyard, when he had sat on his
platform among the Squad and looked up and saw Marco in the arch at the
end of the passage. And because he