reat--incidentally--Doggie wondered. Never, for a
fraction of a second, during their common military association, had
Ballinghall given him to understand that he regarded him otherwise
than as a mere Tommy without any pretensions to gentility. There had
been times when Ballinghall had cursed him--perhaps justifiably and
perhaps lovingly--as though he had been the scum of the earth. Doggie
would no more have dared address him in terms of familiarity than he
would have dared slap the Brigadier-General on the back. And now the
honest warrior sought Doggie's patronage. Of the original crowd in
England who had transformed Doggie's military existence by making him
penny-whistler to the company, only Phineas and himself were left.
There were others, of course, good and gallant fellows, with whom he
became bound in the rough intimacy of the army; but the first friends,
those under whose protecting kindliness his manhood had developed,
were the dearest. And their ghosts remained dear.

At last the division was moved up and there was more fighting.

One day, after a successful raid, Doggie tumbled back with the rest of
the men into the trench and, looking about, missed Phineas. Presently
the word went round that "Mac" had been hit, and later the rumour was
confirmed by the passage down the trench of Phineas on a stretcher,
his weather-battered face a ghastly ivory.

"I'm alive all right, laddie," he gasped, contorting his lips into a
smile. "I've got it clean through the chest like a gentleman. But it
gars me greet I canna look after you any longer."

He made an attempt at waving a hand, and the stretcher-bearers carried
him away out of the army for ever.

Thereafter Doggie felt the loneliest thing on earth, like Wordsworth's
cloud, or the Last Man in Tom Hood's grim poem. For was he not the
last man of the original company, as he had joined it, hundreds of
years ago, in England? It was only then that he realized fully the
merits of the wastrel Phineas McPhail. Not once or twice, but a
thousand times had the man's vigilant affection, veiled under cynical
humour, saved him from despair. Not once but a thousand times had the
gaunt, tireless Scotchman saved him from physical exhaustion. At every
turn of his career, since his enlistment, Phineas had been there,
watchful, helpful, devoted. There he had been, always ready and
willing to be cursed. To curse him had been the great comfort of
Doggie's life. Whom could he curse now? N