ney with
you to England?"

"Between six and seven thousand pounds."

"And if it's a fair question--how much of it have you got left?"

Thorpe had some momentary doubts as to whether this was a fair question,
but he smothered them under the smile with which he felt impelled to
answer the twinkle in Plowden's eyes. "Oh, less than a hundred," he
said, and laughed aloud.

Plowden also laughed. "By George, that's fine!" he cried. "It's
splendid. There's drama in it. I felt it was like that, you know.
Something told me it was your last cartridge that rang the bell. It was
that that made me come to you as I did--and tell you that you were
a great man, and that I wanted to enlist under you. Ah, that kind of
courage is so rare! When a man has it, he can stand the world on
its head." "But I was plumb scared, all the while, myself," Thorpe
protested, genially. "Courage? I could feel it running out of my boots."

"Ah, yes, but that's the great thing," insisted the other. "You didn't
look as if you were frightened. From all one could see, your nerve was
sublime. And nothing else matters--it was sublime."

"Curious--that thing happened to me once before," commented Thorpe, with
ruminating slowness. "It was out on the plains, years ago, and I was
in pretty hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north, and
some cowboys held me up, and were going to make kindling wood of me,
they being under the impression that I was a horse-thief they were
looking after. There was five or six minutes there when my life
wasn't worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was the
scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life. And then something
happened to be said that put the matter right--they saw I was the wrong
man--and then--why then they couldn't be polite enough to me. They half
emptied their flasks down my throat, and they rode with me all the way
to the next town, and there they wanted to buy everything liquid in the
place for me. But what I was speaking of--do you know, those fellows got
a tremendous notion of my nerve. It wasn't so much that they told me
so, but they told others about it. They really thought I was game to the
core--when in reality, as I tell you, I was in the deadliest funk you
ever heard of."

"That's just it," said Plowden, "the part of you which was engaged in
making mental notes of the occasion thought you were frightened; we will
say that it was itself frightened. But the other part of you