For in this ultimate moment he at last seemed to have come to his own.  The vulgar little fears, which, like foxes, gnaw at the roots of the heart, had gone, even the greater perils of faint hope and a halting energy.  The half-hearted had become the stout-hearted.  The resistless vigour of the strong and the simple was his.  He stood in the dark gully peering into the night, his muscles stiff from heel to neck.  The weariness of the day had gone:  only the wound in his ear, got the day before, had begun to bleed afresh.  He wiped the blood away with his handkerchief, and laughed at the thought of this little care.  In a few minutes he would be facing death, and now he was staunching a pin-prick.

He wondered idly how soon death would come.  It would be speedy, at least, and final.  And then the glory of the utter loss.  His bones whitening among the stones, the suns of summer beating on them and the winter snowdrifts decently covering them with a white sepulchre.  No man could seek a lordlier burial.  It was the death he had always craved.  From murder, fire, and sudden death, why should we call on the Lord to deliver us?  A broken neck in a hunting-field, a slip on rocky mountains, a wounded animal at bay—­such was the environment of death for which he had ever prayed.  But this—­this was beyond his dreams.

And with it all a great humility fell upon him.  His battles were all unfought.  His life had been careless and gay; and the noble commonplaces of faith and duty had been things of small meaning.  He had lived within the confines of a little aristocracy of birth and wealth and talent, and the great melancholy world scourged by the winds of God had seemed to him but a phrase of rhetoric.  His creeds and his arguments seemed meaningless now in this solemn hour; the truth had been his no more than his crude opponent’s!  Had he his days to live over again he would look on the world with different eyes.  No man any more should call him a dreamer.  It pleased him to think that, half-hearted and sceptical as he had been, a humorist, a laughing philosopher, he was now dying for one of the catchwords of the crowd.  He had returned to the homely paths of the commonplace, and young, unformed, untried, he was caught up by kind fate to the place of the wise and the heroic.

Suddenly on his thoughts there broke in a dull tread of men, a sound of slipping stones and feet upon dry gravel.  He broke into the cold sweat of tense nerves, and waited, half hidden, with his rifle ready.  Then came the light of dull lanterns which showed a thin, endless column beneath the rock walls.  They advanced with wonderful quietness, the sound of feet broken only by a soft word of command.  He calculated the distance—­now it was three hundred yards, now two, now a bare eighty.  At fifty his rifle flew to his shoulder and he fired.  His nerves were bad, for one bullet clicked on the rock, while the second took the dust a yard before the enemy’s feet.  Instantly there was a halt and the sound of speech.