A pity as deep as any feeling he had ever known had come to him as he stood with Al’mah beside the bed of her dead renegade man; and it seemed to him that they two also might well bury themselves in the desert together, and minister to each other’s despair.  It was only the swift thought of a moment, which faded even as it saw the light; but it had its origin in that last flickering sense of human companionship which dies in the atmosphere of despair.  “Every man must live his dark hours alone,” a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from him—­his old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances to him across the garish lights.  “It is no use,” this Roscius had said, “every man must live his dark hours alone.”

That very evening, after the battle of the Dreitval, Jigger, Stafford’s trumpeter, had said a thing to him which had struck a chord that rang in empty chambers of his being.  He had found Jigger sitting disconsolate beside a gun, which was yet grimy and piteous with the blood of men who had served it, and he asked the lad what his trouble was.

In reply Jigger had said, “When it ’it ’m ‘e curled up like a bit o’ shaving.  An’ when I done what I could ’e says, ’It’s a speshul for one now, an’ it’s lonely goin’,’ ’e says.  When I give ’im a drink ’e says, ’It ’d do me more good later, little ‘un’; an’ ’e never said no more except, ‘One at a time is the order—­only one.’”

Not even his supper had lifted the cloud from Jigger’s face, and Stafford had left the lad trying to compose a letter to the mother of the dead man, who had been an especial favourite with the trumpeter from the slums.

Stafford was roused from his reflections by the grinding, rumbling sound of a train.  He turned his face towards the railway line.

“A troop-train—­more food for the dragons,” he said to himself.  He could not see the train itself, but he could see the head-light of the locomotive, and he could hear its travail as it climbed slowly the last incline to the camp.

“Who comes there!” he said aloud, and in his mind there swept a premonition that the old life was finding him out, that its invisible forces were converging upon him.  But did it matter?  He knew in his soul that he was now doing the right thing, that he had come out in the open where all the archers of penalty had a fair target for their arrows.  He wished to be “Free among the dead that are wounded and that lie in the grave and are out of remembrance;” but he would do no more to make it so than tens of thousands of other men were doing on these battle-fields.

“Who comes there!” he said again, his eyes upon the white, round light in the distance, and he stood still to try and make out the black, winding, groaning thing.

Presently he heard quick footsteps.

A small, alert figure stopped short, a small, abrupt hand saluted.  “The General Commanding ’as sent for you, sir.”