, whichever way
you like to look at it!--that science can not undertake to harness or
account for. When a gun blows up, or a powder-magazine, the shock kills
whom it kills, as when a shell bursts in a dense-packed firing-line. You
can not kill any man before his time comes, even if a thousand tons of
solid masonry combine with you to whelm him, and go hurtling through the
air with him to absolutely obvious destruction.

The fakir's time had come, and the prisoners' time had come. But
Sergeant William Brown's had not.

They found him, blackened by powder, and with every stitch of clothing
blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond.
There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton of
broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof that he
had come belched out of a holocaust. The men who came on him had given
their officer the slip, and were bent on a private looting-expedition of
their own. But by the time that they had dragged him from the water, and
he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe himself, their thoughts of
plunder had departed from them. Brown had a way of quite monopolizing
people's thoughts!

There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all
through the morning and the afternoon that followed. He held them
together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered and
compelled them through the hell-tumult of the ghastliest thing there is
beneath the dome of heaven--house-to-house fighting in an Eastern city.
And at the end of it, when the bugles blew at last "Cease fire,"
and many of the men were marched away by companies to put out the
conflagrations that were blazing here and there, he led them outside
the city-wall, stood them at ease in their own line and saluted their
commanding-officer.

"Twenty men of yours, sir. Present and correct."

"Which twenty?"

"Of Mr. Blair's half-company."

"Where's Mr. Blair?"

"Dunno, sir!"

"Since when have you had charge of them?"

"Since they broke into the city yesterday, sir."

"And you haven't lost a man?"

"Had lots of luck, sir!"

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Sergeant Brown, sir."

"Of the Rifles?"

"Of the Rifles, sir."

"Were you the man who signaled to us from the magazine and blew it up
and made the breach in the wall for us to enter by?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you alive, or dead? Man or ghost?"

"I'm pretty much alive, sir, thank you!"

"D'you reali