ost of melody in it, as
it might have been the wind in a gin-bottle essaying to sing, "It's a
way we have in the Army."

Stalky smiled a tight-lipped smile, and at extreme range opened fire:
the old horse half wheeled in the shafts.

"Where he gwaine tu?" hiccoughed Rabbits-Eggs. Another buckshot tore
through the rotten canvas tilt with a vicious zipp.

"_Habet_!" murmured Stalky, as Rabbits-Eggs swore into the patient
night, protesting that he saw the "dommed colleger" who was assaulting
him.

"And so," King was saying in a high head voice to Beetle, whom he had
kept to play with before Manders minor, well knowing that it hurts
a Fifth-form boy to be held up to a fag's derision, "and so, Master
Beetle, in spite of all our verses, which we are so proud of, when
we presume to come into direct conflict with even so humble a
representative of authority as myself, for instance, we are turned out
of our studies, are we not?"

"Yes, sir," said Beetle, with a sheepish grin on his lips and murder in
his heart. Hope had nearly left him, but he clung to a well-established
faith that never was Stalky so dangerous as when he was invisible.

"You are _not_ required to criticise, thank you. Turned out of our
studies, we are, just as if we were no better than little Manders minor.
Only inky schoolboys we are, and must be treated as such."

Beetle pricked up his ears, for Rabbits-Eggs was swearing savagely
on the road, and some of the language entered at the upper sash. King
believed in ventilation. He strode to the window gowned and majestic,
very visible in the gaslight.

"I zee 'un! I zee 'un!" roared Rabbits-Eggs, now that he had found a
visible foe--another shot from the darkness above. "Yiss, yeou, yeou
long-nosed, fower-eyed, gingy-whiskered beggar! Yeu'm tu old for such
goin's on. Aie! Poultice yeour nose, I tall 'ee! Poultice yeour long
nose!"

Beetle's heart leaped up within him. Somewhere, somehow, he knew, Stalky
moved behind these manifestations. There were hope and the prospect
of revenge. He would embody the suggestion about the nose in deathless
verse. King threw up the window, and sternly rebuked Rabbits-Eggs. But
the carrier was beyond fear or fawning. He had descended from the cart,
and was stooping by the roadside.

It all fell swiftly as a dream. Manders minor raised his hand to his
head with a cry, as a jagged flint cannoned on to some rich tree-calf
bindings in the book-shelf. Another quoited along t