to
stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of
God for Englishman and Transvaaler.

The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the
parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a
ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a
nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the
wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like
a man upheld by forces superhuman.

"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest,
and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to
the work again.

"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a
haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o'
the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye
were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot
casualties--our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when
refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o'
breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm,
invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the
clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your
creedit."

"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon
crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my
particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and--see!" Saxham gravely
exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch
above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, hoary-bearded, Father
Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting,
and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one
night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in
the flesh."

"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle,
tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the
antediluvian headgear to-morrow."

Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart
of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life,
would be solved for good.

Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only
by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to
do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours