-Killer' shakes his head.

"'_Mon_ Angus,' he says, 'A've had a heedious dream. A' dreamt,' says
he, 'that A' went for to kill a wee sausage and A' dived for him and
missed him and before A' could recover, the sausage bit me. 'Tis a
warning,' says he.

"'Sir,' says MacBethmann, trembling in every limb and even in his neck,
'ye'd be wise no' to go out the day.'

"But the prood 'Sausage-Killer' rises himself to his full length.

"'Unhand ma pants, Angus,' says he, 'ma duty calls,' and away goes the
puir wee feller to meet his doom at the hands of the Terror of the
Skies."

"That's you," said the girl.

"Ye're a good guesser," said Tam, pouring out the tea the waiter had
brought. "Do ye take sugar or are ye a victim of the cocktail habit?"

"Did you kill him?" asked the girl.

"Poleetically and in a military sense the 'Sausage-Killer' is dead,"
said Tam; "as a human being he is still alive, being detained during his
Majesty's displeasure."

"You will tell me the rest, won't you?" she pleaded. With her, Tam
invariably ended his romances at the point where they could only be
continued by the relation of his own prowess, "and I'm glad you brought
him down--it makes me shudder to see the balloons burning. Oh, and do
you know they bombed Number One-Three-One last night?"

"Ye don't say!"

There was amazement in his look, but there was pain, too. The traditions
of the air service had become his traditions. A breach of the unwritten
code by the enemy was almost as painful a matter to him as though it was
committed by one of his own comrades. For his spiritual growth had dated
from the hour of his enlistment, and that period of life wherein youth
absorbs its most vivid and most eradicable impressions, had coincided
with the two years he had spent in his new environment.

He understood nothing of the army and its intimate life, of its fierce
and wholesome code. He could only wonder at the courage and the
endurance of those men on the ground who were cheerful in all
circumstances. They amazed and in a sense depressed him. He had been
horrified to see snipers bayoneted without mercy, without being given a
chance to surrender, not realizing that the sniper is outside all
concession and can not claim any of the rough courtesies of war.

He had placed his enemy on a pedestal, and it hurt almost as much to
know that the German fell short of his conception as it would have, had
one of his own comrades been guilty of an unp