not
concern us, and doubtless would have done so but for the slight feverish
headache which made him dull and unresponsive at mess.

'You are overdoing it, Bobby,' said his skipper. 'Might give the rest
of us credit of doing a little work. You go on as if you were the whole
Mess rolled into one. Take it easy.'

'I will,' said Bobby. 'I'm feeling done up, somehow.' Revere looked at
him anxiously and said nothing.

There was a flickering of lanterns about the camp that night, and a
rumour that brought men out of their cots to the tent doors, a paddling
of the naked feet of doolie-bearers and the rush of a galloping horse.

'Wot's up?' asked twenty tents; and through twenty tents ran the answer
'Wick, 'e's down.'

They brought the news to Revere and he groaned. 'Any one but Bobby and I
shouldn't have cared! The Sergeant-Major was right.'

'Not going out this journey,' gasped Bobby, as he was lifted from
the doolie. 'Not going out this journey.' Then with an air of supreme
conviction 'I can't, you see.'

'Not if I can do anything!' said the Surgeon-Major, who had hastened
over from the mess where he had been dining.

He and the Regimental Surgeon fought together with Death for the life
of Bobby Wick. Their work was interrupted by a hairy apparition in a
bluegray dressing-gown who stared in horror at the bed and cried 'Oh, my
Gawd! It can't be 'im!' until an indignant Hospital Orderly whisked him
away.

If care of man and desire to live could have done aught, Bobby would
have been saved. As it was, he made a fight of three days, and the
Surgeon-Major's brow uncreased. 'We'll save him yet,' he said; and the
Surgeon, who, though he ranked with the Captain, had a very youthful
heart, went out upon the word and pranced joyously in the mud.

'Not going out this journey,' whispered Bobby Wick gallantly, at the end
of the third day.

'Bravo!' said the Surgeon-Major. 'That's the way to look at it, Bobby.'

As evening fell a gray shade gathered round Bobby's mouth, and he turned
his face to the tent wall wearily. The Surgeon-Major frowned.

'I'm awfully tired,' said Bobby, very faintly. 'What's the use of
bothering me with medicine? I don't want it. Let me alone.'

The desire for life had departed, and Bobby was content to drift away on
the easy tide of Death.

'It's no good,' said the Surgeon-Major. 'He doesn't want to live. He's
meeting it, poor child.' And he blew his nose.

Half a mile away the regimental band