nothing of a diamond-studded gold watch," said Brock.

"Well, well," said Riley, "I suppose the Germans won't be leaving him
lying out there much longer. I hear the last battalion bagged quite a
bunch that tried to creep out at night to get him in; but I suppose our
fellows, not knowing about it, won't watch him so carefully."

They turned the conversation to other and more casual things, and
shortly afterwards moved off.

The first-fruits of their sowing showed within the hour, when some of
the officers were having tea together in a corner of a ruined cottage,
which had been converted into a keep.

The servant who was preparing tea had placed a battered pot on the half
of a broken door, which served for a mess table; had laid out a loaf of
bread, tin pots of jam, a cake, and a flattened box of flattened
chocolates, and these offices having been fully performed he should
have retired. Instead, however, he fidgeted to and fro, offered to pour
the tea from the dented coffee-pot, asked if anything more was wanted,
pushed the loaf over to the Captain, apologizing at length for the
impossibility of getting a scrape of butter these days; hovered round
the table, and generally made it plain that he had something he wished
to say, or that he supposed they had something to say he wished to
hear.

"What are you dodging about there for, man?" the Captain asked
irritably at last. "Is it anything you want?"

"Nothing, sorr," said the man, "only I was just wondering if you had
heard annything of a Gineral with fifty thousand francs in his pocket,
lying out there beyond the trench."

"Five thousand francs," corrected Riley gently.

"'Twas fifty thousand I heard, sorr," said the man eagerly; "but ye
have heard, then, sorr?"

"What's this about a General?" demanded the Captain.

"Yes!" said Riley quickly. "What is it? We have heard nothing of the
General."

"Ah!" said the messman, eyeing him thoughtfully, "I thought maybe ye
had heard."

"We have heard nothing," said Riley. "What is it you are talking
about?"

"About them fifty thousand francs, sorr," said the messman, cunningly,
"or five thousand, was it?"

"What's this?" said the Captain, and the others making no attempt to
answer his question, left the messman to tell a voluble tale of a
German General ("though 'twas a Field-Marshal some said it was, and
others went the length of Von Kluck himself") who had been killed some
days before, and lay out in the open wit