ound.

The next moment someone fired over his shoulder, and the other went
down, just as West's rifle dropped from his hand and he fell over
sideways, yielding to a horribly sickening sensation, followed by a
half-dreamy fancy that someone had felt for and got hold of his hand, to
grip it in a way that was at first terribly painful--a pang seeming to
run up from hand to shoulder. The pain appeared to grow worse and
worse, then deadened, and came again, and so on, like spasms of agony,
while all the time the firing went on from all around.

"Poor old Ingle!" was about his last clear thought; "they've killed him,
and now they're firing till they've quite frightened me! Oh, how they
keep on shooting! Get it over, you cowardly brutes--nearly a score of
you against two! Oh!" he groaned then: "if I could only have delivered
my despatch!"

His left hand was raised painfully to his breast to feel whether the
paper was still safe; but the pain of the effort was sickening, and his
hand glided over something wet and warm and sticky.

"Poor old Ingle! Blood!" flashed through his brain, as the rifle
reports rang out from very close now, and then all was blank.

The end of everything seemed to have come.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.

THE SURGEON'S WORDS.

"Bad enough, poor fellow; but I think I can pull them both round.
Nothing vital, you see, touched, and these Mauser bullets make
wonderfully clean wounds!"

"And the other?"

"Bad flesh-wounds--great loss of blood. I just got at that artery in
time."

West heard these words spoken by someone whose head kept getting in his
way as he lay staring up at the great bright stars directly overhead,
and it seemed very tiresome.

He tried to speak and ask whoever it was to move aside; but his tongue
would not stir, and he lay perfectly still, trying to think what it all
meant, and in a dull far-off sort of way it gradually dawned upon him
that the people near him were talking about the Boers he had somehow or
another and for some reason shot down.

Then, as he thought, the calm feeling he was enjoying grew troubled, and
he began to recall the fact that he had been shooting somebody's ponies
to supply somebody else with food, and that he must have been mad, for
he felt convinced that they would not be nice eating, as he had heard
that the fat was oily and the flesh tasted sweet. Besides which, it
would be horrible to have to eat horseflesh at a time when his throat
was d