nety.

CHAPTER V. I HEAR OF HAWK

Seldom are we lucky enough to meet in real life a character so strong
and vivid, so full of subtle characteristics, that his appearance in a
novel would make the author's name. Such a character was Hawk.

When you consider, you find that many an author of note has made a
lasting reputation by evolving some such character; and in most cases
this character has been "founded on fact." For example, Stevenson's
"Long John Silver," Kipling's "Kim," and Rider Haggard's "Alan
Quatermain."

Had Kipling met Hawk he would have worked him into a book of Indian
soldier life; for Hawk was full of jungle adventures and stories of the
Indian Survey Department and the Khyber Pass; while his descriptions of
Kashmir and Secunderabad, with its fakirs and jugglers, monkey temples
and sacred bulls, were superb.

On the other hand, Haggard would have placed him "somewhere in Africa,"
a strong, hard man trekking across the African veldt he knew so well;
for Hawk had been in the Boer War.

Little did I realise when I met him on the barrack-square at Limerick
how fate would throw us together upon the scorching sands and rocky
ridges of Gallipoli, nor could either of us foresee the hairbreadth
escapes and queer corners in which we found ourselves at Suvla Bay and
on the Serbian frontier.

I spotted him in the crowd as the only man on parade with a strong,
clear-cut face. I noted his drooping moustache, and especially his keen
grey eyes, which glittered and looked through and through. Somewhere, I
told myself, there was good blood at the back of beyond on his line of
descent. I was right, for, as he told me later, when I had come to know
him as a trusty friend, he came from a Norseman stock. The jaw was too
square and heavy, but the high-built chiselled nose and the deep-set
clear grey eyes were a "throw-back" on the old Viking trail. Although
dressed in ragged civilian clothes he looked a huge, full-grown,
muscular man; active and well developed, with the arms of a miner and
the chest of a gorilla. On one arm I remember he had a heart with a
dagger through it tattooed in blue and red.

I heard of him first as one to be shunned and feared. For it was said
that "when in drink" he would pick up the barrack-room fender with one
hand and hurl it across the room. I was told that he was a master of the
art of swearing--that he could pour forth a continual flow of oaths for
a full five minutes without r