ou
have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As
a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was
taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir,
as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to
any one, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game. And
suddenly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, having
swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement,
and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do but to
do what I do now--to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers,
and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred
to me. I thought it an amusing fancy to make a plan of how this
district or ours ought to be defended if it were ever attacked. It
seems to interest you too."

"If it were ever attacked," repeated Wayne, awed into an almost
mechanical enunciation. "Mr. Turnbull, it is attacked. Thank Heaven, I
am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the
only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless.
Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on
your head, Turnbull, you shall have your youth. God has not destroyed,
He has only deferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall explain
to me this military map of Notting Hill. For you and I have to defend
Notting Hill together."

Mr. Turnbull looked at the other for a moment, then hesitated, and
then sat down beside the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise
again for seven hours, when the dawn broke.

* * * * *

The headquarters of Provost Adam Wayne and his Commander-in-Chief
consisted of a small and somewhat unsuccessful milk-shop at the corner
of Pump Street. The blank white morning had only just begun to break
over the blank London buildings when Wayne and Turnbull were to be
found seated in the cheerless and unswept shop. Wayne had something
feminine in his character; he belonged to that class of persons who
forget their meals when anything interesting is in hand. He had had
nothing for sixteen hours but hurried glasses of milk, and, with a
glass standing empty beside him, he was writing and sketching and
dotting and crossing out with inconceivable rapidity with a pencil and
a piece of paper. Turnbull was of that more masculine type in which a
sense of responsibility increases the appetite, and with his
sketc