truck one
of them when we went with Roberts to Afghanistan. It was on that trip
I and a Pathan rolled all down a hill, him trying to get his knife arm
loose, and me jabbing his breastbone with my bayonet before I got it
into him. I drove it through to the socket. You want to make quite
sure of a Pathan."

Miss Rawlinson winced at this. "Oh," she said, "what a horrible man!"

"It was 'most as tough as when you went after Kiel, and stole the
Scotchman's furs," suggested a Canadian.

The sergeant let the jibe go by. "Oh," he said, "Louis's bucks could
shoot! We had them corralled in a pit, and every time one of the boys
from Montreal broke cover he got a bullet into him. Did any of you
ever hear a dropped man squeal?"

Agatha had heard sufficient, and she and her companions turned away,
but as they moved across the deck the sergeant's voice followed her.

"Oh, yes," he said, "a grand country for a poolman. In the summer he
can sleep beneath a bush."

For some reason this eulogy haunted Agatha when she retired to her room
that night, and she wondered what awaited all those aliens in the new
land, until it occurred to her that in some respects she was situated
very much as they were. Then, for the first time, vague misgivings
crept into her mind as she realised that she had cut herself adrift
from all that she had been accustomed to. She felt suddenly depressed
and lonely.

The depression had, however, almost vanished when, awakening rather
early next morning, she went up on deck. A red sun hung over the
tumbling seas that ran into the hazy east astern, and they rolled up in
crested phalanxes that gleamed green and incandescent white ahead. The
_Scarrowmania_ plunged through them with a spray cloud flying about her
dipping bows. She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and--for she had
some 3,000 tons of railway iron in the bottom of her--she rolled
distressfully. Her tall spars swayed athwart the vivid blueness of the
morning sky, with the rhythmic regularity of a pendulum. The girl,
however, was troubled by no sense of sickness; the keen north-wester
that sang amidst the shrouds was wonderfully fresh; and when she met
Wyllard crossing the saloon deck her cheeks were glowing from the sting
of the spray, and her eyes were bright.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Down there," said Wyllard, pointing to the black opening in the
fore-hatch that led to the steerage quarters. "An acquaintance of mine
wh