of lean stature, the calmly indomitable bearing and the
indescribable stamp of greatness proclaimed the Grand Duke Nicholas
Nicholaivitch; the man from whose sure grasp the supreme command had
been filched by a jealous weakling; the man who might have saved Russia.

He was a gray old eagle, whose mighty talons had been clipped and whose
strong pinions had been broken, but the eagle light was in the iris
still and the eagle power in its glance.

The Kentuckian's thoughts flashed back to the night when life had first
begun to take on colour before his visioning. Then McCalloway and Prince
had named the pitifully few great soldiers of the present, peers of
those who had passed to Valhalla. Were it tonight instead of almost two
decades ago, they must have named this man among the mighty few.

Boone found himself bowing, then he heard the deep voice of the tall
gentleman saying, "General Brussilov has told me. Let us go at once."

Under a sky banked with clouds the car which they entered felt its way
along a broken road. Its lights glared on dark masses that leaped out of
the blackness and became lines of exhausted men stumbling rearward, or
carts of wounded bumping toward relief. The throats of the guns bellowed
with a nearer roar, and eventually they halted at another headquarters
and silently passed between saluting officers into a bare room where
candles burned dimly at the head of a coffin and Cossacks stood at
attention, guarding the dead.

At a low-voiced word from Brussilov the place emptied, save for the
three who looked down on the casket, closed but not yet fastened. Then,
as Boone drank in his breath deeply with a steadying inhalation, the
General lifted the covering and raised his eyes interrogatively toward
the American.

Boone's lips stirred at first, without sound, then moved again as he
said quietly: "It is he."

With the last monosyllable, answering to a command of reverence and awe
and stricken grief, he dropped to his knees and knelt beside the casket,
and when at length he looked up--and rose gropingly--the picture of two
elderly soldiers, standing stiff and tight-lipped, stamped itself
ineradicably on his brain. He found himself a minute later fumbling in a
pocket and bringing out a small object from which with slow and
tremulous fingers he removed the tissue paper wrapping.

His eyes turned first toward the Grand Duke, then toward the General, in
a mute appeal for counsel in a matter of fitnes