be thried."

Opening the front door George lugged in his bedding and kit-bags and,
depositing them on his cot, flung off his fur coat, cap, and serge.
Slavin divested himself likewise and, as the burly, bull-necked man stood
there, slowly filling his pipe, Redmond was able to scan the face and
massive proportions of his superior more closely.

Standing well over six feet, for the presentment of vast, though
perchance clumsy, gorilla-like strength, George reflected with slight awe
that he had never seen the man's equal. His wide-spreading shoulders
were more rounded than square; his deep, arching chest, powerful, stocky
nether limbs and disproportionately long, huge-biceped arms seeming to
fit him as an exponent of the mat rather than the gloves. Truly a
daunting figure to meet in a close-quarter, rough-and-tumble encounter!
thought Redmond. The top of his head was completely bald; his thick,
straight black brows indicating that what little close-cropped iron-gray
hair remained must originally have been coal-black in colour. His
Irish-blue eyes, alternately dreamy and twinklingly alert, were deeply
set in a high-cheeked-boned, bronzed face, with a long upper-lipped,
grimly-humorous mouth. Its expression in repose gave subtle warning that
its owner possessed in a marked degree the strongly melancholic,
emotional, and choleric temperament of his race. There was no
moroseness--no hardness in it, but rather the taciturnity that invariably
settles upon the face of those dwellers of the range who, perforce, live
much alone with their thoughts. Sheathed in mail and armed, that face
and bulky figure to some imaginations might have found its prototype in
some huge, grim, war-worn "man-at-arms" of mediaeval times. Redmond
judged him to be somewhere in his forties; forty-two was his exact age as
he ascertained later.

In curious contrast to his somewhat formidable exterior seemed his mild,
gentle, soft-brogued voice. And with speech, his taciturn face relaxed
insensibly into an almost genial expression, George noted.

Attracted by a cluster of pictures and photographs above and around the
cot in the corner opposite his own, the young fellow crossed over and
scanned them attentively. Tacked up with a random, reckless hand, the
bizarre collection was typically significant of someone's whimsical,
freakish tastes and personality. From the sublime to the ridiculous--and
worse--subjects pious and impious, dreamily-beautiful