the Justice that cries out against what men have done for women
remember what they have done for men.

The boy died before dawn. And now, what with sickness and much fighting,
out of the fifty Tyson had brought out with him there were but twenty
sound men.

When he had seen to the burying of his dead, and gone his rounds among
the hopelessly dying, Tyson turned to his own affairs. The mail had come
in, and his letters had been forwarded to him overnight from the nearest
station. There was one from Stanistreet; it lay unopened on a box of
cartridges amongst his other papers. These he began to look over and
arrange.

They were curious documents. One was a letter to his wife, imploring her
forgiveness. "And yet," he had written, "except for one sin (committed
when I was to all intents and purposes insane), and for one mistake, the
grossest man ever made, you have nothing to forgive. I swear that I loved
you even then; and I shall always love you, as I have never loved--never
could love--any other woman. Believe me, I don't say this to justify
myself. There would be far more excuse for me if I had been simply
incapable of the feeling. As it is, I sinned against the highest, the
best part of myself, as much as against you." There was more in the same
strain, only less coherent; hurried sentences jotted down in the night,
whenever he could snatch a minute from his duty. He must have meant
every word of it at the moment of writing; and yet--this is the curious
thing--it was in flat contradiction to certain statements made in the
other paper.

This was a long letter to Stanistreet, begun in the form of an irregular
diary--a rough account of the march, of the fighting, of the struggle
with dysentery, given in the fewest and plainest words possible, with
hardly a trace of the writer's natural egotism. The two last sheets were
a postscript. They had evidently been written at one short sitting, in
sentences that ran into each other, as if the writer had been in
passionate haste to deliver himself of all he had to say. The first
sentence was a brief self-accusation, what followed was the defense--a
sinner's _apologia pro vita sua_. He had behaved like a scoundrel to his
wife. To other women too, if you like, but it had been fair fighting with
them, brute against beast, an even match. While she--she was not a woman;
she was an adorable mixture--two parts child to one part angel. And he,
Tyson, had never been an angel, and it was