No More Learning

In the holidays
he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of
discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was
generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve
hours under her roof.

The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a
long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who
moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only
to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the
back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that
he was un-Christian,--which he certainly was. "Then," said the
atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my
lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma
is mine, mine, mine! " Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where
certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as
clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said,
still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you
can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples
and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of
you. " Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause
to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep
bitterly on Amomma's neck.

Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her
profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small
liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered
no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the
holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the
children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as
they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school,
Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself;
but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to
send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon. " A week later she asked for
that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that
it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot
to thank him for it.

Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into
a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not
for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the
average canings of a public school--Dick fell under punishment about
three times a month--filled him with contempt for her powers. "She
doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and
she is kinder to you after she has whacked me. " Dick shambled through
the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the
school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them,
cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try
to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both
miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things
worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things. "

The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the
muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and
pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out
nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched
by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the
afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting
patiently behind them.

"Mf! " said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so
smelly? I don'tlike it! "

"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick
bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does
one of these little revolvers carry? "

"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful
noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged
stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful. "

"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there. "

He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of
mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.

"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all
round. "

Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud,
her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.

Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very
cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon
walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations
with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.

"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out
across the sailless sea.

"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a
chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look
at Amomma! --he's eating the cartridges! "

Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma
scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred
to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma
had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried
up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.

"Yes, he's eaten two. "

"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up,
and serve him right. . . . Oh, Dick! have I killed you? "

Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could
not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated
her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in
his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside
him, crying, "Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it. "

"Of course you didn't," said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his
cheek. "But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully. "
A neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had
gone. Maisie began to whimper.

"Don't," said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. "I'm not a
bit hurt. "

"No, but I might have killed you," protested Maisie, the corners of her
mouth drooping. "What should I have done then? "

"Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett. " Dick grinned at the thought; then,
softening, "Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time.
We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit. "

Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's
indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol,
restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically
bombarded the breakwater. "Got it at last! " he exclaimed, as a lock of
weed flew from the wood.

"Let me try," said Maisie, imperiously. "I'm all right now. "

They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself
to pieces, and Amomma the outcast--because he might blow up at any
moment--browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown
at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which
was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down
together before this new target.

"Next holidays," said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked
wildly in his hand, "we'll get another pistol,--central fire,--that will
carry farther. "

"There won't be any next holidays for me," said Maisie. "I'm going away. "

"Where to? "

"I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to
be educated somewhere,--in France, perhaps,--I don'tknow where; but I
shall be glad to go away. "

"I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie,
is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I
shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish----"

The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking
grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy
nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the
milk-white sea beyond.

"I wish," she said, after a pause, "that I could see you again sometime.
You wish that, too? "

"Yes, but it would have been better if--if--you had--shot straight over
there--down by the breakwater. "

Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy
who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper
ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public
ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.

"Don't be stupid," she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct
attacked the side-issue. "How selfish you are! Just think what I should
have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable
enough already. "

"Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett? "

"No. "

"From me, then? "

No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though
he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this
the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.

"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it is. "

"Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing. "

"Let's go home," said Maisie, weakly.

But Dick was not minded to retreat.

"I can't say things," he pleaded, "and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you
about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you
see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving
me to find out. "

"You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying? "

"There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't
know how much I cared. "

"I don't believe you ever did care. "

"No, I didn't; but I do,--I care awfully now, Maisie," he gulped,--"Maisie,
darling, say you care too, please. "

"I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use. "

"Why? "

"Because I am going away. "

"Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say--will you? " A second
"darling" came to his lips more easily than the first. There were
few endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by
instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of
the revolver.

"I promise," she said solemnly; "but if I care there is no need for
promising. "

"And do you care? " For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes
met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech. . . .

"Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said
good-morning; but now it's all different! " Amomma looked on from afar.

He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen
kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its
head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it
was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that
either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every
one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration
of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and
sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.

"You can't forget now," said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek
that stung more than gunpowder.

"I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow," said Maisie, and they looked at
each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour
ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began
to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.

"We shall be awfully late for tea," said Maisie. "Let's go home. "

"Let's use the rest of the cartridges first," said Dick; and he helped
Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,--a descent that she was
quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the
grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and
Dick blushed.

"It's very pretty," he said.

"Pooh! " said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood
close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired
over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was
protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across
the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red
disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his
revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in
that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an
indefinite length of time till such date as----A gust of the growing
wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with
her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma "a little beast," and for a
moment he was in the dark,--a darkness that stung. The bullet went
singing out to the empty sea.

"Spoilt my aim," said he, shaking his head. "There aren't any more
cartridges; we shall have to run home. " But they did not run. They
walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to
them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his
inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden
heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their
years.

"And I shall be----" quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: "I
don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams,
but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho! "

"Be an artist, then," said Maisie. "You're always laughing at my trying
to draw; and it will do you good.
"

"I'll never laugh at anything you do," he answered. "I'll be an artist,
and I'll do things. "

"Artists always want money, don'tthey? "

"I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians
tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin
with. "

"Ah, I'm rich," said Maisie. "I've got three hundred a year all my own
when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is
to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,--just a
father or a mother. "

"You belong to me," said Dick, "for ever and ever. "

"Yes, we belong--for ever. It's very nice. " She squeezed his arm. The
kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only
just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the
gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had
been boggling over for the last two hours.

"And I--love you, Maisie," he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to
ring across the world,--the world that he would tomorrow or the next day
set out to conquer.

There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported,
when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful
unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden
weapon.

"I was playing with it, and it went off by itself," said Dick, when the
powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, "but if you think you're
going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again.
Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow. "

Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but
encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that
evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and
a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not
hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted
herself. He had bidden Maisie good night with down-dropped eyes and from
a distance.

"If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one," said Mrs.
Jennett, spitefully. "You've been quarrelling with Maisie again. "

This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie,
white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of
indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room
red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the
world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it
over with her foot, and, instead of saying "Thank you," cried--"Where is
the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are! "



CHAPTER II

Then we brought the lances down, then the bugles blew,
When we went to Kandahar, ridin' two an" two,
Ridin', ridin', ridin', two an" two,
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
All the way to Kandahar, ridin' two an" two.
--Barrack-Room Ballad.

"I'M NOT angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few thousand
of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn't be in such a hurry
to get at their morning papers then. Can't you imagine the regulation
householder--Lover of Justice, Constant Reader, Paterfamilias, and all
that lot--frizzling on hot gravel? "

"With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man
here a needle? I've got a piece of sugar-sack. "

"I'll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both
my knees are worn through. "

"Why not six square acres, while you're about it? But lend me the
needle, and I'll see what I can do with the selvage. I don't think
there's enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is.
What are you doing with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick? "

"Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe," said
Dick, gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn
riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most
obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the
void developed itself.

"Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for
that whale-boat. "

A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into
exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of
the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel
shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the
sketch.

Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted
with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their
clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags,
and flour--and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the
whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental
carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient
allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of
the boat herself.

"First the bloomin' rudder snaps," said he to the world in general;
"then the mast goes; an' then, s' help me, when she can't do nothin'
else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus. "

"Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are," said the tailor,
without looking up. "Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop
again. "

There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it
raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half
a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next
few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The
desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid
had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the
rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very
nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do
something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the
other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town
called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert,
or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to
embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and
Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the
hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed
generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general
scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column
was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling
on the villagers' crops when the gangs "tracked" the boats with lines
thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible,
and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning
Nile.

With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But
it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be
amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or
half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign
was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and
again a "Special" managed to get slain,--which was not altogether
a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,--and more often the
hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many
correspondents with many corps and columns,--from the veterans who had
followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82, what
time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable
work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub
swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the
end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or
invalided.

Among the seniors--those who knew every shift and change in the
perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest
Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk
a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of
a newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became
burdensome--was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed
Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the
campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere.
The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of
attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was
picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in
England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue
a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the
gross details of transport and commissariat.

He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently
abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of
shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.

"What are you for? " said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent is
that of the commercial traveller on the road.

"My own hand," said the young man, without looking up. "Have you any
tobacco? "

Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked at
it said, "What's your business here? "

"Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I'm supposed to be doing something
down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I'm in charge of the
condenser on one of the water-ships. I've forgotten which. "

"You've cheek enough to build a redoubt with," said Torpenhow, and took
stock of the new acquaintance. "Do you always draw like that? "

The young man produced more sketches. "Row on a Chinese pig-boat," said
he, sententiously, showing them one after another. --"Chief mate dirked
by a comprador. --Junk ashore off Hakodate. --Somali muleteer being
flogged. --Star-shell bursting over camp at Berbera. --Slave-dhow being
chased round Tajurrah Bah. --Soldier lying dead in the moonlight outside
Suakin. --throat cut by Fuzzies. "

"H'm! " said Torpenhow, "can'tsay I care for Verestchagin-and-water
myself, but there's no accounting for tastes. Doing anything now, are
you? "

"No. I'm amusing myself here. "

Torpenhow looked at the sketches again, and nodded. "Yes, you're right
to take your first chance when you can get it. "

He rode away swiftly through the Gate of the Two War-Ships, rattled
across the causeway into the town, and wired to his syndicate, "Got man
here, picture-work. Good and cheap. Shall I arrange? Will do letterpress
with sketches. "

The man on the redoubt sat swinging his legs and murmuring, "I knew the
chance would come, sooner or later. By Gad, they'll have to sweat for it
if I come through this business alive! "

In the evening Torpenhow was able to announce to his friend that
the Central Southern Agency was willing to take him on trial, paying
expenses for three months. "And, by the way, what's your name? " said
Torpenhow.

"Heldar. Do they give me a free hand? "

"They've taken you on chance. You must justify the choice. You'd better
stick to me. I'm going up-country with a column, and I'll do what I can
for you. Give me some of your sketches taken here, and I'll send
'em along. " To himself he said, "That's the best bargain the Central
Southern has ever made; and they got me cheaply enough. "

So it came to pass that, after some purchase of horse-flesh and
arrangements financial and political, Dick was made free of the New
and Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the
inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much
for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are
added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that
neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question,
the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a
bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to
all circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and
the past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes
when they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the
multitude.

Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter's fancy chose to lead him,
and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost
satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its
influence the two were drawn very closely together, for they ate from
the same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie
of all, their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make
gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second
Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed
himself of some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded
by a confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful
duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said
that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent
descriptive article from his rival's riotous waste of words. It was
Torpenhow who--but the tale of their adventures, together and apart,
from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill
many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly
fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with
baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence
under blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they had
floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which
they had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her
bottom-planks.

Now they were sitting on the sand-bank, and the whale-boats were
bringing up the remainder of the column.

"Yes," said Torpenhow, as he put the last rude stitches into his
over-long-neglected gear, "it has been a beautiful business. "

"The patch or the campaign? " said Dick. "Don't think much of either,
myself. "

"You want the Euryalus brought up above the Third Cataract, don't you?
and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I'm quite satisfied with my
breeches. " He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner
of a clown.

"It's very pretty. Specially the lettering on the sack. G. B. T.
Government Bullock Train. That's a sack from India. "

"It's my initials,--Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. I stole the cloth on
purpose. What the mischief are the camel-corps doing yonder? " Torpenhow
shaded his eyes and looked across the scrub-strewn gravel.

A bugle blew furiously, and the men on the bank hurried to their arms
and accoutrements.

"'Pisan soldiery surprised while bathing,'" remarked Dick, calmly.

"D'you remember the picture? It's by Michael Angelo; all beginners copy
it. That scrub's alive with enemy. "

The camel-corps on the bank yelled to the infantry to come to them, and
a hoarse shouting down the river showed that the remainder of the
column had wind of the trouble and was hastening to take share in it.
As swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the
rock-strewn ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with
armed men.

Mercifully, it occurred to these to stand far off for a time, to shout
and gesticulate joyously. One man even delivered himself of a long
story. The camel-corps did not fire. They were only too glad of a little
breathing-space, until some sort of square could be formed. The men on
the sand-bank ran to their side; and the whale-boats, as they toiled up
within shouting distance, were thrust into the nearest bank and emptied
of all save the sick and a few men to guard them. The Arab orator ceased
his outcries, and his friends howled.

"They look like the Mahdi's men," said Torpenhow, elbowing himself
into the crush of the square; "but what thousands of 'em there are! The
tribes hereabout aren't against us, I know. "

"Then the Mahdi's taken another town," said Dick, "and set all these
yelping devils free to show us up. Lend us your glass. "

"Our scouts should have told us of this. We've been trapped," said a
subaltern. "Aren't the camel guns ever going to begin? Hurry up, you
men! "

There was no need of any order. The men flung themselves panting against
the sides of the square, for they had good reason to know that whoso
was left outside when the fighting began would very probably die in
an extremely unpleasant fashion. The little hundred-and-fifty-pound
camel-guns posted at one corner of the square opened the ball as the
square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of rising
ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and there
was no novelty in the entertainment; always the same hot and stifling
formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike rush of
the enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side, the few minutes of
hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert, broken only
by the yells of those whom their handful of cavalry attempted to purse.
They had become careless. The camel-guns spoke at intervals, and the
square slouched forward amid the protesting of the camels. Then came the
attack of three thousand men who had not learned from books that it is
impossible for troops in close order to attack against breech-loading
fire.

A few dropping shots heralded their approach, and a few horsemen led,
but the bulk of the force was naked humanity, mad with rage, and armed
with the spear and the sword. The instinct of the desert, where there
is always much war, told them that the right flank of the square was the
weakest, for they swung clear of the front. The camel-guns shelled them
as they passed and opened for an instant lanes through their midst, most
like those quick-closing vistas in a Kentish hop-garden seen when the
train races by at full speed; and the infantry fire, held till the
opportune moment, dropped them in close-packing hundreds. No civilised
troops in the world could have endured the hell through which they came,
the living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at their heels,
the wounded cursing and staggering forward, till they fell--a torrent
black as the sliding water above a mill-dam--full on the right flank of
the square.

Then the line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky overhead
went out in rolling smoke, and the little stones on the heated ground
and the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing
interest, for men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these
things, counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen pebble
and branch. There was no semblance of any concerted fighting. For aught
the men knew, the enemy might be attempting all four sides of the square
at once. Their business was to destroy what lay in front of them, to
bayonet in the back those who passed over them, and, dying, to drag
down the slayer till he could be knocked on the head by some avenging
gun-butt.

Dick waited with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress grew
unendurable. It was hopeless to attend to the wounded till the attack
was repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest
side of the square. There was a rush from without, the short hough-hough
of the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by thirty or
forty others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right flank of
the square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent help. The
wounded, who knew that they had but a few hours more to live, caught at
the enemy's feet and brought them down, or, staggering into a discarded
rifle, fired blindly into the scuffle that raged in the centre of the
square.

Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his
helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face
which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that
Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to "collar low,"
and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the man's
eyes. The doctor jabbed at a venture with a bayonet, and a helmetless
soldier fired over Dick's shoulder: the flying grains of powder stung
his cheek.