"He's goin' to kill him," she thought, and she got ready to do her part, for with a terrible, hoarse grunt Jay had rushed. Like a greased rod of steel the boy writhed loose from the big, crooked talons that reached for his throat, and his right fist, knobbed on the end of another bar of steel, came up under Jay's bent head with every ounce of the whole weight behind it in the blow. It caught the big man on the point of the chin. Jay's head snapped up and back violently, his feet left the ground, and his big body thudded the road.

"My God, he's knocked him down! My God, he's knocked him down!" muttered the amazed girl. "You got him down!" she cried. "Jump on him an' stomp him!" He turned one startled look toward her and-it is incredible-the look even at that moment was shy; but he stood still, for Ira had picked up the ethics as well as the skill of the art, of which nothing was known in Happy Valley or elsewhere in the hills. So he stood still, his hands open, and waited. For a while Jay did not move, and his eyes, when they did open, looked dazed. He rose slowly, and as things came back to him his face became suddenly distorted. Nothing alive could humiliate him that way and still live; he meant to kill now. "Look out!" screamed the girl. Jay rushed for the gun and Ira darted after him; but there was a quicker flash from the bushes, and Jay found his own gun pointed at his own breast and behind it Allaphair's black eyes searing him. "Huh!" she grunted contemptuously,

and the silence was absolute while she broke the pistol, emptied the cartridges into her hand, and threw them far over into the bushes.

"Less go on home, Iry," she said, and a few steps away she turned and tossed the gun at Jay's feet. He stooped, picked it up, and, twirling it in his hand, looked foolishly after them. Presently he grinned, for at bottom Jay was a man. And two hours later, amid much wonder and many guffaws, he was telling the tale:

"The damned leetle spindle-shank licked me-licked me! An' I'll back him agin anybody in Happy Valley or anywhar else ef you leave out bitin', gougin', and wrasslin'."

"Did ye lose yo' gal, too?" asked Pleasant Trouble.

"Huh!" said Jay, "I reckon not—she knows her boss."

The two walked home slowly and in silence-Ira in front and Allaphair, as does the woman in the hills, following close behind, in a spirit quite foreign to her hitherto. The little school-teacher had turned shy again and said never a word, but, as he opened the gate to let her pass through, she saw the old, old, telltale look in his sombre eyes. Her mother was crooning in the porch.

"No ploughin' termorrer, mammy. Me an' Iry want the ole nag to go down to the Couht House in the mornin'. Iry's axed me to marry him."

Perhaps every woman does not love a master-perhaps Allaphair had found hers.

NE comes across adventure, mental or physical, unexpectedly. There was a dinner at Tommy Dunstan's and I had driven five miles across country. I was late, and I came in out of the semidarkness of an April night—a little crescent moon cutting a thin band of white in a pale-green sky-to find the others already at table. They were mostly people I knew, neighbors of Tommy and myself: nice people; fox-hunters, most of them; solid young people with money back of them; tall, slim, delightfully healthy; the women with the iridescent, small-headed, not very mellow loveliness of American women lilies without perfume. Then I noticed O'May.

He struck me at once as alien and arresting. There was exotic coloring: a brown of sunburn, a vivid black of hair, a heather-gray of eyes. Despite the half of him hidden by the table-cloth one received an impression of slim-waistedness, of broad but distinctly well-bred shoulders, of clothes worn with the careless assurance of perfection that seems to be one of the new traits actually inherited. And there was as well, from the way in which he bent toward the woman to whom he was talking, that curious suggestion of masculinity more common in Europeans than in Americans; a suggestion of how shall I put it ?—of humorous acquiescence in a tradition observed but seen through completely. . . . I wondered who the man was. My neighbors wondered too.

When dinner was over Dunstan called out to me. "Billy," he said, "come here. I want you to meet Captain O'May. Captain John O'May." Captain John O'May! A name like an Irish day in April, isn't it? "Ex-Tenth Hussars"Dunstan has the explanatory manner"ex-Boer War, ex-coca-planter, ex-everything, aren't you, Jack?"

"Ex-everything," returned the gen

tleman in question, with just the faintest hint of a brogue, "ex-everything, except exacting." Then he laughed, showing very white, even teeth under a short mustache, and put out his hand.

I felt immediately the tang to him. Captain O'May sat down; he poured himself a liqueur; he pushed the bottle toward me; I found myself listening with a bewildering suddenness to a preposterous story of baboons. I have no idea how baboons came to be mentioned; I don't believe they were mentioned; but I was swept up in the tale. It seems in South Africa they march in regiments, the males first, the females with their babies following. In front goes a gray-bearded creature, portentous and not to be laughed at. When they come to a river the leaders plunge in and, taking hands, form a line over which the wives and children go. There is much screaming and refusal. The pantaloon general cuffs the obstreperous. It is a curious sight in the great moonlight-the hairy shapes, the precision and gravity of it. All the while they swing their arms and make a hoarse marching chorus

"Rum-pah! Rum-pah!" Something like that. . . . I didn't know whether to believe what I was hearing or not; but I had a distinct vision-of sands and a river like slow quicksilver, of a night wide as unknown seas, and of outlandish processions. My mind was entirely removed from an American suburb to countries lying on the outer edge of a planet which, if only you could see it in perspective, would seem a witch-like globe, phosphorescent with romance. After that I saw

O'May no more for a month.

When I did see him again it was again at Dunstan's, and instantly I felt the little thrill you feel when subconsciously you have been desiring the renewal of an acquaintanceship. I asked him over to my place for the night. He came and spent six days-borrowing my collars and

shirts with a calmness that gave to that irritating act a perpetual dignity. A dinner-jacket of mine fitted him perfectly. I imagine that every one's clothes fitted O'May.

And so, in the curiously casual manner he had, he fell into the habit of Dunstan and myself.

All that summer and autumn and winter he would appear without warning, stay a week or two, and disappear as quietly as he had come. I liked him about; I liked his feline walk; I liked his attitude of quiescent readiness. He was so immediately willing to do anything, but at the same time so little weary of doing nothing at all. One seldom meets a man who combines stoicism with eagerness. O'May lay in wait for life. I spoke of him to my friends as "a silent Irishman;" I was not a little proud that I had discovered him. I had forgotten the baboon story, you see, or, if I thought of it at all, put it down to the conversational eagerness that follows an introduction. After three months I found, quite unexpectedly, that baboons, allegorically speaking, were poignantly characteristic of O'May.

He sucked his pipe; he looked at the fire, and then at the clock which had just struck ten; he sipped his whiskey and burst into a passion of epic narration. I was utterly unprepared. Behind the rigid mask of a British ex-soldier I saw— what I should have suspected long before, peeping out-leering out, rather the unkillable Celt. I was delighted and astonished. Here was tang added to tang.

And O'May did not let the salt evaporate. Before strangers he was a trifle shy, not incurably, a little persuasion would as a rule produce the desired results, but he preferred evenings alone with me. An open fire, a bottle of King William, some tobacco handy, were all the scenery needed for extraordinary feats of mental conjuring. It was as if, having taken my measure and found me an amenable victim, he had decided to exercise upon me to their limit the very great powers of his imagination. And the interesting part was that one never knew when he was telling the truth and when he was not. I doubt if he knew himself.

What was back of it all baffled me. I often wondered. Possibly it was the chromatic Gael, educated almost entirely by a reckless, hard-bitten world. In a happier age O'May would have sung to a harp. But this much must be said, as I have said before the total effect was magnificent. Through all the tropic dusk and welter of incredible incident adventure glowed like a monstrous firefly.

He took me to Trinidad, where he had gorgeously failed at coca-planting; he took me to Ireland, where, apparently, he had been born rather carelessly into an aristocratic but typically Hibernian family; to Africa, where he had fought, and to India, where, as a young subaltern, he had served; and every time he took me he took me differently, nor did I ever recognize again any one met before. Life blossomed exotically. It became alchemic. One had a confused impression of coincidence and paradox.

There had been a little sister of his when first he had gone out to India, a little sister he remembered as a wee bit slip of a thing with big blue eyes and yellow curls. A sunbeam she was in the shadows of an old, badly kept park-and then, apparently, he had forgotten all about her. You conjectured the O'Mays were an enormous family. Years later came a small tribal war up in the hills, and the regiment was ordered there, and with it a young chap just out from England. O'May hardly knew him, but found him as a tent-mate. A nice young fellow he was, son of a Devonshire baronet. Details were never lacking. One night he tacked a photograph above his cot-a photograph of a girl in evening dressvery lovely, astonishingly lovely. O'May felt his heart stirred, and there came the glimmerings of memory. "Who's that?” he asked sharply; he was excited. "Cordelia."

66

"Cordelia who?"

"Cordelia O'May. My fiancée.”

Cordelia O'May! Fancy it! 'Way out there, thousands of miles from anywhere, meeting your future brother-in-law in such a fashion!... Exactly! Fancy it!

And then there was the adventure of the nose. One falls naturally into the language of the Arabian Nights when

speaking of O'May. It was a curious nose, I must admit. It presented obvious opportunity for the narrative gift. Halfway down its thin, flexible length it was broken distinctly and badly, and the lower half seemed not altogether connected with what had gone before. To O'May's countenance it added a finishing touch of diablerie, a supplementary leer, also an additional interest. Here, at all events, was a man to whom something of moment had once happened, even if it was no more than falling forcibly and dramatically down-stairs.

One night he told me about his nose; I had suspected he would.

"It's an imitation nose," he said.
"A what?"

"An imitation nose. It doesn't belong to me at least, the lower half doesn't. I lost it through a dirty Swede in one of old Botha's commandos.".

There was no use in asking how in a cavalry skirmish one could have ascertained the nationality of one's adversary. I awaited the sequel in silence. O'May had been removed to a hospital. They thought he wouldn't live. But he did. When he was convalescent there presented itself the question of his nose. How possibly could he go through life with such a ridiculous subtraction of feature? One imagined a hospital distraught over O'May's nose. Then out of the sunshine of an African day stepped a lady-a veiled lady a lady who refused to give her name. About the incident was all the unexpectedness and fierceness of Oriental romance. And what had the lady come for? She had come to offer the skin of her knee to help restore O'May's shattered countenance. "And so you see," he said, "it isn't my nose at all, it's the lady's."

As to the pursuit of the vivid chance, he exhibited unexpected delicacy. How could he? How as a gentleman? Had the lady wanted him to know who she was she would have told him. No, one shouldn't disturb impalpabilities such as this. The whole thing was so delicate, so tenderly intriguing-and then he laughed "and so damned ridiculous!" and suggested just the touch of Rabelaisianism for which one was looking.

Of course O'May could not live even

in a great city without becoming known. There came a period of wide and sweeping popularity. His name was on every one's lips; every one repeated his stories; he was asked about constantly. Older women found him stirringly alien; younger women, possessed of an air of danger sufficient to be interesting; and the men, although from the first most of them did not like him, were grimly unable to overlook his undoubted skill at games. He played polo unexpectedly well; he rode across country like the crack of a whip; and in cricket he achieved almost immortal fame. I mention cricket particularly because it is important in O'May's story; very important. By mere chance he was asked if he was interested in the placid game. . . . Oh, a little. He had played, of course at school. . . . He appeared in flannels and promptly knocked out a century. Playing myself, I marvelled at his slashing but singularly invulnerable style.

O'May accepted all this in the same unconcerned way in which he had accepted his year of leanness and obscurity; but such casual versatility is likely to bring a certain amount of disaster in its train. Before long I found that disaster had happened. O'May was not designed for unruffled good fortune. The thing grew prodigiously. I realized its seriousness when one day I called upon an old friend of mine, a woman to whom a gift for frankness had become an affectation. She attacked me on the subject of O'May. I found myself submerged in a flood of condemnation. It was a dam bursting. To combat it seemed useless. . . . But he was not a gentleman! He boasted of amorous adventure. Did he mention names? . . . No, but what difference did that make? He was not the sort of person one should introduce to young women. He said he had been in the English army. Well, if he had been, for what reason had he left? He told some ridiculous story about having married for money and then having been forced by the insane jealousy of a woman he did not love to throw up his commission and obtain a divorce. Likely, wasn't it? At all events, she for one would have no more to do with him. . . I sipped my tea and reflected with