"It was only a chance, but a strange one," he went on, with his eyes
fixed on the topmost ridge of his brown puttie. "We were climbing
the face of a kopje, one day. It was very steep, and we crawled up a
narrow trail in single file. Two days before, our guns had been
shelling the whole kopje, and they must have cracked it up badly.
All at once, the man above me loosened a great lump of rock. I was
exactly underneath it. It gave a little bound outward, went
completely over me and struck full on the head of the next man in
line."
The girl sat, bending forward in her chair, her strong, quiet hands
clasped loosely in her lap.
"And he?" she asked quite low.
"He dropped to the foot of the kopje, dead. In his fall, he dragged
down the next man after him, and his leg was crushed."
"And you were saved!" she said a bit breathlessly.
"Doesn't it make you feel a vague responsibility, as if you must
live up to something that you couldn't quite understand?"
Without looking up, he bowed in assent.
"Yes," he said then. "Don't think me foolishly superstitious, Miss
Dent, or too egotistic. I try not to pay much attention to it. Once
in a while, though, not too often, it all comes back over me, and I
feel then as if my life might have been kept for something that is
still ahead of me.
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