“Ye-es. Butcher’s Row wasn’t pretty,” he volunteered. “Seeing Strangwick here, has brought it all back to me again. ’Funny thing! We had a Platoon Sergeant of Number Two--what the deuce was his name?--an elderly bird who must have lied like a patriot to get out to the front at his age; but he was a first-class Non-Com., and the last person, you’d think, to make mistakes. Well, he was due for a fortnight’s home leave in January ’Eighteen. You were at B. H. Q. then, Strangwick, weren’t you?” “Yes. I was Orderly. It was January twenty-first”; Strangwick spoke with a thickish tongue, and his eyes burned. Whatever drug it was, had taken hold. “About then,” Keede said. “Well, this Sergeant, instead of coming down from the trenches the regular way an’ joinin’ Battalion Details after dark, an’ takin’ that funny little train for Arras, thinks he’ll warm himself first. So he gets into a dug-out, in Butcher’s Row, that used to be an old French dressing-station, and fugs up between a couple of braziers of pure charcoal! As luck ’ud have it, that was the only dug-out with an inside door opening inwards--some French anti-gas fitting, I expect--and, by what we could make out, the door must have swung to while he was warming. Anyhow, he didn’t turn up at the train. There was a search at once. We couldn’t afford to waste Platoon Sergeants. We found him in the morning. He’d got his gas all right. A machine-gunner reported him, didn’t he, Strangwick?” “No, sir. Corporal Grant--o’ the Trench Mortars.” “So it was. Yes, Grant--the man with that little wen on his neck. ’Nothing wrong with your memory, at any rate. What was the Sergeant’s name?” “Godsoe--John Godsoe,” Strangwick answered. “Yes, that was it. I had to see him next mornin’--frozen stiff between the two braziers--and not a scrap of private papers on him. _That_ was the only thing that made me think it mightn’t have been--quite an accident.” Strangwick’s relaxing face set, and he threw back at once to the Orderly Room manner. “I give my evidence--at the time--to you, sir. He passed--overtook me, I should say--comin’ down from supports, after I’d warned him for leaf. I thought he was goin’ through Parrot Trench as usual; but ’e must ’ave turned off into French End where the old bombed barricade was.” “Yes. I remember now. You were the last man to see him alive. That was on the twenty-first of January, you say? Now, _when_ was it that Dearlove and Billings brought you to me--clean out of your head?... Keede dropped his hand, in the style of magazine detectives, on Strangwick’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with cloudy wonder, and muttered: “I was took to you on the evenin’ of the twenty-fourth of January. But you don’t think I did him in, do you?” I could not help smiling at Keede’s discomfiture; but he recovered himself. “Then what the dickens _was_ on your mind that evening--before I gave you the hypodermic?”