There is this advantage about military over other arrangements, that they can be absolutely depended upon. The sentinel who has “orders” is an autocrat in their execution. He has no discretion. He enters into no argument. He parleys with nobody, whatever that somebody’s rank may be. He simply commands, “Halt”; and if the one advancing takes one other step, the sentinel fires a death shot at short range and with absolutely certain aim. Killing, on the part of a sentinel whose command of “Halt” is disregarded, is not only no crime in military law—it is a virtue, a simple discharge of peremptory duty. And the sentinel himself, if ordered to stand twenty feet away from a door, stands there, not encroaching upon the distance by so much as a foot, under pain of punishment “in the discretion of a court-martial,” as the military law phrases it. So, when Kilgariff entered the room in which the man who had ruined his life lay wounded, in answer to that man’s summons, he knew that his conversation would be neither interrupted nor overheard in any word or syllable of it. The absoluteness of military law and practice forbade that, even as a possibility. Kilgariff advanced to the man’s bedside, took his seat upon a camp stool, and without the remotest suggestion of a greeting in his voice or manner, abruptly said:— “I am here. What do you want?” “I was sure you would come,” answered the man; “the safe-conduct—” “I tore that up the moment I received it,” answered Kilgariff. “But why? It was valid.” “For any other officer in our army, yes,” answered Kilgariff; “but not for me, as you very well know. Anyhow, I preferred to come under the safe-conduct of Southern carbines and cannon and sabres. Never mind that. Go on. What do you want?” The man winced and groaned with pain as he turned himself a little on his cot in order to face his interlocutor. Presently he said:— “I’m shot through the groin with a canister ball. It is a wound unto death, I suppose.” “Yes? Well? What else? I did not come to ask after your health.” “Of course not. I mention my condition only as a man who flings a card upon the table at a critical moment exclaims, ‘That’s a trump.’ You see, the things I want to say to you are in the nature of an ante-mortem statement, and I want you to understand that, so that you may believe all I have to tell you.” “I understand,” said Kilgariff. “You are precisely the sort of man, who, after lying and cheating all his life, would tell the truth in a dying statement, if only by way of cheating the Day of Judgment and playing stacked cards on the Almighty. Go on.” But before the man could speak again, Kilgariff added:—