During that same week the newspapers at home had been very busy with his name. Some had gone so far as to lay before a greedy public a short and succinct account of his life, compiled from the Army List and a journalistic imagination, finishing the record on the Monday, six days previously, with the usual three-line regret that England should in future be compelled to limp along the path to glory without the assistance of so brilliant a young officer. Such a word as brilliant had never been coupled with the name of Jem even by his best friend in earnest or his worst enemy in irony. Such sarcasm were too shallow to be worth sounding even in disparagement. But we never know what an obituary notice may bring. Not only had he been endowed with many virtues, manly qualities, and the record of noble deeds, but more substantial honours had been heaped upon his fallen crest or pinned upon his breathless bosom. To some of his distant countrymen he was the proud possessor of the Victoria Cross, awarded him post-mortem in the heat of obituary enthusiasm by more than one local paper. To others he was held up by what is called a Representative Press as a second Crichton. And all this because he was dead. Such is glory. All unconscious of these honours, honest Jem Agar sat in his little tent, nibbling the end of his penholder--the gift, by the way, of his father--and wishing that he had bought a Letts's diary with six days in a page instead of three. CHAPTER VIII RELIEVED Well waited is well done. “Here--hi!” This time some one heard him, and that small, silent man, Ben Abdi, stood in the doorway of the tent at attention. “Are you keeping a good look-out down the valley?” asked Major Agar. “Ee yess, sar.” “No signs of any one?” “No, sar.” Agar shut up the diary, which book Ben Abdi had been taught to regard as strictly official, laid it aside, and passed out of the tent, the little Goorkha following close upon his heels with a quick intelligent interest in his every movement which somehow suggested a dusky and faithful little dog. For some moments they stood thus on the edge of the small plateau, the big man in front, the little one behind--alert, with twinkling, beady eyes. Behind them towered a bleak grey slope of bare rock, like a cliff set back at a slight angle, so treeless, so smooth was the face of it. In front the great blue-shadowed valley lay beneath them, stretching away to the south, until in a distant haze the sharp hills seemed to close in and cut it short. Perched thus, as it were, upon the roof of the world, these two men looked down upon it all with a calm sense of possession, and to him of the dominant race standing there some thousands of miles from his native land--alone--master of this great stretch of an alien shore, there must have come some passing thought of the strangeness of it all.