The man was an old-time friend. In the days of our youth, we had often worked together. He was small and nervous, with a quick eye. He always wore me down after a few hours, because he was restless and untiring. He was named Romeyn Rossiter--one of those well-born names. We had met in times before the advent of the telescopic lens, and he used a box camera, tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we snapped polo ponies, coming at full tilt after the ball, riding each other off, while he would stand between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on him. I had to shove him out of the way, at the last tick, when the hoofs were loud. I often wondered if those ponies didn't look suddenly large and imminent on the little glass rectangle into which he was peering. That was the kind of person he was. He was glued to his work. He was a curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is well developed in most of us, was left out of his make-up. No credit to him. It merely wasn't there. He was color-blind to danger. He had spent his life everywhere by bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality. I used to write the text around his pictures, captions underneath them, and then words spilled out over the white paper between his six by tens. We published in the country life magazines. They gave generous big display pages. In those days people used to read what I wrote, because they wanted to find out about the pictures, and the pictures were fine. You must have seen Rossiter's work--caribou, beavers, Walter Travis coming through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward giving a twist delivery. We had the field to ourselves for two or three years, before the other fellows caught the idea, and broke our partnership. I turned to literature, and he began drifting around the world for long shots. He'd be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of Africa--a lion drinking under a tropical moon. Two more years, and I had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those chaps that, once in your life, is like the _motif_ in an opera, or like the high-class story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on a coping and ends with that brick smiting the hero's head. It was London where I ran into him at last. "Happy days?" I said, with a rising inflection. "So, so," he answered. He was doing the free-lance game. He had drifted over to England with his $750 moving-picture machine to see what he could harvest with a quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him. He wasn't going to be happy till he could get the boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with him? I would. Next day, we took the Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend, went by train to Ghent, and trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.