“No—the trout took far more killing. The elephants and the beaters did most of the work so far as the tigers were concerned; it was only a sort of arm-chair performance on my part. I simply sat in a fairly comfortable howdah and fired when I was told to do so.” “It sounds simple, but—well, I’d like to have the chance. And you must have shot straight,” Wally said. He glanced from the grim masks to the slight figure with ungainly shoulders, marvelling in his heart at the contrast between hunter and hunted. At the moment John O’Neill did not look capable of killing a mouse. He dropped in to a big arm-chair, motioning Wally to another. The colour was returning to his face, and his eyes began to lose their pain-filled expression. In the big chair’s depths he looked smaller than ever; but his eyes were very bright, and soon Wally forgot his morning’s fishing and altogether lost sight of his host’s infirmities in the fascination of his talk. Half-crippled as he was, he had been everywhere, and done many things that stronger men long vainly to do. He had travelled widely, and not as the average tourist, who skims over many experiences without gathering the cream of any. John O’Neill had gone off the beaten track in search of the unusual, and he had found it in a dozen different countries. He had hunted and fished; had shot big game in India and made his way up unknown rivers in South America, until sickness had forced him to abandon enterprise and return to civilization to save his life. Wandering in the bypaths of the world, he had brought home a harvest of queer experiences; he told them simply, with a twinkle in his eye and a quick joy in the humorous that often left his hearer shaking with laughter. Wally listened in growing wonderment and a great sense of pity. If this man, so cruelly handicapped, had already done so much, what might he not have done, given a straight and sound body! Yet how he had accomplished even the tenth part of what he had done was a mystery. Wally looked at the frail, slight figure with respectful amazement. John O’Neill broke off presently. “I rattle along at a terrible rate when I’m lucky enough to find a listener,” he said. “And lately I’ve been horribly sick of my own society. You see, they wouldn’t have me in any capacity at the Front; I offered to do anything, and I did think they might have let me drive an ambulance; but an ambulance driver over there really has to be a hefty chap, able to put his shoulder literally to the wheel when a road goes to pieces in front of him, owing to a shell lobbing on it; and of course they said I wouldn’t do, so soon as they looked at me. So I went to London and did Red Cross work and recruiting—and overdid it, like a silly ass. Broke down, and had to crawl home and be ill.” “Hard luck!” said Wally, sympathetically.