“Come in to what?” laughed Somers. Jack took his pipe from his mouth with a little flourish. “In a job like this,” he said, “a man wants a mate--yes, a mate--that he can say _anything_ to, and be absolutely himself with. Must have it. And as far as I go--for me--you don’t mind if I say it, do you?--Kangaroo could never have a mate. He’s as odd as any phœnix bird I’ve ever heard tell of. You couldn’t mate him to anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there’s no female kangaroo of his species. Fine chap, for all that. But as lonely as a nail in a post.” “Sounds something fatal and fixed,” laughed Somers. “It does. And he _is_ fatal and fixed. Those eyeglasses of his, you know--they alone make a man into a sort of eye of God, rather glassy. But my idea is, in a job like this, every man should have a mate--like most of us had in the war. Mine was Victoria’s brother--and still is, in a way. But he got some sort of a sickness that seems to have taken all the fight out of him. Fooling about with the wrong sort of women. Can’t get his pecker up again now, the fool. Poor devil an’ all.” Jack sighed and resumed his pipe. “Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when they’ve got a mate,” he went on again after a while. “But a mate’s not all that easy to strike. We’re a lot of decent chaps, stick at nothing once they wanted to put a thing through, in our lodge--and in my club. But there’s not one of them I feel’s quite up to me--if you know what I mean. Rattling good fellows--but nary one of ’em quite my cut.” “That’s usually so,” laughed Somers. “It is,” said Jack. Then he narrowed and diminished his voice. “Now I feel,” he said cautiously and intensely, “that if you and me was mates, we could put any damn mortal thing through, if we had to knock the bottom out of the blanky show to do it.” Somers dropped his head. He liked the man. But what about the cause? What about the mistrust and reluctancy he felt? And at the same time, the thrill of desire. What was offered? He wanted so much. To be mates with Jack in this cause. Life and death mates. And yet he felt he couldn’t. Not quite. Something stopped him. He looked up at Callcott. The other man’s face was alert and waiting: curiously naked a face too. Somers wished it had had even a moustache, anything rather than this clean, all-clean bare flesh. If Jack had only had a beard too--like a man--and not one of these clean-shaven, too-much exposed faces. Alert, waiting face--almost lurking, waiting for an answer. “Could we ever be _quite_ mates?” Somers asked gently. Jack’s dark eyes watched the other man fixedly. Jack himself wasn’t unlike a kangaroo, thought Somers: a long-faced, smooth-faced, strangely watchful kangaroo with powerful hindquarters.