He threw his sonnet across to Mackenzie, who with a background of huddled khaki limbs and anxious faces was himself anxiously counting out French currency notes and dubious-looking tokens . . . What the deuce did men want to draw money--sometimes quite large sums of money, the Canadians being paid in dollars converted into local coins--when in an hour or so they would be going up? But they always did and their accounts were always in an incredibly entangled state. Mackenzie might well look worried. As like as not he might find himself a fiver or more down at the end of the evening for unauthorized payments. If he had only his pay and an extravagant wife to keep, that might well put the wind up him. But that was _his_ funeral. He told Lieutenant Hotchkiss to come and have a chat with him in his hut, the one next the mess. About horses. He knew a little about horse-illnesses himself. Only empirically, of course. Mackenzie was looking at his watch. "You took two minutes and eleven seconds," he said. "I'll take it for granted it's a sonnet . . . I have not read it because I can't turn it into Latin here . . . I haven't got your knack of doing eleven things at once. . . ." A man with a worried face, encumbered by a bundle and a small book, was studying figures at Mackenzie's elbow. He interrupted Mackenzie in a high American voice to say that he had never drawn fourteen dollars seventy-five cents in Thrasna Barracks, Aldershot. Mackenzie said to Tietjens: "You understand. I have not read your sonnet. I shall turn it into Latin in the mess: in the time stipulated. I don't want you to think I've read it and taken time to think about it." The man beside him said: "When I went to the Canadian Agent, Strand, London, his office was shut up . . ." Mackenzie said with white fury: "How much service have you got? Don't you know better than to interrupt an officer when he is talking. You must settle your own figures with your own confounded Colonial paymaster. I've sixteen dollars thirty cents here for you. Will you take them or leave them?" Tietjens said: "I know that man's case. Turn him over to me. It isn't complicated. He's got his paymaster's cheque, but doesn't know how to cash it and of course they won't give him another. . . ." The man with slow, broad, brown features looked from one to the other officer's face and back again with a keen black-eyed scrutiny as if he were looking into a wind and dazed by the light. He began a long story of how he owed Fat-Eared Bill fifty dollars lost at House. He was perhaps half-Chinese, half-Finn. He continued to talk, being in a state of great anxiety about his money. Tietjens addressed himself to the cases of the Sydney Inniskilling ex-trooper and the McGill graduate who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese Educational Ministry. It made altogether a complicated effect. "You would say," Tietjens said to himself, "that, all together, it ought to be enough to take my mind up."