“We ought to be used to hot corners by this time,” said the grizzled corporal, in comment, “but it’s the deuce to go into ’em on empty stomachs. We’ve been on half-rations two days.” “There’ll be the more to go round among them that’s left,” said the sergeant, grimly, and turned on his heel. The Irishman, pulling his feet with difficulty out of the ooze into which they had settled, suddenly left his place and walked over to the corporal, lifting his hand in a sidelong, clumsy salute. “Wud ye moind tellin me, sur, where I’m to sleep?” he asked, saluting again. The corporal looked at his questioner, spat meditatively into the embers, then looked again, and answered, briefly: “On the ground.” Linsky cast a glance of pained bewilderment, first down at the mud into which he was again sinking, then across the fire into the black, wind-swept night. “God forgive me for a fool,” he groaned aloud, “to lave a counthry where even the pigs have straw to drame on.” “Where did you expect to sleep--in a balloon?” asked the corporal, with curt sarcasm. Then the look of utter hopelessness on the other’s ugly face prompted him to add, in a softer tone; “You must hunt up a tent-mate for yourself--make friends with some fellow who’ll take you in.” “Sorra a wan’ll be friends wid me,” said the despondent recruit. “I’m waitin’ yet, the furst dacent wurrud from anny of ’em.” The corporal’s face showed that he did not specially blame them for their exclusiveness, but his words were kindly enough. “Perhaps I can fix you out,” he said, and sent a comprehensive glance round the group which still huddled over the waning fire, on the other side. “Hughie, here’s a countryman of yours,” he called out to a lean, tall, gray-bearded private who, seated on a rail, had taken off his wet boots and was scraping the mud from them with a bayonet; “can you take him in?” “I have some one already,” the other growled, not even troubling to lift his eyes from his task. It happened that this was a lie, and that the corporal knew it to be one. He hesitated for a moment, dallying with the impulse to speak sharply. Then, reflecting that Hugh O’Mahony was a quarrelsome and unsociable creature with whom a dispute was always a vexation to the spirit, he decided to say nothing. How curiously inscrutable a thing is chance! Upon that one decision turned every human interest in this tale, and most of all, the destiny of the sulky man who sat scraping his boots. The Wheel of Fortune, in this little moment of silence, held him poised within the hair’s breadth of a discovery which would have altered his career in an amazing way, and changed the story of a dozen lives. But the corporal bit his lip and said nothing. O’Mahony bent doggedly over his work--and the wheel rolled on.