"You've left school now, remember that--we don't have men who _cry_ in the army. Get back to your room at once, and don't let me ever see you in this state again. I am disappointed in you, Fox." Poor Willie, sick at heart and sore in limb, crept back to his barrack-room, where he was greeted with jeers and hoots, but, mindful of Captain Trevor's warning, his comrades abstained from stronger measures that night. The months that followed made his life a perfect pandemonium. All his room-mates taxed their ingenuity to the utmost in order to devise new tortures and humiliations for "Weepin' Willie." His bed was always soaking wet, his kit and accoutrements hidden away. They painted his buttons, they whitewashed his boots, they borrowed his blankets. When a man could not sleep, he whiled away the hours of the night by throwing the heaviest missiles he could lay his hands on at the luckless youth. On wet afternoons Willie was "crucified" for the public amusement, a process which consisted in tying up the patient's wrists just above the door, so that whenever it was opened he got a severe jerking. And yet through it all he never showed fight and never complained, but bore blows and jibes alike with stolid indifference. Although Captain Trevor never alluded to that awful night, Willie instinctively felt that his hero despised him, and that hurt him more than all the ill-usage of his room-mates. Nellie he had not seen since, but she had scribbled him a line in pencil. "MR. 'WEEPIN' WILLIE,'--You're a disgrace to the army. I hope never to see you again till you've got given up crying.--NELLIE LINDON." [Illustration: "SHE APPLIED A CORNER TO HER EYES."] This masterpiece of sarcasm Willie kept in the lining of his tunic, and it made him mad every time he thought of it. And so the weary weeks passed by until the trooping season came, and then, much to the delight of all the men, A Company was ordered out to the North-West frontier to join the first battalion as a draft to make good the ravages caused by sickness and the enemy. As the train steamed out of the station, Willie saw Nelly Lindon waving her handkerchief to Big Bob, and as his carriage moved slowly past, she applied a corner to her eyes as if wiping away an imaginary tear, but there was a mischievous smile on her lips. II. "Them's the beggars we've got to smash; look at 'em a-wasting of their ammunition, as if hevery round on it wasn't stolen from the Govermint." "That'll make some of the boys perspirite, I'm thinking," Sergeant Thomson replied, as his eyes followed the direction of Big Bob's finger. Half a mile or so from where the company was halted to refresh itself after its tedious semi-circular march in the early dawn, a long sloping hill, covered with stunted growth and unsteady boulders, rose gradually up to the sky-line; some little way below the summit, a ledge of rock ran parallel with the top, and it was at this ledge that Captain Trevor directed his field-glasses.