It was at Noeux-les-Mines, in the Café Salome, at the bottom of the old slag-heap by the station. After tea, there being no further parade until the working party assembled at ten o'clock that night, I had repaired thither to drink wine and smoke until closing time. As always, the _café_ was crowded with the men of half-a-dozen London regiments, with Scotsmen in stained and muddy kilts, and French artillerymen from the South. Later in the evening they would begin to sing in unison--great roaring choruses swung and tossed from _café_ to _café_ and taken up by the crowded-out groups in the street. I had managed to secure a chair at a little table in the corner, and for companion saw before me a small, grizzled man, about fifty, whose blue eyes, despite the dark rings underneath them, were yet singularly intelligent, keen, and clear. We exchanged a few remarks whilst taking each other's measure, and then, apropos of my description of a terrible bombardment by the German _minenwerfers_ which we had recently endured, he began to talk, and gave me a rambling impression of his strange and original career, and especially of his adventures in connection with his masterpiece, "Big-Bang"--a device now extinct. I will call him X----. Before his connection with the British Army I gathered he had wandered widely in an up-and-down, rolling-stone sort of fashion. The Klondike had known his store during the gold rush. He was one of those men who did undefined but profitable things in the Western States before the days of their organized exploitation; made thousands of dollars and spent every cent of them, roving here and there, never staying anywhere for long, as is the way with these pioneers of the human race. II--THE AMERICAN ADVENTURER TELLS HIS TALE When the war broke out he was in the West, the manager of an opera company touring the coast towns, and immediately he determined to take a hand. At first he experienced considerable perplexity as to how he was to get "mixed up" in the war. Apart from his nationality, his small stature, a finger missing from his right hand, and a pronounced limp--both legacies from the Spanish-American war in the Philippines--seemed destined to preclude him from serving in the army of any country in any capacity. He was even refused by a party of Americans forming a Red Cross contingent for duty with any of the belligerents willing to accept their service.