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‘I–I was looking for a friend hereabouts.’

‘Fat lot of friend you’ll find at the head of this street!’ snarled the rifleman, and jerked his thumb towards the corpse. ‘That makes the third already this morning. These Johnnies ain’t no sense of honour left–firing on outposts as you may call it.’

‘Where are they firing from?’

‘No “they” about it. You saw that cottage–or didn’t you?–right above there, under the wall; the place with one window in it? There’s a devil behind it somewheres; he fires from the back of the room, and what’s more, he never misses his man. You have Nick’s own luck–the pretty target you made, too; that is unless, like some that call themselves Englishmen and ought to know better, he’s a special spite on the Rifles.’

The sergeant paid no heed to the sneer. He was beginning to think.

‘How long has this been going on?’ he asked.

‘Only since daylight. There was a child up yonder, last night; but it stands to reason a child can’t be doing this. He never misses, I tell you. Oh, you had luck, just now!’

‘I wonder,’ said Sergeant Wilkes, musing. ‘I’ll try it again, anyway.’ And while the rifleman gasped he stepped out boldly into the road.

He knew that his guess might, likely enough, be wrong: that, even were it right, the next two seconds might see him a dead man. Yet he was bound to satisfy himself. With his eyes on the sinister window–it stood half open and faced straight down the narrow street–he knelt by the corpse, found its ammunition pouch, unbuckled the strap and drew out a handful of cartridges. Then he straightened himself steadily–but his heart was beating hard–and as steadily walked back and rejoined the rifleman in the passage.

‘You have a nerve,’ said the rifleman, his voice shaking a little. ‘Looks like he don’t fire on redcoats; but you have a nerve all the same.’

‘Or else he may be gone,’ suggested the sergeant, and on the instant corrected himself; ‘but I warn you not to reckon upon that. Is there a window facing on him anywhere, round the bend of the street?’

‘I dunno.’

The rifleman peered forth, turning his head sideways for a cautious reconnoitre. ‘Maybe he has gone, after all–‘

It was but his head he exposed beyond the angle of the doorway; and yet, on the instant a report cracked out sharply, and he pitched forward into the causeway. His own rifle clattered on the stones beside him, and where he fell he lay, like a stone.

Sergeant Wilkes turned with a set jaw and mounted the stairs of the deserted house behind him. They led him up to the roof, and there he dropped on his belly and crawled. Across three roofs he crawled, and lay down behind a balustrade overlooking the transverse roadway. Between the pillars of the balustrade he looked right across the roadway and into the half-open window of the cottage. The room within was dark save for the glimmer of a mirror on the back wall.

‘Kill him I must,’ growled the sergeant through his teeth, ‘though I wait the day for it.’

And he waited there, crouching for an hour–for two hours.

He was shifting his cramped attitude a little–a very little–for about the twentieth time, when a smur of colour showed on the mirror, and the next instant passed into a dark shadow. It may be that the marksman within the cottage had spied yet another rifleman in the street. But the sergeant had noted the reflection in the glass, that it was red. Two shots rang out together. But the sergeant, after peering through the parapet, stood upright, walked back across the roofs, and regained the stairway.

The street was empty. From one of the doorways a voice called to him to come back. But he walked on, up the street and across the roadway to a green-painted wicket. It opened upon a garden, and across the garden he came to a flight of steps with an open door above. Through this, too, he passed and stared into a small room. On the far side of it, in an armchair, sat Corporal Sam, leaning back, with a hand to his breast; and facing him, with a face full of innocent wonder, stood a child–a small, grave, curly-headed child.