As he paused the older man looked up suddenly. Something in the Colonel’s speech had jerked into his mind a name he had almost forgotten.
“I knew a man once,” he said, and hesitated because he was not quite sure whether his knowledge of the man justified a recommendation. The acquaintance had been of the slightest; his opinion of his character was based more upon hearsay than deduction, but he believed it was not at fault.
“Well?”
The Colonel threw in the interjection with sharp impatience, and the other added briefly:
“He might not be sufficiently discreet. I know little of him... I did him a service once.”
“What are his qualifications for this job?” the Colonel asked, passing over the half-implied doubt as to discretion. “Let us get hold of facts; we can deal with surmises later.”
“Your saying you wanted a man with grit brought him to my mind,—that’s what the fellows called him—Grit. And, upon my word! though I suppose I’ve heard his real name, I can remember him by no other. Nobody ever called him anything else. He was a lean chap, with an ugly scar down one side of his face. I met him first up in Rhodesia. He was mining then. But I saw him recently in Cape Town.”
“How did he earn the name of Grit?” the Colonel inquired, showing an increasing interest; and the boy left off biting his nails and looked up with a half-resentful scowl, as if jealous of the unknown man’s qualifications for a mission he knew his chief would not entrust to him.
“I don’t know whether he earned it on a particular occasion, or if it was only a general recognition of the chap’s pluck. They said of him at the mines that he was a man who did not know fear.”
“Pshaw?” The Colonel struck the arm of his chair impatiently with his open palm, and jerked one knee over the other. “I thought you had found me my man,” he said irritably, “a man with coolness and nerve. I don’t want any braggart with a school-boy hero reputation. Tell me something he has done beside boast of his courage.”