He had been sitting idly on the edge of his cot in the tiny tent Major Erlton had lent him, having in truth nothing better to do, and now a voice from the blaze and blare of the heat and light outside startled him.
"May I come in--John Nicholson?"
He almost stammered in his surprise; but without waiting for more than a word the General walked in, alone. He was still in full uniform; and surely no man could become it more, thought Jim Douglas involuntarily.
"I have heard your story, Mr. Douglas," he began in a sonorous but very pleasant voice. "It is a curious one. And I was curious to see you. You must know so much." He paused, fixed his eyes in a perfectly unembarassed stare on his host's face, then said suddenly, with a sort of old-fashioned courtesy: "Sit you down again, please; there isn't a chair, I see; but the cot will stand two of us. If it doesn't it will be clearly my fault." He smiled kindly. "Wounded too--I didn't know that."
"A scratch, sir," put in his hearer hastily, fighting shy even of that commiseration. "I had a little fever in the city; that is all."
The bright hazel eyes, with a hint of sunlight in them, took rather an absent look. "I should like to have done it myself. I've tried that sort of thing; but they always find me out."
"I fancy you must be rather difficult to disguise," began Jim Douglas with a smile, when John Nicholson plunged straight into the heart of things.
"You must know a lot I want to know. Of course I've seen Hodson and his letters; but this is different. First: Will the city fight?"
"As well as it knows how, and it knows better than it did."
"So I fancied. Hodson said not. By the way, he told me that you declared his Intelligence Department was simply perfect. And his accounts--I mean his information--wonderfully accurate."