"Yes, I will," answered Ted steadily. "And, Tom, it's our last time together to-night--we mayn't ever get together again."
"I know," sighed Tom.
"I wish," Ted said hesitatingly--"oh, Tom," with a sorrowful catch in his voice and a great gulp in his throat, "I--I--do wish you'd kiss me--just once."
And so Tom Boynton put his other arm around his chum's neck, and the two lads, who had been friends for three years, held one another for a minute in a close embrace; an instant later Ted Petres tore himself away and sprang into his bed, dragging the clothes over his head, and burying his face in the pillow in a vain attempt to stifle his sobs. And before another day had gone over their heads they had parted, to meet again--when--and where?
PART II
Seven years had gone by. A fierce and scorching sun shone down with glaring radiance upon long stretches of arid and sandy country, covered sparsely with coarse rank grass and brushwood--the country which is called the Soudan; the country where so many brilliant lives ended, sacrificed in the cause of a crusade as hopeless as the crusade of the children--who sought to win Heaven with glory where the flower of the nations had failed--sacrificed to the death in the too late attempt to succour a gallant soldier, the noble victim of an ignoble policy.
And between the brilliant glaring sky and the sun-scorched arid earth, there hung a heavy cloud of gunpowder smoke while the flower of two races fought desperately for conquest. In the midst a square of British troops, with set white faces and sternly compressed lips, with watchful eyes well on the alert, and in each brave heart the knowledge that the fight was for life or death. And on all hands swarms of stalwart Soudanese, reckless of life and counting death their chiefest gain, shouting on Allah and the prophet to aid them, and dying happy in the certain faith of entering paradise if but one Christian dog should fall to their hand.
Oh, what a scene it was! Only a handful of men at bay, while mass after mass of the enemy came down upon them like the waves of the incoming tide upon the sea shore; and as at times a rock-bound coast gives way and falls before the encroaching advances of the ocean, so that ill-fated square gave way before the overwhelming numbers of the soldiers of the Prophet, and in a moment all chance for our men seemed over.
Ay; but the British lion can up and fight again after he has had a roll over which would crush the life out of most of his foes. And so that day, by sheer hard desperate fighting, the square closed up and was formed again, and of all the enemy who had dashed into the midst of it, not one lived to tell the tale.
But, oh! what though the enemy fell half a score to one? How many a brave life was laid down that day, and how many a bullet had found its billet was proved by the shrieks of agony which rose and rang above all the tumult of the fight.