How hollowly the blows re-echoed.  Did they strike muffled but murderous upon the heart of the thousand-league distant dairymaid, or of the old cottage-mother whose evenings were spent in spelling out her boy’s loving letters—­that so oft covered a portion of his exiguous pay?...

Was that a scuttling within?  Quite probably.  It might be—­rats, it might be a bandicoot; it could hardly be a jackal; it might be a SNAKE,—­and Trooper Matthewson’s carbine clattered to the ground and his knees smote together as he thought the word.  Pulling himself together he hastily snatched up his carbine with a flush of shame at the slovenly unsoldierly “crime” of dropping it.  He’d be dropping his arms on parade next!  But it might be a snake—­for he had certainly heard the sound of a movement of some sort.  The strong man felt faint and leant against the mortuary wall for a moment.

Oh, that the wretched carbine were a sword!  A man could feel a man with a sword in his hand.  He could almost face the Snake, even in Snake form, if he had a sword ... but what is a carbine, even a loaded Martini-Henry carbine with its good soft man-stopping slug?  There are no traditions to a carbine—­nothing of the Spirit of one’s Ancestors in one—­a vile mechanic thing of villainous saltpetre.  How should the Snake fear that?  Now a sword was different.  It stood for human war and human courage and human deeds from the mistiest past, and behind it must be a weight of human wrath, feats, and tradition that must make even the Snake pause.  Oh, for his sword—­if the Snake came upon him when he had but this wretched carbine he would probably desert his post, fling the useless toy from him, and flee till he fell blind and fainting on the ground....  And what would the Trooper of the Queen get who deserted his sentry-post, threw away his arms and fled—­and explained in defence that he had seen a snake?  Probably a court-martial would give him a spell of Military Prison.  Yes—­Jail....  What proportion of truth could there be in the firmly-held belief of the men that “crimes” are made so numerous and so inevitable, to the best-meaning and most careful, because there exist a great Military Prison System and a great Military Prison personnel—­and that “criminals” are essential to the respective proper inhabitation and raison d’etre thereof—­that unless a good supply of military “criminals” were forthcoming there might have to be reductions and curtailments—­loss of snug billets....  Certainly soldiers got years of imprisonment for “crimes” for which civilians would get reprimands or nominal fines, and, moreover, when a man became a soldier he certainly lost the elementary fundamental rights guaranteed to Englishmen by Magna Charta—­among them the right of trial by his peers....

Would poor Priddell mind if he did not knock again?  If it were the Snake it could do Priddell no harm now—­he being happily dead—­whereas, if disturbed, it might emerge to the utter undoing—­mind, body, and soul—­of Trooper Matthewson.  It would certainly send him to Jail or Lunatic Asylum—­probably to both in due succession, for he was daily getting worse in the matter of the Snake.