“Doubtless he was born to that end,” observed the Captain, who was apt to get a little peevish when hungry and tired.

And when the Army Aeroplane Hawk returned from its “ground-scouring for casualties” trip, lo, it bore, beneath and beside the pilot and passenger, a real casualty slung in a kind of crude coffin-cradle of planks and poles, a casualty in whose recovery the Colonel took the very deepest interest, for was he not a heaven-sent case, born to the end that he might be smashed to demonstrate the Colonel’s theories?  But no credit was given to the vultures, without whom the “casualty” would never have been found.

CHAPTER XIII.

FOUND.

Colonel John Decies, I.M.S. (retired), visiting the Kot Ghazi Station Hospital, whereof his friend and pupil, Captain Digby-Soames, was Commandant, scanned the temperature chart of the unknown, the desperately injured “case,” retrieved by his beloved flying-machine, who, judging by his utterances in delirium, appeared to be even worse damaged in spirit than he was in body.

“Very high again last night,” he observed to Miss Norah O’Neill of the Queen Alexandra Military Nursing Sisterhood.

“Yes, and very violent,” replied Miss O’Neill.  “I had to call two orderlies and they could hardly hold him.  He appeared to think he was fighting a huge snake or fleeing from one.  He also repeatedly screamed:  ‘It is under my foot!  It is moving, moving, moving out.’”

“Got it, by God!” cried the Colonel, suddenly smiting his forehead with violence. “Of course! Fool!  Fool that I am!  Merciful God in Heaven—­it’s her boy—­and I have saved him! Her boy! And I’ve been cudgelling my failing addled brains for months, wondering where I had seen his face before.  He’s my godson, Sister, and I haven’t set eyes on him for the last—­nearly twenty years!”

Miss Norah O’Neill had never before seen an excited doctor in a hospital ward, but she now beheld one nearly beside himself with excitement, joy, surprise, and incredulity. (It is sad to have to relate that she also heard one murmuring over and over again to himself, “Well, I am damned".)

At last Colonel John Decies announced that the world was a tiny, small place and a very rum one, that it was just like The Hawk to be the means of saving her boy of all people, and then took the patient’s hand in his, and sat studying his face, in wondering, pondering silence.

To Miss Norah O’Neill this seemed extraordinarily powerful affection for a mere godson, and one lost to sight for twenty years at that.  Yet Colonel Decies was a bachelor and, no, the patient certainly resembled him in no way whatsoever.  The tiny new-born germ of a romance died at once in Miss O’Neill’s romantic heart—­and yet, had she but known, here was a romance such as her soul loved above all things—­the son of the adored dead mistress discovered in extremis, and saved, by the devout platonic lover, the life-long lover, and revealed to him by the utterance of the pre-natally learnt words of the dead woman herself!