“I won’t.  Come along.”

“Did you ever think that it might have been that—­you were only a boy, and wounded and weak and overstrained—­and full of longing for your godfather.  Did you ever think that you might have mistaken the likeness of the officer for Kitchener himself?  That the thought of Dundonald’s Destroyer was working in your mind before, and that it materialized at that moment and you—­imagined the words he said.  Perhaps imagined them afterwards, as you searched for him over London.  The two things might have suggested each other in your feverish boy’s brain.”

I stopped, frightened, fearful that he might think me not appreciative of the honor he had done me in telling this intimate experience.  But General Cochrane was in no wise disturbed.

“Yes, I’ve thought that,” he answered dispassionately.  “It may be that was the case.  And yet—­I can’t see it.  That thing happened to me.  I’ve not been able to explain it away to my own satisfaction.  I’ve not been able to believe otherwise than that the Sirdar, England’s hero, came to save England in her peril, and that he did it by breathing his thought into me.  His spirit got across somehow from over there—­to me.  I was the only available person alive.  The copy in the archives was buried, dead and buried and forgotten for seventy years.  So he did it—­that way.  And if your explanation is the right one it isn’t so much less wonderful, is it?” he demanded.  “In these days psychology dares say more than in 1917.  One knows that ghost stories, as they called them in those ignorant times, are not all superstition and imagination.  One knows that a soul lives beyond the present, that a soul sometimes struggles back from what we call the hereafter to this little earth—­makes the difficult connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter.  When the pull is strong enough.  And what pull could be stronger than England’s danger?  To Kitchener?” The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the curtain of eternal silences.

When I spoke again:  “It’s a story the world ought to own some day,” I said.  “Love of country, faithfulness that death could not hinder.”

“Well,” said old General Cochrane, “when I’m gone you may write it for the world if you like, little American.  And what I’ll do will be to find the Sirdar, the very first instant I’m over the border, and say to him, ’I’ve known it was your work all along, sir, and however did you get it across?’”

A month ago my cousin sent me some marked newspapers.  General Cochrane has gone over the border, and I make no doubt that before now he has found the Sirdar and that the two sons and saviors of a beloved little land on a little planet have talked over that moment, in the leisures and simplicities of eternity, and have wondered perhaps that anyone could wonder how he got it across.