The Stratagem and Other Stories

screwed mouth, mooched along the platform to his grub, which he would find in an isolated cottage some three hundred yards away. In strong contrast to the Englishman, with his mous- tache afforesting a whitish face, marked with deep red rings on neck and forehead, his impending paunchiness and his full suit of armour, was the small, active man with the pointed beard whom fate had thrown first into the same compartment, and then into the same hour of exile from all their fellows. His eyes were astonishingly black and fierce; his beard was grizzled and his face heavily lined and obvi- ously burnt by tropical suns; but that face also ex- pressed intelligence, strength, and resourcefulness in a degree which would have made him an ideal comrade in a forlorn hope, or the defence of a desperate vil- lage. Across the back of his left hand was a thick and heavy scar. In spite of all this, he was dressed with sin- gular neatness and correctness; which circumstance, although his English was purer than that of his compan- ion in distress, made the latter secretly incline to suspect him of being a Frenchman. In spite of the quietness of his dress and the self-possession of his demeanour, the sombre glitter of those black eyes, pin-points below shaggy eye-brows, inspired the large man with a certain uneasiness. Not at all a chap to quarrel with, was his thought. However, being himself a widely-travelled man—Boulogne, Dieppe, Paris, Switzerland, and even Venice—he had none of that insularity of which foreign- ers accuse some Englishmen, and he had endeavoured to make conversation during the journey. The small man had proved a poor companion, taciturn to a fault, sparing of words where a nod would satisfy the obliga- tions of courtesy, and seemingly fonder of his pipe than of his fellow-man. A man with a secret, thought the Englishman. The train had jolted out of the station and the porter had faded from the landscape. “A deserted spot,” re- marked the Englishman, whose name was Bevan, “espe-