They were heart-filling lines and they ran with a swirl; the I.A.A. are better served by their pens than their petards. Dan clapped Mulcahy merrily on the back, asking him to sing up. The officers lay down again. There was no need to walk any more. Their men were soothing themselves thunderously, thus—

‘I’ll speak to you after all’s over,’ said Father Dennis authoritatively in Dan’s ear. ‘What’s the use of confessing to me when you do this foolishness? Dan, you’ve been playing with fire! I’ll lay you more penance in a week than—’

‘Come along to Purgatory with us, Father dear. The Boneens are on the move; they’ll let us go now!’

The regiment rose to the blast of the bugle as one man; but one man there was who rose more swiftly than all the others, for half an inch of bayonet was in the fleshy part of his leg.

‘You’ve got to do it,’ said Dan grimly. ‘Do it decent, anyhow;’ and the roar of the rush drowned his words, for the rear companies thrust forward the first, still singing as they swung down the slope—

They should have sung it in the face of England, not of the Afghans, whom it impressed as much as did the wild Irish yell.

‘They came down singing,’ said the unofficial report of the enemy, borne from village to village the next day. ‘They continued to sing, and it was written that our men could not abide when they came. It is believed that there was magic in the aforesaid song.’

Dan and Horse Egan kept themselves in the neighbourhood of Mulcahy. Twice the man would have bolted back in the confusion. Twice he was heaved, kicked, and shouldered back again into the unpaintable inferno of a hotly contested charge.

At the end, the panic excess of his fear drove him into madness beyond all human courage. His eyes staring at nothing, his mouth open and frothing, and breathing as one in a cold bath, he went forward demented, while Dan toiled after him. The charge checked at a high mud wall. It was Mulcahy who scrambled up tooth and nail and hurled down among the bayonets the amazed Afghan who barred his way. It was Mulcahy, keeping to the straight line of the rabid dog, who led a collection of ardent souls at a newly unmasked battery, and flung himself on the muzzle of a gun as his companions danced among the gunners. It was Mulcahy who ran wildly on from that battery into the open plain, where the enemy were retiring in sullen groups. His hands were empty, he had lost helmet and belt, and he was bleeding from a wound in the neck. Dan and Horse Egan, panting and distressed, had thrown themselves down on the ground by the captured guns, when they noticed Mulcahy’s charge.

‘Mad,’ said Horse Egan critically. ‘Mad with fear! He’s going straight to his death, an’ shouting’s no use.’

‘Let him go. Watch now! If we fire we’ll hit him maybe.’

The last of a hurrying crowd of Afghans turned at the noise of shod feet behind him, and shifted his knife ready to hand. This, he saw, was no time to take prisoners. Mulcahy tore on, sobbing; the straight- held blade went home through the defenceless breast, and the body pitched forward almost before a shot from Dan’s rifle brought down the slayer and still further hurried the Afghan retreat. The two Irishmen went out to bring in their dead.

‘He was given the point and that was an easy death,’ said Horse Egan, viewing the corpse. ‘But would you ha’ shot him, Danny, if he had lived?’