LAST NIGHT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 82

LAST NIGHT.

By

CARLSON E. HOLWES.

(Copyright.—For the Witness.) Last night I visited a picture show with a man 1 know —a man wlio is a t».‘ed little clerk with big glasses. The picture was a story of men and horses and guns —a story ot how the mails went across me great American Continent in the bad old days. The hero—an impossibly good-looking hero—was an impossibly rod shot. As .the Indians and bandits ».ll before his Colt .45, 1 hoard the tired little clerk exclaim, “Good boy!” I glanced at my companion. He was in deadly earnest. Every time the hero pulled his gun—with the help of the drummer in the orchestra —my friend gripped the arm of his chair. His body might have been in a theatre, but, in spirit, he was riding through with the mail. And, as the Indians dropped, he imagined his was the gun that did it. It seemed pathetic, in a way Here was this man—whose only excitement was a large packet of cigarettes on tmturday nights—oblivious to everything save the safe delivery of the moving picture mail. Then I understood. Once he had told me—in a listless sort of manner—that the tradition of his family was for its members to die with their boots on. He has a brother who is running the army of some toy republic in Central Europe. Another, who wore “wings” and R.A.F. uniform, lies in an old French garden—a broken aeroplane propellor marking his last resting place. Any history of India will tell you what this clerk’s grandfather did in the Great Mutiny. And if the tall, scrawny palms of an island in the Pacific could speak, their * tale would be a weird one—a tale of a gaunt white man who maintained respect for the law with his fists and a little stick that spat fire and death, killing men where they stood. Those palms looked down on one of the strangest scenes of history —the conversion of savages to subjects of a White Queen who lived away over the seas that had brought this white man—a queen whose rule was just . . . whose vengeance quick and terrible. « a * And here was one of this race of Empire builders—a small, tired man, with a whispering voice which seemed to apologise for his existence. While his relatives carried the flag to the four corners of the earth, he was content to grow potatoes in a tiny suburban garden .... while they pitted the brains of our race against the cunning of the East, he wrote out invoices in a dusty office. And yet, for two shillings, he conld te transported to the world that really belonged to him! Lucky man !