Blake Dempsey had come home. Not with bands playing and banners flying as befitted a hero, but silently, secretly, as he’d slipped away nearly fifteen years before, like a shadow out of the dusk.

Fifteen years! It seemed incredible, sitting in the old home again, that his life of soldiering and vagabondage should have ended. A grim expression flickered over his hard-bitten face as he looked down at his empty sleeve. That was the sort of thing to call halt to a man—the sort of thing to make him realise he couldn’t go on knocking around the world on tramp steamers and getting into spots of bother here and there indefinitely.