The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at
Minchinghampton School.

Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate.
He had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and
manners, a boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes
that went dark and deep with excitement. Several times White had
seen him excited, and when he was excited Benham was capable of
tensely daring things. On one occasion he had insisted upon walking
across a field in which was an aggressive bull. It had been put
there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to the swimming place.
It had bellowed tremendously and finally charged him. He had dodged
it and got away; at the time it had seemed an immense feat to White
and the others who were safely up the field. He had walked to the
fence, risking a second charge by his deliberation. Then he had sat
on the fence and declared his intention of always crossing the field
so long as the bull remained there. He had said this with white
intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, and then
suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence, struggled
with heaving shoulders, and been sick.

The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak
stomach had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.

On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
rather screwed-up sort. He showed it not only in physical but in
mental things. A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious
discussion in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination,
professed an atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of