Of course the colonel started off at once, and when he caught sight of
the hut he noticed that the goats were unmilked and bleating pitifully
round the door. As he drew nearer, the jackdaw and magpie came hopping
out, cawing with mouths wide open; and then he jumped off his horse,
tied him up, and knocked with his whip against the pole which formed
the door-post. There was no answer, and he went in. The idiot was
lying as he had seen him on the previous day, but the troubled look was
gone from his face; and across him with her head close to his lay his
mother, while the squirrel with his little bright eyes was sitting up
by the heads of both. The woman's skirts were dripping wet, as though
she had walked through dewy grass, and she lay quite still. The
colonel laid his hand on the man's forehead; and it was quite cold.
Then he took the woman's hand and that also was cold. He had seen such
sights too often in the wars to be dismayed at finding himself alone
with the dead. "He must have died at sunset," he said to himself, "and
she walked over to Bracefort in the night in distraction and came back
to die before sunrise. No wonder, after such a strain as carrying him
all those miles." He left the two where they lay, and was about to put
the door in its place and go; but the goats clamoured so loud that he
stopped to milk them, which he had learned to do in India, and finding
the meat that he had brought on the previous day untouched in the
basket, he gave some scraps to the magpie and the jackdaw, and ferreted
about till he had discovered some nuts in the hut for the squirrel.
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