Then the Lushkar captain did a deed for which he
ought to have been given the Victoria Cross--distinguished gallantry
in a fight against overwhelming curiosity. He picked up his team with
his eyes as the hostess picks up the ladies at the opportune moment,
and pausing only by the colonel's chair to say, "This isn't _our_
affair, you know, sir," led the team into the veranda and the gardens.
Hira Singh was the last, and he looked at Dirkovitch as he moved. But
Dirkovitch had departed into a brandy paradise of his own. His lips
moved without sound, and he was studying the coffin on the ceiling.
"White--white all over," said Basset-Holmer, the adjutant. "What a
pernicious renegade[15] he must be! I wonder where he came from?"
The colonel shook the man gently by the arm, and "Who are you?" said
he.
There was no answer. The man stared round the mess room and smiled in
the colonel's face. Little Mildred, who was always more of a woman
than a man till "Boot and saddle" was sounded, repeated the question
in a voice that would have drawn confidences from a geyser. The man
only smiled. Dirkovitch, at the far end of the table, slid gently from
his chair to the floor, No son of Adam, in this present imperfect
world, can mix the Hussars' champagne with the Hussars' brandy by five
and eight glasses of each without remembering the pit whence he has
been digged and descending thither.
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