Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/41

 favour. 'Said that Tick was awfully cut up about something, and that we really ought to make his life more pleasant for him. He didn't say all that much at once. 'Don't believe he could if he tried for a week, but he made us understand it. And in a quiet sort of a way—Tick was very quiet in everything he did just then—he tumbled to the new bandobast more then ever, and we nearly all took to him. I say nearly all, because I was an exception. He had a little bit up his sleeve in this matter too.

You see he had given all his skins and heads to the Mess, and they were hung in trophies all round the wall. I was seeing them being put up, and I saw in one corner the Cabul Customs mark, in a sort of aniline ink stamp, that all the skins that come from Peshawar must have. Now I knew Cashmere wasn't Peshawar, and that bears didn't grow with Customs marks inside the hide. But I sat tight and said nothing. I want you to remember that I suspected Tick Boileau from the first. The fellows in the Mess say I was just as much taken in as the rest of 'em; but in our Mess they'd say anything. One of Tick's new peculiarities just at this time was a funk of being left alone. He never said anything about it. He used to be always coming over to fellows' quarters in the afternoon though, just when they were trying to put in a little snooze and he'd sit still or bukh about nothing. He was very queer altogether in that way; and some of us thought he'd had D.T.; others that he was engaged, and wanted to get out of it; and one youngster, just joined, vowed that Tick had committed a murder and was haunted by the ghost of his victim.

One night we were sitting round the table smoking after dinner, and this same youngster began bukhing about a Station dance of some kind that was coming off. 'Asked old Tick if he wasn't coming, and made some feeble joke about "ticks" and kala Juggas. Anyhow, it fetched Tick awfully.

He was lifting a glass of sherry up to his mouth, and his hand shook so that he spilt it all down the front of his mess-jacket. He seemed awfully white, but perhaps that was fancy; and said as if there was something in his throat choking him: "Go to a ball. No! I'd sooner rot as I stand!" Well, it isn't usual for a fellow to cut up like that when he's asked if he's going to a hop. I was sitting next to him and said quietly: "Hullo! What's the matter, old man?" Tick was by way of being no end of a dawg before he took leave, and that made his answer all the