Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/47

 Over the mantelpiece a double sheet of note-paper had been pinned, and above this in letters about two-foot high, was written in charcoal on the wall:—"The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau." The Beast had carefully written out the whole yarn from beginning to end, with stage directions for himself about yelling and looking half mad in red ink at the sides. And he had left that behind for our benefit.

It was a magnificent "sell"; but nothing except Tick's acting would have pulled it off in the perfect way it went. We stopped dead, and just pondered over the length and the breadth and the thickness of it. If we'd only thought for a minute about the improbability of a woman dying at a Mussoorie ball without the whole of upper India knowing it we might have saved ourselves. But that's just what we didn't do. And if you'd listened to Tick you'd have followed our lead. Tick never came back. I fancy he had a sort of notion it wouldn't have been healthy for him if he had. But we've started a sort of Land League—what do you call it? Vehmgericht?—in our Mess; and if we come across him anywhere we're going to make things lively for him. He sent in his papers and went down to Pachmarri, where it seems he really was engaged to a girl with money— something like two thousand a year, I've heard,—married her, and went home. Of course he had spent his three months' leave at Pachmarri too. We found that out afterwards.

I don't think I should have taken all that trouble and expense (for the Mess room is full of those horns and heads) to work out a sell like that, even if it had been as grand a one as "The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau."

P.S.—Just you ask any one of us if "a betrothal to a dead woman is binding in law," and see what happens. I think you'll find that I've written the truth pretty much.