Page:Rudyard Kipling - A diversity of creatures.djvu/308

296 went away climbin' to glory, for that blessed star of our hope got smaller and smaller till we couldn't track it any more. Then we breathed. We hadn't breathed any since their arrival, but we didn't know it till we breathed that time—all together. Then we dug our finger-nails out of our palms an' came alive again—in instalments.

'Lundie spoke first. "We therefore commit their bodies to the air," he says, an' puts his cap on.

The deep—the deep," says Walen. "It's just twenty-three miles to the Channel."

Poor chaps! Poor chaps!" says Mankeltow. "We'd have had 'em to dinner if they hadn't lost their heads. I can't tell you how this distresses me, Laughton."

' "Well, look at here, Arthur," I says. "It's only God's Own Mercy you an' me ain't lyin' in Flora's Temple now, and if that fat man had known enough to fetch his gun around while he was runnin', Lord Lundie and Walen would have been alongside us."

I see that," he says. "But we're alive and they're dead, don't ye know."

' "I know it," I says. "That's where the dead are always so damned unfair on the survivors."

' "I see that too," he says. "But I'd have given a good deal if it hadn't happened, poor chaps!" Amen!" says Lundie. Then? Oh, then we sorter walked back two an' two to Flora's