Page:Under the Deodars - Kipling (1890).djvu/95

 way of thinking. Any public school could send us fifty good men in your place, but it takes time, time, Porkiss, and money and a certain amount of trouble to make a Regiment. S'pose you're the person we go into camp for, eh? "

Whereupon Porkiss was overtaken with a great and chilly fear which a drenching in the rain did not allay, and two days later, quitt                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      ed this world for another, where, men do fondly hope, allowances are made for the weaknesses of the flesh. The Regimental Sergeant-Major looked wearily across the Sergeants' Mess tent when the news was announced.

"There goes the worst of them," he said. "It'll take the best and then, please God, it'll stop."

The Sergeants were silent till one said: "It couldn't be him!" and all knew of whom Travis was thinking.

Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted; hailing the sound into the watery sunlight when there was a break in the weather and bidding them be of good cheer for their trouble was nearly at an end; scuttling on his dun pony round the outskirts of the camp and heading back men, who, with the innate perversity of British soldiers, were always wandering into infected villages, or drinking deeply from rain-flooded pools; comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying who had no friends—the men without "townies;" organizing, with banjoes and burnt cork, Singsongs which should allow the talent of the Regiment full play; and, generally, as he explained, "playing the giddy garden goat all round".

"You're worth half-a-dozen of us, Bobby,' said his skipper in a moment of enthusiasm. "How the devil do you keep it up."

Bobby made no answer, but had Revere looked into the breast-pocket of his coat he might have seen there a sheaf of badly written letters which perhaps accounted for the power that possessed the boy. A letter came to Bobby every other day. The spelling was not above reproach, but the sentiments