Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face.
"Oh, come, I say!" he protested.
"I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!"
And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that Colonel Dewes was quite astounded. He was aware of no similiarity between his own case and that of Shere Ali. He had long since forgotten the exhortations of Luffe.
"Oh, come now," he repeated. "Isn't that a little ungrateful—what?"
He could hardly have chosen a word less likely to soothe the exasperated nerves of his companion. Shere Ali laughed harshly.
"I ought to be grateful?" said he.
"Well," said Dewes, "you have been to Eton and Oxford, you have seen London. All that is bound to have broadened your mind. Don't you feel that your mind has broadened?"
"Tell me the use of a broad mind in Chiltistan," said Shere Ali. And Colonel Dewes, who had last seen the valleys of that remote country more than twenty years before, was baffled by the challenge.
"To tell the truth, I am a little out of touch with Indian problems," he said. "But it's surely good in every way that there should be a man up there who knows we have something in the way of an army. When I was there, there was trouble which would have been quite prevented by knowledge of that kind."