"And you shot him? Well, I have never shot a man yet, and I don't know how I should feel. Were you very uncomfortable afterwards?"
"Not in the slightest. He was going to kill my uncle, and I fired and he went down, and I thought nothing more about it till I mentioned it to my uncle after it was all over."
"I suppose you are a good shot?"
"I am a fair shot," Percy said. "I have practised nearly every day since I left England, except when I was travelling up country. Mr. Fullarton advised me to do so on board ship, and my uncle kept me regularly at that and riding and sword exercise every day, partly because he said these things would be most useful to me, and partly because the Sikhs look up to anyone who can do things better than they can."
"It must be awfully jolly to be able to speak the language, Groves?" Lieutenant Egerton said, "and I hear you speak it like a native. You must have a wonderful knack of picking up languages to have learnt it so completely in six months."
"It was not exactly in six months. I had studied Hindustani before I left England; and luckily Mr. Fullarton had a Punjaubi servant with him, and I worked with him regularly five or six hours a day throughout the voyage, so that I was able to get on pretty fairly with the language by the time I got out here."
"I wish I had spent my voyage as well," Egerton laughed, "instead of spending it spooning with a young woman who was on her way out to be married, and who did marry the man a week after she landed."
"These things are very sad, Egerton," Lieutenant Lascelles laughed. "I suppose you were heart-broken for a time."
"Not quite. I will do her justice to say that she made no secret of her engagement, and never flattered me with the hope that she intended to break it. At the same time she had no objection to flirt with me, it being an understood thing on both sides that it was to end with the voyage. It was very pleasant while it lasted; but it would have been very much wiser to have done as Groves did, and spent the hot hours of the day in getting up a language. I should be a hundred a year better off if I had passed in one of the dialects, and besides, I should have had much better chance of getting a good appointment."
"Ah, well, you can console yourself, Egerton, by thinking that if you had you would be now in some small cantonment down in Bengal, instead of having a chance of seeing whatever fun may be going on here."