"A pleasant surprise, I hope," she asked, smiling, as they shook hands.
"Why, of course it's always good to see you," the boy answered, looking upon her with frank admiration. "And you bet we're proud to have our ladies facing the music with us. But still . . cholera's cholera; and it looks like a record year. They've got it hot and strong at Mian Mir. Two of the Norfolks came down the hill with us, swearing like Billy O. Been up less than a fortnight; and there's a masked ball on at the Club to-morrow. Oh Lord, it's a lively country! Poor old Hodson only got a week in Simla; and he has fever on him still."
Lenox glanced quizzically at the man he desired to weed out of his beloved Battery by the simple means of making him work.
"Hard luck," he remarked; a suspicion of irony in his tone. And Hodson, anathematising under his breath India in general, and the Frontier in particular, strolled off down the platform, head in air. There was little love lost between him and a commandant for whom work was the backbone of life.
Just then, through the open windows of the next carriage, there came forth a voice of thunder—articulate, unparliamentary thunder: and Lenox, with a touch of friendly authority, drew Honor farther away.
"That's old Buckstick," Bobby explained genially. "Giving it to his poor devil of a bearer, because he wants to hit out at some one. They say in the regiment that some fool of a palmist told him to beware of cholera; and I believe the old chap's in a blue funk. Queer thing, funk. Put that man on an unbroken horse, or in the thick of a hand-to-hand scrimmage, and he wouldn't know the meaning of fear. Yet now . . ."
His dissertation was interrupted by the appearance at the window of Colonel Stanham Buckley of the Punjab Infantry, who mopped a moist bald head, and inquired picturesquely of a passing official when the blank this blankety blank train was supposed to start. Then catching sight of a woman's figure, he vanished, with a final incoherent explosion, slamming up the window-shutter behind him.
How the devil, he asked himself furiously, should a sane man expect to find an Englishwoman hanging about Lahore station on a murderous night of July? The idea that she might be travelling to Dera never entered his head. His own wife, after five years of Frontier vicissitudes,—aggravated by debt, and the tyranny of 'little drinks at mess,'—had developed pronounced views on the duties of motherhood. These had led to a house in Surrey, which, for one reason or another, it had never yet seemed feasible to give up: and Buckley had consoled himself after the fashion of his kind, with hard drinking, hard riding, and hard swearing,—the only form of Trinity recognised by a certain type of man.
And as he opened his ice-box, and helped himself to a stiff 'nightcap' before turning in, Desmond joined the group outside.
"Come on, you two," he said, grasping an arm of each, "Dogs and luggage, and carriage all square. We shall be off in a minute. Only half an hour behind time! See you again at Chichawutni, Nick. Don't lie too flat, and get apoplexy. We can't afford to lose willing men!"