“Don’t cough or sneeze near the gun,” murmured Vereker to Bertram, “or it may fall to pieces again. The copper-wire is all right, but the boot-lace was not new to begin with.”
“What kind of gun is it?” he asked.
“It was a Hotchkiss once. It’s a Hot-potch now,” was the reply. “Don’t touch it as you pass,” and the puzzled Bertram observed that it was actually bound with copper-wire at one point and tied with some kind of cord or string at another.
By the hospital—a horrible pit with a tent over it—stood the Indian youth and a party of Swahili stretcher-bearers.
Bertram wondered whether it would ever be his fate to be carried on one of those blood-stained stretchers by a couple of those negroes, laid on the mud at the bottom of that pit, and operated on by that young native of India. He shuddered. Fancy one’s life-blood ebbing away into that mud. Fancy dying, mangled, in that hole with no one but a Bupendranath Chatterji to soothe one’s last agonies. . . .
Having completed his tour of inspection, Major Mallery removed the Stand-to face and resumed his ordinary one, said: “They can dismiss,” to Captain Macke and the group of officers, and tore off his cross-belt and tunic.
All his hearers relaxed their faces likewise, blew their whistles, cried “Dismiss!” in the direction of their respective Native Officers, and removed their belts and tunics almost as quickly as they had removed their Stand-to faces.
They then proceeded to the Bristol Bar.
CHAPTER XVI
The Bristol Bar
“Come along to the Bristol Bar and have a drink, Greene,” said Cecil Clarence, alias Gussie Augustus Gus, emerging from his banda, into which he had cast his tunic and Sam Browne belt.