"Rubbish!" growled a hard-faced old fellow, whose scarred visage looked like an ill-drawn railway map. "Rise from the dead, indeed! if I was once dead, I'd never be sitch a fool as to git up and 'ave it all over agin, I knows that! They've jist desarted, and j'ined Kala Bagh. I remember now as I see'd him, when he was made-up as a juggler, say some'at to Tom, and to Sam Black too. They've desarted, that's wot they've done; and if it warn't for the shame of herdin' with sitch scum as them coffee-coloured thieves yonder, I'm blowed if I wouldn't desart too."
"And so would I," muttered more than one of his hearers.
The story at last reached the ears of Colonel Hardman, who, at any other time, would have been goaded to frenzy by the very thought of any of his men deserting, and, worse still, deserting to join a gang of Hindu robbers. But he soon had something else to think of; for as the summer was drawing to a close, his little Freddy fell suddenly ill.
Then was seen a change such as the fort had never known since British redcoats first garrisoned it. No more songs and laughter, no more coarse jokes or boisterous oaths. The rough soldiers went to and fro as silently as shadows—the officers sat over their evening cigars without uttering a word; and no man who crossed the barrack square after dark ever failed to look up instinctively at the light that burned in an upper room of the colonel's quarters, showing where life and death were contending for the bright-eyed boy whom they all knew and loved.
But, as if to sweep away their last hope, the heat of that memorable summer endured longer than the oldest man could recollect. Even the nights were as sultry as the days, and, slowly but surely, the poor little life withered away, though the kind-hearted doctor (who had always been a special friend of their little favourite) wore himself to a shadow in striving to save him, and the stern father never quitted for an instant, save when his duty called him, the sick-bed on which lay all that he had left to love.
"As if there warn't men enough 'ere to die, and plenty as could be better spared!" growled a big soldier one evening; "and then to go and pick out 'im!"
"Hold yer jaw, can't yer?" broke in a second man savagely; "he shan't die, not if Death was to come for to fetch him hisself, with a full-strength battalion o' devils to back him!"
"I wish I knowed how to pray, so as I could pray for 'im!" muttered a third—one of the wildest and worst men in the whole regiment.
"Well, look 'ere, boys!" cried a fourth; "s'pose we all volunteer to be put down on God's black list instead, mayhap He'll let the little 'un off for this once; for, whoever He is, He surely wouldn't be too hard on a sweet little chap like that!"
And then, doffing his cap as if in the presence of a superior, the rough fellow said, in a voice that he vainly tried to steady—