Dicky’s eyes squinted under the cloths. “And what of your own people?” he managed to ask.
“Oh, many have been killed!”
This was an item that did not require the enumeration of details. Hathis had gone musth, but not for long. Hathis was horrified at the awfulness of the thing she had done. Hathis was back in her pickets again, not realizing her own hurts, anticipating a clubbing on the toes, and in the immortal way of hathis, half suspecting that a clubbing was deserved.
“I’d like to doze a little,” said Dicky.
The student rose, but lingered.
“Would Cobden Sahib permit me to ask one question?”
“Why, of course, shoot—I mean—ask it.”
“It is about that moment when you fell,” said Lala Relu Ram. “Rather, it was when I reached you, and had driven off my people who thought you were one of the English——”
“Yes.”
“You were partly out of the body—unconscious. Yet your eyes were open and you were speaking some word that I have never heard—several times, as you would speak the Holy Name in devotion, with breathing.”