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Garm slept ill that night and whimpered in his dreams. Once he sprang up with a clear, ringing bark, and I heard him wag his tail till it waked him and the bark died out in a howl. He had dreamed he was with his master again, and I nearly cried. It was all Stanley’s silly fault.

The first halt which the detachment of invalids made was some miles from their barracks, on the Amritsar road, and ten miles distant from my house. By a mere chance one of the officers drove back for another good dinner at the Club (cooking on the line of march is always bad), and there I met him. He was a particular friend of mine, and I knew that he knew how to love a dog properly. His pet was a big fat retriever who was going up to the Hills for his health, and, though it was still April, the round, brown brute puffed and panted in the Club verandah as though he would burst.

“It’s amazing,” said the officer, “what excuses these invalids of mine make to get back to barracks. There’s a man in my company now asked me for leave to go back to cantonments to pay a debt he’d forgotten. I was so taken by the idea I let him go, and he jingled off in an ekka as pleased as Punch. Ten miles to pay a debt! Wonder what it was really?”

“If you’ll drive me home I think I can show you,” I said.

So he went over to my house in his dog-cart with the retriever; and on the way I told him the story of Garm.

“I was wondering where that brute had gone to. He’s the best dog in the regiment,” said my friend. “I offered the little fellow twenty rupees for him a month ago. But he’s a hostage, you say, for Stanley’s good conduct. Stanley’s one of the best men I have when he chooses.”

“That’s the reason why,” I said. “A second-rate man wouldn’t have taken things to heart as he has done.”

We drove in quietly at the far end of the garden, and crept round the house. There was a place close to the wall all grown about with tamarisk trees, where I knew Garm kept his bones. Even Vixen was not allowed to sit near it. In the full Indian moonlight I could see a white uniform bending over the dog.

“Good-bye, old man,” we could not help hearing Stanley’s voice. “For ‘Eving’s sake don’t get bit and go mad by any measly pi-dog. But you can look after yourself, old man. You don’t get drunk an’ run about ‘ittin’ your friends. You takes your bones an’ you eats your biscuit, an’ you kills your enemy like a gentleman. I’m goin’ away–don’t ‘owl–I’m goin’ off to Kasauli, where I won’t see you no more.”

I could hear him holding Garm’s nose as the dog threw it up to the stars.

“You’ll stay here an’ be’ave, an’–an’ I’ll go away an’ try to be’ave, an’ I don’t know ‘ow to leave you. I don’t know–“

“I think this is damn silly,” said the officer, patting his foolish fubsy old retriever. He called to the private, who leaped to his feet, marched forward, and saluted.

“You here?” said the officer, turning away his head.

“Yes, sir, but I’m just goin’ back.”

“I shall be leaving here at eleven in my cart. You come with me. I can’t have sick men running about fall over the place. Report yourself at eleven, here.”

We did not say much when we went indoors, but the officer muttered and pulled his retriever’s ears.

He was a disgraceful, overfed doormat of a dog; and when he waddled off to my cookhouse to be fed, I had a brilliant idea.

At eleven o’clock that officer’s dog was nowhere to be found, and you never heard such a fuss as his owner made. He called and shouted and grew angry, and hunted through my garden for half an hour.