There remained only on the barrack-square the blood of man calling
from the ground. The hot sun had dried it to a dusky gold-beater-
skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat, and as the wind rose
each lozenge, rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it
were a dumb tongue. Then a heavier gust blew all away down wind in
grains of dark-coloured dust. It was too hot to stand in the
sunshine before breakfast. The men were all in barracks talking
the matter over. A knot of soldiers' wives stood by one of the
entrances to the married quarters, while inside a woman shrieked
and raved with wicked filthy words.

A quiet and well-conducted sergeant had shot down in broad
daylight just after early parade one of his own corporals, had
then returned to barracks and sat on a cot till the guard came for
him. He would, therefore, in due time be handed over to the High
Court for trial. Further, but this he could hardly have considered
in his scheme of revenge, he would horribly upset my work; for the
reporting of the trial would fall on me without a relief. What
that trial would be like I knew even to weariness. There would be
the rifle carefully uncleaned, with the fouling marks about breech
and muzzle, to be sworn to by half a dozen superfluous privates;
there would be heat, reeking heat, till the wet pencil slipped
sideways between the fingers; and the punkah would swish and the
pleaders would jabber in the verandahs, and his Commanding Officer
would put in certificates of the prisoner's moral character, while
the jury would pant and the summer uniforms of the witnesses would
smell of dye and soaps; and some abject barrack-sweeper would lose
his head in cross-examination, and the young barrister who always
defended soldiers' cases for the credit that they never brought
him, would say and do wonderful things, and would then quarrel