"They kept me at the pigeon hospital for a month. Though my wing was repaired and my leg sewn up where it belonged, they could not make me fly again. Every time I hopped up in the air my ears, I know not how, were filled with terrible noises of guns, and my eyes saw nothing but flaming bullets. I was so frightened that I would dash immediately to the ground. You may say that I was hearing imaginary guns and seeing imaginary walls of bullets: maybe, but their effect on me was the same as that of real ones. My wings were paralysed, my entrails frozen with terror. "Besides, I would not fly without Ghond. Why should I spring from the hands of a man whose complexion was not brown and whose eyes were blue? I had not known such people before. We pigeons don't take to any and every outsider. At last they brought me in a cage to the hospital where Ghond was, and left me beside him. When I saw him I hardly recognized him, for his eyes--Ghond's eyes--wore a look of real fear! Yes, he too had been frightened out of his wits for once. I know, as all birds and beasts do, what fear looks like, and I felt sorry for Ghond. "But on seeing me, that film of terror left his eyes, and they burnt with a light of joy. He sat up in bed, took me in his hands and kissed my foot that had held the message that he had sent. Then he patted my right wing and said: 'Even in great distress, O thou constellation of divine feathers, thou hast borne thy owner with his message among friends and won glory for all pigeons and the whole Indian army.' Again he kissed my foot. His humility touched me and by example humbled me. I felt no more pride when I remembered how I fell in the trenches of an Indian brigade after that aeroplane had partly smashed my wing, for had I fallen in a German trench, then ... they would have seized the message on my leg, they would have surrounded the forest where Ghond lay hid with that wild dog--I shuddered to think of what they would have done! Alas! the dog, our true friend and saviour, where was he now?" CHAPTER VIII HEALING OF HATE AND FEAR "That dog," Ghond took up the story, "must have lost his French master early in the war. Probably the Germans had shot the man, and after that, when he saw his master's home looted and the barn set on fire, he went wild with terror and ran away into the woods, where he lived hidden from the sight of men under the thick thorn-bush, spacious as a hut and dark as the interior of a tomb. Probably he ventured out only at night in quest of food, and being a hunting dog by heredity, all his savage qualities returned as he spent day after day and night after night in the woods like an outlaw. "When he came across me, he was surprised because I was not afraid. I gave out no odour of fear. I must have been the first man in months whose fear did not frighten him to attack.