British -- India -- Fiction; India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction; Short stories, English
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to have
saved the wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of assured and
open marriage, came then. Dicky burst into a roar of laughter--laughter
he could not check--nasty, jangling merriment that seemed as if it
would go on forever. When he had recovered himself he said, quite
seriously:--“I'm tired of work. I'm an old man now. It's about time I
retired. And I will.”
“The boy's mad!” said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the
question.
PIG.
Go, stalk the red deer o'er the heather
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man,--
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin,--the hunting of Man.
The Old Shikarri.
I believe the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a twist in
his temper, whom Pinecoffin sold to Nafferton and by whom Nafferton was
nearly slain. There may have been other causes of offence; the horse was
the official stalking-horse. Nafferton was very angry; but Pinecoffin
laughed and said that he had never guaranteed the beast's manners.
Nafferton laughed, too, though he vowed that he would write off his fall
against Pinecoffin if he waited five years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond
Skipton will forgive an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a
South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You can see from their
names that Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffin. He was a
peculiar man, and his notions of humor were cruel. He taught me a new
and fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffin from Mithankot
to Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad up and across the Punjab,
a large province and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no
intention of allowing Assistant Commissioners to “sell him pups,” in the
shape of ramping, screaming countrybreds, without making their lives a
burden to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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