Snake and Sword: A NovelWren, Percival Christopher
General
Snake and Sword: A Novel
Wren, Percival Christopher
British -- India -- Fiction
“Well, you start splinting that right leg on to the left and stiffen
the knees with something (you’ll probably be able to get a decent stick
or two off that small tree), and shove the arm inside his leather
legging. We’ve two pairs of putties you can bandage with, and there are
_puggries_ on all three _topis_. Probably his gun’s somewhere about,
for another leg-splint, too. I’ll get down to the machine for the cord
and then I’ll skirmish around for anything in the nature of poles or
planks. I can get over to that hut and back before you’ve done. It’ll
be the camelling that’ll kill him.”
At the distant building the Colonel found an abandoned broken-wheeled
bullock-cart, from which he looted the bottom-boards, which were planks
six feet long, laid upon, but not fastened to, the framework of the
body of the cart. From the compound of the place (an ancient and
rarely-visited dak-bungalow, probably the most outlying and deserted in
India) he procured a bamboo pole that had once supported a lamp, the
long leg-rests of an old chair, and two or three sticks, more or less
serviceable for his purpose.
Returning to the camel, he ascended to where his passenger and pupil
awaited him. Over his shoulder he bore the planks, pole and sticks that
the contemptuous but invaluable camel had borne to a point a few yards
below the scene of the tragedy.
“Good egg,” observed the younger man. “We’ll do him up in those like a
mummy.”
“Yes,” returned the Colonel, “then carry him to the oont and bind him
along one side of the saddle, and then lead the beast down. Easily
sling him on to the machine, and there we are. Lucky we’ve got the coil
of cord. Fine demonstration for the Kot Ghazi fellers! Show that the
thing can be done, even without the proper kind of ’plane and surgical
outfit. What luck we spotted him—or that he fell just in our return
track!”
“Doubtless he was born to that end,” observed the Captain, who was apt
to get a little peevish when hungry and tired.
And when the Army Aeroplane _Hawk_ returned from its “ground-scouring
for casualties” trip, lo, it bore, beneath and beside the pilot and
passenger, a real casualty slung in a kind of crude coffin-cradle of
planks and poles, a casualty in whose recovery the Colonel took the
very deepest interest, for was he not a heaven-sent case, born to the
end that he might be smashed to demonstrate the Colonel’s theories? But
no credit was given to the vultures, without whom the “casualty” would
never have been found.
CHAPTER XIII.
FOUND.
Colonel John Decies, I.M.S. (retired), visiting the Kot Ghazi Station
Hospital, whereof his friend and pupil, Captain Digby-Soames, was
Commandant, scanned the temperature chart of the unknown, the
desperately injured “case,” retrieved by his beloved flying-machine,
who, judging by his utterances in delirium, appeared to be even worse
damaged in spirit than he was in body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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