Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy by Rudyard Kipling Page B

implored me not to stay but to get back to my tent at once.
    It seems that he had tracked Pornic’s hooves fourteen miles across the sands to the crater; had returned and told my servants, who flatly refused to meddle with any one, white or black, once fallen into the hideous Village of the Dead; whereupon Dunnoo had taken one of my ponies and a couple of punkah ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled me out as I have described.
    To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold mohur a month – a sum which I still think far too little for the services he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish spot again or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass I have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive in giving this to be published is the hope that someone may possibly identify, from the details and the inventory which I have given above, the corpse of the man in the olive-green hunting-suit.

THE UNLIMITED DRAW OF TICK BOILEAU
    He came to us from Naogong, somewhere in Central India; and as soon as we saw him we all voted him a Beast. That was in the Mess of the 45th Bengal Cavalry, stationed at Pindi; and everything I’m going to write about happened this season. I’ve told you he was an awful Beast – old even for a subaltern; but then he’d joined the Army late, and had knocked about the world a good deal. We didn’t know that at first. I wish we had. It would have saved the honour of the Mess. He was called ‘Tick’ in Naogong, because he was never out of debt; but that didn’t make us think him a beast. Quite the other way, for most of us were pretty well clipped ourselves. No, what we hated about the fellow was his ‘dark-horsiness’. I can’t express it any better than that; and, besides, it’s an awful nuisance having to write at all. But all the other fellows in the Mess say I’m the only man who can handle a pen decently; and that I must, for their credit, tell the world exactly how it came about. Everyone is chaffing us so beastly now.
    Well, I was saying that we didn’t like Tick Boileau’s ‘dark-horsiness.’ I mean by that you never knew what the fellow could do and what he could not; and he was always coming out, with that beastly conceited grin on his face, in a new line – ’specially before women – and making the other man, who had tried to do the same thing, feel awfully small and humble. That was his strong point – simpering and cutting a fellow out when he was doing his hardest at something or other. Same with billiards; same with riding; same with the banjo; he could really make the banjo talk – better even than Banjo Browne at Kasauli you know; same with tennis. And to make everything more beastly, he used to pretend at first he couldn’t doanything. We found him out in the end; but we’d have found him out sooner if we’d listened to what old Harkness the Riding-Master said the day after Tick had been handed over to him to make into a decent ‘Hornet.’ That’s what the bye-name of our regiment is. Harkness told me when I came into Riding School, and laughed at Tick clinging on to the neck of his old crock as if he had never seen a horse before. Harkness was cursing like – a riding-master. He said: – ‘You mark my words, Mr Mactavish, he’s been kidding me, and he’d kid you. He can ride. Wish some of you other gentleman could ride as well. He is playing the dark horse – that’s what he’s doing, and be d – – d to him!’ Well, Tick was as innocent as a baby when he rolled off on to the tan. I noticed that he fell somehow as if he knew the hang of the trick; and Harkness passed him out of Riding School on the strength of that fall. He sat square enough on parade, and pretended to be awfully astonished. Well, we didn’t think anything of