in South Africa made short work of the officers they did
not love, and it would have been easy to make an end of Ranjoor
Singh on any dark night. But he led too well; men were afraid to
take the responsibility lest the others turn on them. One night I
overheard two troopers considering the thought, and they suspected I
had overheard. I said nothing, but they were afraid, as I knew they
would be. Has the sahib ever heard of "left-hand casualties"? I will
explain.

We Sikhs have a saying that in fear there is no wisdom. None can be
wise and afraid. None can be afraid and wise. The men at the front,
both Indian and British-French, too, for aught I know--who feared to
fight longer in the trenches were seized in those early days with
the foolish thought of inflicting some injury on themselves--not
very severe, but enough to cause a spell of absence at the base and
a rest in hospital. Folly being the substance of that idea, and most
men being right-handed, such self-inflicted wounds were practically
always in the hand or foot and always on the left side. The
ambulance men knew them, on the instant.

Those two fools of my squadron wounded themselves with bullets in
the left hand, forgetting that their palms would be burned by the
discharge. I was sent to the rear to give evidence against them (for
I saw them commit the foolishness). The cross-examination we all
three underwent was clever--at the hands of a young British captain,
who, I dare swear, was suckled by a Sikh nurse in the Punjab. In
less than thirty minutes he had the whole story out of us; and the
two troopers were shot that evening for an example.

That young captain was greatly impressed with the story we had told
about Ranjoor Singh, and he called me back afterward and asked me a
hundred questions more--until he must have known the very color of
my entrails and I knew not which way I faced. To all of this a
senior officer of the Intelligence Department listened with both
ears, and presently he and the captain talked together.

The long and short of that was that Ranjoor Singh was sent for; and
when he returned to the trench after two days' absence it was to
work independently of us--from our trench, but irrespective of our
doings. Even Colonel Kirby now had no orders to give him, although
they two talked long and at frequent intervals in the place Colonel
Kirby called his funk-hole. It was now that the squadron's
reawakening love for Ranjoor Singh received t