arin was, and she ran in front of the horse to show me the way.
About a mile up the road we came across our artilleryman sitting very
stiffly on the edge of a culvert with a greasy handkerchief on his
knees. Garin was in front of him, looking rather pleased. When the man
moved leg or hand, Garin bared his teeth in silence. A broken string
hung from his collar, and the other half of, it lay, all warm, in the
artilleryman's still hand. He explained to me, keeping his eyes straight
in front of him, that he had met this dog (he called him awful names)
walking alone, and was going to take him to the Fort to be killed for a
masterless pariah.
I said that Garin did not seem to me much of a pariah, but that he had
better take him to the Fort if he thought best. He said he did not care
to do so. I told him to go to the Fort alone. He said he did not want to
go at that hour, but would follow my advice as soon as I had called off
the dog. I instructed Garin to take him to the Fort, and Garm marched
him solemnly up to the gate, one mile and a half under a hot sun, and I
told the quarter-guard what had happened; but the young artilleryman was
more angry than was at all necessary when they began to laugh. Several
regiments, he was told, had tried to steal Garm in their time.
That month the hot weather shut down in earnest, and the dogs slept
in the bathroom on the cool wet bricks where the bath is placed. Every
morning, as soon as the man filled my bath the two jumped in, and every
morning the man filled the bath a second time. I said to him that he
might as well fill a small tub specially for the dogs. "Nay," said he
smiling, "it is not their custom. They would not understand. Besides,
the big bath gives them more space."
The punkah-coolies who pull the punkahs day and night came to know Garin
intimately. He noticed that when the swaying fan stopped I would call
out to the coolie and bid him pull with a long stroke. If the man still
slept I would wake him up. He discovered, too, that it was a good thing
to lie in the wave of air under the punkah. Maybe Stanley had taught him
all about this in barracks. At any rate, when the punkah stopped, Garin
would first growl and cock his eye at the rope, and if that did not
wake the man it nearly always did--he would tiptoe forth and talk in
the sleeper's ear. Vixen was a clever little dog, but she could never
connect the punkah and the coolie; so Garin gave me grateful hours of
cool sle
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