ng summer!

All day a blinding blaze of sun beat upon the wooden roof, forced a way
through the shaded windows, lay like a blasting spell upon the parched
compound. The cluster-roses had shrivelled and died long since. Their
brown leaves still clung to the veranda and rattled desolately with a
dry, scaly sound in the burning wind of dawn.

The green parakeets had ceased to look for sweets on the veranda.
Nothing dainty ever made its appearance there. The Englishman who came
and went with such grim endurance offered them no temptations.

Sometimes he spent the night on a _charpoy_ on the veranda, lying
motionless, though often sleepless, through the breathless, dragging
hours. There had been sickness among the officers and Merryon, who was
never sick, was doing the work of three men. He did it doggedly, with
the stubborn determination characteristic of him; not cheerfully--no one
ever accused Merryon of being cheerful--but efficiently and
uncomplainingly. Other men cursed the heat, but he never took the
trouble. He needed all his energies for what he had to do.

His own chance of leave had become very remote. There was so much sick
leave that he could not be spared. Over that, also, he made no
complaint. It was useless to grumble at the inevitable. There was not a
man in the mess who could not be spared more easily than he.

For he was indomitable, unfailing, always fulfilling his duties with
machine-like regularity, stern, impenetrable, hard as granite.

As to what lay behind that hardness, no one ever troubled to inquire.
They took him for granted, much as if he had been a well-oiled engine
guaranteed to surmount all obstacles. How he did it was nobody's
business but his own. If he suffered in that appalling heat as other men
suffered, no one knew of it. If he grew a little grimmer and a little
gaunter, no one noticed. Everyone knew that whatever happened to others,
he at least would hold on. Everyone described him as "hard as nails."

Each day seemed more intolerable than the last, each night a perceptible
narrowing of the fiery circle in which they lived. They seemed to be
drawing towards a culminating horror that grew hourly more palpable,
more monstrously menacing--a horror that drained their strength even
from afar.

"It's going to kill us this time," declared little Robey, the youngest
subaltern, to whom the nights were a torment unspeakable. He had been
within an ace of heat apoplexy more than once, and