"For God's sake let's get outside--away from the
room--and think!"

We went outside, and walked on the banks of the Canal for an hour,
eating and drinking what we had with us, until the moon rose. I know now
exactly how a murderer feels. Finally, we forced ourselves back to the
room with the lamp and the Other Thing in it, and began to take up
the next piece of work. I am not going to write about this. It was too
horrible. We burned the bedstead and dropped the ashes into the Canal;
we took up the matting of the room and treated that in the same way.
I went off to a village and borrowed two big hoes--I did not want the
villagers to help--while the Major arranged--the other matters. It took
us four hours' hard work to make the grave. As we worked, we argued out
whether it was right to say as much as we remembered of the Burial
of the Dead. We compromised things by saying the Lord's Prayer with a
private unofficial prayer for the peace of the soul of The Boy. Then we
filled in the grave and went into the verandah--not the house--to lie
down to sleep. We were dead-tired.

When we woke the Major said, wearily: "We can't go back till to-morrow.
We must give him a decent time to die in. He died early THIS morning,
remember. That seems more natural." So the Major must have been lying
awake all the time, thinking.

I said: "Then why didn't we bring the body back to the cantonments?"

The Major thought for a minute:--"Because the people bolted when they
heard of the cholera. And the ekka has gone!"

That was strictly true. We had forgotten all about the ekka-pony, and he
had gone home.

So, we were left there alone, all that stifling day, in the Canal Rest
House, testing and re-testing our story of The Boy's death to see if it
was weak at any point. A native turned up in the afternoon, but we said
that a Sahib was dead of cholera, and he ran away. As the dusk gathered,
the Major told me all his fears about The Boy, and awful stories of
suicide or nearly-carried-out suicide--tales that made one's hair crisp.
He said that he himself had once gone into the same Valley of the Shadow
as the Boy, when he was young and new to the country; so he understood
how things fought together in The Boy's poor jumbled head. He also said
that youngsters, in their repentant moments, consider their sins much
more serious and ineffaceable than they really are. We talked together
all through the evening, and rehearsed the story of the death of T