Soldiers Three - Part 2

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Rudyard Kipling. Soldiers Three - Part 2

‘LOVE-O’WOMEN’

THE BIG DRUNK DRAF’

THE MUTINEY OF THE MAVERICKS

THE MAN WHO WAS

ONLY A SUBALTERN

IN THE MATTER OF A PRIVATE

THE LOST LEGION

THE DRUMS OF THE FORE AND AFT

JUDSON AND THE EMPIRE

A CONFERENCE OF THE POWERS

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AN awful thing has happened! My friend, Private Mulvaney, who went home in the Serapis, time-expired, not very long ago, has come back to India as a civilian! It was all Dinah Shadd’s fault. She could not stand the poky little lodgings, and she missed her servant Abdullah more than words could tell. The fact was that the Mulvaneys had been out here too long, and had lost touch of England.

Mulvaney knew a contractor on one of the new Central India lines, and wrote to him for some sort of work. The contractor said that if Mulvaney could pay the passage he would give him command of a gang of coolies for old sake’s sake. The pay was eighty-five rupees a month, and Dinah Shadd said that if Terence did not accept she would make his life a “basted purgathory.” Therefore the Mulvaneys came out as “civilians,” which was a great and terrible fall; though Mulvaney tried to disguise it by saying that he was “Ker’nel on the railway line, an’ a consequinshal man.”

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“‘Can’t I help, Sorr?’ sez I; ‘’tis a strong man’s job they’ve given you, an’ you’ll be wantin’ help by sundown.’ He was a bhoy wid bowils, that child, an’ a rale gintleman.

“‘Sit down,’ sez he.

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