And how, meditating on
the methods of such drastic deliverance--sitting in the palm-shaded
verandah of a fly-blown little eating-house, kept by a monkey-faced,
squint-eyed Japanese--he happened to pick up a Calcutta newspaper. He
read its columns mechanically, without interest or understanding, his
mind still working on methods of death, when a name leapt at him weighted
with personal meaning.
"It hit me," Faircloth said, "full between the eyes, knocking the
cry-baby stuff out of me, and knocking stuff of very different order in.
For I wanted something stronger than mother-love--precious though that
is--to brace me up and put some spunk into me just then.--Sir Charles was
campaigning in Afghanistan, and this Calcutta paper sang his praises to a
rousing tune. Lamented the loss of him to the Indian Government, and the
lack of appreciation and support of him at home which induced him to take
foreign service. Can't you imagine how all this about a great soldier,
whose blood after all ran in my veins, pulled me clean up out of the
slime, where suicide tempted the soft side of me, into another world?--A
sane world, in which a man can make good, if only he's pluck to hold
on.
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