Miss M'Kenna did not
care so much. The Sergeant's wife was helping her to make her
wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only
moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or less
miserable.
And they had so much to make them happy, too. All their work was over
at eight in the morning, and for the rest of the day they could lie
on their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies.
They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and
then threw themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till
it was cool enough to go out with their 'towny,' whose vocabulary
contained less than six hundred words, and the Adjective, and whose
views on every conceivable question they had heard many times before.
There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance Room
with the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any profession cannot
read for eight hours a day in a temperature of 96 degrees or 98 degrees
in the shade, running up sometimes to 103 degrees at midnight. Very
few men, even though they get a pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer
and hide it under their cots, can continue drinking for six hours a
day.
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