Solemn word.  That’s the sort of thing. . .  He wouldn’t have believed it.  Would I?  Squatted on the verandah chewing betel-nut, sighing and spitting all over the place for more than an hour, and as glum as an undertaker before he came out with that dashed conundrum.  That’s the kind of thing that isn’t so funny as it looks.  What was a fellow to say?—­Good wife?—­Yes.  Good wife—­old though.  Started a confounded long story about some brass pots.  Been living together for fifteen years—­twenty years—­could not tell.  A long, long time.  Good wife.  Beat her a little—­not much—­just a little, when she was young.  Had to—­for the sake of his honour.  Suddenly in her old age she goes and lends three brass pots to her sister’s son’s wife, and begins to abuse him every day in a loud voice.  His enemies jeered at him; his face was utterly blackened.  Pots totally lost.  Awfully cut up about it.  Impossible to fathom a story like that; told him to go home, and promised to come along myself and settle it all.  It’s all very well to grin, but it was the dashedest nuisance!  A day’s journey through the forest, another day lost in coaxing a lot of silly villagers to get at the rights of the affair.  There was the making of a sanguinary shindy in the thing.  Every bally idiot took sides with one family or the other, and one half of the village was ready to go for the other half with anything that came handy.  Honour bright!  No joke! . . .  Instead of attending to their bally crops.  Got him the infernal pots back of course—­and pacified all hands.  No trouble to settle it.  Of course not.  Could settle the deadliest quarrel in the country by crooking his little finger.  The trouble was to get at the truth of anything.  Was not sure to this day whether he had been fair to all parties.  It worried him.  And the talk!  Jove!  There didn’t seem to be any head or tail to it.  Rather storm a twenty-foot-high old stockade any day.  Much!  Child’s play to that other job.  Wouldn’t take so long either.  Well, yes; a funny set out, upon the whole—­the fool looked old enough to be his grandfather.  But from another point of view it was no joke.  His word decided everything—­ever since the smashing of Sherif Ali.  An awful responsibility,” he repeated.  “No, really—­joking apart, had it been three lives instead of three rotten brass pots it would have been the same. . . .”

’Thus he illustrated the moral effect of his victory in war.  It was in truth immense.  It had led him from strife to peace, and through death into the innermost life of the people; but the gloom of the land spread out under the sunshine preserved its appearance of inscrutable, of secular repose.  The sound of his fresh young voice—­it’s extraordinary how very few signs of wear he showed—­floated lightly, and passed away over the unchanged face of the forests like the sound of the big guns on that cold dewy morning when he had no other concern on earth but the proper control of the chills in his body.