Well, a man can struggle with himself until the Thing actually appears in the concrete, and he goes mad—­but Night!  Oh, God grant deep sleep at night—­or wide wakefulness and a light.  Neither Nightmare nor wakefulness in the dark, oh, Merciful God.

Yes, things were getting worse. He was going mad.  MAD.  Desert—­and get out of India somehow?

Never!  No gentleman “deserts” anything or anybody.

Suicide—­and face God unafraid and unashamed?

Never!  The worst and meanest form of “deserting”.

No.  Stick it.  And live to work—­work to live.  And strive and strive and strive to obliterate the image of Lucille—­that sorrow’s crown of sorrow.

And so Trooper Matthewson’s course of training was a severe one and he appeared to fear rest and relaxation as some people fear work and employment.

His favourite occupation was to get the ten best boxers of the regiment to jointly engage in a ten-round contest with him, one round each.  He would frequently finish fresher than the tenth man.  Coming of notedly powerful stock on both sides, and having been physically educated from babyhood, Dam, with clean living and constant training, was a very uncommon specimen.  There may have been one or two other men in the regiment as well developed, or nearly so; but when poise, rapidity, and skill were taken into account there was no one near him.  Captain Chevalier said he was infinitely the quickest heavy-weight boxer he had ever seen—­and Captain Chevalier was a pillar of the National Sporting Club and always knew the current professionals personally when he was in England.  In fact, with the enormous strength of the best heavy-weight, Dam combined the lightning rapidity and mobility of the best feather-weight.

His own doubt as to the result of his contest with the heavy-weight Champion of India arose from the fact that the latter was a person of much lower nervous development, a creature far less sensitive to shock, a denser and more elementary organism altogether, and possessed of a far thicker skull, shorter jaw, and thicker neck.  Dam summed him up thus with no sense of contemptuous superiority, but with a plain recognition of the facts that the Champion was a fighting machine, a dull, foreheadless, brutal gladiator who owed his championship very largely to the fact that he was barely sensible to pain, and impervious to padded blows.  It was said that he had never been knocked out in all his boxing-career, that the kick of a horse on his chin would not knock him out, that his head was solid bone, and that the shortness of his jaw and thickness of his neck absolutely prevented sufficient leverage between the point of the jaw and the spinal cord for the administration of the shock to the medulla oblongata that causes the necessary ten-seconds’ unconsciousness of the “knock-out”.