He lifted up his tenor voice, chanting the while he rocked—­

  “Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
  Damned from here to Eternity,
  God ha’ mercy on such as we,
      Baa!  Yah!  Bah!”

Redmond flinched and raised a weakly protesting hand.  “Don’t, old man!” he implored miserably, “don’t! what’s the—­”

“Eh!” queried Yorke brutally—­rocking—­“does hurt?”

  “If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
  And all we—­”

“No! no! no!  Yorkey!” George’s voice rose to a cry, “not that! . . . quit it, old man! . . . that’s one of the most terrible things Kipling ever wrote—­terrible because it’s so absolutely, utterly hopeless. . . .”

“Well, then!” said Yorke slowly—­

  “Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?”

“It wasn’t beer,” muttered Redmond absently, “it was whiskey.  Slavic and I drank it.”  With an effort he strove to arouse himself out of the despondency that he himself had fallen into.

“Listen! . . .  Oh! quit that d——­d rocking, Yorkey! . . .  Listen now! we’ve put up a mighty good scrap against each other—­we’ll call that a draw—­let’s put up another against our—­well! we’ll call it our rotten luck . . .  D——­n it all, old man, we’re not ‘down an’ outs’ doing duty in this outfit—­the best military police corps in the world! . . .  Let’s both of us quit squalling this eternal ‘nobody loves me’ stuff!  This isn’t any slobbery brotherly love or New Jerusalem business, or anything like that, either.  I’m not a bloomin’ missionary!” He qualified that assertion unnecessarily to prove it.  “But let’s stick together and back each other up—­just us two and old man Slavin—­make it a sort of ’rule of three.’  We can have a deuce of a good time on this detachment then! . . .”

He spoke hotly, eagerly, with boyish fervour, his soul in his eyes.

Yorke remained silent, with averted eyes.  That imploring, wistful, bruised young countenance was almost more than he could stand.  George, dropping on one knee beside him put a tremulous hand on the senior constable’s shoulder.  “What’s wrong, Yorkey?” he queried.  He shook the bowed shoulder gently.  “What’s made you consistently knock every third buck that’s been sent here? ’till they got fed up, and transferred? . . .  They tried to put the wind up me about it at the Post.  What’s bitin’ you?  I don’t seem to get your angle at all!”

“Oh, I don’t know!” Yorke coughed and spat drearily.  “Kind of rum reason, you’ll think.  Long story—­too long—­dates back.  Listen then!  Ten years back, in the pride of my giddy youth, I held a Junior Sub’s commission in the ——­ Lancers—­in India.  This is just a synopsis of my case, mind! . . .  Well! the regiment was lying at Rawal Pindi, and—­I guess I kind of ran amuck there—­got myself into a rotten esclandre—­entirely my own fault I’ll admit: