Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг - In Flood Time (Unabridged)

First published in The Week's News on 11 August 1888 (Martindell has 4 August), and collected in In Black and White in The Indian Railway Library the same year and Soldiers Three in 1895. An Englishman, on a journey, is held up by a flooded river. He is given refuge by the warden of the ford, an old Mussulman, who for many years had helped travellers cross over. He tells the tale of how in the days of his youth and strength he had loved a Hindu girl in a village across the river. They could not marry, but he used to meet her secretly in the fields. Once he had swum across when the river was in flood, and had been carried away. He would have drowned had he not been able to cling to the body of a dead man. When he reached land he found it was the corpse of the hated Sikh who was to have become her husband.