← catalogue

The Day's Work

by Rudyard Kipling · English · Gutenberg #2569 · 605,519 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Day's Work
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Day's Work

Author: Rudyard Kipling


        
Release date: March 1, 2001 [eBook #2569]
                Most recently updated: February 11, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569

Credits: An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAY'S WORK ***




The Day’s Work

by Rudyard Kipling


Contents

 THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
 A WALKING DELEGATE
 THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF
 THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS
 THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA
 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
 PART I
 PART II
 ･007
 THE MALTESE CAT
 “BREAD UPON THE WATERS”
 AN ERROR IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION
 MY SUNDAY AT HOME
 THE BRUSHWOOD BOY




THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS


The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was
a C. I. E.; he dreamed of a C. S. I.: indeed, his friends told him that
he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,
disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility
almost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through
that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his
charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, his
Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop
would bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it,
and there would be speeches.

Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran
along one of the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared
away north and south for three miles on either side of the river—and
permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work
was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge,
trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick
piers. Each one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped
with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the
Ganges’ bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above
that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At
either end rose towers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced
for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to
their haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with
hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning
borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was
filled with the noise of hooves, the rattle of the drivers’ sticks, and
the swish and roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the
dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of
railway-sleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support
the last of the girders as those were riveted up. In the little deep
water left by the drought, an overhead-crane travelled to and fro along
its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron into place, snorting and
backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber-yard. Riveters
by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of
the railway-line, hung from invisible staging under the bellies of the
girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the
overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of
flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale yellow
in the sun’s glare. East and west and north and south the
construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments,
the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the
side-boards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand
tons more material were flung out to hold the river in place.

Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of
the country that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on
the humming village of five thousand workmen; up stream and down, along
the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers,
lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers—and only he knew
how strong those were—and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work
was good. There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking
only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers—his
bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but _pukka_—permanent—to endure
when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson
truss, had perished. Practically, the thing was done.

Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little
switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted
securely over a trestle, and nodded to his chief.

“All but,” said he, with a smile.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” the senior answered. “Not half a bad job
for two men, is it?”

“One—and a half. Gad, what a Cooper’s Hill cub I was when I came on the
works!” Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past
three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.

“You _were_ rather a colt,” said Findlayson. “I wonder how you’ll like
going back to office-work when this job’s over.”

“I shall hate it!” said the young man, and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson’s, and he muttered, “Isn’t it damned good?”

“I think we’ll go up the service together,” Findlayson said to himself.
“You’re too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wast;
assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if
any credit comes to me out of the business!”

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and
his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness
to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by the
half-hundred—fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway
workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to
direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen—but none knew better
than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to
be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises—by slipping
of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of
the river—but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom
Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as
remorselessly as they worked themselves. Findlayson thought it over
from the beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when
the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the
width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of
paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations—and
Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept;
the heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England;
the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if
one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that
followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end
that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month’s leave
to another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his
poor little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as
his own tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear
of God into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so
till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table, and—he
feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was
the cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works;
and after the cholera smote the smallpox. The fever they had always
with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class
with whipping powers, for the better government of the community, and
Findlayson watched him wield his powers temperately, learning what to
overlook and what to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and it
covered storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape,
violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that
knows it should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance;
birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring
castes; argument, expostulation, persuasion, and the blank despair that
a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the
gun-case. Behind everything rose the black frame of the Kashi
Bridge—plate by plate, girder by girder, span by span—and each pier of
it recalled Hitchcock, the all-round man, who had stood by his chief
without failing from the very first to this last.

So the bridge was two men’s work—unless one counted Peroo, as Peroo
certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar,
familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who had risen
to the rank of sarang on the British India boats, but wearying of
routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up the service and gone
inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment. For his
knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy weights, Peroo was worth
almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services; but
custom decreed the wage of the overhead men, and Peroo was not within
many silver pieces of his proper value. Neither running water nor
extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an ex-serang, he knew how to
hold authority. No piece of iron was so big or so badly placed that
Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it—a loose-ended, sagging
arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount of talking, but perfectly
equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had saved the girder of
Number Seven pier from destruction when the new wire rope jammed in the
eye of the crane, and the huge plate tilted in its slings, threatening
to slide out sideways. Then the native workmen lost their heads with
great shoutings, and Hitchcock’s right arm was broken by a falling
T-plate, and he buttoned it up in his coat and swooned, and came to and
directed for four hours till Peroo, from the top of the crane, reported
“All’s well,” and the plate swung home. There was no one like Peroo,
serang, to lash, and guy, and hold to control the donkey-engines, to
hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it
had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete
blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to
adventure up-stream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the
embankment-facings. He would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson
and Hitchcock without fear, till his wonderful English, or his still
more wonderful _lingua-franca_, half Portuguese and half Malay, ran out
and he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would
recommend. He controlled his own gang of tacklemen—mysterious relatives
from Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month and tried to the uttermost.
No consideration of family or kin allowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a
giddy head on the pay-roll. “My honour is the honour of this bridge,”
he would say to the about-to-be-dismissed. “What do I care for your
honour? Go and work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for.”

The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred round
the tattered dwelling of a sea-priest—one who had never set foot on
black water, but had been chosen as ghostly counsellor by two
generations of sea-rovers all unaffected by port missions or those
creeds which are thrust upon sailors by agencies along Thames bank. The
priest of the Lascara had nothing to do with their caste, or indeed
with anything at all. He ate the offerings of his church, and slept and
smoked, and slept again “for,” said Peroo, who had haled him a thousand
miles inland, “he is a very holy man. He never cares what you eat so
long as you do not eat beef, and that is good, because on land we
worship Shiva, we Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani’s boats we attend
strictly to the orders of the Burra Malum [the first mate], and on this
bridge we observe what Finlinson Sahib says.”

Finlinson Sahib had that day given orders to clear the scaffolding from
the guard-tower on the right bank, and Peroo with his mates was casting
loose and lowering down the bamboo poles and planks as swiftly as ever
they had whipped the cargo out of a coaster.

From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang’s silver pipe
and the creak and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was standing on the
topmost coping of the tower, clad in the blue dungaree of his abandoned
service, and as Findlayson motioned to him to be careful, for his was
no life to throw away, he gripped the last pole, and, shading his eyes
ship-fashion, answered with the long-drawn wail of the fo’c’sle
lookout: “_Ham dekhta hai_” (“I am looking out”). Findlayson laughed
and then sighed. It was years since he had seen a steamer, and he was
sick for home. As his trolley passed under the tower, Peroo descended
by a rope, ape-fashion, and cried: “It looks well now, Sahib. Our
bridge is all but done. What think you Mother Gunga will say when the
rail runs over?”

“She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that delayed
us.”

“There is always time for her; and none the less there has been delay.
Has the Sahib forgotten last autumn’s flood, when the stoneboats were
sunk without warning—or only a half-day’s warning?”

“Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs are
holding well on the west bank.”

“Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for more
stone on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib”—he meant
Hitchcock— “and he laughs.”

“No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a bridge in
thine own fashion.”

The Lascar grinned. “Then it will not be in this way—with stonework
sunk under water, as the _Quetta_ was sunk. I like sus-suspen-sheen
bridges that fly from bank to bank, with one big step, like a
gang-plank. Then no water can hurt. When does the Lord Sahib come to
open the bridge?”

“In three months, when the weather is cooler.”

“Ho! ho! He is like the Burra Malum. He sleeps below while the work is
being done. Then he comes upon the quarter-deck and touches with his
finger, and says: ‘This is not clean! Dam jibboonwallah!’”

“But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam jibboonwallah, Peroo.”

“No, Sahib; but he does not come on deck till the work is all finished.
Even the Burra Malum of the _Nerbudda_ said once at Tuticorin—”

“Bah! Go! I am busy.”

“I, also!” said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. “May I take the
light dinghy now and row along the spurs?”

“To hold them with thy hands? They are, I think, sufficiently heavy.”

“Nay, Sahib. It is thus. At sea, on the Black Water, we have room to be
blown up and down without care. Here we have no room at all. Look you,
we have put the river into a dock, and run her between stone sills.”

Findlayson smiled at the “we.”

“We have bitted and bridled her. She is not like the sea, that can beat
against a soft beach. She is Mother Gunga—in irons.” His voice fell a
little.

“Peroo, thou hast been up and down the world more even than I. Speak
true talk, now. How much dost thou in thy heart believe of Mother
Gunga?”

“All that our priest says. London is London, Sahib. Sydney is Sydney,
and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is Mother Gunga, and
when I come back to her banks I know this and worship. In London I did
poojah to the big temple by the river for the sake of the God within .
. . . Yes, I will not take the cushions in the dinghy.”

Findlayson mounted his horse and trotted to the shed of a bungalow that
he shared with his assistant. The place had become home to him in the
last three years. He had grilled in the heat, sweated in the rains, and
shivered with fever under the rude thatch roof; the lime-wash beside
the door was covered with rough drawings and formulae, and the
sentry-path trodden in the matting of the verandah showed where he had
walked alone. There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer’s work, and
the evening meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over
their cigars they listened to the hum of the village as the gangs came
up from the river-bed and the lights began to twinkle.

“Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He’s taken a couple of
nephews with him, and he’s lolling in the stern like a commodore,” said
Hitchcock.

“That’s all right. He’s got something on his mind. You’d think that ten
years in the British India boats would have knocked most of his
religion out of him.”

“So it has,” said Hitchcock, chuckling. “I overheard him the other day
in the middle of a most atheistical talk with that fat old _guru_ of
theirs. Peroo denied the efficacy of prayer; and wanted the _guru_ to
go to sea and watch a gale out with him, and see if he could stop a
monsoon.”

“All the same, if you carried off his _guru_ he’d leave us like a shot.
He was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St. Paul’s when
he was in London.”

“He told me that the first time he went into the engine-room of a
steamer, when he was a boy, he prayed to the low-pressure cylinder.”

“Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He’s propitiating his own
Gods now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think of a bridge
being run across her. Who’s there?” A shadow darkened the doorway, and
a telegram was put into Hitchcock’s hand.

“She ought to be pretty well used to it by this time. Only a _tar_. It
ought to be Ralli’s answer about the new rivets. . . . Great Heavens!”
Hitchcock jumped to his feet.

“What is it?” said the senior, and took the form. “_That’s_ what Mother
Gunga thinks, is it,” he said, reading. “Keep cool, young’un. We’ve got
all our work cut out for us. Let’s see. Muir wired half an hour ago:
‘_Floods on the Ramgunga. Look out_.’ Well, that gives us—one, two—nine
and a half for the flood to reach Melipur Ghaut and seven’s sixteen and
a half to Lataoli—say fifteen hours before it comes down to us.”

“Curse that hill-fed sewer of a Ramgunga! Findlayson, this is two
months before anything could have been expected, and the left bank is
littered up with stuff still. Two full months before the time!”

“That’s why it comes. I’ve only known Indian rivers for five-and-twenty
years, and I don’t pretend to understand. Here comes another _tar_.”
Findlayson opened the telegram. “Cockran, this time, from the Ganges
Canal: ‘_Heavy rains here. Bad._’ He might have saved the last word.
Well, we don’t want to know any more. We’ve got to work the gangs all
night and clean up the river-bed. You’ll take the east bank and work
out to meet me in the middle. Get every thing that floats below the
bridge: we shall have quite enough rivercraft coming down adrift
anyhow, without letting the stone-boats ram the piers. What have you
got on the east bank that needs looking after.”

“Pontoon—one big pontoon with the overhead crane on it. T’other
overhead crane on the mended pontoon, with the cart-road rivets from
Twenty to Twenty-three piers—two construction lines, and a
turning-spur. The pilework must take its chance,” said Hitchcock.

“All right. Roll up everything you can lay hands on. We’ll give the
gang fifteen minutes more to eat their grub.”

Close to the verandah stood a big night-gong, never used except for
flood, or fire in the village. Hitchcock had called for a fresh horse,
and was off to his side of the bridge when Findlayson took the
cloth-bound stick and smote with the rubbing stroke that brings out the
full thunder of the metal.

Long before the last rumble ceased every night-gong in the village had
taken up the warning. To these were added the hoarse screaming of
conches in the little temples; the throbbing of drums and tom-toms;
and, from the European quarters, where the riveters lived, McCartney’s
bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed
desperately, calling to “Stables.” Engine after engine toiling home
along the spurs at the end of her day’s work whistled in answer till
the whistles were answered from the far bank. Then the big gong
thundered thrice for a sign that it was flood and not fire; conch,
drum, and whistle echoed the call, and the village quivered to the
sound of bare feet running upon soft earth. The order in all cases was
to stand by the day’s work and wait instructions. The gangs poured by
in the dusk; men stopping to knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal;
gang-foremen shouting to their subordinates as they ran or paused by
the tool-issue sheds for bars and mattocks; locomotives creeping down
their tracks wheel-deep in the crowd; till the brown torrent
disappeared into the dusk of the river-bed, raced over the pilework,
swarmed along the lattices, clustered by the cranes, and stood still,
each man in his place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take up
everything and bear it beyond highwater mark, and the flare-lamps broke
out by the hundred between the webs of dull iron as the riveters began
a night’s work, racing against the flood that was to come. The girders
of the three centre piers—those that stood on the cribs—were all but in
position. They needed just as many rivets as could be driven into them,
for the flood would assuredly wash out their supports, and the ironwork
would settle down on the caps of stone if they were not blocked at the
ends. A hundred crowbars strained at the sleepers of the temporary line
that fed the unfinished piers. It was heaved up in lengths, loaded into
trucks, and backed up the bank beyond flood-level by the groaning
locomotives. The tool-sheds on the sands melted away before the attack
of shouting armies, and with them went the stacked ranks of Government
stores, iron-bound boxes of rivets, pliers, cutters, duplicate parts of
the riveting-machines, spare pumps and chains. The big crane would be
the last to be shifted, for she was hoisting all the heavy stuff up to
the main structure of the bridge. The concrete blocks on the fleet of
stone-boats were dropped overside, where there was any depth of water,
to guard the piers, and the empty boats themselves were poled under the
bridge down-stream. It was here that Peroo’s pipe shrilled loudest, for
the first stroke of the big gong had brought the dinghy back at racing
speed, and Peroo and his people were stripped to the waist, working for
the honour and credit which are better than life.

“I knew she would speak,” he cried. “_I_ knew, but the telegraph gives
us good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting—children of
unspeakable shame—are we here for the look of the thing?” It was two
feet of wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders as Peroo
leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of the sea.

Findlayson was more troubled for the stone-boats than anything else.
McCartney, with his gangs, was blocking up the ends of the three
doubtful spans, but boats adrift, if the flood chanced to be a high
one, might endanger the girders; and there was a very fleet in the
shrunken channel.

“Get them behind the swell of the guard-tower,” he shouted down to
Peroo. “It will be dead-water there. Get them below the bridge.”

“_Accha!_ [Very good.] _I_ know; we are mooring them with wire-rope,”
was the answer. “Heh! Listen to the Chota Sahib. He is working hard.”

From across the river came an almost continuous whistling of
locomotives, backed by the rumble of stone. Hitchcock at the last
minute was spending a few hundred more trucks of Tarakee stone in
reinforcing his spurs and embankments.

“The bridge challenges Mother Gunga,” said Peroo, with a laugh. “But
when _she_ talks I know whose voice will be the loudest.”

For hours the naked men worked, screaming and shouting under the
lights. It was a hot, moonless night; the end of it was darkened by
clouds and a sudden squall that made Findlayson very grave.

“She moves!” said Peroo, just before the dawn. “Mother Gunga is awake!
Hear!” He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the current
mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with a crisp slap.

“Six hours before her time,” said Findlayson, mopping his forehead
savagely. “Now we can’t depend on anything. We’d better clear all hands
out of the river-bed.”

Again the big gong beat, and a second time there was the rushing of
naked feet on earth and ringing iron; the clatter of tools ceased. In
the silence, men heard the dry yawn of water crawling over thirsty
sand.

Foreman after foreman shouted to Findlayson, who had posted himself by
the guard-tower, that his section of the river-bed had been cleaned
out, and when the last voice dropped Findlayson hurried over the bridge
till the iron plating of the permanent way gave place to the temporary
plank-walk over the three centre piers, and there he met Hitchcock.

“All clear your side?” said Findlayson. The whisper rang in the box of
latticework.

“Yes, and the east channel’s filling now. We’re utterly out of our
reckoning. When is this thing down on us?”

“There’s no saying. She’s filling as fast as she can. Look!” Findlayson
pointed to the planks below his feet, where the sand, burned and
defiled by months of work, was beginning to whisper and fizz.

“What orders?” said Hitchcock.

“Call the roll—count stores—sit on your hunkers—and pray for the
bridge. That’s all I can think of. Good night. Don’t risk your life
trying to fish out anything that may go down-stream.”

“Oh, I’ll be as prudent as you are! ’Night. Heavens, how she’s filling!
Here’s the rain in earnest!” Findlayson picked his way back to his
bank, sweeping the last of McCartney’s riveters before him. The gangs
had spread themselves along the embankments, regardless of the cold
rain of the dawn, and there they waited for the flood. Only Peroo kept
his men together behind the swell of the guard-tower, where the
stone-boats lay tied fore and aft with hawsers, wire-rope, and chains.

A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half
wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to bank between the
stone facings, and the faraway spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother
Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured
water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the
water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the
cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats
groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the
abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher against the dim
sky-line.

“Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do. Now
she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!” said Peroo,
watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. “Ohé! Fight, then!
Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out.”

But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river
lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer,
plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the
piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his
work.

When day came the village gasped. “Only last night,” men said, turning
to each other, “it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!”

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water
that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by
rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream
were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the
pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the
horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when
it touched a pier.

“Big flood,” said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood
as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her
now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there
happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry
his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was
nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his
macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking
the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he
listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the
hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the
full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he
could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a
locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge’s failure
would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young man
with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
everything—everything that made a hard life worth the living. They
would say, the men of his own profession. . . he remembered the half
pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart’s new waterworks
burst and broke down in brickheaps and sludge, and Lockhart’s spirit
broke in him and he died. He remembered what he himself had said when
the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by the sea; and most he
remembered poor Hartopp’s face three weeks later, when the shame had
marked it. His bridge was twice the size of Hartopp’s, and it carried
the Findlayson truss as well as the new pier-shoe—the Findlayson bolted
shoe. There were no excuses in his service. Government might listen,
perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood
or fell. He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span,
brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing, estimating, and
recalculating, lest there should be any mistake; and through the long
hours and through the flights of formulae that danced and wheeled
before him a cold fear would come to pinch his heart. His side of the
sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic?
Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication-table, the river
might be scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of any one of those
eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to
him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink and
return to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still rising.
Peroo, in a mat shelter-coat, crouched at his feet, watching now his
face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.

At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the
village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.

Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest
of his creed—a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind
with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so
lamentable a _guru_.

“What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,”
shouted Peroo, “if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou
hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and
well-wishing. Now they are angry. Speak to them!”

“What is a man against the wrath of Gods?” whined the priest, cowering
as the wind took him. “Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.”

“Son of a pig, pray _here!_ Is there no return for salt fish and curry
powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had
enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have been
serving in the Kumpani’s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I—”
A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest,
breaking free from his disciple, fled to the village.

“Fat pig!” said Peroo. “After all that we have done for him! When the
flood is down I will see to it that we get a new _guru_. Finlinson
Sahib, it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been
eaten. Be wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on
an empty belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will
do.”

“The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.”

“Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?” said Peroo, laughing. “I
was troubled for my boats and sheers _before_ the flood came. Now we
are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take
these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all
weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten
nothing else to-day at all.”

He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waistbelt and thrust it
into Findlayson’s hand, saying, “Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more
than opium—clean Malwa opium!”

Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,
and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least
a good guard against fever—the fever that was creeping upon him out of
the wet mud—and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of
autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.

Peroo nodded with bright eyes. “In a little—in a little the Sahib will
find that he thinks well again. I too will—” He dived into his
treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down
to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier,
and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson
stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about
one of the piers—the seventh—that he had not fully settled in his mind.
The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and
at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow in his
ears like the deepest note of a double-bass—an entrancing sound upon
which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at
his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats
were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a
long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.

“A tree hit them. They will all go,” cried Peroo. “The main hawser has
parted. What does the Sahib do?”

An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson’s mind.
He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and
angles—each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was
the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it
was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet
would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But
why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he
hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside,
gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and,
further, to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so
difficult. And then—but it was of no conceivable importance—a wirerope
raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with
it all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in
the rainy darkness—sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo
was standing over him.

“I had forgotten,” said the Lascar, slowly, “that to those fasting and
unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to
the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great
ones. Can the Sahib swim?”

“What need? He can fly—fly as swiftly as the wind,” was the thick
answer.

“He is mad!” muttered Peroo, under his breath. “And he threw me aside
like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat
cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to
look at death with a clear eye.”

He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows
of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at
the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson,
the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops
struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of
all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and
perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that
a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs
apart to keep his balance—this was the most important point—would be
borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan
came to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl
the body ashore as wind drives paper, to waft it kite-fashion to the
bank. Thereafter—the boat spun dizzily—suppose the high wind got under
the freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the
far-away sands, or would it duck about, beyond control, through all
eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it
seemed that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had
settled all his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the
black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. “She cannot
live,” he grunted. “Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy
with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good.
Finlinson Sahib, she fills.”

“_Accha!_ I am going away. Come thou also.”

In his mind, Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was
circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot. His
body—he was really sorry for its gross helplessness—lay in the stern,
the water rushing about its knees.

“How very ridiculous!” he said to himself, from his eyrie—“that is
Findlayson—chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be
drowned, too. Drowned when it’s close to shore. I’m—I’m onshore
already. Why doesn’t it come along.”

To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and
that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the
reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the
body. He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding
prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the
swirling water, till at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the
river, and dropped, panting, on wet earth.

“Not this night,” said Peroo, in his ear. “The Gods have protected us.”
The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried
stumps. “This is some island of last year’s indigo-crop,” he went on.
“We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes
of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on
the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk
carefully.”

Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any
merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his
eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself,
with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had
built a bridge—a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining
seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under
heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of
Man.

An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to
be seen on the little patch in the flood—a clump of thorn, a clump of
swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a
Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy
man whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and
the weather had broken the red-daubed image of his god. The two men
stumbled, heavy limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set
cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches,
while the rain and river roared together.

The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as
a huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree.
The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the
insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow
crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap
that almost swept the ground. There was a noise behind him of other
beasts coming up from the floodline through the thicket, a sound of
heavy feet and deep breathing.

“Here be more beside ourselves,” said Findlayson, his head against the
tree-pole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.

“Truly,” said Peroo, thickly, “and no small ones.”

“What are they, then? I do not see clearly.”

“The Gods. Who else? Look!”

“Ah, true! The Gods surely—the Gods.” Findlayson smiled as his head
fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood,
who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it—the Gods
to whom his village prayed nightly—the Gods who were in all men’s
mouths and about all men’s ways. He could not raise his head or stir a
finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at
the lightning.

The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A
green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against
the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting
shadows of beasts. There was a black Buck at the Bull’s heels—such a
Buck as Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in
dreams—a Buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming
straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green
eyes burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the
dead grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.

The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness
a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the
fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his
neck and shoulders.

Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among them a drunken Man
flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse bellow broke out
from near the ground. “The flood lessens even now,” it cried. “Hour by
hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!”

“My bridge,” said Findlayson to himself. “That must be very old work
now. What have the Gods to do with my bridge?”

His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Mugger—the
blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges—draggled herself before
the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.

“They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only
torn away a handful of planks. The walls stand. The towers stand. They
have chained my flood, and the river is not free any more. Heavenly
Ones, take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank!
It is I, Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the
Justice of the Gods!”

“What said I?” whispered Peroo. “This is in truth a Punchayet of the
Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.”

The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat
to her head, snarled wickedly.

Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and
fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.

“We be here,” said a deep voice, “the Great Ones. One only and very
many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already.
Hanuman listens also.”

“Kashi is without her Kotwal tonight,” shouted the Man with the
drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island
rang to the baying of hounds. “Give her the Justice of the Gods.”

“Ye were still when they polluted my waters,” the great Crocodile
bellowed. “Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls.
I had no help save my own strength, and that failed—the strength of
Mother Gunga failed—before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have
done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!”

“I brought the death; I rode the spotted sickness from hut to hut of
their workmen, and yet they would not cease.” A nose-slitten, hide-worn
Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. “I cast the
death at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.”

Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.

“Bah!” he said, spitting. “Here is Sitala herself; Mata—the smallpox.
Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?”

“Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out
on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons
of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to
make a mock of. The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!”

The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: “If the
Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things there
would be many dark altars in the land, mother.”

“But this goes beyond a mock,” said the Tigress, darting forward a
griping paw. “Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones; ye know
that they have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer.
Let Indra judge.”

The Buck made no movement as he answered: “How long has this evil
been?”

“Three years, as men count years,” said the Mugger, close pressed to
the earth.

“Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to see
vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and
tomorrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men
call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till tomorrow?”
said the Buck.

There was along hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon
stood up above the dripping trees.

“Judge ye, then,” said the River, sullenly. “I have spoken my shame.
The flood falls still. I can do no more.”

“For my own part”—it was the voice of the great Ape seated within the
shrine—“it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also
builded no small bridge in the world’s youth.”

“They say, too,” snarled the Tiger, “that these men came of the wreck
of thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided—”

“They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their
toil endures. Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest how the land is
threaded with their fire-carriages.”

“Yea, I know,” said the Bull. “Their Gods instructed them in the
matter.”

A laugh ran round the circle.

“Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and
those that made them are scarcely yet cold,” said the Mugger, “tomorrow
their Gods will die.”

“Ho!” said Peroo. “Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the
padre-sahib who preached on the _Mombassa_, and he asked the Burra
Malum to put me in irons for a great rudeness.”

“Surely they make these things to please their Gods,” said the Bull
again.

“Not altogether,” the Elephant rolled forth. “It is for the profit of
my mahajuns —my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year,
when they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking
over their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are
those of men in far places—for all the towns are drawn together by the
fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the
account-books grow as fat as myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck,
I bless my peoples.”

“They have changed the face of the land-which is my land. They have
killed and made new towns on my banks,” said the Mugger.

“It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt
if it pleases the dirt,” answered the Elephant.

“But afterwards?” said the Tiger. “Afterwards they will see that Mother
Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and
later from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with
naked altars.”

The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.

“Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi,
and he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship
Bhairon—and it is always time—the fire-carriages move one by one, and
each bears a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but
rolling upon wheels, and my honour is increased.”

“Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims,” said the
Ape, leaning forward, “and but for the fire-carriage they would have
come slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember.”

“They come to me always,” Bhairon went on thickly. “By day and night
they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who
is like Bhairon today? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my
staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that
never were so many altars as today, and the fire carriage serves them
well. Bhairon am I—Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of
the Heavenly Ones today. Also my staff says—”

“Peace, thou!” lowed the Bull. “The worship of the schools is mine, and
they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the
delight of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou
knowest also.”

“Yea, I know,” said the Tigress, with lowered head.

“Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men
that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that
water—ye know how men say—come to us without punishment, and Gunga
knows that the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of
such anxious ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest
festivals among the pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who
smote at Pooree, under the Image there, her thousands in a day and a
night, and bound the sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so
that it ran from one end of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before
the fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have
served thee well, Mother of Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who
am not Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making
words and telling talk of strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows
faith among my people in the schools, and I have no anger; for when all
words are said, and the new talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the
last.”

“True. It is true,” murmured Hanuman. “To Shiv and to the others,
mother, they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where
they worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone
within their shrines.”

“Small thanks,” said the Buck, turning his head slowly. “I am that One
and His Prophet also.”

“Even so, father,” said Hanuman. “And to the South I go who am the
oldest of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I touch the
shrines of the new faith and the Woman whom we know is hewn
twelve-armed, and still they call her Mary.”

“Small thanks, brother,” said the Tigress. “I am that Woman.”

“Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and stand
before the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of me they
change their faiths and are very wise. Ho! ho! I am the builder of
bridges, indeed—bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads
surely to Us in the end. Be content, Gunga.

“Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at all.”

“Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones? Shall I smooth out my flood lest
unhappily I bear away their walls? Will Indra dry my springs in the
hills and make me crawl humbly between their wharfs? Shall I bury me in
the sand ere I offend?”

“And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage atop.
Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!” said Ganesh the Elephant. “A
child had not spoken more foolishly. Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere
it return to the dirt. I know only that my people grow rich and praise
me. Shiv has said that the men of the schools do not forget; Bhairon is
content for his crowd of the Common People; and Hanuman laughs.”

“Surely I laugh,” said the Ape. “My altars are few beside those of
Ganesh or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new worshippers from
beyond the Black Water—the men who believe that their God is toil. I
run before them beckoning, and they follow Hanuman.”

“Give them the toil that they desire, then,” said the River. “Make a
bar across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge. Once thou
wast strong in Lanka, Hanuman. Stoop and lift my bed.”

“Who gives life can take life.” The Ape scratched in the mud with a
long forefinger. “And yet, who would profit by the killing? Very many
would die.”

There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the boys
sing when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late spring. The
Parrot screamed joyously, sidling along his branch with lowered head as
the song grew louder, and in a patch of clear moonlight stood revealed
the young herd, the darling of the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids
and of mothers ere their children are born—Krishna the Well-beloved. He
stooped to knot up his long wet hair, and the parrot fluttered to his
shoulder.

“Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting,” hiccupped Bhairon.
“Those make thee late for the council, brother.”

“And then?” said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head. “Ye can
do little without me or Karma here.” He fondled the Parrot’s plumage
and laughed again. “What is this sitting and talking together? I heard
Mother Gunga roaring in the dark, and so came quickly from a hut where
I lay warm. And what have ye done to Karma, that he is so wet and
silent? And what does Mother Gunga here? Are the heavens full that ye
must come paddling in the mud beast-wise? Karma, what do they do?”

“Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridgebuilders, and Kali is
with her. Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that her honour may be
made great,” cried the Parrot. “I waited here, knowing that thou
wouldst come, O my master!”

“And the Heavenly Ones said nothing? Did Gunga and the Mother of
Sorrows out-talk them? Did none speak for my people?”

“Nay,” said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; “I said it was
but dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?”

“I was content to let them toil—well content,” said Hanuman.

“What had I to do with Gunga’s anger?” said the Bull.

“I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of all
Kashi. I spoke for the Common People.”

“Thou?” The young God’s eyes sparkled.

“Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths today?” returned
Bhairon, unabashed. “For the sake of the Common People I said very many
wise things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff—”

Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,
slipped an arm round the cold neck. “Mother,” he said gently, “get thee
to thy flood again. This matter is not for thee. What harm shall thy
honour take of this live dirt? Thou hast given them their fields new
year after year, and by thy flood they are made strong. They come all
to thee at the last. What need to slay them now? Have pity, mother, for
a little and it is only for a little.”

“If it be only for a little—” the slow beast began.

“Are they Gods, then?” Krishna, returned with a laugh, his eyes looking
into the dull eyes of the River. “Be certain that it is only for a
little. The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and presently justice will
be done. Go now, mother, to the flood again. Men and cattle are thick
on the waters—the banks fall—the villages melt because of thee.”

“But the bridge—the bridge stands.” The Mugger turned grunting into the
undergrowth as Krishna rose.

“It is ended,” said the Tigress, viciously. “There is no more justice
from the Heavenly Ones. Ye have made shame and sport of Gunga, who
asked no more than a few score lives.”

“Of _my_ people—who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village yonder—of
the young girls, and the young men who sing to them in the dark of the
child that will be born next morn—of that which was begotten tonight,”
said Krishna. “And when all is done, what profit? Tomorrow sees them at
work. Ay, if ye swept the bridge out from end to end they would begin
anew. Hear me! Bhairon is drunk always. Hanuman mocks his people with
new riddles.”

“Nay, but they are very old ones,” the Ape said, laughing.

“Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy men;
Ganesh thinks only of his fat traders; but I—I live with these my
people, asking for no gifts, and so receiving them hourly.”

“And very tender art thou of thy people,” said the Tigress.

“They are my own. The old women dream of me turning in their sleep; the
maids look and listen for me when they go to fill their lotahs by the
river. I walk by the young men waiting without the gates at dusk, and I
call over my shoulder to the whitebeards. Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that
I alone of us all walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure
in our heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two
voices at twilight in the standing crops. Wise are ye, but ye live far
off, forgetting whence ye came. So do I not forget. And the
fire-carriage feeds your shrines, ye say? And the fire-carriages bring
a thousand pilgrims where but ten came in the old years? True. That is
true, today.”

“But tomorrow they are dead, brother,” said Ganesh.

“Peace!” said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again. “And tomorrow,
beloved—what of tomorrow?”

“This only. A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the Common
Folk—a word that neither man nor God can lay hold of—an evil word—a
little lazy word among the Common Folk, saying (and none know who set
that word afoot) that they weary of ye, Heavenly Ones.”

The Gods laughed together softly. “And then, beloved?” they said.

“And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee, Shiv,
and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a louder noise of
worship. But the word has gone abroad, and, after, they will pay fewer
dues to our fat Brahmins. Next they will forget your altars, but so
slowly that no man can say how his forgetfulness began.

“I knew—I knew! I spoke this also, but they would not hear,” said the
Tigress. “We should have slain—we should have slain!”

“It is too late now. Ye should have slain at the beginning when the men
from across the water had taught our folk nothing. Now my people see
their work, and go away thinking. They do not think of the Heavenly
Ones altogether. They think of the fire-carriage and the other things
that the bridge-builders have done, and when your priests thrust
forward hands asking alms, they give a little unwillingly. That is the
beginning, among one or two, or five or ten—for I, moving among my
people, know what is in their hearts.”

“And the end, Jester of the Gods? What shall the end be?” said Ganesh.

“The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv!
The flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the tongue till
ye become little Gods again—Gods of the jungle—names that the hunters
of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in the thicket and among the
caves—rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark, as ye
were at the beginning. That is the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for
Bhairon—Bhairon of the Common People.”

“It is very far away,” grunted Bhairon. “Also, it is a lie.”

“Many women have kissed Krishna. They told him this to cheer their own
hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the tale,” said the
Bull, below his breath.

“Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman and made her
twelve-armed. So shall we twist all their Gods,” said Hanuman.

“Their Gods! This is no question of their Gods—one or three—man or
woman. The matter is with the people. _They_ move, and not the Gods of
the bridgebuilders,” said Krishna.

“So be it. I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood
still breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me,” said
Hanuman the Ape. “They will only change a little the names of their
Gods. I shall lead the builders of the bridges as of old; Shiv shall be
worshipped in the schools by such as doubt and despise their fellows;
Ganesh shall have his mahajuns, and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the
pilgrims, and the sellers of toys. Beloved, they will do no more than
change the names, and that we have seen a thousand times.”

“Surely they will do no more than change the names,” echoed Ganesh; but
there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.

“They will change more than the names. Me alone they cannot kill, so
long as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring follows the
winter rains. Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I walked upon the
earth. My people know not now what they know; but I, who live with
them, I read their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is
born already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are
_not_ the old under new names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your
faces in the smoke of the altars before they grow cold! Take dues and
listen to the cymbals and the drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are
flowers and songs. As men count time the end is far off; but as we who
know reckon it is today. I have spoken.”

The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long in
silence.

“This I have not heard before,” Peroo whispered in his companion’s ear.
“And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the
_Goorkha_, I have wondered if our priests were so wise—so wise. The day
is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning.”

A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed
as the darkness withdrew.

Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.

“Let Indra judge. Father of all, speak thou! What of the things we have
heard? Has Krishna lied indeed? Or—”

“Ye know,” said the Buck, rising to his feet. “Ye know the Riddle of
the Gods. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and the Hells and
Earth disappear. Be content. Brahm dreams still. The dreams come and
go, and the nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams.
Krishna has walked too long upon earth, and yet I love him the more for
the tale he has told. The Gods change, beloved—all save One!”

“Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men,” said Krishna,
knotting his girdle. “It is but a little time to wait, and ye shall
know if I lie.”

“Truly it is but a little time, as thou sayest, and we shall know. Get
thee to thy huts again, beloved, and make sport for the young things,
for still Brahm dreams. Go, my children! Brahm dreams—and till he wakes
the Gods die not.”

“Whither went they?” said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a little
with the cold.

“God knows!” said Findlayson. The river and the island lay in full
daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth
under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down
showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings.

“Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out? Canst thou move,
Sahib?”

Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself. His head swam and
ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he sluiced his
forehead in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi Bridge was
wondering how he had managed to fall upon the island, what chances the
day offered of return, and, above all, how his work stood.

“Peroo, I have forgotten much. I was under the guard-tower watching the
river; and then. . . . Did the flood sweep us away?”

“No. The boats broke loose, Sahib, and” (if the Sahib had forgotten
about the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him) “in striving to
retie them, so it seemed to me—but it was dark—a rope caught the Sahib
and threw him upon a boat. Considering that we two, with Hitchcock
Sahib, built, as it were, that bridge, I came also upon the boat, which
came riding on horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and
so, splitting, cast us ashore. I made a great cry when the boat left
the wharf, and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us. As for
the bridge, so many have died in the building that it cannot fall.”

A fierce sun, that drew out all the smell of the sodden land, had
followed the storm, and in that clear light there was no room for a man
to think of the dreams of the dark. Findlayson stared up-stream, across
the blaze of moving water, till his eyes ached. There was no sign of
any bank to the Ganges, much less of a bridgeline.

“We came down far,” he said. “It was wonderful that we were not drowned
a hundred times.”

“That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his time. I
have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports,
but”—Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the
peepul—“never man has seen that we saw here.”

“What?”

“Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?”

“There was a fever upon me.” Findlayson was still looking uneasily
across the water. “It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men
talking, but I do not remember. A boat could live in this water now, I
think.”

“Oho! Then it is true.‘When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods die.’ Now I
know, indeed, what he meant. Once, too, the _guru_ said as much to me;
but then I did not understand. Now I am wise.”

“What?” said Findlayson, over his shoulder.

Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself. “Six—seven—ten monsoons
since, I was watch on the fo’c’sle of the _Rewah_—the Kumpani’s big
boat—and there was a big _tufan_, green and black water beating, and I
held fast to the life-lines, choking under the waters. Then I thought
of the Gods—of Those whom we saw tonight”—he stared curiously at
Findlayson’s back, but the white man was looking across the flood.
“Yes, I say of Those whom we saw this night past, and I called upon
Them to protect me. And while I prayed, still keeping my lookout, a big
wave came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great black
bowianchor, and the _Rewah_ rose high and high, leaning towards the
lefthand side, and the water drew away from beneath her nose, and I lay
upon my belly, holding the ring, and looking down into those great
deeps. Then I thought, even in the face of death: If I lose hold I die,
and for me neither the _Rewah_ nor my place by the galley where the
rice is cooked, nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London, will be any
more for me. ‘How shall I be sure,’ I said, that the Gods to whom I
pray will abide at all?’ This I thought, and the _Rewah_ dropped her
nose as a hammer falls, and all the sea came in and slid me backwards
along the fo’c’sle and over the break of the fo’c’sle, and I very badly
bruised my shin against the donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I
have seen the Gods. They are good for live men, but for the dead. . .
They have spoken Themselves. Therefore, when I come to the village I
will beat the _guru_ for talking riddles which are no riddles. When
Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go.”

“Look up-stream. The light blinds. Is there smoke yonder?”

Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands. “He is a wise man and quick.
Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat. He has borrowed the Rao
Sahib’s steam launch, and comes to look for us. I have always said that
there should have been a steam-launch on the bridge works for us.”

The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge;
and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty
leisure in playing billiards and shooting black-buck with the young
man. He had been bear-led by an English tutor of sporting tastes for
some five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues
accumulated during his minority by the Indian Government. His
steam-launch, with its silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and
mahogany decks, was a new toy which Findlayson had found horribly in
the way when the Rao came to look at the bridge works.

“It’s great luck,” murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less
afraid, wondering what news might be of the bridge.

The gaudy blue and white funnel came down-stream swiftly. They could
see Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses, and his face
was unusually white. Then Peroo hailed, and the launch made for the
tail of the island. The Rao Sahib, in tweed shooting-suit and a
seven-hued turban, waved his royal hand, and Hitchcock shouted. But he
need have asked no questions, for Findlayson’s first demand was for his
bridge.

“All serene! Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson. You’re
seven koss down-stream. Yes; there’s not a stone shifted anywhere; but
how are you? I borrowed the Rao Sahib’s launch, and he was good enough
to come along. Jump in.”

“Ah, Finlinson, you are very well, eh? That was most unprecedented
calamity last night, eh? My royal palace, too, it leaks like the devil,
and the crops will also be short all about my country. Now you shall
back her out, Hitchcock. I—I do not understand steam engines. You are
wet? You are cold, Finlinson? I have some things to eat here, and you
will take a good drink.”

“I’m immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you’ve saved my life. How
did Hitchcock—”

“Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night
and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned,
Finlinson, so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We
will go quick, Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve
forty-five in the state temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not
so I would have asked you to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore,
these religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?”

Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid
wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he
steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted
wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat was the back of his _guru_.




A WALKING DELEGATE


According to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is salting-time on
the farm, and, unless something very important happens, we attend to
the salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, are treated first;
they stay in the home meadow ready for work on Monday. Then come the
cows, with Pan, the calf, who should have been turned into veal long
ago, but survived on account of his manners; and lastly the horses,
scattered through the seventy acres of the Back Pasture.

You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling
water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple undergrowth
closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an
old county-road running past two green hollows fringed with wild rose
that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where
nobody ever comes except in cider-time; then across another brook, and
so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and spruce,
with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock
and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp; but the
horses like it well enough—our own, and the others that are turned down
there to feed at fifty cents a week. Most people walk to the Back
Pasture, and find it very rough work; but one can get there in a buggy,
if the horse knows what is expected of him. The safest conveyance is
our coupé. This began life as a buckboard, and we bought it for five
dollars from a sorrowful man who had no other sort of possessions; and
the seat came off one night when we were turning a corner in a hurry.
After that alteration it made a beautiful salting-machine, if you held
tight, because there was nothing to catch your feet when you fell out,
and the slats rattled tunes.

One Sunday afternoon we went out with the salt as usual. It was a
broiling hot day, and we could not find the horses anywhere till we let
Tedda Gabler, the bobtailed mare who throws up the dirt with her big
hooves exactly as a tedder throws hay, have her head. Clever as she is,
she tipped the coupé over in a hidden brook before she came out on a
ledge of rock where all the horses had gathered, and were switching
flies. The Deacon was the first to call to her. He is a very dark
iron-grey four-year-old, son of Grandee. He has been handled since he
was two, was driven in a light cart before he was three, and now ranks
as an absolutely steady lady’s horse—proof against steam-rollers,
grade-crossings, and street processions.

“Salt!” said the Deacon, joyfully. “You’re dreffle late, Tedda.”

“Any—any place to cramp the coupé?” Tedda panted. “It weighs turr’ble
this weather. I’d ’a’ come sooner, but they didn’t know what they
wanted—ner haow. Fell out twice, both of ’em. I don’t understand sech
foolishness.”

“You look consider’ble het up. Guess you’d better cramp her under them
pines, an’ cool off a piece.”

Tedda scrambled on the ledge, and cramped the coupé in the shade of a
tiny little wood of pines, while my companion and I lay down among the
brown, silky needles, and gasped. All the home horses were gathered
round us, enjoying their Sunday leisure.

There were Rod and Rick, the seniors on the farm. They were the regular
road-pair, bay with black points, full brothers, aged, sons of a
Hambletonian sire and a Morgan dam. There were Nip and Tuck,
seal-browns, rising six, brother and sister, Black Hawks by birth,
perfectly matched, just finishing their education, and as handsome a
pair as man could wish to find in a forty-mile drive. There was
Muldoon, our ex-car-horse, bought at a venture, and any colour you
choose that is not white; and Tweezy, who comes from Kentucky, with an
affliction of his left hip, which makes him a little uncertain how his
hind legs are moving. He and Muldoon had been hauling gravel all the
week for our new road. The Deacon you know already. Last of all, and
eating something, was our faithful Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the black
buggy-horse, who had seen us through every state of weather and road,
the horse who was always standing in harness before some door or
other—a philosopher with the appetite of a shark and the manners of an
archbishop. Tedda Gabler was a new “trade,” with a reputation for vice
which was really the result of bad driving. She had one working gait,
which she could hold till further notice; a Roman nose; a large,
prominent eye; a shaving-brush of a tail; and an irritable temper. She
took her salt through her bridle; but the others trotted up nuzzling
and wickering for theirs, till we emptied it on the clean rocks. They
were all standing at ease, on three legs for the most part, talking the
ordinary gossip of the Back Pasture—about the scarcity of water, and
gaps in the fence, and how the early windfalls tasted that season—when
little Rick blew the last few grains of his allowance into a crevice,
and said:

“Hurry, boys! Might ha’ knowed that ‘Livery-plug’ would be around.”

We heard a clatter of hooves, and there climbed up from the ravine
below a fifty-center transient—a wall-eyed, yellow frame-house of a
horse, sent up to board from a livery-stable in town, where they called
him “The Lamb,” and never let him out except at night and to strangers.
My companion, who knew and had broken most of the horses, looked at the
ragged hammer-head as it rose, and said quietly:

“Ni-ice beast. Man-eater, if he gets the chance—see his eye. Kicker,
too—see his hocks. Western horse.”

The animal lumbered up, snuffling and grunting. His feet showed that he
had not worked for weeks and weeks, and our creatures drew together
significantly.

“As usual,” he said, with an underhung sneer—“bowin’ your heads before
the Oppressor that comes to spend his leisure gloatin’ over you.”

“Mine’s done,” said the Deacon; he licked up the remnant of his salt,
dropped his nose in his master’s hand, and sang a little grace all to
himself. The Deacon has the most enchanting manners of any one I know.

“An’ fawnin’ on them for what is your inalienable right. It’s
humiliatin’,” said the yellow horse, sniffing to see if he could find a
few spare grains.

“Go daown hill, then, Boney,” the Deacon replied. “Guess you’ll find
somethin’ to eat still, if yer hain’t hogged it all. You’ve ett more’n
any three of us to-day—an’ day ’fore that—an’ the last two months—sence
you’ve been here.”

“I am not addressin’ myself to the young an’ immature. I am speakin’ to
those whose opinion _an_’ experience commands respect.”

I saw Rod raise his head as though he were about to make a remark; then
he dropped it again, and stood three-cornered, like a plough-horse. Rod
can cover his mile in a shade under three minutes on an ordinary road
to an ordinary buggy. He is tremendously powerful behind, but, like
most Hambletonians, he grows a trifle sullen as he gets older. No one
can love Rod very much; but no one can help respecting him.

“I wish to wake _those_,” the yellow horse went on, “to an abidin’
sense o’ their wrongs an’ their injuries an’ their outrages.”

“Haow’s that?” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, dreamily. He thought
Boney was talking of some kind of feed.

“An’ when I say outrages and injuries”—Boney waved his tail
furiously—“I mean ’em, too. Great Oats! That’s just what I _do_ mean,
plain an’ straight.”

“The gentleman talks quite earnest,” said Tuck, the mare, to Nip, her
brother. “There’s no doubt thinkin’ broadens the horizons o’ the mind.
His language is quite lofty.”

“Hesh, sis,” Nip answered. “He hain’t widened nothin’ ’cep’ the circle
he’s ett in pasture. They feed words fer beddin’ where he comes from.”

“It’s elegant talkin’, though,” Tuck returned, with an unconvinced toss
of her pretty, lean little head.

The yellow horse heard her, and struck an attitude which he meant to be
extremely impressive. It made him look as though he had been badly
stuffed.

“Now I ask you, I ask you without prejudice an’ without favour,—what
has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably
entitled to the free air o’ heaven, blowin’ acrost this boundless
prairie?”

“Hev ye ever wintered here?” said the Deacon, merrily, while the others
snickered. “It’s kinder cool.”

“Not yet,” said Boney. “I come from the boundless confines o’ Kansas,
where the noblest of our kind have their abidin’ place among the
sunflowers on the threshold o’ the settin’ sun in his glory.”

“An’ they sent you ahead as a sample?” said Rick, with an amused quiver
of his long, beautifully groomed tail, as thick and as fine and as wavy
as a quadroon’s back hair.

“Kansas, sir, needs no adver_tise_ment. Her native sons rely on
themselves an’ their native sires. Yes, sir.”

Then Tweezy lifted up his wise and polite old head. His affliction
makes him bashful as a rule, but he is ever the most courteous of
horses.

“Excuse me, suh,” he said slowly, “but, unless I have been misinfohmed,
most of your prominent siahs, suh, are impo’ted from Kentucky; an’
_I_’m from Paduky.”

There was the least little touch of pride in the last words.

“Any horse dat knows beans,” said Muldoon, suddenly (he had been
standing with his hairy chin on Tweezy’s broad quarters), “gits outer
Kansas ’fore dey crip his shoes. I blew in dere from Ioway in de days
o’ me youth an’ innocence, an’ I wuz grateful when dey boxed me fer N’
York. You can’t tell _me_ anything about Kansas I don’t wanter fergit.
De Belt Line stables ain’t no Hoffman House, but dey’re Vanderbilts
’longside o’ Kansas.”

“What the horses o’ Kansas think to-day, the horses of America will
think to-morrow; an’ I tell _you_ that when the horses of America rise
in their might, the day o’ the Oppressor is ended.”

There was a pause, till Rick said, with a little grunt:

“Ef you put it that way, every one of us has riz in his might, ’cep’
Marcus, mebbe. Marky, ’j ever rise in yer might?”

“Nope,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thoughtfully quidding over a
mouthful of grass. “I seen a heap o’ fools try, though.”

“You admit that you riz?” said the Kansas horse, excitedly. “Then
why—why in Kansas did you ever go under again?”

“Horse can’t walk on his hind legs _all_ the time,” said the Deacon.

“Not when he’s jerked over on his back ’fore he knows what fetched him.
We’ve all done it, Boney,” said Rick. “Nip an’ Tuck they tried it,
spite o’ what the Deacon told ’em; an’ the Deacon he tried it, spite o’
what me an’ Rod told him; an’ me an’ Rod tried it, spite o’ what
Grandee told us; an’ I guess Grandee he tried it, spite o’ what his dam
told him. It’s the same old circus from generation to generation. ’Colt
can’t see why he’s called on to back. Same old rearin’ on end—straight
up. Same old feelin’ that you’ve bested ’em this time. Same old little
yank at your mouth when you’re up good an’ tall. Same old Pegasus-act,
wonderin’ where you’ll ’light. Same old wop when you hit the dirt with
your head where your tail should be, and your in’ards shook up like a
bran-mash. Same old voice in your ear: ‘Waal, ye little fool, an’ what
did you reckon to make by that?’ We’re through with risin’ in our might
on this farm. We go to pole er single, accordin’ ez we’re hitched.”

“An’ Man the Oppressor sets an’ gloats over you, same as he’s settin’
now. Hain’t that been your experience, madam?”

This last remark was addressed to Tedda; and any one could see with
half an eye that poor, old anxious, fidgety Tedda, stamping at the
flies, must have left a wild and tumultuous youth behind her.

“’Pends on the man,” she answered, shifting from one foot to the other,
and addressing herself to the home horses. “They abused me dreffle when
I was young. I guess I was sperrity an’ nervous some, but they didn’t
allow for that. ’Twas in Monroe County, Noo York, an’ sence then till I
come here, I’ve run away with more men than ’u’d fill a boardin’-house.
Why, the man that sold me here he says to the boss, s’ he: ‘Mind, now,
I’ve warned you. ’Twon’t be none of my fault if she sheds you daown the
road. Don’t you drive her in a top-buggy, ner ’thout winkers,’ s’ he,
‘ner ’thout this bit ef you look to come home behind her.’ ’N’ the fust
thing the boss did was to git the top-buggy.

“Can’t say as I like top-buggies,” said Rick; “they don’t balance
good.”

“Suit me to a ha’ar,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Top-buggy means
the baby’s in behind, an’ I kin stop while she gathers the pretty
flowers—yes, an’ pick a maouthful, too. The women-folk all say I hev to
be humoured, an’ I don’t kerry things to the sweatin’-point.”

“’Course I’ve no pre_jud_ice against a top-buggy s’ long’s I can see
it,” Tedda went on quickly. “It’s ha’f-seein’ the pesky thing bobbin’
an’ balancin’ behind the winkers gits on _my_ nerves. Then the boss
looked at the bit they’d sold with me, an’ s’ he: ‘Jiminy Christmas!
This ’u’d make a clothes-horse stan’ ’n end!’ Then he gave me a plain
bar bit, an’ fitted it’s if there was some feelin’ to my maouth.”

“Hain’t ye got any, Miss Tedda?” said Tuck, who has a mouth like
velvet, and knows it.

“Might ’a’ had, Miss Tuck, but I’ve forgot. Then he give me an open
bridle,—my style’s an open bridle—an’—I dunno as I ought to tell this
by rights—he—give—me—a kiss.”

“My!” said Tuck, “I can’t tell fer the shoes o’ me what makes some men
so fresh.”

“Pshaw, sis,” said Nip, “what’s the sense in actin’ so? _You_ git a
kiss reg’lar’s hitchin’-up time.”

“Well, you needn’t tell, smarty,” said Tuck, with a squeal and a kick.

“I’d heard o’ kisses, o’ course,” Tedda went on, “but they hadn’t come
my way specially. I don’t mind tellin’ I was that took aback at that
man’s doin’s he might ha’ lit fire-crackers on my saddle. Then we went
out jest’s if a kiss was nothin’, an’ I wasn’t three strides into my
gait ’fore I felt the boss knoo his business, an’ was trustin’ me. So I
studied to please him, an’ he never took the whip from the dash—a whip
drives me plumb distracted—an’ the upshot was that—waal, I’ve come up
the Back Pasture to-day, an’ the coupé’s tipped clear over twice, an’
I’ve waited till ’twuz fixed each time. You kin judge for yourselves. I
don’t set up to be no better than my neighbours,—specially with my tail
snipped off the way ’tis,—but I want you all to know Tedda’s quit
fightin’ in harness or out of it, ’cep’ when there’s a born fool in the
pasture, stuffin’ his stummick with board that ain’t rightly hisn,
’cause he hain’t earned it.”

“Meanin’ me, madam?” said the yellow horse.

“Ef the shoe fits, clinch it,” said Tedda, snorting. “_I_ named no
names, though, to be sure, some folks are mean enough an’ greedy enough
to do ’thout ’em.”

“There’s a deal to be forgiven to ignorance,” said the yellow horse,
with an ugly look in his blue eye.

“Seemin’ly, yes; or some folks ’u’d ha’ been kicked raound the pasture
’bout onct a minute sence they came—board er no board.”

“But what you do _not_ understand, if you will excuse me, madam, is
that the whole principle o’ servitood, which includes keep an’ feed,
starts from a radically false basis; an’ I am proud to say that me an’
the majority o’ the horses o’ Kansas think the entire concern should be
relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. I say we’re too
progressive for that. I say we’re too enlightened for that. ’Twas good
enough’s long’s we didn’t think, but naow—but naow—a new loominary has
arisen on the horizon!”

“Meanin’ you?” said the Deacon.

“The horses o’ Kansas are behind me with their multitoodinous
thunderin’ hooves, an’ we say, simply but grandly, that we take our
stand with all four feet on the inalienable rights of the horse, pure
and simple,—the high-toned child o’ nature, fed by the same wavin’
grass, cooled by the same ripplin’ brook—yes, an’ warmed by the same
gen’rous sun as falls impartially on the outside an’ the _in_side of
the pampered machine o’ the trottin’-track, or the bloated coupé-horses
o’ these yere Eastern cities. Are we not the same flesh an’ blood?”

“Not by a bushel an’ a half,” said the Deacon, under his breath.
“Grandee never was in Kansas.”

“My! Ain’t that elegant, though, abaout the wavin’ grass an’ the
ripplin’ brooks?” Tuck whispered in Nip’s ear. “The gentleman’s real
convincin’, _I_ think.”

“I say we _are_ the same flesh an’ blood! Are we to be separated, horse
from horse, by the artificial barriers of a trottin’-record, or are we
to look down upon each other on the strength o’ the gifts o’ nature—an
extry inch below the knee, or slightly more powerful quarters? What’s
the use o’ them advantages to you? Man the Oppressor comes along, an’
sees you’re likely an’ good-lookin’, an’ grinds you to the face o’ the
earth. What for? For his own pleasure: for his own convenience! Young
an’ old, black an’ bay, white an’ grey, there’s no distinctions made
between us. We’re ground up together under the remorseless teeth o’ the
engines of oppression!”

“Guess his breechin’ must ha’ broke goin’ daown-hill,” said the Deacon.
“Slippery road, maybe, an’ the buggy come onter him, an’ he didn’t know
’nough to hold back. That don’t feel like teeth, though. Maybe he
busted a shaft, an’ it pricked him.”

“An’ I come to you from Kansas, wavin’ the tail o’ friendship to all
an’ sundry, an’ in the name of the uncounted millions o’ pure-minded,
high-toned horses now strugglin’ towards the light o’ freedom, I say to
you, Rub noses with us in our sacred an’ holy cause. The power is
yourn. Without you, I say, Man the Oppressor cannot move himself from
place to place. Without you he cannot reap, he cannot sow, he cannot
plough.”

“Mighty odd place, Kansas!” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Seemin’ly
they reap in the spring an’ plough in the fall. ’Guess it’s right fer
them, but ’twould make me kinder giddy.”

“The produc’s of your untirin’ industry would rot on the ground if you
did not weakly consent to help him. _Let_ ’em rot, I say! Let him call
you to the stables in vain an’ nevermore! Let him shake his ensnarin’
oats under your nose in vain! Let the Brahmas roost in the buggy, an’
the rats run riot round the reaper! Let him walk on his two hind feet
till they blame well drop off! Win no more soul-destroin’ races for his
pleasure! Then, an’ not till then, will Man the Oppressor know where
he’s at. Quit workin’, fellow-sufferers an’ slaves! Kick! Rear! Plunge!
Lie down on the shafts, an’ woller! Smash an’ destroy! The conflict
will be but short, an’ the victory is certain. After that we can press
our inalienable rights to eight quarts o’ oats a day, two good
blankets, an’ a fly-net an’ the best o’ stablin’.”

The yellow horse shut his yellow teeth with a triumphant snap; and Tuck
said, with a sigh: “Seems’s if somethin’ ought to be done. Don’t seem
right, somehow,—oppressin’ us an all,—to my way o’ thinkin’.”

Said Muldoon, in a far-away and sleepy voice:

“Who in Vermont’s goin’ to haul de inalienable oats? Dey weigh like Sam
Hill, an’ sixty bushel at dat allowance ain’t goin’ to last t’ree weeks
here. An’ dere’s de winter hay for five mont’s!”

“We can settle those minor details when the great cause is won,” said
the yellow horse. “Let us return simply but grandly to our inalienable
rights—the right o’ freedom on these yere verdant hills, an’ no
invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree:”

“What in stables ’jer call an invijjus distinction?” said the Deacon,
stiffly.

“Fer one thing, bein’ a bloated, pampered trotter jest because you
happen to be raised that way, an’ couldn’t no more help trottin’ than
eatin’.”

“Do ye know anythin’ about trotters?” said the Deacon.

“I’ve seen ’em trot. That was enough for me. _I_ don’t want to know any
more. Trottin’s immoral.”

“Waal, I’ll tell you this much. They don’t bloat, an’ they don’t
pamp—much. I don’t hold out to be no trotter myself, though I am free
to say I had hopes that way—onct. But I _do_ say, fer I’ve seen ’em
trained, that a trotter don’t trot with his feet: he trots with his
head; an’ he does more work—ef you know what _that_ is—in a week than
you er your sire ever done in all your lives. He’s everlastingly at it,
a trotter is; an’ when he isn’t, he’s studyin’ haow. You seen ’em trot?
Much you hev! You was hitched to a rail, back o’ the stand, in a
buckboard with a soap-box nailed on the slats, an’ a frowzy buff’lo
atop, while your man peddled rum fer lemonade to little boys as thought
they was actin’ manly, till you was both run off the track an’
jailed—you intoed, shufflin’, sway-backed, wind-suckin’ skate, you!”

“Don’t get het up, Deacon,” said Tweezy, quietly. “Now, suh, would you
consider a fox-trot, an’ single-foot, an’ rack, an’ pace, _an_’ amble,
distinctions not worth distinguishin’? I assuah you, gentlemen, there
was a time befo’ I was afflicted in my hip, if you’ll pardon me, Miss
Tuck, when I was quite celebrated in Paduky for _all_ those gaits; an’
in my opinion the Deacon’s co’rect when he says that a ho’se of any
position in society gets his gaits by his haid, an’ not by—his, ah,
limbs, Miss Tuck. I reckon I’m very little good now, but I’m
rememberin’ the things I used to do befo’ I took to transpo’tin’ real
estate with the help an’ assistance of this gentleman here.” He looked
at Muldoon.

“Invijjus arterficial hind legs!” said the ex-car-horse, with a grunt
of contempt. “On de Belt Line we don’t reckon no horse wuth his keep
’less he kin switch de car off de track, run her round on de cobbles,
an’ dump her in ag’in ahead o’ de truck what’s blockin’ him. Dere is a
way o’ swingin’ yer quarters when de driver says,‘Yank her out, boys!’
dat takes a year to learn. Onct yer git onter it, youse kin yank a
cable-car outer a manhole. I don’t advertise myself for no
circus-horse, but I knew dat trick better than most, an’ dey was good
to me in de stables, fer I saved time on de Belt—an’ time’s what dey
hunt in N’ York.”

“But the simple child o’ nature—” the yellow horse began.

“Oh, go an’ unscrew yer splints! You’re talkin’ through yer bandages,”
said Muldoon, with a horse-laugh. “Dere ain’t no loose-box for de
simple child o’ nature on de Belt Line, wid de _Paris_ comin’ in an’ de
_Teutonic_ goin’ out, an’ de trucks an’ de coupé’s sayin’ things, an’
de heavy freight movin’ down fer de Boston boat ’bout t’ree o’clock of
an August afternoon, in de middle of a hot wave when de fat Kanucks an’
Western horses drops dead on de block. De simple child o’ nature had
better chase himself inter de water. Every man at de end of his lines
is mad or loaded or silly, an’ de cop’s madder an’ loadeder an’ sillier
than de rest. Dey all take it outer de horses. Dere’s no wavin’ brooks
ner ripplin’ grass on de Belt Line. Run her out on de cobbles wid de
sparks flyin’, an’ stop when de cop slugs you on de bone o’ yer nose.
Dat’s N’York; see?

“I was always told s’ciety in Noo York was dreffle refined an’
high-toned,” said Tuck. “We’re lookin’ to go there one o’ these days,
Nip an’ me.”

“Oh, _you_ won’t see no Belt business where you’ll go, miss. De man dat
wants you’ll want you bad, an’ he’ll summer you on Long Island er at
Newport, wid a winky-pinky silver harness an’ an English coachman.
You’ll make a star-hitch, you an’ yer brother, miss. But I guess you
won’t have no nice smooth bar bit. Dey checks ’em, an’ dey bangs deir
tails, an’ dey bits ’em, de city folk, an’ dey says it’s English, ye
know, an’ dey darsen’t cut a horse loose ’ca’se o’ de cops. N’ York’s
no place fer a horse, ’less he’s on de Belt, an’ can go round wid de
boys. Wisht _I_ was in de Fire Department!”

“But did you never stop to consider the degradin’ servitood of it all?”
said the yellow horse.

“You don’t stop on de Belt, cully. You’re stopped. An’ we was all in de
servitood business, man an’ horse, an’ Jimmy dat sold de papers. Guess
de passengers weren’t out to grass neither, by de way dey acted. I done
my turn, an’ I’m none o’ Barnum’s crowd; but any horse dat’s worked on
de Belt four years don’t train wid no simple child o’ nature—not by de
whole length o’ N’ York.”

“But can it be possible that with your experience, and at your time of
life, you do not believe that all horses are free and equal?” said the
yellow horse.

“Not till they’re dead,” Muldoon answered quietly. “An’ den it depends
on de gross total o’ buttons an’ mucilage dey gits outer youse at
Barren Island.”

“They tell me you’re a prominent philosopher.” The yellow horse turned
to Marcus. “Can _you_ deny a basic and pivotal statement such as this?”

“I don’t deny anythin’,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, cautiously;
“but ef you _ast_ me, I should say ’twuz more different sorts o’
clipped oats of a lie than anythin’ I’ve had my teeth into sence I wuz
foaled.”

“Are you a horse?” said the yellow horse.

“Them that knows me best ’low I am.”

“Ain’t _I_ a horse?”

“Yep; one kind of.”

“Then ain’t you an’ me equal?”

“How fer kin you go in a day to a loaded buggy, drawin’ five hundred
pounds?” Marcus asked carelessly.

“That has nothing to do with the case,” the yellow horse answered
excitedly.

“There’s nothing I know hez more to do with the case,” Marcus replied.

“Kin ye yank a full car outer de tracks ten times in de mornin’?” said
Muldoon.

“Kin ye go to Keene—forty-two mile in an afternoon—with a mate,” said
Rick; “an’ turn out bright an’ early next mornin’?”

“Was there evah any time in your careah, suh—I am not referrin’ to the
present circumstances, but our mutual glorious past—when you could
carry a pretty girl to market hahnsome, an’ let her knit all the way on
account o’ the smoothness o’ the motion?” said Tweezy.

“Kin you keep your feet through the West River Bridge, with the
narrer-gage comin’ in on one side, an’ the Montreal flyer the other,
an’ the old bridge teeterin’ between?” said the Deacon. “Kin you put
your nose down on the cow-catcher of a locomotive when you’re waitin’
at the depot an’ let ’em play ‘Curfew shall not ring to-night’ with the
big brass bell?”

“Kin you hold back when the brichin’ breaks? Kin you stop fer orders
when your nigh hind leg’s over your trace an’ ye feel good of a frosty
mornin’?” said Nip, who had only learned that trick last winter, and
thought it was the crown of horsely knowledge.

“What’s the use o’ talkin’?” said Tedda Gabler, scornfully. “What kin
ye do?”

“I rely on my simple rights—the inalienable rights o’ my unfettered
horsehood. An’ I am proud to say I have never, since my first shoes,
lowered myself to obeyin’ the will o’ man.”

“Must ha’ had a heap o’ whips broke over yer yaller back,” said Tedda.
“Hev ye found it paid any?”

“Sorrer has been my portion since the day I was foaled. Blows an’ boots
an’ whips an’ insults—injury, outrage, an’ oppression. I would not
endoor the degradin’ badges o’ servitood that connect us with the buggy
an’ the farm-wagon.”

“It’s amazin’ difficult to draw a buggy ’thout traces er collar er
breast-strap er somefin’,” said Marcus. “A Power-machine for sawin’
wood is most the only thing there’s no straps to. I’ve helped saw ’s
much as three cord in an afternoon in a Power-machine. Slep’, too, most
o’ the time, I did; but ’tain’t half as inte_res_tin’ ez goin’
daown-taown in the Concord.”

“Concord don’t hender _you_ goin’ to sleep any,” said Nip. “My
throat-lash! D’you remember when you lay down in the sharves last week,
waitin’ at the piazza?”

“Pshaw! That didn’t hurt the sharves. They wuz good an’ wide, an’ I lay
down keerful. The folks kep’ me hitched up nigh an hour ’fore they
started; an’ larfed—why, they all but lay down themselves with larfin’.
Say, Boney, if you’ve got to be hitched _to_ anything that goes on
wheels, you’ve got to be hitched _with_ somefin’.”

“Go an’ jine a circus,” said Muldoon, “an’ walk on your hind legs. All
de horses dat knows too much to work [he pronounced it ‘woik,’ New York
fashion] jine de circus.”

“I am not sayin’ anythin’ again’ work,” said the yellow horse; “work is
the finest thing in the world.”

“Seems too fine fer some of us,” Tedda snorted.

“I only ask that each horse should work for himself, an’ enjoy the
profit of his labours. Let him work intelligently, an’ not as a
machine.”

“There ain’t no horse that works like a machine,” Marcus began.

“There’s no way o’ workin’ that doesn’t mean goin’ to pole er
single—they never put me in the Power-machine—er under saddle,” said
Rick.

“Oh, shucks! We’re talkin’ same ez we graze,” said Nip, “raound an’
raound in circles. Rod, we hain’t heard from you yet, an’ you’ve more
know-how than any span here.”

Rod, the off-horse of the pair, had been standing with one hip lifted,
like a tired cow; and you could only tell by the quick flutter of the
haw across his eye, from time to time, that he was paying any attention
to the argument. He thrust his jaw out sidewise, as his habit is when
he pulls, and changed his leg. His voice was hard and heavy, and his
ears were close to his big, plain Hambletonian head.

“How old are you?” he said to the yellow horse.

“Nigh thirteen, I guess.”

“Mean age; ugly age; I’m gettin’ that way myself. How long hev ye been
pawin’ this firefanged stable-litter?”

“If you mean my principles, I’ve held ’em sence I was three.”

“Mean age; ugly age; teeth give heaps o’ trouble then. Set a colt to
actin’ crazy fer a while. _You_’ve kep’ it up, seemin’ly. D’ye talk
much to your neighbours fer a steady thing?”

“I uphold the principles o’ the Cause wherever I am pastured.”

“Done a heap o’ good, I guess?”

“I am proud to say I have taught a few of my companions the principles
o’ freedom an’ liberty.”

“Meanin’ they ran away er kicked when they got the chanst?”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’, an’ not in the concrete. My teachin’s
educated them.”

“What a horse, specially a young horse, hears in the abstrac’, he’s
liable to do in the Concord. You was handled late, I presoom.”

“Four, risin’ five.”

“That’s where the trouble began. Driv’ by a woman, like ez not—eh?”

“Not fer long,” said the yellow horse, with a snap of his teeth.

“Spilled her?”

“I heerd she never drove again.”

“Any childern?”

“Buckboards full of ’em.”

“Men too?”

“I have shed conside’ble men in my time.”

“By kickin’?”

“Any way that come along. Fallin’ back over the dash is as handy as
most.”

“They must be turr’ble afraid o’ you daown taown?”

“They’ve sent me here to get rid o’ me. I guess they spend their time
talkin’ over my campaigns.”

“_I_ wanter know!”

“Yes, _sir_. Now, all you gentlemen have asked me what I can do. I’ll
just show you. See them two fellers lyin’ down by the buggy?”

“Yep; one of ’em owns me. T’other broke me,” said Rod.

“Get ’em out here in the open, an’ I’ll show you something. Lemme hide
back o’ you peoples, so’s they won’t see what I’m at.”

“Meanin’ ter kill ’em?” Rod drawled. There was a shudder of horror
through the others; but the yellow horse never noticed.

“I’ll catch ’em by the back o’ the neck, an’ pile-drive ’em a piece.
They can suit ’emselves about livin’ when I’m through with ’em.”

“Shouldn’t wonder ef they did,” said Rod.

The yellow horse had hidden himself very cleverly behind the others as
they stood in a group, and was swaying his head close to the ground
with a curious scythe-like motion, looking side-wise out of his wicked
eyes. You can never mistake a man-eater getting ready to knock a man
down. We had had one to pasture the year before.

“See that?” said my companion, turning over on the pine-needles. “Nice
for a woman walking ’cross lots, wouldn’t it be?”

“Bring ’em out!” said the yellow horse, hunching his sharp back.
“There’s no chance among them tall trees. Bring out the—oh! Ouch!”

It was a right-and-left kick from Muldoon. I had no idea that the old
car-horse could lift so quickly. Both blows caught the yellow horse
full and fair in the ribs, and knocked the breath out of him.

“What’s that for?” he said angrily, when he recovered himself; but I
noticed he did not draw any nearer to Muldoon than was necessary.

Muldoon never answered, but discoursed to himself in the whining grunt
that he uses when he is going down-hill in front of a heavy load. We
call it singing; but I think it’s something much worse, really. The
yellow horse blustered and squealed a little, and at last said that, if
it was a horse-fly that had stung Muldoon, he would accept an apology.

“You’ll get it,” said Muldoon, “in de sweet by-and-bye—all de apology
you’ve any use for. Excuse me interruptin’ you, Mr. Rod, but I’m like
Tweezy—I’ve a Southern drawback in me hind legs.”

“Naow, I want you all here to take notice, an’ you’ll learn something,”
Rod went on. “This yaller-backed skate comes to our pastur’-”

“Not havin’ paid his board,” put in Tedda.

“Not havin’ earned his board, an’ talks smooth to us abaout ripplin’
brooks an’ wavin’ grass, an’ his high-toned, pure-souled horsehood,
which don’t hender him sheddin’ women an’ childern, an’ fallin’ over
the dash onter men. You heard his talk, an’ you thought it mighty fine,
some o’ you.”

Tuck looked guilty here, but she did not say anything.

“Bit by bit he goes on ez you have heard.”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’,” said the yellow horse, in an altered
voice.

“Abstrac’ be switched! Ez I’ve said, it’s this yer blamed abstrac’
business that makes the young uns cut up in the Concord; an’ abstrac’
or no abstrac’, he crep’ on an’ on till he come to killin’ plain an’
straight—killin’ them as never done him no harm, jest beca’se they
owned horses.”

“An’ knowed how to manage ’em,” said Tedda. “That makes it worse.”

“Waal, he didn’t kill ’em, anyway,” said Marcus. “He’d ha’ been half
killed ef he had tried.”

“Makes no differ,” Rod answered. “He meant to; an’ ef he hadn’t—s’pose
we want the Back Pasture turned into a biffin’-ground on our only day
er rest? ’S’pose _we_ want _our_ men walkin’ round with bits er lead
pipe an’ a twitch, an’ their hands full o’ stones to throw at us,
same’s if we wuz hogs er hooky keows? More’n that, leavin’ out Tedda
here—an’ I guess it’s more her maouth than her manners stands in her
light—there ain’t a horse on this farm that ain’t a woman’s horse, an’
proud of it. An’ this yer bogspavined Kansas sunflower goes up an’
daown the length o’ the country, traded off an’ traded on, boastin’ as
he’s shed women—an’ childern. I don’t say as a woman in a buggy ain’t a
fool. I don’t say as she ain’t the lastin’est kind er fool, ner I don’t
say a child ain’t worse—spattin’ the lines an’ standin’ up an’
hollerin’—but I _do_ say, ’tain’t none of our business to shed ’em
daown the road.”

“We don’t,” said the Deacon. “The baby tried to git some o’ my tail for
a sooveneer last fall when I was up to the haouse, an’ I didn’t kick.
Boney’s talk ain’t goin’ to hurt us any. We ain’t colts.”

“Thet’s what you _think_. Bimeby you git into a tight corner, ’Lection
day er Valley Fair, like’s not, daown-taown, when you’re all het an’
lathery, an’ pestered with flies, an’ thirsty, an’ sick o’ bein’ worked
in an aout ’tween buggies. _Then_ somethin’ whispers inside o’ your
winkers, bringin’ up all that talk abaout servitood an’ inalienable
truck an’ sech like, an’ jest then a Militia gun goes off; er your
wheels hit, an’—waal, you’re only another horse ez can’t be trusted.
I’ve been there time an’ again. Boys—fer I’ve seen you all bought er
broke—on my solemn repitation fer a three-minute clip, I ain’t givin’
you no bran-mash o’ my own fixin’. I’m tellin’ you my experiences, an’
I’ve had ez heavy a load an’ ez high a check’s any horse here. I wuz
born with a splint on my near fore ez big’s a walnut, an’ the cussed,
three-cornered Hambletonian temper that sours up an’ curdles daown ez
you git older. I’ve favoured my splint; even little Rick he don’t know
what it’s cost me to keep my end up sometimes; an’ I’ve fit my temper
in stall an’ harness, hitched up an’ at pasture, till the sweat
trickled off my hooves, an’ they thought I wuz off condition, an’
drenched me.”

“When my affliction came,” said Tweezy, gently, “I was very near to
losin’ my manners. Allow me to extend to you my sympathy, suh.”

Rick said nothing, but he looked at Rod curiously. Rick is a
sunny-tempered child who never bears malice, and I don’t think he quite
understood. He gets his temper from his mother, as a horse should.

“I’ve been there too, Rod,” said Tedda. “Open confession’s good for the
soul, an’ all Monroe County knows I’ve had my experriences.”

“But if you will excuse me, suh, that pusson”—Tweezy looked unspeakable
things at the yellow horse—“that pusson who has insulted our
intelligences comes from Kansas. An’ what a ho’se of his position, an’
Kansas at that, says cannot, by any stretch of the halter, concern
gentlemen of _our_ position. There’s no shadow of equal’ty, suh, not
even for one kick. He’s beneath our contempt.”

“Let him talk,” said Marcus. “It’s always inte_res_tin’ to know what
another horse thinks. It don’t tech us.”

“An’ he talks so, too,” said Tuck. “I’ve never heard anythin’ so smart
for a long time.”

Again Rod stuck out his jaws sidewise, and went on slowly, as though he
were slugging on a plain bit at the end of a thirty-mile drive:

“I want all you here ter understand thet ther ain’t no Kansas, ner no
Kentucky, ner yet no Vermont, in _our_ business. There’s jest two kind
o’ horse in the United States—them ez can an’ will do their work after
bein’ properly broke an’ handled, an’ them as won’t. I’m sick an’ tired
o’ this everlastin’ tail-switchin’ an’ wickerin’ abaout one State er
another. A horse kin be proud o’ his State, an’ swap lies abaout it in
stall or when he’s hitched to a block, ef he keers to put in fly-time
that way; but he hain’t no right to let that pride o’ hisn interfere
with his work, ner to make it an excuse fer claimin’ he’s different.
That’s colts’ talk, an’ don’t you fergit it, Tweezy. An’, Marcus, you
remember that bein’ a philosopher, an’ anxious to save trouble,—fer you
_are_,—don’t excuse you from jumpin’ with all your feet on a
slack-jawed, crazy clay-bank like Boney here. It’s leavin’ ’em alone
that gives ’em their chance to ruin colts an’ kill folks. An’, Tuck,
waal, you’re a mare anyways—but when a horse comes along an’ covers up
all his talk o’ killin’ with ripplin’ brooks, an wavin grass, an’ eight
quarts of oats a day free, _after_ killin’ his man, don’t you be run
away with by his yap. You’re too young an’ too nervous.”

“I’ll—I’ll have nervous prostration sure ef there’s a fight here,” said
Tuck, who saw what was in Rod’s eye; “I’m—I’m that sympathetic I’d run
away clear to next caounty.”

“Yep; I know that kind o’ sympathy. Jest lasts long enough to start a
fuss, an’ then lights aout to make new trouble. I hain’t been ten years
in harness fer nuthin’. Naow, we’re goin’ to keep school with Boney fer
a spell.”

“Say, look a-here, you ain’t goin’ to hurt me, are you? Remember, I
belong to a man in town,” cried the yellow horse, uneasily. Muldoon
kept behind him so that he could not run away.

“I know it. There must be some pore delooded fool in this State hez a
right to the loose end o’ your hitchin’-strap. I’m blame sorry fer him,
but he shall hev his rights when we’re through with you,” said Rod.

“If it’s all the same, gentlemen, I’d ruther change pasture. Guess I’ll
do it now.”

“Can’t always have your ’druthers. Guess you won’t,” said Rod.

“But look a-here. All of you ain’t so blame unfriendly to a stranger.
S’pose we count noses.”

“What in Vermont fer?” said Rod, putting up his eyebrows. The idea of
settling a question by counting noses is the very last thing that ever
enters the head of a well-broken horse.

“To see how many’s on my side. Here’s Miss Tuck, anyway; an’ Colonel
Tweezy yonder’s neutral; an’ Judge Marcus, an’ I guess the Reverend
[the yellow horse meant the Deacon] might see that I had my rights.
He’s the likeliest-lookin’ Trotter I’ve ever set eyes on. Pshaw. Boys.
You ain’t goin’ to pound _me_, be you? Why, we’ve gone round in
pasture, all colts together, this month o’ Sundays, hain’t we, as
friendly as could be. There ain’t a horse alive I don’t care who he
is—has a higher opinion o’ you, Mr. Rod, than I have. Let’s do it fair
an’ true an’ above the exe. Let’s count noses same’s they do in
Kansas.” Here he dropped his voice a little and turned to Marcus: “Say,
Judge, there’s some green food I know, back o’ the brook, no one hain’t
touched yet. After this little _fraças_ is fixed up, you an’ me’ll make
up a party an’ ’tend to it.”

Marcus did not answer for a long time, then he said: “There’s a pup up
to the haouse ’bout eight weeks old. He’ll yap till he gits a lickin’,
an’ when he sees it comin’ he lies on his back, an’ yowls. But he don’t
go through no cir_kit_uous nose-countin’ first. I’ve seen a noo light
sence Rod spoke. You’ll better stand up to what’s served. I’m goin’ to
philosophise all over your carcass.”

“_I_’m goin’ to do yer up in brown paper,” said Muldoon. “I can fit you
on apologies.”

“Hold on. Ef we all biffed you now, these same men you’ve been so dead
anxious to kill ’u’d call us off. Guess we’ll wait till they go back to
the haouse, an’ you’ll have time to think cool an’ quiet,” said Rod.

“Have you no respec’ whatever fer the dignity o’ our common horsehood?”
the yellow horse squealed.

“Nary respec’ onless the horse kin do something. America’s paved with
the kind er horse you are—jist plain yaller-dog horse—waitin’ ter be
whipped inter shape. We call ’em yearlings an’ colts when they’re
young. When they’re aged we pound ’em—in this pastur’. Horse, sonny, is
what you start from. We know all about horse here, an’ he ain’t any
high-toned, pure souled child o’ nature. Horse, plain horse, same ez
you, is chock-full o’ tricks, an’ meannesses, an’ cussednesses, an’
shirkin’s, an’ monkey-shines, which he’s took over from his sire an’
his dam, an’ thickened up with his own special fancy in the way o’
goin’ crooked. Thet’s _horse,_ an’ thet’s about his dignity an’ the
size of his soul ’fore he’s been broke an’ rawhided a piece. Now we
ain’t goin’ to give ornery unswitched _horse_, that hain’t done
nawthin’ wuth a quart of oats sence he wuz foaled, pet names that would
be good enough fer Nancy Hanks, or Alix, or Directum, who _hev_. Don’t
you try to back off acrost them rocks. Wait where you are! Ef I let my
Hambletonian temper git the better o’ me I’d frazzle you out finer than
rye-straw inside o’ three minutes, you woman-scarin’, kid-killin’,
dash-breakin’, unbroke, unshod, ungaited, pastur’-hoggin’, saw-backed,
shark-mouthed, hair-trunk-thrown-in-in-trade son of a bronco an’ a
sewin’-machine!”

“I think we’d better get home,” I said to my companion, when Rod had
finished; and we climbed into the coupé, Tedda whinnying, as we bumped
over the ledges: “Well, I’m dreffle sorry I can’t stay fer the
sociable; but I hope an’ trust my friends’ll take a ticket fer me.”

“Bet your natchul!” said Muldoon, cheerfully, and the horses scattered
before us, trotting into the ravine.

Next morning we sent back to the livery-stable what was left of the
yellow horse. It seemed tired, but anxious to go.




THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF


It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of
twenty-five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the
outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and
machinery; and her designers and owner thought as much of her as though
she had been the _Lucania_. Any one can make a floating hotel that will
pay expenses, if he puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for
private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in these days of
competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo-boat must be
built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a certain steady speed.
This boat was, perhaps, two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two
feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her
main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory
was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her
owners—they were a very well known Scotch firm—came round with her from
the north, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to
Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner’s
daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring
the new paint and the brass work, and the patent winches, and
particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a
bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the _Dimbula_. It was a
beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness—she was
painted lead-colour with a red funnel—looked very fine indeed. Her
house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged
the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the High and
Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.

“And now,” said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, “she’s a
real ship, isn’t she? It seems only the other day father gave the order
for her, and now—and now—isn’t she a beauty!” The girl was proud of the
firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.

“Oh, she’s no so bad,” the skipper replied cautiously. “But I’m sayin’
that it takes more than christenin’ to mak’ a ship. In the nature o’
things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she’s just irons and rivets and
plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet.”

“I thought father said she was exceptionally well found.”

“So she is,” said the skipper, with a laugh. “But it’s this way wi’
ships, Miss Frazier. She’s all here, but the parrts of her have not
learned to work together yet. They’ve had no chance.”

“The engines are working beautifully. I can hear them.”

“Yes, indeed. But there’s more than engines to a ship. Every inch of
her, ye’ll understand, has to be livened up and made to work wi’ its
neighbour—sweetenin’ her, we call it, technically.”

“And how will you do it?” the girl asked.

“We can no more than drive and steer her and so forth; but if we have
rough weather this trip—it’s likely—she’ll learn the rest by heart! For
a ship, ye’ll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body
closed at both ends. She’s a highly complex structure o’ various an’
conflictin’ strains, wi’ tissues that must give an’ tak’ accordin’ to
her personal modulus of elasteecity.” Mr. Buchanan, the chief engineer,
was coming towards them. “I’m sayin’ to Miss Frazier, here, that our
little _Dimbula_ has to be sweetened yet, and nothin’ but a gale will
do it. How’s all wi’ your engines, Buck?”

“Well enough—true by plumb an’ rule, o’ course; but there’s no
spontaneeity yet.” He turned to the girl. “Take my word, Miss Frazier,
and maybe ye’ll comprehend later; even after a pretty girl’s christened
a ship it does not follow that there’s such a thing as a ship under the
men that work her.”

“I was sayin’ the very same, Mr. Buchanan,” the skipper interrupted.

“That’s more metaphysical than I can follow,” said Miss Frazier,
laughing.

“Why so? Ye’re good Scotch, an’—I knew your mother’s father, he was
fra’ Dumfries—ye’ve a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier, just
as ye have in the _Dimbula_,” the engineer said.

“Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an’ earn Miss Frazier
her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?” said the
skipper. “We’ll be in dock the night, and when you’re goin’ back to
Glasgie ye can think of us loadin’ her down an’ drivin’ her forth—all
for your sake.”

In the next few days they stowed some four thousand tons dead-weight
into the _Dimbula_, and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she met
the lift of the open water, she naturally began to talk. If you lay
your ear to the side of the cabin, the next time you are in a steamer,
you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling
and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and
squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder-storm. Wooden ships
shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through
all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The _Dimbula_ was
very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or a number,
or both, to describe it; and every piece had been hammered, or forged,
or rolled, or punched by man, and had lived in the roar and rattle of
the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate
voice, in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it.
Cast-iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and
wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and welded
and riveted, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not
half as wise as our human talk, because they are all, though they do
not know it, bound down one to the other in a black darkness, where
they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what will overtake
them next.

As soon as she had cleared the Irish coast, a sullen, grey-headed old
wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat
down on the steam-capstan used for hauling up the anchor. Now the
capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and
green; besides which, nobody likes being ducked.

“Don’t you do that again,” the capstan sputtered through the teeth of
his cogs. “Hi! Where’s the fellow gone?”

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but “Plenty
more where he came from,” said a brother-wave, and went through and
over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron
deck-beams below.

“Can’t you keep still up there?” said the deckbeams. “What’s the matter
with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to, and the
next you don’t!”

“It isn’t my fault,” said the capstan. “There’s a green brute outside
that comes and hits me on the head.”

“Tell that to the shipwrights. You’ve been in position for months and
you’ve never wriggled like this before. If you aren’t careful you’ll
strain _us_.”

“Talking of strain,” said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, “are any of
you fellows—you deck-beams, we mean—aware that those exceedingly ugly
knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure—_ours?_”

“Who might you be?” the deck-beams inquired.

“Oh, nobody in particular,” was the answer. “We’re only the port and
starboard upper-deck stringers; and if you persist in heaving and
hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps.”

Now the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that
run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are
called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends
of the deck-beams, which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers
always consider themselves most important, because they are so long.

“You will take steps—will you?” This was a long echoing rumble. It came
from the frames—scores and scores of them, each one about eighteen
inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four
places. “We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in _that_”;
and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything
together whispered: “You Will! You will! Stop quivering and be quiet.
Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches! What’s that?”

Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did
their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow,
and she shook like a rat in a terrier’s mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda-water—half sea and half air—going much faster than was
proper, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines—and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in a
row—snorted through all their three pistons. “Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It’s an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work
if you fly off the handle that way?”

“I didn’t fly off the handle,” said the screw, twirling huskily at the
end of the screw-shaft. “If I had, you’d have been scrap-iron by this
time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on
to. That’s all.”

“That’s all, d’you call it?” said the thrust-block, whose business it
is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it
back it would crawl right into the engine-room. (It is the holding back
of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) “I know I do my
work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All I
ask for is bare justice. Why can’t you push steadily and evenly,
instead of whizzing like a whirligig, and making me hot under all my
collars?” The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and
he did not wish to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw-shaft as it ran
to the stern whispered: “Justice—give us justice.”

“I can only give you what I can get,” the screw answered. “Look out!
It’s coming again!”

He rose with a roar as the _Dimbula_ plunged, and
“whack—flack—whack—whack” went the engines, furiously, for they had
little to check them.

“I’m the noblest outcome of human ingenuity—Mr. Buchanan says so,”
squealed the high-pressure cylinder. “This is simply ridiculous!” The
piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was
mixed with dirty water. “Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I’m
choking,” it gasped. “Never in the history of maritime invention has
such a calamity over-taken one so young and strong. And if I go, who’s
to drive the ship?”

“Hush! oh, hush!” whispered the Steam, who, of course, had been to sea
many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or a
gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder-storm, or anywhere else where
water was needed. “That’s only a little priming, a little
carrying-over, as they call it. It’ll happen all night, on and off. I
don’t say it’s nice, but it’s the best we can do under the
circumstances.”

“What difference can circumstances make? I’m here to do my work—on
clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!” the cylinder roared.

“The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I’ve worked on the North
Atlantic run a good many times—it’s going to be rough before morning.”

“It isn’t distressingly calm now,” said the extra strong frames—they
were called web-frames—in the engine-room. “There’s an upward thrust
that we don’t understand, and there’s a twist that is very bad for our
brackets and diamond-plates, and there’s a sort of west-northwesterly
pull, that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention
this because we happened to cost a good deal of money, and we feel sure
that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this frivolous
way.”

“I’m afraid the matter is out of owner’s hands for the present,” said
the Steam, slipping into the condenser. “You’re left to your own
devices till the weather betters.”

“I wouldn’t mind the weather,” said a flat bass voice below; “it’s this
confounded cargo that’s breaking my heart. I’m the garboard-strake, and
I’m twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to know
something.”

The garboard-strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship, and
the _Dimbula’s_ garboard-strake was nearly three-quarters of an inch
mild steel.

“The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected,” the
strake grunted, “and the cargo pushes me down, and, between the two, I
don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“When in doubt, hold on,” rumbled the Steam, making head in the
boilers.

“Yes; but there’s only dark, and cold, and hurry, down here; and how do
I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those
bulwark-plates up above, I’ve heard, ain’t more than five-sixteenths of
an inch thick—scandalous, I call it.”

“I agree with you,” said a huge web-frame, by the main cargo-hatch. He
was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across
the ship in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck where
deck-beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and down. “I
work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the sole strength of
this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The responsibility, I assure
you, is enormous. I believe the money-value of the cargo is over one
hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of that!”

“And every pound of it is dependent on my personal exertions.” Here
spoke a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside,
and was seated not very far from the garboard-strake. “I rejoice to
think that I am a Prince-Hyde Valve, with best Para rubber facings.
Five patents cover me—I mention this without pride—five separate and
several patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am screwed
fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is
incontrovertible!”

Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick that
they pick up from their inventors.

“That’s news,” said a big centrifugal bilge-pump. “I had an idea that
you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I’ve used
you for that more than once. I forget the precise number, in thousands,
of gallons which I am guaranteed to throw per hour; but I assure you,
my complaining friends, that there is not the least danger. I alone am
capable of clearing any water that may find its way here. By my Biggest
Deliveries, we pitched then!”

The sea was getting up in workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly
gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all
sides by fat, grey clouds; and the wind bit like pincers as it fretted
the spray into lacework on the flanks of the waves.

“I tell you what it is,” the foremast telephoned down its wire-stays.
“I’m up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There’s an
organised conspiracy against us. I’m sure of it, because every single
one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole sea is
concerned in it—and so’s the wind. It’s awful!”

“What’s awful?” said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth
time.

“This organised conspiracy on your part,” the capstan gurgled, taking
his cue from the mast. “Organised bubbles and spindrift! There has been
a depression in the Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!” He leaped overside; but
his friends took up the tale one after another.

“Which has advanced—” That wave hove green water over the funnel.

“As far as Cape Hatteras—” He drenched the bridge.

“And is now going out to sea—to sea—to sea!” The third went out in
three surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom up
and sank in the darkening troughs alongside, while the broken falls
whipped the davits.

“That’s all there is to it,” seethed the white water roaring through
the scuppers. “There’s no animus in our proceedings. We’re only
meteorological corollaries.”

“Is it going to get any worse?” said the bow-anchor chained down to the
deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.

“Not knowing, can’t say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks
awfully. Good-bye.”

The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and
found itself all mixed up on the deck amidships, which was a well-deck
sunk between high bulwarks. One of the bulwark-plates, which was hung
on hinges to open outward, had swung out, and passed the bulk of the
water back to the sea again with a clean smack.

“Evidently that’s what I’m made for,” said the plate, closing again
with a sputter of pride. “Oh, no, you don’t, my friend!” The top of a
wave was trying to get in from the outside, but as the plate did not
open in that direction, the defeated water spurted back.

“Not bad for five-sixteenths of an inch,” said the bulwark-plate. “My
work, I see, is laid down for the night”; and it began opening and
shutting, as it was designed to do, with the motion of the ship.

“We are not what you might call idle,” groaned all the frames together,
as the _Dimbula_ climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the top, and
shot into the next hollow, twisting in the descent. A huge swell pushed
up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free with
nothing to support them. Then one joking wave caught her up at the bow,
and another at the stern, while the rest of the water slunk away from
under her just to see how she would like it; so she was held up at her
two ends only, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on
the groaning iron keels and bilge-stringers.

“Ease off! Ease off, there!” roared the garboard-strake. “I want
one-eighth of an inch fair play. D’ you hear me, you rivets!”

“Ease off! Ease off!” cried the bilge-stringers. “Don’t hold us so
tight to the frames!”

“Ease off!” grunted the deck-beams, as the _Dimbula_ rolled fearfully.
“You’ve cramped our knees into the stringers, and we can’t move. Ease
off, you flat-headed little nuisances.”

Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away
in torrents of streaming thunder.

“Ease off!” shouted the forward collision-bulkhead. “I want to crumple
up, but I’m stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little
forge-filings. Let me breathe!”

All the hundreds of plates that are riveted to the frames, and make the
outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted
to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position,
complained against the rivets.

“We can’t help it! _We_ can’t help it!” they murmured in reply. “We’re
put here to hold you, and we’re going to do it; you never pull us twice
in the same direction. If you’d say what you were going to do next,
we’d try to meet your views.

“As far as I could feel,” said the upper-deck planking, and that was
four inches thick, “every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in
opposite directions. Now, what’s the sense of that? My friends, let us
all pull together.”

“Pull any way you please,” roared the funnel, “so long as you don’t try
your experiments on _me_. I need fourteen wire-ropes, all pulling in
different directions, to hold me steady. Isn’t that so?”

“We believe you, my boy!” whistled the funnel-stays through their
clinched teeth, as they twanged in the wind from the top of the funnel
to the deck.

“Nonsense! We must all pull together,” the decks repeated. “Pull
lengthways.”

“Very good,” said the stringers; “then stop pushing sideways when you
get wet. Be content to run gracefully fore and aft, and curve in at the
ends as we do.”

“No—no curves at the end. A very slight workmanlike curve from side to
side, with a good grip at each knee, and little pieces welded on,” said
the deck-beams.

“Fiddle!” cried the iron pillars of the deep, dark hold. “Who ever
heard of curves? Stand up straight; be a perfectly round column, and
carry tons of good solid weight—like that! There!” A big sea smashed on
the deck above, and the pillars stiffened themselves to the load.

“Straight up and down is not bad,” said the frames, who ran that way in
the sides of the ship, “but you must also expand yourselves sideways.
Expansion is the law of life, children. Open out! open out!”

“Come back!” said the deck-beams, savagely, as the upward heave of the
sea made the frames try to open. “Come back to your bearings, you
slack-jawed irons!”

“Rigidity! Rigidity! Rigidity!” thumped the engines. “Absolute,
unvarying rigidity—rigidity!”

“You see!” whined the rivets, in chorus. “No two of you will ever pull
alike, and—and you blame it all on us. We only know how to go through a
plate and bite down on both sides so that it can’t, and mustn’t, and
sha’n’t move.”

“I’ve got one fraction of an inch play, at any rate,” said the
garboard-strake, triumphantly. So he had, and all the bottom of the
ship felt the easier for it.

“Then we’re no good,” sobbed the bottom rivets. “We were ordered—we
were ordered—never to give; and we’ve given, and the sea will come in,
and we’ll all go to the bottom together! First we’re blamed for
everything unpleasant, and now we haven’t the consolation of having
done our work.”

“Don’t say I told you,” whispered the Steam, consolingly; “but, between
you and me and the last cloud I came from, it was bound to happen
sooner or later. You _had_ to give a fraction, and you’ve given without
knowing it. Now, hold on, as before.”

“What’s the use?” a few hundred rivets chattered. “We’ve given—we’ve
given; and the sooner we confess that we can’t keep the ship together,
and go off our little heads, the easier it will be. No rivet forged can
stand this strain.”

“No one rivet was ever meant to. Share it among you,” the Steam
answered.

“The others can have my share. I’m going to pull out,” said a rivet in
one of the forward plates.

“If you go, others will follow,” hissed the Steam. “There’s nothing so
contagious in a boat as rivets going. Why, I knew a little chap like
you—he was an eighth of an inch fatter, though—on a steamer—to be sure,
she was only twelve hundred tons, now I come to think of it—in exactly
the same place as you are. He pulled out in a bit of a bobble of a sea,
not half as bad as this, and he started all his friends on the same
butt-strap, and the plates opened like a furnace door, and I had to
climb into the nearest fog-bank, while the boat went down.”

“Now that’s peculiarly disgraceful,” said the rivet. “Fatter than me,
was he, and in a steamer not half our tonnage? Reedy little peg! I
blush for the family, sir.” He settled himself more firmly than ever in
his place, and the Steam chuckled.

“You see,” he went on, quite gravely, “a rivet, and especially a rivet
in your position, is really the one indispensable part of the ship.”

The Steam did not say that he had whispered the very same thing to
every single piece of iron aboard. There is no sense in telling too
much.

And all that while the little _Dimbula_ pitched and chopped, and swung
and slewed, and lay down as though she were going to die, and got up as
though she had been stung, and threw her nose round and round in
circles half a dozen times as she dipped, for the gale was at its
worst. It was inky black, in spite of the tearing white froth on the
waves, and, to top everything, the rain began to fall in sheets, so
that you could not see your hand before your face. This did not make
much difference to the ironwork below, but it troubled the foremast a
good deal.

“Now it’s all finished,” he said dismally. “The conspiracy is too
strong for us. There is nothing left but to—”

“_Hurraar! Brrrraaah! Brrrrrrp!_” roared the Steam through the
fog-horn, till the decks quivered. “Don’t be frightened, below. It’s
only me, just throwing out a few words, in case any one happens to be
rolling round to-night.”

“You don’t mean to say there’s any one except us on the sea in such
weather?” said the funnel, in a husky snuffle.

“Scores of ’em,” said the Steam, clearing its throat. “_Rrrrrraaa!
Brraaaaa! Prrrrp!_ It’s a trifle windy up here; and, Great Boilers! how
it rains!”

“We’re drowning,” said the scuppers. They had been doing nothing else
all night, but this steady thrash of rain above them seemed to be the
end of the world.

“That’s all right. We’ll be easier in an hour or two. First the wind
and then the rain. Soon you may make sail again! _Grrraaaaaah!
Drrrraaaa! Drrrp!_ I have a notion that the sea is going down already.
If it does you’ll learn something about rolling. We’ve only pitched
till now. By the way, aren’t you chaps in the hold a little easier than
you were?”

There was just as much groaning and straining as ever, but it was not
so loud or squeaky in tone; and when the ship quivered she did not jar
stiffly, like a poker hit on the floor, but gave with a supple little
waggle, like a perfectly balanced golf-club.

“We have made a most amazing discovery,” said the stringers, one after
another. “A discovery that entirely changes the situation. We have
found, for the first time in the history of ship-building, that the
inward pull of the deck-beams and the outward thrust of the frames
locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to
endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of
marine architecture.”

The Steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the fog-horn. “What
massive intellects you great stringers have,” he said softly, when he
had finished.

“We also,” began the deck-beams, “are discoverers and geniuses. We are
of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps us. We
find that we lock up on them when we are subjected to a heavy and
singular weight of sea above.”

Here the _Dimbula_ shot down a hollow, lying almost on her side;
righting at the bottom with a wrench and a spasm.

“In these cases—are you aware of this, Steam?—the plating at the bows,
and particularly at the stern—we would also mention the floors beneath
us—help us to resist any tendency to spring.” The frames spoke, in the
solemn awed voice which people use when they have just come across
something entirely new for the very first time.

“I’m only a poor puffy little flutterer,” said the Steam, “but I have
to stand a good deal of pressure in my business. It’s all tremendously
interesting. Tell us some more. You fellows are so strong.”

“Watch us and you’ll see,” said the bow-plates, proudly. “Ready, behind
there! Here’s the father and mother of waves coming! Sit tight, rivets
all!” A great sluicing comber thundered by, but through the scuffle and
confusion the Steam could hear the low, quick cries of the ironwork as
the various strains took them—cries like these: “Easy, now—easy! _Now_
push for all your strength! Hold out! Give a fraction! Hold up! Pull
in! Shove crossways! Mind the strain at the ends! Grip, now! Bite
tight! Let the water get away from under—and there she goes!”

The wave raced off into the darkness, shouting, “Not bad, that, if it’s
your first run!” and the drenched and ducked ship throbbed to the beat
of the engines inside her. All three cylinders were white with the salt
spray that had come down through the engine-room hatch; there was white
fur on the canvas-bound steam-pipes, and even the bright-work deep
below was speckled and soiled; but the cylinders had learned to make
the most of steam that was half water, and were pounding along
cheerfully.

“How’s the noblest outcome of human ingenuity hitting it?” said the
Steam, as he whirled through the engine-room.

“Nothing for nothing in this world of woe,” the cylinders answered, as
though they had been working for centuries, “and precious little for
seventy-five pounds head. We’ve made two knots this last hour and a
quarter! Rather humiliating for eight hundred horse-power, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s better than drifting astern, at any rate. You seem rather
less—how shall I put it—stiff in the back than you were.”

“If you’d been hammered as we’ve been this night, you wouldn’t be
stiff—iff—iff; either. Theoreti—retti—retti—cally, of course, rigidity
is the thing. Purrr—purr—practically, there has to be a little give and
take. _We_ found that out by working on our sides for five minutes at a
stretch—chch—chh. How’s the weather?”

“Sea’s going down fast,” said the Steam.

“Good business,” said the high-pressure cylinder. “Whack her up, boys.
They’ve given us five pounds more steam”; and he began humming the
first bars of “Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah,” which, as
you may have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not built for high
speed. Racing-liners with twin-screws sing “The Turkish Patrol” and the
overture to the “Bronze Horse,” and “Madame Angot,” till something goes
wrong, and then they render Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette,”
with variations.

“You’ll learn a song of your own some fine day,” said the Steam, as he
flew up the fog-horn for one last bellow.

Next day the sky cleared and the sea dropped a little, and the
_Dimbula_ began to roll from side to side till every inch of iron in
her was sick and giddy. But luckily they did not all feel ill at the
same time: otherwise she would have opened out like a wet paper box.

The Steam whistled warnings as he went about his business: it is in
this short, quick roll and tumble that follows a heavy sea that most of
the accidents happen, for then everything thinks that the worst is over
and goes off guard. So he orated and chattered till the beams and
frames and floors and stringers and things had learned how to lock down
and lock up on one another, and endure this new kind of strain.

They found ample time to practise, for they were sixteen days at sea,
and it was foul weather till within a hundred miles of New York. The
_Dimbula_ picked up her pilot, and came in covered with salt and red
rust. Her funnel was dirty-grey from top to bottom; two boats had been
carried away; three copper ventilators looked like hats after a fight
with the police; the bridge had a dimple in the middle of it; the house
that covered the steam steering-gear was split as with hatchets; there
was a bill for small repairs in the engine-room almost as long as the
screw-shaft; the forward cargo-hatch fell into bucket-staves when they
raised the iron cross-bars; and the steam-capstan had been badly
wrenched on its bed. Altogether, as the skipper said, it was “a pretty
general average.”

“But she’s soupled,” he said to Mr. Buchanan. “For all her dead-weight
she rode like a yacht. Ye mind that last blow off the Banks—I am proud
of her, Buck.”

“It’s vera good,” said the chief engineer, looking along the
dishevelled decks. “Now, a man judgin’ superfeecially would say we were
a wreck, but we know otherwise—by experience.”

Naturally everything in the _Dimbula_ fairly stiffened with pride, and
the foremast and the forward collision-bulkhead, who are pushing
creatures, begged the Steam to warn the Port of New York of their
arrival. “Tell those big boats all about us,” they said. “They seem to
take us quite as a matter of course.”

It was a glorious, clear, dead calm morning, and in single file, with
less than half a mile between each, their bands playing and their
tugboats shouting and waving handkerchiefs, were the _Majestic_, the
_Paris_, the _Touraine_, the _Servia_, the _Kaiser Wilhelm II._, and
the _Werkendam_, all statelily going out to sea. As the _Dimbula_
shifted her helm to give the great boats clear way, the Steam (who
knows far too much to mind making an exhibition of himself now and
then) shouted:

“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know ye
by these presents, we are the _Dimbula_, fifteen days nine hours from
Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with four thousand ton of cargo
for the first time in our career! We have not foundered. We are here.
’_Eer! ’Eer!_ We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly
unparalleled in the annals of ship-building! Our decks were swept! We
pitched; we rolled! We thought we were going to die! _Hi! Hi!_ But we
didn’t. We wish to give notice that we have come to New York all the
way across the Atlantic, through the worst weather in the world; and we
are the _Dimbula!_ We are—arr—ha—ha—ha-r-r-r!”

The beautiful line of boats swept by as steadily as the procession of
the Seasons. The _Dimbula_ heard the _Majestic_ say, “Hmph!” and the
_Paris_ grunted, “How!” and the _Touraine_ said, “Oui!” with a little
coquettish flicker of steam; and the _Servia_ said, “Haw!” and the
_Kaiser_ and the _Werkendam_ said, “Hoch!” Dutch fashion—and that was
absolutely all.

“I did my best,” said the Steam, gravely, “but I don’t think they were
much impressed with us, somehow. Do you?”

“It’s simply disgusting,” said the bow-plates. “They might have seen
what we’ve been through. There isn’t a ship on the sea that has
suffered as we have—is there, now?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,” said the Steam, “because I’ve
worked on some of those boats, and sent them through weather quite as
bad as the fortnight that we’ve had, in six days; and some of them are
a little over ten thousand tons, I believe. Now I’ve seen the
_Majestic_, for instance, ducked from her bows to her funnel; and I’ve
helped the _Arizona_, I think she was, to back off an iceberg she met
with one dark night; and I had to run out of the _Paris’s_ engine-room,
one day, because there was thirty foot of water in it. Of course, I
don’t deny—” The Steam shut off suddenly, as a tugboat, loaded with a
political club and a brass band, that had been to see a New York
Senator off to Europe, crossed their bows, going to Hoboken. There was
a long silence that reached, without a break, from the cut-water to the
propeller-blades of the _Dimbula_.

Then a new, big voice said slowly and thickly, as though the owner had
just waked up: “It’s my conviction that I have made a fool of myself.”

The Steam knew what had happened at once; for when a ship finds herself
all the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into one voice,
which is the soul of the ship.

“Who are you?” he said, with a laugh. “I am the _Dimbula_, of course.
I’ve never been anything else except that—and a fool!”

The tugboat, which was doing its very best to be run down, got away
just in time; its band playing clashily and brassily a popular but
impolite air:

In the days of old Rameses—are you on?
In the days of old Rameses—are you on?
In the days of old Rameses,
That story had paresis,
Are you on—are you on—are you on?


“Well, I’m glad you’ve found yourself,” said the Steam. “To tell the
truth, I was a little tired of talking to all those ribs and stringers.
Here’s Quarantine. After that we’ll go to our wharf and clean up a
little, and—next month we’ll do it all over again.”




THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS


Some people will tell you that if there were but a single loaf of bread
in all India it would be divided equally between the Plowdens, the
Trevors, the Beadons, and the Rivett-Carnacs. That is only one way of
saying that certain families serve India generation after generation,
as dolphins follow in line across the open sea.

Let us take a small and obscure case. There has been at least one
representative of the Devonshire Chinns in or near Central India since
the days of Lieutenant-Fireworker Humphrey Chinn, of the Bombay
European Regiment, who assisted at the capture of Seringapatam in 1799.
Alfred Ellis Chinn, Humphrey’s younger brother, commanded a regiment of
Bombay grenadiers from 1804 to 1813, when he saw some mixed fighting;
and in 1834 John Chinn of the same family—we will call him John Chinn
the First—came to light as a level-headed administrator in time of
trouble at a place called Mundesur. He died young, but left his mark on
the new country, and the Honourable the Board of Directors of the
Honourable the East India Company embodied his virtues in a stately
resolution, and paid for the expenses of his tomb among the Satpura
hills.

He was succeeded by his son, Lionel Chinn, who left the little old
Devonshire home just in time to be severely wounded in the Mutiny. He
spent his working life within a hundred and fifty miles of John Chinn’s
grave, and rose to the command of a regiment of small, wild hill-men,
most of whom had known his father. His son John was born in the small
thatched-roofed, mud-walled cantonment, which is even to-day eighty
miles from the nearest railway, in the heart of a scrubby, tigerish
country. Colonel Lionel Chinn served thirty years and retired. In the
Canal his steamer passed the outward-bound troop-ship, carrying his son
eastward to the family duty.

The Chinns are luckier than most folk, because they know exactly what
they must do. A clever Chinn passes for the Bombay Civil Service, and
gets away to Central India, where everybody is glad to see him. A dull
Chinn enters the Police Department or the Woods and Forest, and sooner
or later he, too, appears in Central India, and that is what gave rise
to the saying, “Central India is inhabited by Bhils, Mairs, and Chinns,
all very much alike.” The breed is small-boned, dark, and silent, and
the stupidest of them are good shots. John Chinn the Second was rather
clever, but as the eldest son he entered the army, according to Chinn
tradition. His duty was to abide in his father’s regiment for the term
of his natural life, though the corps was one which most men would have
paid heavily to avoid. They were irregulars, small, dark, and blackish,
clothed in rifle-green with black-leather trimmings; and friends called
them the “Wuddars,” which means a race of low-caste people who dig up
rats to eat. But the Wuddars did not resent it. They were the only
Wuddars, and their points of pride were these:

Firstly, they had fewer English officers than any native regiment.
Secondly, their subalterns were not mounted on parade, as is the
general rule, but walked at the head of their men. A man who can hold
his own with the Wuddars at their quickstep must be sound in wind and
limb. Thirdly, they were the most _pukka shikarries_ (out-and-out
hunters) in all India. Fourthly-up to one-hundredthly—they were the
Wuddars—Chinn’s Irregular Bhil Levies of the old days, but now,
henceforward and for ever, the Wuddars.

No Englishman entered their mess except for love or through family
usage. The officers talked to their soldiers in a tongue not two
hundred white folk in India understood; and the men were their
children, all drawn from the Bhils, who are, perhaps, the strangest of
the many strange races in India. They were, and at heart are, wild men,
furtive, shy, full of untold superstitions. The races whom we call
natives of the country found the Bhil in possession of the land when
they first broke into that part of the world thousands of years ago.
The books call them Pre-Aryan, Aboriginal, Dravidian, and so forth;
and, in other words, that is what the Bhils call themselves. When a
Rajput chief whose bards can sing his pedigree backwards for twelve
hundred years is set on the throne, his investiture is not complete
till he has been marked on the forehead with blood from the veins of a
Bhil. The Rajputs say the ceremony has no meaning, but the Bhil knows
that it is the last, last shadow of his old rights as the long-ago
owner of the soil.

Centuries of oppression and massacre made the Bhil a cruel and
half-crazy thief and cattle-stealer, and when the English came he
seemed to be almost as open to civilisation as the tigers of his own
jungles. But John Chinn the First, father of Lionel, grandfather of our
John, went into his country, lived with him, learned his language, shot
the deer that stole his poor crops, and won his confidence, so that
some Bhils learned to plough and sow, while others were coaxed into the
Company’s service to police their friends.

When they understood that standing in line did not mean instant
execution, they accepted soldiering as a cumbrous but amusing kind of
sport, and were zealous to keep the wild Bhils under control. That was
the thin edge of the wedge. John Chinn the First gave them written
promises that, if they were good from a certain date, the Government
would overlook previous offences; and since John Chinn was never known
to break his word—he promised once to hang a Bhil locally esteemed
invulnerable, and hanged him in front of his tribe for seven proved
murders—the Bhils settled down as steadily as they knew how. It was
slow, unseen work, of the sort that is being done all over India
to-day; and though John Chinn’s only reward came, as I have said, in
the shape of a grave at Government expense, the little people of the
hills never forgot him.

Colonel Lionel Chinn knew and loved them, too, and they were very
fairly civilised, for Bhils, before his service ended. Many of them
could hardly be distinguished from low-caste Hindoo farmers; but in the
south, where John Chinn the First was buried, the wildest still clung
to the Satpura ranges, cherishing a legend that some day Jan Chinn, as
they called him, would return to his own. In the mean time they
mistrusted the white man and his ways. The least excitement would
stampede them, plundering, at random, and now and then killing; but if
they were handled discreetly they grieved like children, and promised
never to do it again.

The Bhils of the regiment—the uniformed men—were virtuous in many ways,
but they needed humouring. They felt bored and homesick unless taken
after tiger as beaters; and their cold-blooded daring—all Wuddars shoot
tigers on foot: it is their caste-mark—made even the officers wonder.
They would follow up a wounded tiger as unconcernedly as though it were
a sparrow with a broken wing; and this through a country full of caves
and rifts and pits, where a wild beast could hold a dozen men at his
mercy. Now and then some little man was brought to barracks with his
head smashed in or his ribs torn away; but his companions never learned
caution; they contented themselves with settling the tiger.

Young John Chinn was decanted at the verandah of the Wuddars’ lonely
mess-house from the back seat of a two-wheeled cart, his gun-cases
cascading all round him. The slender little, hookey-nosed boy looked
forlorn as a strayed goat when he slapped the white dust off his knees,
and the cart jolted down the glaring road. But in his heart he was
contented. After all, this was the place where he had been born, and
things were not much changed since he had been sent to England, a
child, fifteen years ago.

There were a few new buildings, but the air and the smell and the
sunshine were the same; and the little green men who crossed the
parade-ground looked very familiar. Three weeks ago John Chinn would
have said he did not remember a word of the Bhil tongue, but at the
mess door he found his lips moving in sentences that he did not
understand—bits of old nursery rhymes, and tail-ends of such orders as
his father used to give the men.

The Colonel watched him come up the steps, and laughed.

“Look!” he said to the Major. “No need to ask the young un’s breed.
He’s a _pukka_ Chinn. Might be his father in the Fifties over again.”

“Hope he’ll shoot as straight,” said the Major. “He’s brought enough
ironmongery with him.”

“Wouldn’t be a Chinn if he didn’t. Watch him blowin’ his nose. Regular
Chinn beak. Flourishes his handkerchief like his father. It’s the
second edition—line for line.”

“Fairy tale, by Jove!” said the Major, peering through the slats of the
jalousies. “If he’s the lawful heir, he’ll.... Now old Chinn could no
more pass that chick without fiddling with it than....”

“His son!” said the Colonel, jumping up.

“Well, I be blowed!” said the Major. The boy’s eye had been caught by a
split-reed screen that hung on a slew between the veranda pillars, and,
mechanically, he had tweaked the edge to set it level. Old Chinn had
sworn three times a day at that screen for many years; he could never
get it to his satisfaction.

His son entered the anteroom in the middle of a fivefold silence. They
made him welcome for his father’s sake and, as they took stock of him,
for his own. He was ridiculously like the portrait of the Colonel on
the wall, and when he had washed a little of the dust from his throat
he went to his quarters with the old man’s short, noiseless
jungle-step.

“So much for heredity,” said the Major. “That comes of four generations
among the Bhils.”

“And the men know it,” said a Wing officer. “They’ve been waiting for
this youth with their tongues hanging out. I am persuaded that, unless
he absolutely beats ’em over the head, they’ll lie down by companies
and worship him.”

“Nothin’ like havin’ a father before you,” said the Major. “I’m a
parvenu with my chaps. I’ve only been twenty years in the regiment, and
my revered parent he was a simple squire. There’s no getting at the
bottom of a Bhil’s mind. Now, _why_ is the superior bearer that young
Chinn brought with him fleeing across country with his bundle?” He
stepped into the verandah, and shouted after the man—a typical
new-joined subaltern’s servant who speaks English and cheats in
proportion.

“What is it?” he called.

“Plenty bad man here. I going, sar,” was the reply. “Have taken Sahib’s
keys, and say will shoot.”

“Doocid lucid—doocid convincin’. How those up-country thieves can leg
it! He has been badly frightened by some one.” The Major strolled to
his quarters to dress for mess.

Young Chinn, walking like a man in a dream, had fetched a compass round
the entire cantonment before going to his own tiny cottage. The
captain’s quarters, in which he had been born, delayed him for a
little; then he looked at the well on the parade-ground, where he had
sat of evenings with his nurse, and at the ten-by-fourteen church,
where the officers went to service if a chaplain of any official creed
happened to come along. It seemed very small as compared with the
gigantic buildings he used to stare up at, but it was the same place.

From time to time he passed a knot of silent soldiers, who saluted.
They might have been the very men who had carried him on their backs
when he was in his first knickerbockers. A faint light burned in his
room, and, as he entered, hands clasped his feet, and a voice murmured
from the floor.

“Who is it?” said young Chinn, not knowing he spoke in the Bhil tongue.

“I bore you in my arms, Sahib, when I was a strong man and you were a
small one—crying, crying, crying! I am your servant, as I was your
father’s before you. We are all your servants.”

Young Chinn could not trust himself to reply, and the voice went on:

“I have taken your keys from that fat foreigner, and sent him away; and
the studs are in the shirt for mess. Who should know, if I do not know?
And so the baby has become a man, and forgets his nurse; but my nephew
shall make a good servant, or I will beat him twice a day.”

Then there rose up, with a rattle, as straight as a Bhil arrow, a
little white-haired wizened ape of a man, with medals and orders on his
tunic, stammering, saluting, and trembling. Behind him a young and wiry
Bhil, in uniform, was taking the trees out of Chinn’s mess-boots.

Chinn’s eyes were full of tears. The old man held out his keys.

“Foreigners are bad people. He will never come back again. We are all
servants of your father’s son. Has the Sahib forgotten who took him to
see the trapped tiger in the village across the river, when his mother
was so frightened and he was so brave?”

The scene came back to Chinn in great magic-lantern flashes. “Bukta!”
he cried; and all in a breath: “You promised nothing should hurt me.
_Is_ it Bukta?”

The man was at his feet a second time. “He has not forgotten. He
remembers his own people as his father remembered. Now can I die. But
first I will live and show the Sahib how to kill tigers. That _that_
yonder is my nephew. If he is not a good servant, beat him and send him
to me, and I will surely kill him, for now the Sahib is with his own
people. Ai, Jan _baba_—Jan _baba!_ My Jan _baba!_ I will stay here and
see that this does his work well. Take off his boots, fool. Sit down
upon the bed, Sahib, and let me look. It _is_ Jan _baba_.”

He pushed forward the hilt of his sword as a sign of service, which is
an honour paid only to viceroys, governors, generals, or to little
children whom one loves dearly. Chinn touched the hilt mechanically
with three fingers, muttering he knew not what. It happened to be the
old answer of his childhood, when Bukta in jest called him the little
General Sahib.

The Major’s quarters were opposite Chinn’s, and when he heard his
servant gasp with surprise he looked across the room. Then the Major
sat on the bed and whistled; for the spectacle of the senior native
commissioned officer of the regiment, an “unmixed” Bhil, a Companion of
the Order of British India, with thirty-five years’ spotless service in
the army, and a rank among his own people superior to that of many
Bengal princelings, valeting the last-joined subaltern, was a little
too much for his nerves.

The throaty bugles blew the Mess-call that has a long legend behind it.
First a few piercing notes like the shrieks of beaters in a far-away
cover, and next, large, full, and smooth, the refrain of the wild song:
“And oh, and oh, the green pulse of Mundore—Mundore!”

“All little children were in bed when the Sahib heard that call last,”
said Bukta, passing Chinn a clean handkerchief. The call brought back
memories of his cot under the mosquito-netting, his mother’s kiss, and
the sound of footsteps growing fainter as he dropped asleep among his
men. So he hooked the dark collar of his new mess-jacket, and went to
dinner like a prince who has newly inherited his father’s crown.

Old Bukta swaggered forth curling his whiskers. He knew his own value,
and no money and no rank within the gift of the Government would have
induced him to put studs in young officers’ shirts, or to hand them
clean ties. Yet, when he took off his uniform that night, and squatted
among his fellows for a quiet smoke, he told them what he had done, and
they said that he was entirely right. Thereat Bukta propounded a theory
which to a white mind would have seemed raving insanity; but the
whispering, level-headed little men of war considered it from every
point of view, and thought that there might be a great deal in it.

At mess under the oil-lamps the talk turned as usual to the unfailing
subject of _shikar_—big game-shooting of every kind and under all sorts
of conditions. Young Chinn opened his eyes when he understood that each
one of his companions had shot several tigers in the Wuddar style—on
foot, that is—making no more of the business than if the brute had been
a dog.

“In nine cases out of ten,” said the Major, “a tiger is almost as
dangerous as a porcupine. But the tenth time you come home feet first.”

That set all talking, and long before midnight Chinn’s brain was in a
whirl with stories of tigers—man-eaters and cattle-killers each
pursuing his own business as methodically as clerks in an office; new
tigers that had lately come into such-and-such a district; and old,
friendly beasts of great cunning, known by nicknames in the mess—such
as “Puggy,” who was lazy, with huge paws, and “Mrs. Malaprop,” who
turned up when you never expected her, and made female noises. Then
they spoke of Bhil superstitions, a wide and picturesque field, till
young Chinn hinted that they must be pulling his leg.

“’Deed, we aren’t,” said a man on his left. “We know all about you.
You’re a Chinn and all that, and you’ve a sort of vested right here;
but if you don’t believe what we’re telling you, what will you do when
old Bukta begins his stories? He knows about ghost-tigers, and tigers
that go to a hell of their own; and tigers that walk on their hind
feet; and your grandpapa’s riding-tiger, as well. Odd he hasn’t spoken
of that yet.”

“You know you’ve an ancestor buried down Satpura way, don’t you?” said
the Major, as Chinn smiled irresolutely.

“Of course I do,” said Chinn, who had the chronicle of the Book of
Chinn by heart. It lies in a worn old ledger on the Chinese lacquer
table behind the piano in the Devonshire home, and the children are
allowed to look at it on Sundays.

“Well, I wasn’t sure. Your revered ancestor, my boy, according to the
Bhils, has a tiger of his own—a saddle-tiger that he rides round the
country whenever he feels inclined. _I_ don’t call it decent in an
ex-Collector’s ghost; but that is what the Southern Bhils believe. Even
our men, who might be called moderately cool, don’t care to beat that
country if they hear that Jan Chinn is running about on his tiger. It
is supposed to be a clouded animal—not stripy, but blotchy, like a
tortoise-shell tom-cat. No end of a brute, it is, and a sure sign of
war or pestilence or—or something. There’s a nice family legend for
you.”

“What’s the origin of it, d’ you suppose?” said Chinn.

“Ask the Satpura Bhils. Old Jan Chinn was a mighty hunter before the
Lord. Perhaps it was the tiger’s revenge, or perhaps he’s huntin’ ’em
still. You must go to his tomb one of these days and inquire. Bukta
will probably attend to that. He was asking me before you came whether
by any ill-luck you had already bagged your tiger. If not, he is going
to enter you under his own wing. Of course, for you of all men it’s
imperative. You’ll have a first-class time with Bukta.”

The Major was not wrong. Bukta kept an anxious eye on young Chinn at
drill, and it was noticeable that the first time the new officer lifted
up his voice in an order the whole line quivered. Even the Colonel was
taken aback, for it might have been Lionel Chinn returned from
Devonshire with a new lease of life. Bukta had continued to develop his
peculiar theory among his intimates, and it was accepted as a matter of
faith in the lines, since every word and gesture on young Chinn’s part
so confirmed it.

The old man arranged early that his darling should wipe out the
reproach of not having shot a tiger; but he was not content to take the
first or any beast that happened to arrive. In his own villages he
dispensed the high, low, and middle justice, and when his people—naked
and fluttered—came to him with word of a beast marked down, he bade
them send spies to the kills and the watering-places, that he might be
sure the quarry was such an one as suited the dignity of such a man.

Three or four times the reckless trackers returned, most truthfully
saying that the beast was mangy, undersized—a tigress worn with
nursing, or a broken-toothed old male—and Bukta would curb young
Chinn’s impatience.

At last, a noble animal was marked down—a ten-foot cattle-killer with a
huge roll of loose skin along the belly, glossy-hided, full-frilled
about the neck, whiskered, frisky, and young. He had slain a man in
pure sport, they said.

“Let him be fed,” quoth Bukta, and the villagers dutifully drove out a
cow to amuse him, that he might lie up near by.

Princes and potentates have taken ship to India and spent great moneys
for the mere glimpse of beasts one-half as fine as this of Bukta’s.

“It is not good,” said he to the Colonel, when he asked for
shooting-leave, “that my Colonel’s son who may be—that my Colonel’s son
should lose his maidenhead on any small jungle beast. That may come
after. I have waited long for this which is a tiger. He has come in
from the Mair country. In seven days we will return with the skin.”

The mess gnashed their teeth enviously. Bukta, had he chosen, might
have invited them all. But he went out alone with Chinn, two days in a
shooting-cart and a day on foot, till they came to a rocky, glary
valley with a pool of good water in it. It was a parching day, and the
boy very naturally stripped and went in for a bathe, leaving Bukta by
the clothes. A white skin shows far against brown jungle, and what
Bukta beheld on Chinn’s back and right shoulder dragged him forward
step by step with staring eyeballs.

“I’d forgotten it isn’t decent to strip before a man of his position,”
said Chinn, flouncing in the water. “How the little devil stares! What
is it, Bukta?” “The Mark!” was the whispered answer.

“It is nothing. You know how it is with my people!” Chinn was annoyed.
The dull-red birth-mark on his shoulder, something like a
conventionalised Tartar cloud, had slipped his memory or he would not
have bathed. It occurred, so they said at home, in alternate
generations, appearing, curiously enough, eight or nine years after
birth, and, save that it was part of the Chinn inheritance, would not
be considered pretty. He hurried ashore, dressed again, and went on
till they met two or three Bhils, who promptly fell on their faces. “My
people,” grunted Bukta, not condescending to notice them. “And so your
people, Sahib. When I was a young man we were fewer, but not so weak.
Now we are many, but poor stock. As may be remembered. How will you
shoot him, Sahib? From a tree; from a shelter which my people shall
build; by day or by night?”

“On foot and in the daytime,” said young Chinn.

“That was your custom, as I have heard,” said Bukta to himself. “I will
get news of him. Then you and I will go to him. I will carry one gun.
You have yours. There is no need of more. What tiger shall stand
against _thee?_”

He was marked down by a little water-hole at the head of a ravine,
full-gorged and half asleep in the May sunlight. He was walked up like
a partridge, and he turned to do battle for his life. Bukta made no
motion to raise his rifle, but kept his eyes on Chinn, who met the
shattering roar of the charge with a single shot—it seemed to him hours
as he sighted—which tore through the throat, smashing the backbone
below the neck and between the shoulders. The brute couched, choked,
and fell, and before Chinn knew well what had happened Bukta bade him
stay still while he paced the distance between his feet and the ringing
jaws.

“Fifteen,” said Bukta. “Short paces. No need for a second shot, Sahib.
He bleeds cleanly where he lies, and we need not spoil the skin. I said
there would be no need of these, but they came—in case.”

Suddenly the sides of the ravine were crowned with the heads of Bukta’s
people—a force that could have blown the ribs out of the beast had
Chinn’s shot failed; but their guns were hidden, and they appeared as
interested beaters, some five or six waiting the word to skin. Bukta
watched the life fade from the wild eyes, lifted one hand, and turned
on his heel.

“No need to show that _we_ care,” said he. “Now, after this, we can
kill what we choose. Put out your hand, Sahib.”

Chinn obeyed. It was entirely steady, and Bukta nodded. “That also was
your custom. My men skin quickly. They will carry the skin to
cantonments. Will the Sahib come to my poor village for the night and,
perhaps, forget that I am his officer?”

“But those men—the beaters. They have worked hard, and perhaps—”

“Oh, if they skin clumsily, we will skin them. They are my people. In
the lines I am one thing. Here I am another.”

This was very true. When Bukta doffed uniform and reverted to the
fragmentary dress of his own people, he left his civilisation of drill
in the next world. That night, after a little talk with his subjects,
he devoted to an orgie; and a Bhil orgie is a thing not to be safely
written about. Chinn, flushed with triumph, was in the thick of it, but
the meaning of the mysteries was hidden. Wild folk came and pressed
about his knees with offerings. He gave his flask to the elders of the
village. They grew eloquent, and wreathed him about with flowers. Gifts
and loans, not all seemly, were thrust upon him, and infernal music
rolled and maddened round red fires, while singers sang songs of the
ancient times, and danced peculiar dances. The aboriginal liquors are
very potent, and Chinn was compelled to taste them often, but, unless
the stuff had been drugged, how came he to fall asleep suddenly, and to
waken late the next day—half a march from the village?

“The Sahib was very tired. A little before dawn he went to sleep,”
Bukta explained. “My people carried him here, and now it is time we
should go back to cantonments.”

The voice, smooth and deferential, the step, steady and silent, made it
hard to believe that only a few hours before Bukta was yelling and
capering with naked fellow-devils of the scrub.

“My people were very pleased to see the Sahib. They will never forget.
When next the Sahib goes out recruiting, he will go to my people, and
they will give him as many men as we need.”

Chinn kept his own counsel, except as to the shooting of the tiger, and
Bukta embroidered that tale with a shameless tongue. The skin was
certainly one of the finest ever hung up in the mess, and the first of
many. When Bukta could not accompany his boy on shooting-trips, he took
care to put him in good hands, and Chinn learned more of the mind and
desire of the wild Bhil in his marches and campings, by talks at
twilight or at wayside pools, than an uninstructed man could have come
at in a lifetime.

Presently his men in the regiment grew bold to speak of their
relatives—mostly in trouble—and to lay cases of tribal custom before
him. They would say, squatting in his verandah at twilight, after the
easy, confidential style of the Wuddars, that such-and-such a bachelor
had run away with such-and-such a wife at a far-off village. Now, how
many cows would Chinn Sahib consider a just fine? Or, again, if written
order came from the Government that a Bhil was to repair to a walled
city of the plains to give evidence in a law-court, would it be wise to
disregard that order? On the other hand, if it were obeyed, would the
rash voyager return alive?

“But what have I to do with these things?” Chinn demanded of Bukta,
impatiently. “I am a soldier. I do not know the law.”

“Hoo! Law is for fools and white men. Give them a large and loud order,
and they will abide by it. Thou art their law.”

“But wherefore?”

Every trace of expression left Bukta’s countenance. The idea might have
smitten him for the first time. “How can I say?” he replied. “Perhaps
it is on account of the name. A Bhil does not love strange things. Give
them orders, Sahib—two, three, four words at a time such as they can
carry away in their heads. That is enough.”

Chinn gave orders then, valiantly, not realising that a word spoken in
haste before mess became the dread unappealable law of villages beyond
the smoky hills was, in truth, no less than the Law of Jan Chinn the
First, who, so the whispered legend ran, had come back to earth, to
oversee the third generation, in the body and bones of his grandson.

There could be no sort of doubt in this matter. All the Bhils knew that
Jan Chinn reincarnated had honoured Bukta’s village with his presence
after slaying his first—in this life—tiger; that he had eaten and drunk
with the people, as he was used; and—Bukta must have drugged Chinn’s
liquor very deeply—upon his back and right shoulder all men had seen
the same angry red Flying Cloud that the high Gods had set on the flesh
of Jan Chinn the First when first he came to the Bhil. As concerned the
foolish white world which has no eyes, he was a slim and young officer
in the Wuddars; but his own people knew he was Jan Chinn, who had made
the Bhil a man; and, believing, they hastened to carry his words,
careful never to alter them on the way.

Because the savage and the child who plays lonely games have one horror
of being laughed at or questioned, the little folk kept their
convictions to themselves; and the Colonel, who thought he knew his
regiment, never guessed that each one of the six hundred quick-footed,
beady-eyed rank-and-file, to attention beside their rifles, believed
serenely and unshakenly that the subaltern on the left flank of the
line was a demi-god twice born—tutelary deity of their land and people.
The Earth-gods themselves had stamped the incarnation, and who would
dare to doubt the handiwork of the Earth-gods?

Chinn, being practical above all things, saw that his family name
served him well in the lines and in camp. His men gave no trouble—one
does not commit regimental offences with a god in the chair of
justice—and he was sure of the best beaters in the district when he
needed them. They believed that the protection of Jan Chinn the First
cloaked them, and were bold in that belief beyond the utmost daring of
excited Bhils.

His quarters began to look like an amateur natural-history museum, in
spite of duplicate heads and horns and skulls that he sent home to
Devonshire. The people, very humanly, learned the weak side of their
god. It is true he was unbribable, but bird-skins, butterflies,
beetles, and, above all, news of big game pleased him. In other
respects, too, he lived up to the Chinn tradition. He was fever-proof.
A night’s sitting out over a tethered goat in a damp valley, that would
have filled the Major with a month’s malaria, had no effect on him. He
was, as they said, “salted before he was born.”

Now in the autumn of his second year’s service an uneasy rumour crept
out of the earth and ran about among the Bhils. Chinn heard nothing of
it till a brother-officer said across the mess-table: “Your revered
ancestor’s on the rampage in the Satpura country. You’d better look him
up.”

“I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I’m a little sick of my revered
ancestor. Bukta talks of nothing else. What’s the old boy supposed to
be doing now?”

“Riding cross-country by moonlight on his processional tiger. That’s
the story. He’s been seen by about two thousand Bhils, skipping along
the tops of the Satpuras, and scaring people to death. They believe it
devoutly, and all the Satpura chaps are worshipping away at his
shrine—tomb, I mean—like good ’uns. You really ought to go down there.
Must be a queer thing to see your grandfather treated as a god.”

“What makes you think there’s any truth in the tale?” said Chinn.

“Because all our men deny it. They say they’ve never heard of Chinn’s
tiger. Now that’s a manifest lie, because every Bhil _has_.”

“There’s only one thing you’ve overlooked,” said the Colonel,
thoughtfully. “When a local god reappears on earth, it’s always an
excuse for trouble of some kind; and those Satpura Bhils are about as
wild as your grandfather left them, young ’un. It means something.”

“Meanin’ they may go on the war-path?” said Chinn.

“Can’t say—as yet. Shouldn’t be surprised a little bit.”

“I haven’t been told a syllable.”

“Proves it all the more. They are keeping something back.”

“Bukta tells me everything, too, as a rule. Now, why didn’t he tell me
that?”

Chinn put the question directly to the old man that night, and the
answer surprised him.

“Why should I tell what is well known? Yes, the Clouded Tiger is out in
the Satpura country.”

“What do the wild Bhils think that it means?”

“They do not know. They wait. Sahib, what _is_ coming? Say only one
little word, and we will be content.”

“We? What have tales from the south, where the jungly Bhils live, to do
with drilled men?”

“When Jan Chinn wakes is no time for any Bhil to be quiet.”

“But he has not waked, Bukta.”

“Sahib”—the old man’s eyes were full of tender reproof—“if he does not
wish to be seen, why does he go abroad in the moonlight? We know he is
awake, but we do not know what he desires. Is it a sign for all the
Bhils, or one that concerns the Satpura folk alone? Say one little
word, Sahib, that I may carry it to the lines, and send on to our
villages. Why does Jan Chinn ride out? Who has done wrong? Is it
pestilence? Is it murrain? Will our children die? Is it a sword?
Remember, Sahib, we are thy people and thy servants, and in this life I
bore thee in my arms—not knowing.”

“Bukta has evidently looked on the cup this evening,” Chinn thought;
“but if I can do anything to soothe the old chap I must. It’s like the
Mutiny rumours on a small scale.”

He dropped into a deep wicker chair, over which was thrown his first
tiger-skin, and his weight on the cushion flapped the clawed paws over
his shoulders. He laid hold of them mechanically as he spoke, drawing
the painted hide, cloak-fashion, about him.

“Now will I tell the truth, Bukta,” he said, leaning forward, the dried
muzzle on his shoulder, to invent a specious lie.

“I see that it is the truth,” was the answer, in a shaking voice.

“Jan Chinn goes abroad among the Satpuras, riding on the Clouded Tiger,
ye say? Be it so. Therefore the sign of the wonder is for the Satpura
Bhils only, and does not touch the Bhils who plough in the north and
east, the Bhils of the Khandesh, or any others, except the Satpura
Bhils, who, as we know, are wild and foolish.”

“It is, then, a sign for _them_. Good or bad?”

“Beyond doubt, good. For why should Jan Chinn make evil to those whom
he has made men? The nights over yonder are hot; it is ill to lie in
one bed over-long without turning, and Jan Chinn would look again upon
his people. So he rises, whistles his Clouded Tiger, and goes abroad a
little to breathe the cool air. If the Satpura Bhils kept to their
villages, and did not wander after dark, they would not see him.
Indeed, Bukta, it is no more than that he would see the light again in
his own country. Send this news south, and say that it is my word.”

Bukta bowed to the floor. “Good Heavens!” thought Chinn, “and this
blinking pagan is a first-class officer, and as straight as a die! I
may as well round it off neatly.” He went on:

“If the Satpura Bhils ask the meaning of the sign, tell them that Jan
Chinn would see how they kept their old promises of good living.
Perhaps they have plundered; perhaps they mean to disobey the orders of
the Government; perhaps there is a dead man in the jungle; and so Jan
Chinn has come to see.”

“Is he, then, angry?”

“Bah! Am _I_ ever angry with my Bhils? I say angry words, and threaten
many things. _Thou_ knowest, Bukta. I have seen thee smile behind the
hand. I know, and thou knowest. The Bhils are my children. I have said
it many times.”

“Ay. We be thy children,” said Bukta.

“And no otherwise is it with Jan Chinn, my father’s father. He would
see the land he loved and the people once again. It is a good ghost,
Bukta. I say it. Go and tell them. And I do hope devoutly,” he added,
“that it will calm ’em down.” Flinging back the tiger-skin, he rose
with a long, unguarded yawn that showed his well-kept teeth.

Bukta fled, to be received in the lines by a knot of panting inquirers.

“It is true,” said Bukta. “He wrapped himself in the skin, and spoke
from it. He would see his own country again. The sign is not for us;
and, indeed, he is a young man. How should he lie idle of nights? He
says his bed is too hot and the air is bad. He goes to and fro for the
love of night-running. He has said it.”

The grey-whiskered assembly shuddered.

“He says the Bhils are his children. Ye know he does not lie. He has
said it to me.”

“But what of the Satpura Bhils? What means the sign for them?”

“Nothing. It is only night-running, as I have said. He rides to see if
they obey the Government, as he taught them to do in his first life.”

“And what if they do not?”

“He did not say.”

The light went out in Chinn’s quarters.

“Look,” said Bukta. “Now he goes away. None the less it is a good
ghost, as he has said. How shall we fear Jan Chinn, who made the Bhil a
man? His protection is on us; and ye know Jan Chinn never broke a
protection spoken or written on paper. When he is older and has found
him a wife he will lie in his bed till morning.”

A commanding officer is generally aware of the regimental state of mind
a little before the men; and this is why the Colonel said, a few days
later, that some one had been putting the Fear of God into the Wuddars.
As he was the only person officially entitled to do this, it distressed
him to see such unanimous virtue. “It’s too good to last,” he said. “I
only wish I could find out what the little chaps mean.”

The explanation, as it seemed to him, came at the change of the moon,
when he received orders to hold himself in readiness to “allay any
possible excitement” among the Satpura Bhils, who were, to put it
mildly, uneasy because a paternal Government had sent up against them a
Mahratta State-educated vaccinator, with lancets, lymph, and an
officially registered calf. In the language of State, they had
“manifested a strong objection to all prophylactic measures,” had
“forcibly detained the vaccinator,” and “were on the point of
neglecting or evading their tribal obligations.”

“That means they are in a blue funk—same as they were at census-time,”
said the Colonel; “and if we stampede them into the hills we’ll never
catch ’em, in the first place, and, in the second, they’ll whoop off
plundering till further orders. Wonder who the God-forsaken idiot is
who is trying to vaccinate a Bhil. I knew trouble was coming. One good
thing is that they’ll only use local corps, and we can knock up
something we’ll call a campaign, and let them down easy. Fancy us
potting our best beaters because they don’t want to be vaccinated!
They’re only crazy with fear.”

“Don’t you think, sir,” said Chinn, the next day, “that perhaps you
could give me a fortnight’s shooting-leave?”

“Desertion in the face of the enemy, by Jove!” The Colonel laughed. “I
might, but I’d have to antedate it a little, because we’re warned for
service, as you might say. However, we’ll assume that you applied for
leave three days ago, and are now well on your way south.”

“I’d like to take Bukta with me.”

“Of course, yes. I think that will be the best plan. You’ve some kind
of hereditary influence with the little chaps, and they may listen to
you when a glimpse of our uniforms would drive them wild. You’ve never
been in that part of the world before, have you? Take care they don’t
send you to your family vault in your youth and innocence. I believe
you’ll be all right if you can get ’em to listen to you.”

“I think so, sir; but if—if they should accidentally put an—make asses
of ’emselves—they might, you know—I hope you’ll represent that they
were only frightened. There isn’t an ounce of real vice in ’em, and I
should never forgive myself if any one of—of my name got them into
trouble.”

The Colonel nodded, but said nothing.

Chinn and Bukta departed at once. Bukta did not say that, ever since
the official vaccinator had been dragged into the hills by indignant
Bhils, runner after runner had skulked up to the lines, entreating,
with forehead in the dust, that Jan Chinn should come and explain this
unknown horror that hung over his people.

The portent of the Clouded Tiger was now too clear. Let Jan Chinn
comfort his own, for vain was the help of mortal man. Bukta toned down
these beseechings to a simple request for Chinn’s presence. Nothing
would have pleased the old man better than a rough-and-tumble campaign
against the Satpuras, whom he, as an “unmixed” Bhil, despised; but he
had a duty to all his nation as Jan Chinn’s interpreter; and he
devoutly believed that forty plagues would fall on his village if he
tampered with that obligation. Besides, Jan Chinn knew all things, and
he rode the Clouded Tiger.

They covered thirty miles a day on foot and pony, raising the blue
wall-like line of the Satpuras as swiftly as might be. Bukta was very
silent.

They began the steep climb a little after noon, but it was near sunset
ere they reached the stone platform clinging to the side of a rifted,
jungle-covered hill, where Jan Chinn the First was laid, as he had
desired, that he might overlook his people. All India is full of
neglected graves that date from the beginning of the eighteenth
century—tombs of forgotten colonels of corps long since disbanded;
mates of East India men who went on shooting expeditions and never came
back; factors, agents, writers, and ensigns of the Honourable the East
India Company by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands. English
folk forget quickly, but natives have long memories, and if a man has
done good in his life it is remembered after his death. The weathered
marble four-square tomb of Jan Chinn was hung about with wild flowers
and nuts, packets of wax and honey, bottles of native spirits, and
infamous cigars, with buffalo horns and plumes of dried grass. At one
end was a rude clay image of a white man, in the old-fashioned top-hat,
riding on a bloated tiger.

Bukta salamed reverently as they approached. Chinn bared his head and
began to pick out the blurred inscription. So far as he could read it
ran thus—word for word, and letter for letter:

To the Memory of JOHN CHINN, Esq.
Late Collector of............
....ithout Bloodshed or ... error of Authority
Employ . only .. eans of Conciliat ... and Confiden.
accomplished the ...tire Subjection...
a Lawless and Predatory Peop...
....taching them to ... ish Government
by a Conque.. over .... Minds
The most perma... and rational Mode of Domini..
...Governor General and Counc ... engal
have ordered thi ..... erected
....arted this Life Aug. 19, 184. Ag...


On the other side of the grave were ancient verses, also very worn. As
much as Chinn could decipher said:

.... the savage band
Forsook their Haunts and b..... is Command
....mended .. rals check a ...st for spoil.
And . s . ing Hamlets prove his gene.... toil.
Humanit ... survey ......ights restor..
A Nation ..ield .. subdued without a Sword.


For some little time he leaned on the tomb thinking of this dead man of
his own blood, and of the house in Devonshire; then, nodding to the
plains: “Yes; it’s a big work—all of it—even my little share. He must
have been worth knowing.... Bukta, where are my people?”

“Not here, Sahib. No man comes here except in full sun. They wait
above. Let us climb and see.”

But Chinn, remembering the first law of Oriental diplomacy, in an even
voice answered: “I have come this far only because the Satpura folk are
foolish, and dared not visit our lines. Now bid them wait on me _here_.
I am not a servant, but the master of Bhils.”

“I go—I go,” clucked the old man. Night was falling, and at any moment
Jan Chinn might whistle up his dreaded steed from the darkening scrub.

Now for the first time in a long life Bukta disobeyed a lawful command
and deserted his leader; for he did not come back, but pressed to the
flat table-top of the hill, and called softly. Men stirred all about
him—little trembling men with bows and arrows who had watched the two
since noon.

“Where is he?” whispered one.

“At his own place. He bids you come,” said Bukta.

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Rather let him loose the Clouded Tiger upon us. We do not go.”

“Nor I, though I bore him in my arms when he was a child in this his
life. Wait here till the day.”

“But surely he will be angry.”

“He will be very angry, for he has nothing to eat. But he has said to
me many times that the Bhils are his children. By sunlight I believe
this, but—by moonlight I am not so sure. What folly have ye Satpura
pigs compassed that ye should need him at all?”

“One came to us in the name of the Government with little ghost-knives
and a magic calf, meaning to turn us into cattle by the cutting off of
our arms. We were greatly afraid, but we did not kill the man. He is
here, bound—a black man; and we think he comes from the west. He said
it was an order to cut us all with knives—especially the women and the
children. We did not hear that it was an order, so we were afraid, and
kept to our hills. Some of our men have taken ponies and bullocks from
the plains, and others pots and cloths and ear-rings.”

“Are any slain?”

“By our men? Not yet. But the young men are blown to and fro by many
rumours like flames upon a hill. I sent runners asking for Jan Chinn
lest worse should come to us. It was this fear that he foretold by the
sign of the Clouded Tiger.”

“He says it is otherwise,” said Bukta; and he repeated, with
amplifications, all that young Chinn had told him at the conference of
the wicker chair.

“Think you,” said the questioner, at last, “that the Government will
lay hands on us?”

“Not I,” Bukta rejoined. “Jan Chinn will give an order, and ye will
obey. The rest is between the Government and Jan Chinn. I myself know
something of the ghost-knives and the scratching. It is a charm against
the Smallpox. But how it is done I cannot tell. Nor need that concern
you.”

“If he stands by us and before the anger of the Government we will most
strictly obey Jan Chinn, except—except we do not go down to that place
to-night.”

They could hear young Chinn below them shouting for Bukta; but they
cowered and sat still, expecting the Clouded Tiger. The tomb had been
holy ground for nearly half a century. If Jan Chinn chose to sleep
there, who had better right? But they would not come within eyeshot of
the place till broad day.

At first Chinn was exceedingly angry, till it occurred to him that
Bukta most probably had a reason (which, indeed, he had), and his own
dignity might suffer if he yelled without answer. He propped himself
against the foot of the grave, and, alternately dozing and smoking,
came through the warm night proud that he was a lawful, legitimate,
fever-proof Chinn.

He prepared his plan of action much as his grandfather would have done;
and when Bukta appeared in the morning with a most liberal supply of
food, said nothing of the overnight desertion. Bukta would have been
relieved by an outburst of human anger; but Chinn finished his victual
leisurely, and a cheroot, ere he made any sign.

“They are very much afraid,” said Bukta, who was not too bold himself.
“It remains only to give orders. They said they will obey if thou wilt
only stand between them and the Government.”

“That I know,” said Chinn, strolling slowly to the table-land. A few of
the elder men stood in an irregular semicircle in an open glade; but
the ruck of people—women and children were hidden in the thicket. They
had no desire to face the first anger of Jan Chinn the First.

Seating himself on a fragment of split rock, he smoked his cheroot to
the butt, hearing men breathe hard all about him. Then he cried, so
suddenly that they jumped:

“Bring the man that was bound!”

A scuffle and a cry were followed by the appearance of a Hindoo
vaccinator, quaking with fear, bound hand and foot, as the Bhils of old
were accustomed to bind their human sacrifices. He was pushed
cautiously before the presence; but young Chinn did not look at him.

“I said—the man that _was_ bound. Is it a jest to bring me one tied
like a buffalo? Since when could the Bhil bind folk at his pleasure?
Cut!”

Half a dozen hasty knives cut away the thongs, and the man crawled to
Chinn, who pocketed his case of lancets and tubes of lymph. Then,
sweeping the semicircle with one comprehensive forefinger, and in the
voice of compliment, he said, clearly and distinctly: “Pigs!”

“Ai!” whispered Bukta. “Now he speaks. Woe to foolish people!”

“I have come on foot from my house” (the assembly shuddered) “to make
clear a matter which any other Satpura Bhil would have seen with both
eyes from a distance. Ye know the Smallpox who pits and scars your
children so that they look like wasp-combs. It is an order of the
Government that whoso is scratched on the arm with these little knives
which I hold up is charmed against her. All Sahibs are thus charmed,
and very many Hindoos. This is the mark of the charm. Look!”

He rolled back his sleeve to the armpit and showed the white scars of
the vaccination-mark on his white skin. “Come, all, and look.”

A few daring spirits came up, and nodded their heads wisely. There was
certainly a mark, and they knew well what other dread marks were hidden
by the shirt. Merciful was Jan Chinn, that then and there proclaimed
his godhead!

“Now all these things the man whom ye bound told you.”

“I did—a hundred times; but they answered with blows,” groaned the
operator, chafing his wrists and ankles.

“But, being pigs, ye did not believe; and so came I here to save you,
first from Smallpox, next from a great folly of fear, and lastly, it
may be, from the rope and the jail. It is no gain to me; it is no
pleasure to me: but for the sake of that one who is yonder, who made
the Bhil a man”—he pointed down the hill—“I, who am of his blood, the
son of his son, come to turn your people. And I speak the truth, as did
Jan Chinn.”

The crowd murmured reverently, and men stole out of the thicket by twos
and threes to join it. There was no anger in their god’s face.

“These are my orders. (Heaven send they’ll take ’em, but I seem to have
impressed ’em so far!) I myself will stay among you while this man
scratches your arms with the knives, after the order of the Government.
In three, or it may be five or seven, days, your arms will swell and
itch and burn. That is the power of Smallpox fighting in your base
blood against the orders of the Government. I will therefore stay among
you till I see that Smallpox is conquered, and I will not go away till
the men and the women and the little children show me upon their arms
such marks as I have even now showed you. I bring with me two very good
guns, and a man whose name is known among beasts and men. We will hunt
together, I and he and your young men, and the others shall eat and lie
still. This is my order.”

There was a long pause while victory hung in the balance. A
white-haired old sinner, standing on one uneasy leg, piped up:

“There are ponies and some few bullocks and other things for which we
need a _kowl_ [protection]. They were not taken in the way of trade.”

The battle was won, and John Chinn drew a breath of relief. The young
Bhils had been raiding, but if taken swiftly all could be put straight.

“I will write a _kowl_ so soon as the ponies, the bullocks, and the
other things are counted before me and sent back whence they came. But
first we will put the Government mark on such as have not been visited
by Smallpox.” In an undertone, to the vaccinator: “If you show you are
afraid you’ll never see Poona again, my friend.”

“There is not sufficient ample supply of vaccination for all this
population,” said the man. “They destroyed the offeecial calf.”

“They won’t know the difference. Scrape ’em and give me a couple of
lancets; I’ll attend to the elders.”

The aged diplomat who had demanded protection was the first victim. He
fell to Chinn’s hand and dared not cry out. As soon as he was freed he
dragged up a companion, and held him fast, and the crisis became, as it
were, a child’s sport; for the vaccinated chased the unvaccinated to
treatment, vowing that all the tribe must suffer equally. The women
shrieked, and the children ran howling; but Chinn laughed, and waved
the pink-tipped lancet.

“It is an honour,” he cried. “Tell them, Bukta, how great an honour it
is that I myself mark them. Nay, I cannot mark every one—the Hindoo
must also do his work—but I will touch all marks that he makes, so
there will be an equal virtue in them. Thus do the Rajputs stick pigs.
Ho, brother with one eye! Catch that girl and bring her to me. She need
not run away yet, for she is not married, and I do not seek her in
marriage. She will not come? Then she shall be shamed by her little
brother, a fat boy, a bold boy. He puts out his arm like a soldier.
Look! _He_ does not flinch at the blood. Some day he shall be in my
regiment. And now, mother of many, we will lightly touch thee, for
Smallpox has been before us here. It is a true thing, indeed, that this
charm breaks the power of Mata. There will be no more pitted faces
among the Satpuras, and so ye can ask many cows for each maid to be
wed.”

And so on and so on—quick-poured showman’s patter, sauced in the Bhil
hunting-proverbs and tales of their own brand of coarse humour till the
lancets were blunted and both operators worn out.

But, nature being the same the world over, the unvaccinated grew
jealous of their marked comrades, and came near to blows about it. Then
Chinn declared himself a co

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569