sequence; for he did not choose
to risk an epidemic which might have grown uncontrollable by
assembling villagers in thousands at the relief-sheds. It was cheaper
to take Government bullocks, work them to death, and leave them to
the crows in the wayside sloughs.

That was the time when eight years of clean living and hard condition
told, though a man's head were ringing like a bell from the cinchona,
and the earth swayed under his feet when he stood and under his bed
when he slept. If Hawkins had seen fit to make him a bullock-driver,
that, he thought, was entirely Hawkins's own affair. There were men
in the North who would know what he had done; men of thirty years'
service in his own department who would say that it was 'not half
bad'; and above, immeasurably above all men of all grades, there was
William in the thick of the fight, who would approve because she
understood. He had so trained his mind that it would hold fast to the
mechanical routine of the day, though his own voice sounded strange
in his own ears, and his hands, when he wrote, grew large as pillows
or small as peas at the end of his wrists. That steadfastness bore
his body to the telegraph-office at the railway-station, and dictated
a telegram to Hawkins, saying that the Khanda district was, in his
judgment, now safe, and he 'waited further orders.'

The Madrassee telegraph-clerk did not approve of a large, gaunt man
falling over him in a dead faint, not so much because of the weight,
as because of the names and blows that Faiz Ullah dealt him when he
found the body rolled under a bench. Then Faiz Ullah took blankets
and quilts and coverlets where he found them, and lay down under them
at his master's side, and bound his arms with a tent-rope, and filled
him with a horrible stew of herbs, and set the policeman to fight him
when he wished to escape from the intolerable heat of his coverings,
and shut the door of the telegraph-office to keep out the curious for
two nights and one day; and when a light engine came down the line,
and Hawkins kicked in the door, Scott hailed him weakly, but in a
natural voice, and Faiz Ullah stood back and took all the credit.

'For two nights, Heaven-born, he was _pagal_' said Faiz Ullah. 'Look
at my nose, and consider the eye of the policeman. He beat us with
his bound hands; but we sat upon him, Heaven-born, and though his
words were _tez_, we sweated him. Heaven-born, never has been such a
sweat! He is weaker now th