he tonga to
one side, into a rut, fetched up on a tree-stump, rebounded on to a
rock, and struck the road again. "Observe," said Ram Baksh; "but that is
nothing. You wait till we get on the Boondi Road, and I'll make you
shake, shake like a bottle." "Is it _very_ bad?" "I've never been to
Boondi myself, but I hear it is all rocks--great rocks as big as this
tonga." But though he boasted himself and his horses nearly all the way,
he could not reach Deoli in anything like the time he had set forth. "If
I am not at Boondi by four," he had said, at six in the morning, "let me
go without my fee." But by midday he was still far from Deoli, and
Boondi lay twenty-eight miles beyond that station. "What can I do?" said
he. "I've laid out lots of horses--any amount. But the fact is I've
never been to Boondi. I shan't go there in the night." Ram Baksh's "lots
of horses" were three pair between Nasirabad and Deoli--three pair of
undersized ponies who did wonders. At one place, after he had quitted a
cotton wagon, a drove of gipsies, and a man on horseback, with his
carbine across his saddle-bow, the Englishman came to a stretch of road
so utterly desolate that he said: "Now I am clear of everybody who ever
knew me. This is the beginning of the waste into which the scape-goat
was sent."

From a bush by the roadside sprang up a fat man who cried aloud in
English: "How does Your Honour do? I met Your Honour in Simla this year.
Are you quite well? Ya-as, I am here. Your Honour remembers me? I am
travelling. Ya-as. Ha! Ha!" and he went on, leaving His Honour bemazed.
It was a Babu--a Simla Babu, of that there could be no doubt; but who he
was or what he was doing, thirty miles from anywhere, His Honour could
not make out. The native moves about more than most folk, except railway
people, imagine. The big banking firms of Upper India naturally keep in
close touch with their great change-houses in Ajmir, despatching and
receiving messengers regularly. So it comes to pass that the necessitous
circumstances of Lieutenant McRannamack, of the Tyneside Tailtwisters,
quartered on the Frontier, are thoroughly known and discussed, a
thousand miles south of the cantonment where the light-hearted
Lieutenant goes to his money-lender.

This is by the way. Let us return to the banks of the Banas River, where
"poor Carey," as Tod calls him, came when he was sickening for his last
illness. The Banas is one of those streams which runs "over golden
sands