re you taking any of your men down?"

"A dozen. I suppose I shall have to superintend relief distributions.
'Didn't know you were under orders too."

"I didn't till after I left you last night. Raines had the news first.
My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and I got
off at once. 'Shouldn't wonder if it wouldn't be a good thing--this
famine--if we come through it alive."

"Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together," said Martyn; and then,
after a pause: "My sister's here."

"Good business," said Scott, heartily. "Going to get off at Umballa, I
suppose, and go up to Simla. Who'll she stay with there?"

"No-o; that's just the trouble of it. She's going down with me."

Scott sat bolt upright under the oil-lamps as the train jolted past
Tarn-Taran. "What! You don't mean you couldn't afford--"

"'Tain't that. I'd have scraped up the money somehow."

"You might have come to me, to begin with," said Scott, stiffly; "we
aren't altogether strangers."

"Well, you needn't be stuffy about it. I might, but--you don't know my
sister. I've been explaining and exhorting and all the rest of it all
day--lost my temper since seven this morning, and haven't got it back
yet--but she wouldn't hear of any compromise. A woman's entitled to
travel with her husband if she wants to; and William says she's on the
same footing. You see, we've been together all our lives, more or less,
since my people died. It isn't as if she were an ordinary sister."

"All the sisters I've ever heard of would have stayed where they were
well off."

She's as clever as a man, confound--Martyn went on. "She broke up the
bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. 'Settled the whole
thing in three hours--servants, horses, and all. I didn't get my orders
till nine."

"Jimmy Hawkins won't be pleased," said Scott "A famine's no place for a
woman."

"Mrs. Jim--I mean Lady Jim's in camp with him. At any rate, she says
she will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own
responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from
under me by showing me her answer."

Scott laughed aloud. "If she can do that she can take care of herself,
and Mrs. Jim won't let her run into any mischief. There aren't many
women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine with their eyes
open. It isn't as if she didn't know what these things mean. She was
through the Jalo cholera last year."

The train stopped at Amri