verything you'll need--quinine,
chlorodyne, and so on?"

"'Think so," said Scott, patting three or four of his shooting-pockets
as he mounted and rode alongside his convoy.

"Good-bye," he cried.

"Good-bye, and good luck," said William. "I'm awfully obliged for the
money." She turned on a spurred heel and disappeared into the tent,
while the carts pushed on past the famine-sheds, past the roaring lines
of the thick, fat fires, down to the baked Gehenna of the South.

PART II

So let us melt and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the Laity our love.

A Valediction.

It was punishing work, even though he travelled by night and camped by
day; but within the limits of his vision there was no man whom Scott
could call master. He was as free as Jimmy Hawkins--freer, in fact,
for the Government held the Head of the Famine tied neatly to a
telegraph-wire, and if Jimmy had ever regarded telegrams seriously, the
death-rate of that famine would have been much higher than it was.

At the end of a few days' crawling Scott learned something of the size
of the India which he served, and it astonished him. His carts, as
you know, were loaded with wheat, millet, and barley, good food-grains
needing only a little grinding. But the people to whom he brought the
life-giving stuffs were rice-eaters. They could hull rice in their
mortars, but they knew nothing of the heavy stone querns of the North,
and less of the material that the white man convoyed so laboriously.
They clamoured for rice--unhusked paddy, such as they were accustomed
to--and, when they found that there was none, broke away weeping from
the sides of the cart. What was the use of these strange hard grains
that choked their throats? They would die. And then and there very
many of them kept their word. Others took their allowance, and bartered
enough millet to feed a man through a week for a few handfuls of rotten
rice saved by some less unfortunate. A few put their share into the
rice-mortars, pounded it, and made a paste with foul water; but they
were very few. Scott understood dimly that many people in the India of
the South ate rice, as a rule, but he had spent his service in a grain
Province, had seldom seen rice in the blade or ear, and least of all
would have believed that in time