s they
most joyfully did, for it was a recreation, and many ownerless goats
were driven in. Once fed, the poor brutes were willing enough to
follow the carts, and a few days' good food--food such as human
beings died for lack of--set them in milk again.

'But I am no goatherd,' said Faiz Ullah. 'It is against my _izzat_
[my honour].'

'When we cross the Bias River again we will talk of _izzat_,' Scott
replied. 'Till that day thou and the policemen shall be sweepers to
the camp, if I give the order.'

'Thus, then, it is done,' grunted Faiz Ullah, 'if the Sahib will have
it so'; and he showed how a goat should be milked, while Scott stood
over him.

'Now we will feed them,' said Scott; 'thrice a day we will feed
them'; and he bowed his back to the milking, and took a horrible
cramp.

When you have to keep connection unbroken between a restless mother
of kids and a baby who is at the point of death, you suffer in all
your system. But the babies were fed. Morning, noon and evening Scott
would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags
under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more
than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths
drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too,
the goats were fed; and since they would struggle without a leader,
and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up
riding, and pace slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating
his step to their weaknesses. All this was sufficiently absurd, and
he felt the absurdity keenly; but at least he was saving life, and
when the women saw that their children did not die, they made shift
to eat a little of the strange foods, and crawled after the carts,
blessing the master of the goats.

'Give the women something to live for,' said Scott to himself, as
he sneezed in the dust of a hundred little feet, 'and they'll hang
on somehow. But this beats William's condensed milk trick all to
pieces. I shall never live it down, though.'

He reached his destination very slowly, found that a rice-ship had
come in from Burmah, and that stores of paddy were available; found
also an overworked Englishman in charge of the shed, and, loading the
carts, set back to cover the ground he had already passed. He left
some of the children and half his goats at the famine-shed. For this
he was not thanked by the Englishman, who had already more stray
babies than he knew what to do