gue asserted, and the later consignments proved, put the
Fear of God into a man so great that he feared only Parliament, and
said so till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table,
and--he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then
there was the cholera that came in the night to the village by the
bridge-works; and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The fever
they had always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate
of the third class with whipping powers, for the better government of
the community, and Findlayson watched him wield his powers
temperately, learning what to overlook and what to look after. It was
a long, long reverie, and it covered storm, sudden freshets, death in
every manner and shape, violent and awful rage against red tape half
frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things;
drought, sanitation, finance; birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the
village of twenty warring castes; argument, expostulation, persuasion,
and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his
rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind everything rose the
black frame of the Kashi Bridge--plate by plate, girder by girder,
span by span--and each pier of it recalled Hitchcock, the all-round
man, who had stood by his chief without failing from the very first to
this last. So the bridge was two men's work--unless one counted Peroo,
as Peroo certainly counted himself. He was a lascar, a Kharva from
Bulsar, familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who
had risen to the rank of serang on the British India boats, but
wearying of routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up the
service and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure of
employment. For his knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy
weights, Peroo was worth almost any price he might have chosen to put
upon his services; but custom decreed the wage of the overhead-men,
and Peroo was not within many silver pieces of his proper value.
Neither running water nor extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an
ex-serang, he knew how to hold authority. No piece of iron was so big
or so badly placed that Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it--a
loose-ended, sagging arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount of
talking, but perfectly equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had
saved the girder of Number Seven Pier from destruction when the new
wire rope jammed in the eye o