for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we
are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take
these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all
weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing
else to-day at all."

He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust
it into Findlayson's hand, saying: "Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more
than opium--clean Malwa opium."

Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,
and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least
a good guard against fever--the fever that was creeping upon him out of
the wet mud--and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of
autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.

Peroo nodded with bright eyes. "In a little--in a little the Sahib
will find that he thinks well again. I too will--" He dived into his
treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down
to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier,
and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson
stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about
one of the piers--the seventh--that he had not fully settled in his
mind. The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by
one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow
in his ears like the deepest note of a double-bass--an entrancing sound
upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo
was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the
stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out
fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.

"A tree hit them. They will all go," cried Peroo. "The main hawser has
parted. What does the Sahib do?"

An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's
mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and
angles--each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was
the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it
was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet
would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But
why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he
hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently
and slowly, because