g or the sound of a night-fowl could be heard. Luckily the Thakur had,
some twenty miles back, stepped out to smoke by the roadside, and his
tonga had been passed meanwhile. The sowar was sent back to find that
tonga and bring it on. He cantered into the haze of the moonlight and
disappeared. Then said the driver: "Had there been no tonga behind us, I
should have put the mails on a horse, because the Sirkar's mail cannot
stop." The Englishman sat down upon the parcels-bag, for he felt that
there was trouble coming. The driver looked East and West and said: "I,
too, will go and see if the tonga can be found, for the Sirkar's dak
cannot stop. Meantime, oh, Sahib, do you take care of the mails--one bag
and one bag of parcels." So he ran swiftly into the haze of the
moonlight and was lost, and the Englishman was left alone in charge of
Her Majesty's mails, two unhappy ponies, and a lop-sided tonga. He lit a
fire, for the night was bitterly cold, and only mourned that he could
not destroy the whole of the territories of His Highness, the Maharana
of Udaipur. But he managed to raise a very fine blaze, before he
reflected that all this trouble was his own fault for wandering into
Native States undesirous of Englishmen.

The ponies coughed dolorously from time to time, but they could not lift
the weight of a dead silence that seemed to be crushing the earth. After
an interval measurable by centuries, sowar, driver, and Thakur's tonga
reappeared; the latter full to the brim and bubbling over with humanity
and bedding. "We will now," said the driver, not deigning to notice the
Englishman who had been on guard over the mails, "put the Sirkar's mail
into this tonga and go forward." Amiable heathen! He was going--he said
so--to leave the Englishman to wait in the Sahara, for certainly thirty
hours and perhaps forty-eight. Tongas are scarce on the Udaipur road.
There are a few occasions in life when it is justifiable to delay Her
Majesty's Mail. This was one of them. Seating himself upon the
parcels-bag, the Englishman cried in what was intended to be a very
terrible voice, but the silence soaked it up and left only a thin
trickle of sound, that any one who touched the bags would be hit with a
stick, several times, over the head. The bags were the only link between
him and the civilisation he had so rashly foregone. And there was a
pause.

The Thakur put his head out of the tonga and spoke shrilly in Mewari.
The Englishman replied i