the girder of
Number Seven pier from destruction when the new wire rope jammed in the
eye of the crane, and the huge plate tilted in its slings, threatening
to slide out sideways. Then the native workmen lost their heads with
great shoutings, and Hitchcock's right arm was broken by a falling
T-plate, and he buttoned it up in his coat and swooned, and came to and
directed for four hours till Peroo, from the top of the crane, reported
"All's well," and the plate swung home. There was no one like Peroo,
serang, to lash, and guy, and hold to control the donkey-engines, to
hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it
had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete
blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to
adventure up-stream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the
embankment-facings. He would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson
and Hitchcock without fear, till his wonderful English, or his still
more wonderful lingua franca, half Portuguese and half Malay, ran
out and he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would
recommend. He controlled his own gang of tacklemen--mysterious relatives
from Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month and tried to the uttermost.
No consideration of family or kin allowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a
giddy head on the pay-roll. "My honour is the honour of this bridge," he
would say to the about-to-be-dismissed. "What do I care for your honour?
Go and work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for."

The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred round the
tattered dwelling of a sea-priest--one who had never set foot on black
water, but had been chosen as ghostly counsellor by two generations of
sea-rovers all unaffected by port missions or those creeds which are
thrust upon sailors by agencies along Thames bank. The priest of the
Lascara had nothing to do with their caste, or indeed with anything at
all. He ate the offerings of his church, and slept and smoked, and slept
again "for," said Peroo, who had haled him a thousand miles inland, "he
is a very holy man. He never cares what you eat so long as you do
not eat beef, and that is good, because on land we worship Shiva, we
Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani's boats we attend strictly to the
orders of the Burra Malum [the first mate], and on this bridge we
observe what Finlinson Sahib says."

Finlinson Sahib had that day given orders