ook horse and
plashed about in the wet, rejoicing. Now the Government decreed that
seed-grain should be distributed to the people, as well as advances of
money for the purchase of new oxen; and the white men were doubly worked
for this new duty, while William skipped from brick to brick laid down
on the trampled mud, and dosed her charges with warming medicines that
made them rub their little round stomachs; and the milch goats throve
on the rank grass. There was never a word from Scott in the Khanda
district, away to the southeast, except the regular telegraphic report
to Hawkins. The rude country roads had disappeared; his drivers were
half mutinous; one of Martyn's loaned policemen had died of cholera; and
Scott was taking thirty grains of quinine a day to fight the fever
that comes with the rain: but those were things Scott did not consider
necessary to report. He was, as usual, working from a base of supplies
on a railway line, to cover a circle of fifteen miles radius, and since
full loads were impossible, he took quarter-loads, and toiled four times
as hard by consequence; for he did not choose to risk an epidemic which
might have grown uncontrollable by assembling villagers in thousands at
the relief-sheds. It was cheaper to take Government bullocks, work them
to death, and leave them to the crows in the wayside sloughs.

That was the time when eight years of clean living and hard condition
told, though a man's head were ringing like a bell from the cinchona,
and the earth swayed under his feet when he stood and under his bed when
he slept. If Hawkins had seen fit to make him a bullock-driver, that, he
thought, was entirely Hawkins's own affair. There were men in the North
who would know what he had done; men of thirty years' service in his
own department who would say that it was "not half bad"; and above,
immeasurably above, all men of all grades, there was William in the
thick of the fight, who would approve because she understood. He had so
trained his mind that it would hold fast to the mechanical routine of
the day, though his own voice sounded strange in his own ears, and his
hands, when he wrote, grew large as pillows or small as peas at the end
of his wrists. That steadfastness bore his body to the telegraph-office
at the railway-station, and dictated a telegram to Hawkins saying that
the Khanda district was, in his judgment, now safe, and he "waited
further orders."

The Madrassee telegraph-clerk did