, spent his poor
little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own
tongue 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 Smallpox. 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 sarang 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