I have done one braver thing
Than all the worthies did;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is to keep that hid.
THE UNDERTAKING.
'Is it officially declared yet?'
'They've gone as far as to admit extreme local scarcity, and they've
started relief-works in one or two districts, the paper says.'
'That means it will be declared as soon as they can make sure of the
men and the rolling-stock. Shouldn't wonder if it were as bad as the
Big Famine.'
'Can't be,' said Scott, turning a little in the long cane chair.
'We've had fifteen-anna crops in the north, and Bombay and Bengal
report more than they know what to do with. They'll be able to check
it before it gets out of hand. It will only be local.'
Martyn picked up the _Pioneer_ from the table, read through the
telegrams once more, and put up his feet on the chair-rests. It was a
hot, dark, breathless evening, heavy with the smell of the
newly-watered Mall. The flowers in the Club gardens were dead and
black on their stalks, the little lotus-pond was a circle of caked
mud, and the tamarisk-trees were white with the dust of days. Most of
the men were at the bandstand in the public gardens--from the Club
verandah you could hear the native Police band hammering stale
waltzes--or on the polo-ground or in the high-walled fives-court,
hotter than a Dutch oven. Half a dozen grooms, squatted at the heads
of their ponies, waited their masters' return. From time to time a
man would ride at a foot-pace into the Club compound, and listlessly
loaf over to the whitewashed barracks beside the main building. These
were supposed to be chambers. Men lived in them, meeting the same
faces night after night at dinner, and drawing out their office-work
till the latest possible hour, that they might escape that doleful
company.
'What are you going to do?' said Martyn, with a yawn. 'Let's have a
swim before dinner.'
'Water's hot,' said Scott. 'I was at the bath to-day.'
'Play you game o' billiards--fifty up.'
'It's a hundred and five in the hall now. Sit still and don't be so
abominably energetic.'
A grunting camel swung up to the porch, his badged and belted rider
fumbling a leather pouch.
'_Kubber-kargaz--ki--yektraaa_,' the man whined, handing down the
newspaper extra--a slip printed on one side only, and damp from the
press. It was pinned on the green baize-board, between notices of
ponies for sale and fox-terriers missing.
Martyn rose lazily, read it, and whistled. 'It's declared!' he cried.
'One, two, three--eight districts go under the operation of the
Famine Code _ek dum_. They've put Jimmy Hawkins in charge.'
'Good business!' said Scott, with the first sign of interest he had
shown. 'When in doubt hire a Punjabi. I worked under Jimmy when I
first came out and he belonged to the Punjab. He has more _bundobust_
than most men.'
'Jimmy's a Jubilee Knight now,' said Martyn. 'He was a good chap,
even though he is a thrice-born civilian and went to the Benighted
Presidency. What unholy names these Madras districts rejoice in--all
_ungas_ or _rungas_ or _pillays_ or _polliums_.'
A dog-cart drove up, and a man entered, mopping his head. He was
editor of the one daily paper at the capital of a province of
twenty-five million natives and a few hundred white men, and as his
staff was limited to himself and one assistant, his office hours ran
variously from ten to twenty a day.
'Hi, Raines; you're supposed to know everything,' said Martyn,
stopping him. 'How's this Madras "scarcity" going to turn out?'
'No one knows as yet. There's a message as long as your arm coming in
on the telephone. I've left my cub to fill it out. Madras has owned
she can't manage it alone, and Jimmy seems to have a free hand in
getting all the men he needs. Arbuthnot's warned to hold himself in
readiness.'
'"Badger" Arbuthnot?'
'The Peshawur chap. Yes, and the _Pi_ wires that Ellis and Clay have
been moved from the North-West already, and they've taken half a
dozen Bombay men, too. It's pukka famine, by the looks of it.'
'They're nearer the scene of action than we are; but if it comes to
indenting on the Punjab this early, there's more in this than meets
the eye,' said Martyn.
'Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Didn't come to stay for ever,' said
Scott, dropping one of Marryat's novels, and rising to his feet.
'Martyn, your sister's waiting for you.'
A rough gray horse was backing and shifting at the edge of the
verandah, where the light of a kerosene-lamp fell on a brown calico
habit and a white face under a gray felt hat.
'Right, O,' said Martyn. 'I'm ready. Better come and dine with us if
you've nothing to do, Scott. William, is there any dinner in the
house?'
'I'll go home first and see,' was the rider's answer. 'You can drive
him over--at eight, remember.'
Scott moved leisurely to his room, and changed into the evening-dress
of the season and the country: spotless white linen from head to
foot, with a broad silk cummerbund. Dinner at the Martyns' was a
decided improvement on the goat-mutton, twiney-tough fowl, and
tinned entrees of the Club. But it was a great pity Martyn could not
afford to send his sister to the Hills for the hot weather. As an
Acting District Superintendent of Police, Martyn drew the magnificent
pay of six hundred depreciated silver rupees a month, and his little
four-roomed bungalow said just as much. There were the usual
blue-and-white striped jail-made rugs on the uneven floor; the usual
glass studded Amritsar _phulkaris_ draped to nails driven into the
flaking whitewash of the walls; the usual half-dozen chairs that did
not match, picked up at sales of dead men's effects; and the usual
streaks of black grease where the leather punka-thong ran through the
wall. It was as though everything had been unpacked the night before
to be repacked next morning. Not a door in the house was true on its
hinges. The little windows, fifteen feet up, were darkened with
wasp-nests, and lizards hunted flies between the beams of the
wood-ceiled roof. But all this was part of Scott's life. Thus did
people live who had such an income; and in a land where each man's
pay, age, and position are printed in a book, that all may read, it
is hardly worth while to play at pretences in word or deed. Scott
counted eight years' service in the Irrigation Department, and drew
eight hundred rupees a month, on the understanding that if he served
the State faithfully for another twenty-two years he could retire on
a pension of some four hundred rupees a month. His working life,
which had been spent chiefly under canvas or in temporary shelters
where a man could sleep, eat, and write letters, was bound up with
the opening and guarding of irrigation canals, the handling of two or
three thousand workmen of all castes and creeds, and the payment of
vast sums of coined silver. He had finished that spring, not without
credit, the last section of the great Mosuhl Canal, and--much against
his will, for he hated office work--had been sent in to serve during
the hot weather on the accounts and supply side of the Department,
with sole charge of the sweltering sub-office at the capital of the
Province. Martyn knew this; William, his sister, knew it; and
everybody knew it.
Scott knew, too, as well as the rest of the world, that Miss Martyn
had come out to India four years before, to keep house for her
brother, who, as everyone, again, knew, had borrowed the money to pay
for her passage, and that she ought, as all the world said, to have
married long ago. Instead of this, she had refused some half a dozen
subalterns, a civilian twenty years her senior, one major, and a man
in the Indian Medical Department. This, too, was common property. She
had 'stayed down three hot weathers,' as the saying is, because her
brother was in debt and could not afford the expense of her keep at
even a cheap hill-station. Therefore her face was white as bone, and
in the centre of her forehead was a big silvery scar about the size
of a shilling--the mark of a Delhi sore, which is the same as a
'Bagdad date.' This comes from drinking bad water, and slowly eats
into the flesh till it is ripe enough to be burned out with acids.
None the less William had enjoyed herself hugely in her four years.
Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river on horseback;
once she had been run away with on a camel; had witnessed a midnight
attack of thieves on her brother's camp; had seen justice
administered with long sticks, in the open under trees; could speak
Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her
seniors; had altogether fallen out of the habit of writing to her
aunts in England, or cutting the pages of the English magazines; had
been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told;
and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever,
during which her head had been shaved; and hoped to keep her
twenty-third birthday that September. It is conceivable that her
aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the
ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl
thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over
her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill;
whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could
act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants
and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men
slowly and deliberately between the eyes--yea, after they had
proposed to her and been rejected.
'I like men who do things,' she had confided to a man in the
Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth merchants
and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth's 'Excursion' in annotated
cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she
'didn't understand poetry very much; it made her head ache,' and
another broken heart took refuge at the Club. But it was all
William's fault. She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work,
and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.
Scott had known her more or less for some three years, meeting her,
as a rule, under canvas when his camp and her brother's joined for a
day on the edge of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several
times at the big Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred
white people came into the station; and he had always a great
respect for her housekeeping and her dinners.
She looked more like a boy than ever when, after their meal, she sat,
one foot tucked under her, on the leather camp-sofa, rolling
cigarettes for her brother, her low forehead puckered beneath the
dark curls as she twiddled the papers. She stuck out her rounded
chin when the tobacco stayed in place, and, with a gesture as true as
a school-boy's throwing a stone, tossed the finished article across
the room to Martyn, who caught it with one hand, and continued his
talk with Scott. It was all 'shop,'--canals and the policing of
canals; the sins of villagers who stole more water than they had paid
for, and the grosser sin of native constables who connived at the
thefts; of the transplanting bodily of villages to newly-irrigated
ground, and of the coming fight with the desert in the south when the
Provincial funds should warrant the opening of the long-surveyed Luni
Protective Canal System. And Scott spoke openly of his great desire
to be put on one particular section of the work where he knew the
land and the people, and Martyn sighed for a billet in the Himalayan
foot-hills, and spoke his mind of his superiors, and William rolled
cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on her brother
because he was happy.
At ten Scott's horse came to the door, and the evening was ended.
The lights of the two low bungalows in which the daily paper was
printed showed bright across the road. It was too early to try to
find sleep, and Scott drifted over to the editor. Raines, stripped
to the waist like a sailor at a gun, lay in a long chair, waiting
for night telegrams. He had a theory that if a man did not stay by
his work all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever;
so he ate and slept among his files.
'Can you do it?' he said drowsily. 'I didn't mean to bring you over.'
'About what? I've been dining at the Martyns'.'
'The famine, of course, Martyn's warned for it, too. They're taking
men where they can find 'em. I sent a note to you at the Club just
now, asking if you could do us a letter once a week from the
south--between two and three columns, say. Nothing sensational, of
course, but just plain facts about who is doing what, and so forth.
Our regular rates--ten rupees a column.'
'Sorry, but it's out of my line,' Scott answered, staring absently at
the map of India on the wall. 'It's rough on Martyn--very. Wonder
what he'll do with his sister. Wonder what the deuce they'll do with
me? I've no famine experience. This is the first I've heard of it.
_Am_ I ordered?'
'Oh, yes. Here's the wire. They'll put you on relief-works,' Raines
went on, 'with a horde of Madrassis dying like flies; one native
apothecary and half a pint of cholera-mixture among the ten thousand
of you. It comes of your being idle for the moment. Every man who
isn't doing two men's work seems to have been called upon. Hawkins
evidently believes in Punjabis. It's going to be quite as bad as
anything they have had in the last ten years.'
'It's all in the day's work, worse luck. I suppose I shall get my
orders officially some time to morrow. I'm glad I happened to drop
in. Better go and pack my kit now. Who relieves me here--do you
know?'
Raines turned over a sheaf of telegrams. 'McEuan,' said he, 'from
Murree.'
Scott chuckled. 'He thought he was going to be cool all summer. He'll
be very sick about this. Well, no good talking. Night.'
Two hours later, Scott, with a clear conscience, laid himself down to
rest on a string cot in a bare room. Two worn bullock-trunks, a
leather water-bottle, a tin ice-box, and his pet saddle sewed up in
sacking were piled at the door, and the Club secretary's receipt for
last month's bill was under his pillow. His orders came next morning,
and with them an unofficial telegram from Sir James Hawkins, who did
not forget good men, bidding him report himself with all speed at
some unpronounceable place fifteen hundred miles to the south, for
the famine was sore in the land, and white men were needed.
A pink and fattish youth arrived in the red-hot noonday, whimpering a
little at fate and famines, which never allowed any one three months'
peace. He was Scott's successor--another cog in the machinery, moved
forward behind his fellow, whose services, as the official
announcement ran, 'were placed at the disposal of the Madras
Government for famine duty until further orders.' Scott handed over
the funds in his charge, showed him the coolest corner in the office,
warned him against excess of zeal, and, as twilight fell, departed
from the Club in a hired carriage, with his faithful body servant,
Faiz Ullah, and a mound of disordered baggage atop, to catch the
Southern Mail at the loopholed and bastioned railway-station. The
heat from the thick brick walls struck him across the face as if it
had been a hot towel, and he reflected that there were at least five
nights and four days of travel before him. Faiz Ullah, used to the
chances of service, plunged into the crowd on the stone platform,
while Scott, a black cheroot between his teeth, waited till his
compartment should be set away. A dozen native policemen, with their
rifles and bundles, shouldered into the press of Punjabi farmers,
Sikh craftsmen, and greasy-locked Afreedee pedlars, escorting with
all pomp Martyn's uniform case, water-bottles, ice-box, and
bedding-roll. They saw Faiz Ullah's lifted hand, and steered for it.
'My Sahib and your Sahib,' said Faiz Ullah to Martyn's man, 'will
travel together. Thou and I, O brother, will thus secure the
servants' places close by, and because of our masters' authority none
will dare to disturb us.'
When Faiz Ullah reported all things ready, Scott settled down
coatless and bootless on the broad leather-covered bunk. The heat
under the iron-arched roof of the station might have been anything
over a hundred degrees. At the last moment Martyn entered, hot and
dripping.
'Don't swear,' said Scott, lazily; 'it's too late to change your
carriage; and we'll divide the ice.'
'What are you doing here?' said the policeman.
'Lent to the Madras Government, same as you. By Jove, it's a bender
of a night! Are you taking any of your men down?'
'A dozen. Suppose I'll have to superintend relief distributions.
Didn't know you were under orders too.'
'I didn't till after I left you last night. Raines had the news
first. My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and
I got off at once. Shouldn't wonder if it wouldn't be a good
thing--this famine--if we come through it alive.'
'Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together,' said Martyn; and
then, after a pause: 'My sister's here.'
'Good business,' said Scott, heartily. 'Going to get off at Umballa,
I suppose, and go up to Simla. Who'll she stay with there?'
'No-o; that's just the trouble of it. She's going down with me.'
Scott sat bolt upright under the oil lamp as the train jolted past
Tarn-Taran station. 'What! You don't mean you couldn't afford--'
'Oh, I'd have scraped up the money somehow.'
'You might have come to me, to begin with,' said Scott, stiffly; 'we
aren't altogether strangers.'
'Well, you needn't be stuffy about it. I might, but--you don't know
my sister. I've been explaining and exhorting and entreating and
commanding and all the rest of it all day--lost my temper since seven
this morning, and haven't got it back yet--but she wouldn't hear of
any compromise, A woman's entitled to travel with her husband if she
wants to, and William says she's on the same footing. You see, we've
been together all our lives, more or less, since my people died. It
isn't as if she were an ordinary sister.'
'All the sisters I've ever heard of would have stayed where they were
well off.'
'She's as clever as a man, confound her,' Martyn went on. 'She broke
up the bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. Settled the
whole _subchiz_ [outfit] in three hours--servants, horses, and all. I
didn't get my orders till nine.
'Jimmy Hawkins won't be pleased,' said Scott. 'A famine's no place
for a woman.'
'Mrs. Jim--I mean Lady Jim's in camp with him. At any rate, she says
she will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own
responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from
under me by showing me her answer.'
Scott laughed aloud. 'If she can do that she can take care of
herself, and Mrs. Jim won't let her run into any mischief. There
aren't many women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine
with their eyes open. It isn't as if she didn't know what these
things mean. She was through the Jaloo cholera last year.'
The train stopped at Amritsar, and Scott went back to the ladies'
compartment, immediately behind their carriage. William, a cloth
riding-cap on her curls, nodded affably.
'Come in and have some tea,' she said. 'Best thing in the world for
heat-apoplexy.'
'Do I look as if I were going to have heat-apoplexy?'
'Never can tell,' said William, wisely. 'It's always best to be
ready.'
She had arranged her belongings with the knowledge of an old
campaigner. A felt-covered water-bottle hung in the draught of one
of the shuttered windows; a tea-set of Russian china, packed in a
wadded basket, stood ready on the seat: and a travelling spirit-lamp
was clamped against the woodwork above it.
William served them generously, in large cups, hot tea, which saves
the veins of the neck from swelling inopportunely on a hot night. It
was characteristic of the girl that, her plan of action once settled,
she asked for no comments on it. Life with men who had a great deal
of work to do, and very little time to do it in, had taught her the
wisdom of effacing as well as of fending for herself. She did not by
word or deed suggest that she would be useful, comforting, or
beautiful in their travels, but continued about her business
serenely: put the cups back without clatter when tea was ended, and
made cigarettes for her guests.
'This time last night,' said Scott, 'we didn't expect--er--this kind
of thing, did we?'
'I've learned to expect anything,' said William. 'You know, in our
service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this
ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally--if we live.'
'It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,' Scott replied,
with equal gravity. 'I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works
this cold weather; but there's no saying how long the famine may keep
us.'
'Hardly beyond October I should think,' said Martyn. 'It will be
ended, one way or the other, then.'
'And we've nearly a week of this,' said William. 'Sha'n't we be dusty
when it's over?'
For a night and a day they knew their surroundings; and for a night
and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a
narrow-gauge line, they remembered how in the days of their
apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the
languages in which the names of the stations were written changed,
and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very
smells were new. Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in
front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from
far off. They waited in extemporised sidings blocked by processions
of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to
slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where;
but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks,
and dogs howled.
Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the
untravelled Englishman--the flat, red India of palm-tree,
palmyra-palm, and rice, the India of the picture-books, of _Little
Henry and His Bearer_--all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had
left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and
far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train,
holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would
be left behind, men and women clustering round and above it like ants
by spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a
regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder;
and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived
that the burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up
beside their dead oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met
more white men, here one and there two, whose tents stood close to
the line, and who came armed with written authorities and angry words
to cut off a truck. They were too busy to do more than nod at Scott
and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who could do nothing
except make tea, and watch how her men staved off the rush of
wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time in
heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking
receipts from the hollowed-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another
argot than theirs.
They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of tea; for they were
six days and seven nights on the road, and it seemed to them like
seven times seven years.
At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red
fires of railway sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they
came to their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of
the Famine, unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command
of affairs.
Martyn, he decreed, then and there, was to live on trains till
further orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with
starving people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp
on the edge of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and
return, and his constables would guard the loaded grain-cars, also
picking up people, and would drop them at a camp a hundred miles
south. Scott--Hawkins was very glad to see Scott again--would, that
same hour, take charge of a convoy of bullock-carts, and would go
south, feeding as he went, to yet another famine-camp, far from the
rail, where he would leave his starving--there would be no lack of
starving on the route--and wait for orders by telegraph. Generally,
Scott was in all small things to do what he thought best.
William bit her under lip. There was no one in the wide world like
her one brother, but Martyn's orders gave him no discretion. She came
out, masked with dust from head to foot, a horse-shoe wrinkle on her
forehead, put here by much thinking during the past week, but as
self-possessed as ever. Mrs. Jim--who should have been Lady Jim, but
that no one remembered to call her aright--took possession of her
with a little gasp.
'Oh, I'm so glad you're here,' she almost sobbed. 'You oughtn't to,
of course, but there--there isn't another woman in the place, and we
must help each other, you know; and we've all the wretched people and
the little babies they are selling.'
'I've seen some,' said William.
'Isn't it ghastly? I've bought twenty; they're in our camp; but won't
you have something to eat first? We've more than ten people can do
here; and I've got a horse for you. Oh, I'm so glad you've come!
You're a Punjabi too, you know.'
'Steady, Lizzie,' said Hawkins, over his shoulder. 'We'll look after
you, Miss Martyn. Sorry I can't ask you to breakfast, Martyn. You'll
have to eat as you go. Leave two of your men to help Scott. These
poor devils can't stand up to load carts. Saunders' (this to the
engine-driver, half asleep in the cab), 'back down and get those
empties away.' You've 'line clear' to Anundrapillay; they'll give you
orders north of that. Scott, load up your carts from that B.P.P.
truck, and be off as soon as you can. The Eurasian in the pink shirt
is your interpreter and guide. You'll find an apothecary of sorts
tied to the yoke of the second wagon. He's been trying to bolt;
you'll have to look after him. Lizzie, drive Miss Martyn to camp, and
tell them to send the red horse down here for me.'
Scott, with Faiz Ullah and two policemen, was already busy on the
carts, backing them up to the truck and unbolting the sideboards
quietly, while the others pitched in the bags of millet and wheat.
Hawkins watched him for as long as it took to fill one cart.
'That's a good man,' he said. 'If all goes well I shall work
him--hard.' This was Jim Hawkins's notion of the highest compliment
one human being could pay another.
An hour later Scott was under way; the apothecary threatening him
with the penalties of the law for that he, a member of the
Subordinate Medical Department, had been coerced and bound against
his will and all laws governing the liberty of the subject; the
pink-shirted Eurasian begging leave to see his mother, who happened
to be dying some three miles, away: 'Only verree, verree short leave
of absence, and will presently return, sar--'; the two constables,
armed with staves, bringing up the rear; and Faiz Ullah, a
Mohammedan's contempt for all Hindoos and foreigners in every line of
his face, explaining to the drivers that though Scott Sahib was a man
to be feared on all fours, he, Faiz Ullah, was Authority itself.
The procession creaked past Hawkins's camp--three stained tents under
a clump of dead trees; behind them the famine-shed where a crowd of
hopeless ones tossed their arms around the cooking-kettles.
'Wish to Heaven William had kept out of it,' said Scott to himself,
after a glance. 'We'll have cholera, sure as a gun, when the Rains
come.'
But William seemed to have taken kindly to the operations of the
Famine Code, which, when famine is declared, supersede the workings
of the ordinary law. Scott saw her, the centre of a mob of weeping
women, in a calico riding-habit and a blue-gray felt hat with a gold
puggaree.
'I want fifty rupees, please. I forgot to ask Jack before he went
away. Can you lend it me? It's for condensed milk for the babies,'
said she.
Scott took the money from his belt, and handed it over without a
word. 'For goodness sake take care of yourself,' he said.
'Oh, I shall be all right. We ought to get the milk in two days. By
the way, the orders are, I was to tell you, that you're to take one
of Sir Jim's horses. There's a gray Cabuli here that I thought would
be just your style, so I've said you'd take him. Was that right?'
'That's awfully good of you. We can't either of us talk much about
style, I'm afraid.'
Scott was in a weather-stained drill shooting-kit, very white at the
seams and a little frayed at the wrists. William regarded him
thoughtfully, from his pith helmet to his greased ankle-boots. 'You
look very nice, I think. Are you sure you've everything you'll
need--quinine, chlorodyne, and so on?'
'Think so,' said Scott, patting three or four of his shooting pockets
as the horse was led up, and he mounted and rode alongside his
convoy.
'Good-bye,' he cried.
'Good-bye, and good luck,' said William. 'I'm awfully obliged for the
money.' She turned on a spurred heel and disappeared into the tent,
while the carts pushed on past the famine-sheds, past the roaring
lines of the thick, fat fires, down to the baked Gehenna of the
South.