PART II

･007

THE MALTESE CAT

“BREAD UPON THE WATERS”

AN ERROR IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION

MY SUNDAY AT HOME

THE BRUSHWOOD BOY

THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS

The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was

a C. I. E.; he dreamed of a C. S. I.: indeed, his friends told him that

he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,

disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility

almost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through

that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his

charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, his

Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop

would bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it,

and there would be speeches.

Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran

along one of the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared

away north and south for three miles on either side of the river—and

permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work

was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge,

trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick

piers. Each one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped

with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the

Ganges’ bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above

that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At

either end rose towers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced

for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to

their haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with

hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning

borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was

filled with the noise of hooves, the rattle of the drivers’ sticks, and

the swish and roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the

dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of

railway-sleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support

the last of the girders as those were riveted up. In the little deep

water left by the drought, an overhead-crane travelled to and fro along

its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron into place, snorting and

backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber-yard. Riveters

by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of

the railway-line, hung from invisible staging under the bellies of the

girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the

overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of

flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale yellow

in the sun’s glare. East and west and north and south the

construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments,

the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the

side-boards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand

tons more material were flung out to hold the river in place.

Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of

the country that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on

the humming village of five thousand workmen; up stream and down, along

the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers,

lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers—and only he knew

how strong those were—and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work

was good. There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking

only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers—his

bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but _pukka_—permanent—to endure

when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson

truss, had perished. Practically, the thing was done.

Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little

switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted

securely over a trestle, and nodded to his chief.

“All but,” said he, with a smile.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” the senior answered. “Not half a bad job

for two men, is it?”

“One—and a half. Gad, what a Cooper’s Hill cub I was when I came on the

works!” Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past

three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.

“You _were_ rather a colt,” said Findlayson. “I wonder how you’ll like

going back to office-work when this job’s over.”

“I shall hate it!” said the young man, and as he went on his eye

followed Findlayson’s, and he muttered, “Isn’t it damned good?”

“I think we’ll go up the service together,” Findlayson said to himself.

“You’re too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wast;

assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if

any credit comes to me out of the business!”

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and

his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness

to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by the

half-hundred—fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway

workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to

direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen—but none knew better

than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to

be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises—by slipping

of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of

the river—but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom

Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as

remorselessly as they worked themselves. Findlayson thought it over

from the beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when

the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the

width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of

paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations—and

Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept;

the heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England;

the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if

one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that

followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end

that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month’s leave

to another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, 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 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 to clear the scaffolding from

the guard-tower on the right bank, and Peroo with his mates was casting

loose and lowering down the bamboo poles and planks as swiftly as ever

they had whipped the cargo out of a coaster.

From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang’s silver pipe

and the creak and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was standing on the

topmost coping of the tower, clad in the blue dungaree of his abandoned

service, and as Findlayson motioned to him to be careful, for his was

no life to throw away, he gripped the last pole, and, shading his eyes

ship-fashion, answered with the long-drawn wail of the fo’c’sle

lookout: “_Ham dekhta hai_” (“I am looking out”). Findlayson laughed

and then sighed. It was years since he had seen a steamer, and he was

sick for home. As his trolley passed under the tower, Peroo descended

by a rope, ape-fashion, and cried: “It looks well now, Sahib. Our

bridge is all but done. What think you Mother Gunga will say when the

rail runs over?”

“She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that delayed

us.”

“There is always time for her; and none the less there has been delay.

Has the Sahib forgotten last autumn’s flood, when the stoneboats were

sunk without warning—or only a half-day’s warning?”

“Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs are

holding well on the west bank.”

“Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for more

stone on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib”—he meant

Hitchcock— “and he laughs.”

“No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a bridge in

thine own fashion.”

The Lascar grinned. “Then it will not be in this way—with stonework

sunk under water, as the _Quetta_ was sunk. I like sus-suspen-sheen

bridges that fly from bank to bank, with one big step, like a

gang-plank. Then no water can hurt. When does the Lord Sahib come to

open the bridge?”

“In three months, when the weather is cooler.”

“Ho! ho! He is like the Burra Malum. He sleeps below while the work is

being done. Then he comes upon the quarter-deck and touches with his

finger, and says: ‘This is not clean! Dam jibboonwallah!’”

“But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam jibboonwallah, Peroo.”

“No, Sahib; but he does not come on deck till the work is all finished.

Even the Burra Malum of the _Nerbudda_ said once at Tuticorin—”

“Bah! Go! I am busy.”

“I, also!” said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. “May I take the

light dinghy now and row along the spurs?”

“To hold them with thy hands? They are, I think, sufficiently heavy.”

“Nay, Sahib. It is thus. At sea, on the Black Water, we have room to be

blown up and down without care. Here we have no room at all. Look you,

we have put the river into a dock, and run her between stone sills.”

Findlayson smiled at the “we.”

“We have bitted and bridled her. She is not like the sea, that can beat

against a soft beach. She is Mother Gunga—in irons.” His voice fell a

little.

“Peroo, thou hast been up and down the world more even than I. Speak

true talk, now. How much dost thou in thy heart believe of Mother

Gunga?”

“All that our priest says. London is London, Sahib. Sydney is Sydney,

and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is Mother Gunga, and

when I come back to her banks I know this and worship. In London I did

poojah to the big temple by the river for the sake of the God within .

. . . Yes, I will not take the cushions in the dinghy.”

Findlayson mounted his horse and trotted to the shed of a bungalow that

he shared with his assistant. The place had become home to him in the

last three years. He had grilled in the heat, sweated in the rains, and

shivered with fever under the rude thatch roof; the lime-wash beside

the door was covered with rough drawings and formulae, and the

sentry-path trodden in the matting of the verandah showed where he had

walked alone. There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer’s work, and

the evening meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over

their cigars they listened to the hum of the village as the gangs came

up from the river-bed and the lights began to twinkle.

“Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He’s taken a couple of

nephews with him, and he’s lolling in the stern like a commodore,” said

Hitchcock.

“That’s all right. He’s got something on his mind. You’d think that ten

years in the British India boats would have knocked most of his

religion out of him.”

“So it has,” said Hitchcock, chuckling. “I overheard him the other day

in the middle of a most atheistical talk with that fat old _guru_ of

theirs. Peroo denied the efficacy of prayer; and wanted the _guru_ to

go to sea and watch a gale out with him, and see if he could stop a

monsoon.”

“All the same, if you carried off his _guru_ he’d leave us like a shot.

He was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St. Paul’s when

he was in London.”

“He told me that the first time he went into the engine-room of a

steamer, when he was a boy, he prayed to the low-pressure cylinder.”

“Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He’s propitiating his own

Gods now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think of a bridge

being run across her. Who’s there?” A shadow darkened the doorway, and

a telegram was put into Hitchcock’s hand.

“She ought to be pretty well used to it by this time. Only a _tar_. It

ought to be Ralli’s answer about the new rivets. . . . Great Heavens!”

Hitchcock jumped to his feet.

“What is it?” said the senior, and took the form. “_That’s_ what Mother

Gunga thinks, is it,” he said, reading. “Keep cool, young’un. We’ve got

all our work cut out for us. Let’s see. Muir wired half an hour ago:

‘_Floods on the Ramgunga. Look out_.’ Well, that gives us—one, two—nine

and a half for the flood to reach Melipur Ghaut and seven’s sixteen and

a half to Lataoli—say fifteen hours before it comes down to us.”

“Curse that hill-fed sewer of a Ramgunga! Findlayson, this is two

months before anything could have been expected, and the left bank is

littered up with stuff still. Two full months before the time!”

“That’s why it comes. I’ve only known Indian rivers for five-and-twenty

years, and I don’t pretend to understand. Here comes another _tar_.”

Findlayson opened the telegram. “Cockran, this time, from the Ganges

Canal: ‘_Heavy rains here. Bad._’ He might have saved the last word.

Well, we don’t want to know any more. We’ve got to work the gangs all

night and clean up the river-bed. You’ll take the east bank and work

out to meet me in the middle. Get every thing that floats below the

bridge: we shall have quite enough rivercraft coming down adrift

anyhow, without letting the stone-boats ram the piers. What have you

got on the east bank that needs looking after.”

“Pontoon—one big pontoon with the overhead crane on it. T’other

overhead crane on the mended pontoon, with the cart-road rivets from

Twenty to Twenty-three piers—two construction lines, and a

turning-spur. The pilework must take its chance,” said Hitchcock.

“All right. Roll up everything you can lay hands on. We’ll give the

gang fifteen minutes more to eat their grub.”

Close to the verandah stood a big night-gong, never used except for

flood, or fire in the village. Hitchcock had called for a fresh horse,

and was off to his side of the bridge when Findlayson took the

cloth-bound stick and smote with the rubbing stroke that brings out the

full thunder of the metal.

Long before the last rumble ceased every night-gong in the village had

taken up the warning. To these were added the hoarse screaming of

conches in the little temples; the throbbing of drums and tom-toms;

and, from the European quarters, where the riveters lived, McCartney’s

bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed

desperately, calling to “Stables.” Engine after engine toiling home

along the spurs at the end of her day’s work whistled in answer till

the whistles were answered from the far bank. Then the big gong

thundered thrice for a sign that it was flood and not fire; conch,

drum, and whistle echoed the call, and the village quivered to the

sound of bare feet running upon soft earth. The order in all cases was

to stand by the day’s work and wait instructions. The gangs poured by

in the dusk; men stopping to knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal;

gang-foremen shouting to their subordinates as they ran or paused by

the tool-issue sheds for bars and mattocks; locomotives creeping down

their tracks wheel-deep in the crowd; till the brown torrent

disappeared into the dusk of the river-bed, raced over the pilework,

swarmed along the lattices, clustered by the cranes, and stood still,

each man in his place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take up

everything and bear it beyond highwater mark, and the flare-lamps broke

out by the hundred between the webs of dull iron as the riveters began

a night’s work, racing against the flood that was to come. The girders

of the three centre piers—those that stood on the cribs—were all but in

position. They needed just as many rivets as could be driven into them,

for the flood would assuredly wash out their supports, and the ironwork

would settle down on the caps of stone if they were not blocked at the

ends. A hundred crowbars strained at the sleepers of the temporary line

that fed the unfinished piers. It was heaved up in lengths, loaded into

trucks, and backed up the bank beyond flood-level by the groaning

locomotives. The tool-sheds on the sands melted away before the attack

of shouting armies, and with them went the stacked ranks of Government

stores, iron-bound boxes of rivets, pliers, cutters, duplicate parts of

the riveting-machines, spare pumps and chains. The big crane would be

the last to be shifted, for she was hoisting all the heavy stuff up to

the main structure of the bridge. The concrete blocks on the fleet of

stone-boats were dropped overside, where there was any depth of water,

to guard the piers, and the empty boats themselves were poled under the

bridge down-stream. It was here that Peroo’s pipe shrilled loudest, for

the first stroke of the big gong had brought the dinghy back at racing

speed, and Peroo and his people were stripped to the waist, working for

the honour and credit which are better than life.

“I knew she would speak,” he cried. “_I_ knew, but the telegraph gives

us good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting—children of

unspeakable shame—are we here for the look of the thing?” It was two

feet of wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders as Peroo

leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of the sea.

Findlayson was more troubled for the stone-boats than anything else.

McCartney, with his gangs, was blocking up the ends of the three

doubtful spans, but boats adrift, if the flood chanced to be a high

one, might endanger the girders; and there was a very fleet in the

shrunken channel.

“Get them behind the swell of the guard-tower,” he shouted down to

Peroo. “It will be dead-water there. Get them below the bridge.”

“_Accha!_ [Very good.] _I_ know; we are mooring them with wire-rope,”

was the answer. “Heh! Listen to the Chota Sahib. He is working hard.”

From across the river came an almost continuous whistling of

locomotives, backed by the rumble of stone. Hitchcock at the last

minute was spending a few hundred more trucks of Tarakee stone in

reinforcing his spurs and embankments.

“The bridge challenges Mother Gunga,” said Peroo, with a laugh. “But

when _she_ talks I know whose voice will be the loudest.”

For hours the naked men worked, screaming and shouting under the

lights. It was a hot, moonless night; the end of it was darkened by

clouds and a sudden squall that made Findlayson very grave.

“She moves!” said Peroo, just before the dawn. “Mother Gunga is awake!

Hear!” He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the current

mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with a crisp slap.

“Six hours before her time,” said Findlayson, mopping his forehead

savagely. “Now we can’t depend on anything. We’d better clear all hands

out of the river-bed.”

Again the big gong beat, and a second time there was the rushing of

naked feet on earth and ringing iron; the clatter of tools ceased. In

the silence, men heard the dry yawn of water crawling over thirsty

sand.

Foreman after foreman shouted to Findlayson, who had posted himself by

the guard-tower, that his section of the river-bed had been cleaned

out, and when the last voice dropped Findlayson hurried over the bridge

till the iron plating of the permanent way gave place to the temporary

plank-walk over the three centre piers, and there he met Hitchcock.

“All clear your side?” said Findlayson. The whisper rang in the box of

latticework.

“Yes, and the east channel’s filling now. We’re utterly out of our

reckoning. When is this thing down on us?”

“There’s no saying. She’s filling as fast as she can. Look!” Findlayson

pointed to the planks below his feet, where the sand, burned and

defiled by months of work, was beginning to whisper and fizz.

“What orders?” said Hitchcock.

“Call the roll—count stores—sit on your hunkers—and pray for the

bridge. That’s all I can think of. Good night. Don’t risk your life

trying to fish out anything that may go down-stream.”

“Oh, I’ll be as prudent as you are! ’Night. Heavens, how she’s filling!

Here’s the rain in earnest!” Findlayson picked his way back to his

bank, sweeping the last of McCartney’s riveters before him. The gangs

had spread themselves along the embankments, regardless of the cold

rain of the dawn, and there they waited for the flood. Only Peroo kept

his men together behind the swell of the guard-tower, where the

stone-boats lay tied fore and aft with hawsers, wire-rope, and chains.

A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half

wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to bank between the

stone facings, and the faraway spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother

Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured

water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the

water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the

cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats

groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the

abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher against the dim

sky-line.

“Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do. Now

she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!” said Peroo,

watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. “Ohé! Fight, then!

Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out.”

But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first

down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river

lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer,

plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the

piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his

work.

When day came the village gasped. “Only last night,” men said, turning

to each other, “it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!”

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water

that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by

rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream

were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the

pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the

horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen

together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when

it touched a pier.

“Big flood,” said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood

as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her

now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there

happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry

his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was

nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his

macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were

over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking

the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he

listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the

hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the

full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he

could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a

locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge’s failure

would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young man

with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant

everything—everything that made a hard life worth the living. They

would say, the men of his own profession. . . he remembered the half

pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart’s new waterworks

burst and broke down in brickheaps and sludge, and Lockhart’s spirit

broke in him and he died. He remembered what he himself had said when

the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by the sea; and most he

remembered poor Hartopp’s face three weeks later, when the shame had

marked it. His bridge was twice the size of Hartopp’s, and it carried

the Findlayson truss as well as the new pier-shoe—the Findlayson bolted

shoe. There were no excuses in his service. Government might listen,

perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood

or fell. He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span,

brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing, estimating, and

recalculating, lest there should be any mistake; and through the long

hours and through the flights of formulae that danced and wheeled

before him a cold fear would come to pinch his heart. His side of the

sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic?

Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication-table, the river

might be scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of any one of those

eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to

him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink and

return to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still rising.

Peroo, in a mat shelter-coat, crouched at his feet, watching now his

face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.

At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the

village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.

Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest

of his creed—a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind

with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so

lamentable a _guru_.

“What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,”

shouted Peroo, “if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou

hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and

well-wishing. Now they are angry. Speak to them!”

“What is a man against the wrath of Gods?” whined the priest, cowering

as the wind took him. “Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.”

“Son of a pig, pray _here!_ Is there no return for salt fish and curry

powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had

enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have been

serving in the Kumpani’s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I—”

A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest,

breaking free from his disciple, fled to the village.

“Fat pig!” said Peroo. “After all that we have done for him! When the

flood is down I will see to it that we get a new _guru_. Finlinson

Sahib, it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been

eaten. Be wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on

an empty belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will

do.”

“The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.”

“Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?” said Peroo, laughing. “I

was troubled for my boats and sheers _before_ the flood came. Now we

are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take

these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all

weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten

nothing else to-day at all.”

He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waistbelt and thrust it

into Findlayson’s hand, saying, “Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more

than opium—clean Malwa opium!”

Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,

and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least

a good guard against fever—the fever that was creeping upon him out of

the wet mud—and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of

autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.

Peroo nodded with bright eyes. “In a little—in a little the Sahib will

find that he thinks well again. I too will—” He dived into his

treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down

to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier,

and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson

stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about

one of the piers—the seventh—that he had not fully settled in his mind.

The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and

at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow in his

ears like the deepest note of a double-bass—an entrancing sound upon

which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at

his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats

were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a

long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.

“A tree hit them. They will all go,” cried Peroo. “The main hawser has

parted. What does the Sahib do?”

An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson’s mind.

He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and

angles—each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was

the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it

was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet

would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But

why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he

hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside,

gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and,

further, to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so

difficult. And then—but it was of no conceivable importance—a wirerope

raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with

it all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in

the rainy darkness—sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo

was standing over him.

“I had forgotten,” said the Lascar, slowly, “that to those fasting and

unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to

the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great

ones. Can the Sahib swim?”

“What need? He can fly—fly as swiftly as the wind,” was the thick

answer.

“He is mad!” muttered Peroo, under his breath. “And he threw me aside

like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat

cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to

look at death with a clear eye.”

He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows

of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at

the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson,

the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops

struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of

all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and

perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that

a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs

apart to keep his balance—this was the most important point—would be

borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan

came to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl

the body ashore as wind drives paper, to waft it kite-fashion to the

bank. Thereafter—the boat spun dizzily—suppose the high wind got under

the freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the

far-away sands, or would it duck about, beyond control, through all

eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it

seemed that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had

settled all his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the

black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. “She cannot

live,” he grunted. “Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy

with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good.

Finlinson Sahib, she fills.”

“_Accha!_ I am going away. Come thou also.”

In his mind, Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was

circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot. His

body—he was really sorry for its gross helplessness—lay in the stern,

the water rushing about its knees.

“How very ridiculous!” he said to himself, from his eyrie—“that is

Findlayson—chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be

drowned, too. Drowned when it’s close to shore. I’m—I’m onshore

already. Why doesn’t it come along.”

To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and

that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the

reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the

body. He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding

prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the

swirling water, till at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the

river, and dropped, panting, on wet earth.

“Not this night,” said Peroo, in his ear. “The Gods have protected us.”

The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried

stumps. “This is some island of last year’s indigo-crop,” he went on.

“We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes

of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on

the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk

carefully.”

Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any

merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his

eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself,

with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had

built a bridge—a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining

seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under

heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of

Man.

An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to

be seen on the little patch in the flood—a clump of thorn, a clump of

swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a

Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy

man whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and

the weather had broken the red-daubed image of his god. The two men

stumbled, heavy limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set

cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches,

while the rain and river roared together.

The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as

a huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way under the tree.

The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the

insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow

crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap

that almost swept the ground. There was a noise behind him of other

beasts coming up from the floodline through the thicket, a sound of

heavy feet and deep breathing.

“Here be more beside ourselves,” said Findlayson, his head against the

tree-pole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.

“Truly,” said Peroo, thickly, “and no small ones.”

“What are they, then? I do not see clearly.”

“The Gods. Who else? Look!”

“Ah, true! The Gods surely—the Gods.” Findlayson smiled as his head

fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood,

who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it—the Gods

to whom his village prayed nightly—the Gods who were in all men’s

mouths and about all men’s ways. He could not raise his head or stir a

finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at

the lightning.

The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A

green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against

the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting

shadows of beasts. There was a black Buck at the Bull’s heels—such a

Buck as Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in

dreams—a Buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming

straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green

eyes burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the

dead grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.

The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness

a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the

fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his

neck and shoulders.

Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among them a drunken Man

flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse bellow broke out

from near the ground. “The flood lessens even now,” it cried. “Hour by

hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!”

“My bridge,” said Findlayson to himself. “That must be very old work

now. What have the Gods to do with my bridge?”

His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Mugger—the

blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges—draggled herself before

the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.

“They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only

torn away a handful of planks. The walls stand. The towers stand. They

have chained my flood, and the river is not free any more. Heavenly

Ones, take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank!

It is I, Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the

Justice of the Gods!”

“What said I?” whispered Peroo. “This is in truth a Punchayet of the

Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.”

The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat

to her head, snarled wickedly.

Somewhere in the shadow, a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and

fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.

“We be here,” said a deep voice, “the Great Ones. One only and very

many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already.

Hanuman listens also.”

“Kashi is without her Kotwal tonight,” shouted the Man with the

drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island

rang to the baying of hounds. “Give her the Justice of the Gods.”

“Ye were still when they polluted my waters,” the great Crocodile

bellowed. “Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls.

I had no help save my own strength, and that failed—the strength of

Mother Gunga failed—before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have

done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!”

“I brought the death; I rode the spotted sickness from hut to hut of

their workmen, and yet they would not cease.” A nose-slitten, hide-worn

Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. “I cast the

death at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.”

Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.

“Bah!” he said, spitting. “Here is Sitala herself; Mata—the smallpox.

Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?”

“Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out

on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons

of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to

make a mock of. The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!”

The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly: “If the

Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things there

would be many dark altars in the land, mother.”

“But this goes beyond a mock,” said the Tigress, darting forward a

griping paw. “Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye, too, Heavenly Ones; ye know

that they have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer.

Let Indra judge.”

The Buck made no movement as he answered: “How long has this evil

been?”

“Three years, as men count years,” said the Mugger, close pressed to

the earth.

“Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to see

vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and

tomorrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men

call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till tomorrow?”

said the Buck.

There was along hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon

stood up above the dripping trees.

“Judge ye, then,” said the River, sullenly. “I have spoken my shame.

The flood falls still. I can do no more.”

“For my own part”—it was the voice of the great Ape seated within the

shrine—“it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also

builded no small bridge in the world’s youth.”

“They say, too,” snarled the Tiger, “that these men came of the wreck

of thy armies, Hanuman, and therefore thou hast aided—”

“They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their

toil endures. Indra is too high, but Shiv, thou knowest how the land is

threaded with their fire-carriages.”

“Yea, I know,” said the Bull. “Their Gods instructed them in the

matter.”

A laugh ran round the circle.

“Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and

those that made them are scarcely yet cold,” said the Mugger, “tomorrow

their Gods will die.”

“Ho!” said Peroo. “Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the

padre-sahib who preached on the _Mombassa_, and he asked the Burra

Malum to put me in irons for a great rudeness.”

“Surely they make these things to please their Gods,” said the Bull

again.

“Not altogether,” the Elephant rolled forth. “It is for the profit of

my mahajuns —my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year,

when they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking

over their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are

those of men in far places—for all the towns are drawn together by the

fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the

account-books grow as fat as myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck,

I bless my peoples.”

“They have changed the face of the land-which is my land. They have

killed and made new towns on my banks,” said the Mugger.

“It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt

if it pleases the dirt,” answered the Elephant.

“But afterwards?” said the Tiger. “Afterwards they will see that Mother

Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and

later from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with

naked altars.”

The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently.

“Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi,

and he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship

Bhairon—and it is always time—the fire-carriages move one by one, and

each bears a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but

rolling upon wheels, and my honour is increased.”

“Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Pryag black with the pilgrims,” said the

Ape, leaning forward, “and but for the fire-carriage they would have

come slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember.”

“They come to me always,” Bhairon went on thickly. “By day and night

they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who

is like Bhairon today? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my

staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that

never were so many altars as today, and the fire carriage serves them

well. Bhairon am I—Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of

the Heavenly Ones today. Also my staff says—”

“Peace, thou!” lowed the Bull. “The worship of the schools is mine, and

they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the

delight of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou

knowest also.”

“Yea, I know,” said the Tigress, with lowered head.

“Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men

that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that

water—ye know how men say—come to us without punishment, and Gunga

knows that the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of

such anxious ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest

festivals among the pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who

smote at Pooree, under the Image there, her thousands in a day and a

night, and bound the sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so

that it ran from one end of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before

the fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have

served thee well, Mother of Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who

am not Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making

words and telling talk of strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows

faith among my people in the schools, and I have no anger; for when all

words are said, and the new talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the

last.”

“True. It is true,” murmured Hanuman. “To Shiv and to the others,

mother, they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where

they worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone

within their shrines.”

“Small thanks,” said the Buck, turning his head slowly. “I am that One

and His Prophet also.”

“Even so, father,” said Hanuman. “And to the South I go who am the

oldest of the Gods as men know the Gods, and presently I touch the

shrines of the new faith and the Woman whom we know is hewn

twelve-armed, and still they call her Mary.”

“Small thanks, brother,” said the Tigress. “I am that Woman.”

“Even so, sister; and I go West among the fire-carriages, and stand

before the bridge-builders in many shapes, and because of me they

change their faiths and are very wise. Ho! ho! I am the builder of

bridges, indeed—bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads

surely to Us in the end. Be content, Gunga.

“Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at all.”

“Am I alone, then, Heavenly Ones? Shall I smooth out my flood lest

unhappily I bear away their walls? Will Indra dry my springs in the

hills and make me crawl humbly between their wharfs? Shall I bury me in

the sand ere I offend?”

“And all for the sake of a little iron bar with the fire-carriage atop.

Truly, Mother Gunga is always young!” said Ganesh the Elephant. “A

child had not spoken more foolishly. Let the dirt dig in the dirt ere

it return to the dirt. I know only that my people grow rich and praise

me. Shiv has said that the men of the schools do not forget; Bhairon is

content for his crowd of the Common People; and Hanuman laughs.”

“Surely I laugh,” said the Ape. “My altars are few beside those of

Ganesh or Bhairon, but the fire-carriages bring me new worshippers from

beyond the Black Water—the men who believe that their God is toil. I

run before them beckoning, and they follow Hanuman.”

“Give them the toil that they desire, then,” said the River. “Make a

bar across my flood and throw the water back upon the bridge. Once thou

wast strong in Lanka, Hanuman. Stoop and lift my bed.”

“Who gives life can take life.” The Ape scratched in the mud with a

long forefinger. “And yet, who would profit by the killing? Very many

would die.”

There came up from the water a snatch of a love-song such as the boys

sing when they watch their cattle in the noon heats of late spring. The

Parrot screamed joyously, sidling along his branch with lowered head as

the song grew louder, and in a patch of clear moonlight stood revealed

the young herd, the darling of the Gopis, the idol of dreaming maids

and of mothers ere their children are born—Krishna the Well-beloved. He

stooped to knot up his long wet hair, and the parrot fluttered to his

shoulder.

“Fleeting and singing, and singing and fleeting,” hiccupped Bhairon.

“Those make thee late for the council, brother.”

“And then?” said Krishna, with a laugh, throwing back his head. “Ye can

do little without me or Karma here.” He fondled the Parrot’s plumage

and laughed again. “What is this sitting and talking together? I heard

Mother Gunga roaring in the dark, and so came quickly from a hut where

I lay warm. And what have ye done to Karma, that he is so wet and

silent? And what does Mother Gunga here? Are the heavens full that ye

must come paddling in the mud beast-wise? Karma, what do they do?”

“Gunga has prayed for a vengeance on the bridgebuilders, and Kali is

with her. Now she bids Hanuman whelm the bridge, that her honour may be

made great,” cried the Parrot. “I waited here, knowing that thou

wouldst come, O my master!”

“And the Heavenly Ones said nothing? Did Gunga and the Mother of

Sorrows out-talk them? Did none speak for my people?”

“Nay,” said Ganesh, moving uneasily from foot to foot; “I said it was

but dirt at play, and why should we stamp it flat?”

“I was content to let them toil—well content,” said Hanuman.

“What had I to do with Gunga’s anger?” said the Bull.

“I am Bhairon of the Common Folk, and this my staff is Kotwal of all

Kashi. I spoke for the Common People.”

“Thou?” The young God’s eyes sparkled.

“Am I not the first of the Gods in their mouths today?” returned

Bhairon, unabashed. “For the sake of the Common People I said very many

wise things which I have now forgotten, but this my staff—”

Krishna turned impatiently, saw the Mugger at his feet, and kneeling,

slipped an arm round the cold neck. “Mother,” he said gently, “get thee

to thy flood again. This matter is not for thee. What harm shall thy

honour take of this live dirt? Thou hast given them their fields new

year after year, and by thy flood they are made strong. They come all

to thee at the last. What need to slay them now? Have pity, mother, for

a little and it is only for a little.”

“If it be only for a little—” the slow beast began.

“Are they Gods, then?” Krishna, returned with a laugh, his eyes looking

into the dull eyes of the River. “Be certain that it is only for a

little. The Heavenly Ones have heard thee, and presently justice will

be done. Go now, mother, to the flood again. Men and cattle are thick

on the waters—the banks fall—the villages melt because of thee.”

“But the bridge—the bridge stands.” The Mugger turned grunting into the

undergrowth as Krishna rose.

“It is ended,” said the Tigress, viciously. “There is no more justice

from the Heavenly Ones. Ye have made shame and sport of Gunga, who

asked no more than a few score lives.”

“Of _my_ people—who lie under the leaf-roofs of the village yonder—of

the young girls, and the young men who sing to them in the dark of the

child that will be born next morn—of that which was begotten tonight,”

said Krishna. “And when all is done, what profit? Tomorrow sees them at

work. Ay, if ye swept the bridge out from end to end they would begin

anew. Hear me! Bhairon is drunk always. Hanuman mocks his people with

new riddles.”

“Nay, but they are very old ones,” the Ape said, laughing.

“Shiv hears the talk of the schools and the dreams of the holy men;

Ganesh thinks only of his fat traders; but I—I live with these my

people, asking for no gifts, and so receiving them hourly.”

“And very tender art thou of thy people,” said the Tigress.

“They are my own. The old women dream of me turning in their sleep; the

maids look and listen for me when they go to fill their lotahs by the

river. I walk by the young men waiting without the gates at dusk, and I

call over my shoulder to the whitebeards. Ye know, Heavenly Ones, that

I alone of us all walk upon the earth continually, and have no pleasure

in our heavens so long as a green blade springs here, or there are two

voices at twilight in the standing crops. Wise are ye, but ye live far

off, forgetting whence ye came. So do I not forget. And the

fire-carriage feeds your shrines, ye say? And the fire-carriages bring

a thousand pilgrims where but ten came in the old years? True. That is

true, today.”

“But tomorrow they are dead, brother,” said Ganesh.

“Peace!” said the Bull, as Hanuman leaned forward again. “And tomorrow,

beloved—what of tomorrow?”

“This only. A new word creeping from mouth to mouth among the Common

Folk—a word that neither man nor God can lay hold of—an evil word—a

little lazy word among the Common Folk, saying (and none know who set

that word afoot) that they weary of ye, Heavenly Ones.”

The Gods laughed together softly. “And then, beloved?” they said.

“And to cover that weariness they, my people, will bring to thee, Shiv,

and to thee, Ganesh, at first greater offerings and a louder noise of

worship. But the word has gone abroad, and, after, they will pay fewer

dues to our fat Brahmins. Next they will forget your altars, but so

slowly that no man can say how his forgetfulness began.

“I knew—I knew! I spoke this also, but they would not hear,” said the

Tigress. “We should have slain—we should have slain!”

“It is too late now. Ye should have slain at the beginning when the men

from across the water had taught our folk nothing. Now my people see

their work, and go away thinking. They do not think of the Heavenly

Ones altogether. They think of the fire-carriage and the other things

that the bridge-builders have done, and when your priests thrust

forward hands asking alms, they give a little unwillingly. That is the

beginning, among one or two, or five or ten—for I, moving among my

people, know what is in their hearts.”

“And the end, Jester of the Gods? What shall the end be?” said Ganesh.

“The end shall be as it was in the beginning, O slothful son of Shiv!

The flame shall die upon the altars and the prayer upon the tongue till

ye become little Gods again—Gods of the jungle—names that the hunters

of rats and noosers of dogs whisper in the thicket and among the

caves—rag-Gods, pot Godlings of the tree, and the village-mark, as ye

were at the beginning. That is the end, Ganesh, for thee, and for

Bhairon—Bhairon of the Common People.”

“It is very far away,” grunted Bhairon. “Also, it is a lie.”

“Many women have kissed Krishna. They told him this to cheer their own

hearts when the grey hairs came, and he has told us the tale,” said the

Bull, below his breath.

“Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman and made her

twelve-armed. So shall we twist all their Gods,” said Hanuman.

“Their Gods! This is no question of their Gods—one or three—man or

woman. The matter is with the people. _They_ move, and not the Gods of

the bridgebuilders,” said Krishna.

“So be it. I have made a man worship the fire-carriage as it stood

still breathing smoke, and he knew not that he worshipped me,” said

Hanuman the Ape. “They will only change a little the names of their

Gods. I shall lead the builders of the bridges as of old; Shiv shall be

worshipped in the schools by such as doubt and despise their fellows;

Ganesh shall have his mahajuns, and Bhairon the donkey-drivers, the

pilgrims, and the sellers of toys. Beloved, they will do no more than

change the names, and that we have seen a thousand times.”

“Surely they will do no more than change the names,” echoed Ganesh; but

there was an uneasy movement among the Gods.

“They will change more than the names. Me alone they cannot kill, so

long as a maiden and a man meet together or the spring follows the

winter rains. Heavenly Ones, not for nothing have I walked upon the

earth. My people know not now what they know; but I, who live with

them, I read their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is

born already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are

_not_ the old under new names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your

faces in the smoke of the altars before they grow cold! Take dues and

listen to the cymbals and the drums, Heavenly Ones, while yet there are

flowers and songs. As men count time the end is far off; but as we who

know reckon it is today. I have spoken.”

The young God ceased, and his brethren looked at each other long in

silence.

“This I have not heard before,” Peroo whispered in his companion’s ear.

“And yet sometimes, when I oiled the brasses in the engine-room of the

_Goorkha_, I have wondered if our priests were so wise—so wise. The day

is coming, Sahib. They will be gone by the morning.”

A yellow light broadened in the sky, and the tone of the river changed

as the darkness withdrew.

Suddenly the Elephant trumpeted aloud as though man had goaded him.

“Let Indra judge. Father of all, speak thou! What of the things we have

heard? Has Krishna lied indeed? Or—”

“Ye know,” said the Buck, rising to his feet. “Ye know the Riddle of

the Gods. When Brahm ceases to dream, the Heavens and the Hells and

Earth disappear. Be content. Brahm dreams still. The dreams come and

go, and the nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams.

Krishna has walked too long upon earth, and yet I love him the more for

the tale he has told. The Gods change, beloved—all save One!”

“Ay, all save one that makes love in the hearts of men,” said Krishna,

knotting his girdle. “It is but a little time to wait, and ye shall

know if I lie.”

“Truly it is but a little time, as thou sayest, and we shall know. Get

thee to thy huts again, beloved, and make sport for the young things,

for still Brahm dreams. Go, my children! Brahm dreams—and till he wakes

the Gods die not.”

“Whither went they?” said the Lascar, awe-struck, shivering a little

with the cold.

“God knows!” said Findlayson. The river and the island lay in full

daylight now, and there was never mark of hoof or pug on the wet earth

under the peepul. Only a parrot screamed in the branches, bringing down

showers of water-drops as he fluttered his wings.

“Up! We are cramped with cold! Has the opium died out? Canst thou move,

Sahib?”

Findlayson staggered to his feet and shook himself. His head swam and

ached, but the work of the opium was over, and, as he sluiced his

forehead in a pool, the Chief Engineer of the Kashi Bridge was

wondering how he had managed to fall upon the island, what chances the

day offered of return, and, above all, how his work stood.

“Peroo, I have forgotten much. I was under the guard-tower watching the

river; and then. . . . Did the flood sweep us away?”

“No. The boats broke loose, Sahib, and” (if the Sahib had forgotten

about the opium, decidedly Peroo would not remind him) “in striving to

retie them, so it seemed to me—but it was dark—a rope caught the Sahib

and threw him upon a boat. Considering that we two, with Hitchcock

Sahib, built, as it were, that bridge, I came also upon the boat, which

came riding on horseback, as it were, on the nose of this island, and

so, splitting, cast us ashore. I made a great cry when the boat left

the wharf, and without doubt Hitchcock Sahib will come for us. As for

the bridge, so many have died in the building that it cannot fall.”

A fierce sun, that drew out all the smell of the sodden land, had

followed the storm, and in that clear light there was no room for a man

to think of the dreams of the dark. Findlayson stared up-stream, across

the blaze of moving water, till his eyes ached. There was no sign of

any bank to the Ganges, much less of a bridgeline.

“We came down far,” he said. “It was wonderful that we were not drowned

a hundred times.”

“That was the least of the wonder, for no man dies before his time. I

have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports,

but”—Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the

peepul—“never man has seen that we saw here.”

“What?”

“Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?”

“There was a fever upon me.” Findlayson was still looking uneasily

across the water. “It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men

talking, but I do not remember. A boat could live in this water now, I

think.”

“Oho! Then it is true.‘When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods die.’ Now I

know, indeed, what he meant. Once, too, the _guru_ said as much to me;

but then I did not understand. Now I am wise.”

“What?” said Findlayson, over his shoulder.

Peroo went on as if he were talking to himself. “Six—seven—ten monsoons

since, I was watch on the fo’c’sle of the _Rewah_—the Kumpani’s big

boat—and there was a big _tufan_, green and black water beating, and I

held fast to the life-lines, choking under the waters. Then I thought

of the Gods—of Those whom we saw tonight”—he stared curiously at

Findlayson’s back, but the white man was looking across the flood.

“Yes, I say of Those whom we saw this night past, and I called upon

Them to protect me. And while I prayed, still keeping my lookout, a big

wave came and threw me forward upon the ring of the great black

bowianchor, and the _Rewah_ rose high and high, leaning towards the

lefthand side, and the water drew away from beneath her nose, and I lay

upon my belly, holding the ring, and looking down into those great

deeps. Then I thought, even in the face of death: If I lose hold I die,

and for me neither the _Rewah_ nor my place by the galley where the

rice is cooked, nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London, will be any

more for me. ‘How shall I be sure,’ I said, that the Gods to whom I

pray will abide at all?’ This I thought, and the _Rewah_ dropped her

nose as a hammer falls, and all the sea came in and slid me backwards

along the fo’c’sle and over the break of the fo’c’sle, and I very badly

bruised my shin against the donkey-engine: but I did not die, and I

have seen the Gods. They are good for live men, but for the dead. . .

They have spoken Themselves. Therefore, when I come to the village I

will beat the _guru_ for talking riddles which are no riddles. When

Brahm ceases to dream the Gods go.”

“Look up-stream. The light blinds. Is there smoke yonder?”

Peroo shaded his eyes with his hands. “He is a wise man and quick.

Hitchcock Sahib would not trust a rowboat. He has borrowed the Rao

Sahib’s steam launch, and comes to look for us. I have always said that

there should have been a steam-launch on the bridge works for us.”

The territory of the Rao of Baraon lay within ten miles of the bridge;

and Findlayson and Hitchcock had spent a fair portion of their scanty

leisure in playing billiards and shooting black-buck with the young

man. He had been bear-led by an English tutor of sporting tastes for

some five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues

accumulated during his minority by the Indian Government. His

steam-launch, with its silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and

mahogany decks, was a new toy which Findlayson had found horribly in

the way when the Rao came to look at the bridge works.

“It’s great luck,” murmured Findlayson, but he was none the less

afraid, wondering what news might be of the bridge.

The gaudy blue and white funnel came down-stream swiftly. They could

see Hitchcock in the bows, with a pair of opera-glasses, and his face

was unusually white. Then Peroo hailed, and the launch made for the

tail of the island. The Rao Sahib, in tweed shooting-suit and a

seven-hued turban, waved his royal hand, and Hitchcock shouted. But he

need have asked no questions, for Findlayson’s first demand was for his

bridge.

“All serene! Gad, I never expected to see you again, Findlayson. You’re

seven koss down-stream. Yes; there’s not a stone shifted anywhere; but

how are you? I borrowed the Rao Sahib’s launch, and he was good enough

to come along. Jump in.”

“Ah, Finlinson, you are very well, eh? That was most unprecedented

calamity last night, eh? My royal palace, too, it leaks like the devil,

and the crops will also be short all about my country. Now you shall

back her out, Hitchcock. I—I do not understand steam engines. You are

wet? You are cold, Finlinson? I have some things to eat here, and you

will take a good drink.”

“I’m immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you’ve saved my life. How

did Hitchcock—”

“Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night

and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned,

Finlinson, so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We

will go quick, Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve

forty-five in the state temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not

so I would have asked you to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore,

these religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?”

Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid

wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he

steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted

wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat was the back of his _guru_.

A WALKING DELEGATE

According to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is salting-time on

the farm, and, unless something very important happens, we attend to

the salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, are treated first;

they stay in the home meadow ready for work on Monday. Then come the

cows, with Pan, the calf, who should have been turned into veal long

ago, but survived on account of his manners; and lastly the horses,

scattered through the seventy acres of the Back Pasture.

You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling

water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple undergrowth

closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an

old county-road running past two green hollows fringed with wild rose

that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where

nobody ever comes except in cider-time; then across another brook, and

so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and spruce,

with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock

and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp; but the

horses like it well enough—our own, and the others that are turned down

there to feed at fifty cents a week. Most people walk to the Back

Pasture, and find it very rough work; but one can get there in a buggy,

if the horse knows what is expected of him. The safest conveyance is

our coupé. This began life as a buckboard, and we bought it for five

dollars from a sorrowful man who had no other sort of possessions; and

the seat came off one night when we were turning a corner in a hurry.

After that alteration it made a beautiful salting-machine, if you held

tight, because there was nothing to catch your feet when you fell out,

and the slats rattled tunes.

One Sunday afternoon we went out with the salt as usual. It was a

broiling hot day, and we could not find the horses anywhere till we let

Tedda Gabler, the bobtailed mare who throws up the dirt with her big

hooves exactly as a tedder throws hay, have her head. Clever as she is,

she tipped the coupé over in a hidden brook before she came out on a

ledge of rock where all the horses had gathered, and were switching

flies. The Deacon was the first to call to her. He is a very dark

iron-grey four-year-old, son of Grandee. He has been handled since he

was two, was driven in a light cart before he was three, and now ranks

as an absolutely steady lady’s horse—proof against steam-rollers,

grade-crossings, and street processions.

“Salt!” said the Deacon, joyfully. “You’re dreffle late, Tedda.”

“Any—any place to cramp the coupé?” Tedda panted. “It weighs turr’ble

this weather. I’d ’a’ come sooner, but they didn’t know what they

wanted—ner haow. Fell out twice, both of ’em. I don’t understand sech

foolishness.”

“You look consider’ble het up. Guess you’d better cramp her under them

pines, an’ cool off a piece.”

Tedda scrambled on the ledge, and cramped the coupé in the shade of a

tiny little wood of pines, while my companion and I lay down among the

brown, silky needles, and gasped. All the home horses were gathered

round us, enjoying their Sunday leisure.

There were Rod and Rick, the seniors on the farm. They were the regular

road-pair, bay with black points, full brothers, aged, sons of a

Hambletonian sire and a Morgan dam. There were Nip and Tuck,

seal-browns, rising six, brother and sister, Black Hawks by birth,

perfectly matched, just finishing their education, and as handsome a

pair as man could wish to find in a forty-mile drive. There was

Muldoon, our ex-car-horse, bought at a venture, and any colour you

choose that is not white; and Tweezy, who comes from Kentucky, with an

affliction of his left hip, which makes him a little uncertain how his

hind legs are moving. He and Muldoon had been hauling gravel all the

week for our new road. The Deacon you know already. Last of all, and

eating something, was our faithful Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the black

buggy-horse, who had seen us through every state of weather and road,

the horse who was always standing in harness before some door or

other—a philosopher with the appetite of a shark and the manners of an

archbishop. Tedda Gabler was a new “trade,” with a reputation for vice

which was really the result of bad driving. She had one working gait,

which she could hold till further notice; a Roman nose; a large,

prominent eye; a shaving-brush of a tail; and an irritable temper. She

took her salt through her bridle; but the others trotted up nuzzling

and wickering for theirs, till we emptied it on the clean rocks. They

were all standing at ease, on three legs for the most part, talking the

ordinary gossip of the Back Pasture—about the scarcity of water, and

gaps in the fence, and how the early windfalls tasted that season—when

little Rick blew the last few grains of his allowance into a crevice,

and said:

“Hurry, boys! Might ha’ knowed that ‘Livery-plug’ would be around.”

We heard a clatter of hooves, and there climbed up from the ravine

below a fifty-center transient—a wall-eyed, yellow frame-house of a

horse, sent up to board from a livery-stable in town, where they called

him “The Lamb,” and never let him out except at night and to strangers.

My companion, who knew and had broken most of the horses, looked at the

ragged hammer-head as it rose, and said quietly:

“Ni-ice beast. Man-eater, if he gets the chance—see his eye. Kicker,

too—see his hocks. Western horse.”

The animal lumbered up, snuffling and grunting. His feet showed that he

had not worked for weeks and weeks, and our creatures drew together

significantly.

“As usual,” he said, with an underhung sneer—“bowin’ your heads before

the Oppressor that comes to spend his leisure gloatin’ over you.”

“Mine’s done,” said the Deacon; he licked up the remnant of his salt,

dropped his nose in his master’s hand, and sang a little grace all to

himself. The Deacon has the most enchanting manners of any one I know.

“An’ fawnin’ on them for what is your inalienable right. It’s

humiliatin’,” said the yellow horse, sniffing to see if he could find a

few spare grains.

“Go daown hill, then, Boney,” the Deacon replied. “Guess you’ll find

somethin’ to eat still, if yer hain’t hogged it all. You’ve ett more’n

any three of us to-day—an’ day ’fore that—an’ the last two months—sence

you’ve been here.”

“I am not addressin’ myself to the young an’ immature. I am speakin’ to

those whose opinion _an_’ experience commands respect.”

I saw Rod raise his head as though he were about to make a remark; then

he dropped it again, and stood three-cornered, like a plough-horse. Rod

can cover his mile in a shade under three minutes on an ordinary road

to an ordinary buggy. He is tremendously powerful behind, but, like

most Hambletonians, he grows a trifle sullen as he gets older. No one

can love Rod very much; but no one can help respecting him.

“I wish to wake _those_,” the yellow horse went on, “to an abidin’

sense o’ their wrongs an’ their injuries an’ their outrages.”

“Haow’s that?” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, dreamily. He thought

Boney was talking of some kind of feed.

“An’ when I say outrages and injuries”—Boney waved his tail

furiously—“I mean ’em, too. Great Oats! That’s just what I _do_ mean,

plain an’ straight.”

“The gentleman talks quite earnest,” said Tuck, the mare, to Nip, her

brother. “There’s no doubt thinkin’ broadens the horizons o’ the mind.

His language is quite lofty.”

“Hesh, sis,” Nip answered. “He hain’t widened nothin’ ’cep’ the circle

he’s ett in pasture. They feed words fer beddin’ where he comes from.”

“It’s elegant talkin’, though,” Tuck returned, with an unconvinced toss

of her pretty, lean little head.

The yellow horse heard her, and struck an attitude which he meant to be

extremely impressive. It made him look as though he had been badly

stuffed.

“Now I ask you, I ask you without prejudice an’ without favour,—what

has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably

entitled to the free air o’ heaven, blowin’ acrost this boundless

prairie?”

“Hev ye ever wintered here?” said the Deacon, merrily, while the others

snickered. “It’s kinder cool.”

“Not yet,” said Boney. “I come from the boundless confines o’ Kansas,

where the noblest of our kind have their abidin’ place among the

sunflowers on the threshold o’ the settin’ sun in his glory.”

“An’ they sent you ahead as a sample?” said Rick, with an amused quiver

of his long, beautifully groomed tail, as thick and as fine and as wavy

as a quadroon’s back hair.

“Kansas, sir, needs no adver_tise_ment. Her native sons rely on

themselves an’ their native sires. Yes, sir.”

Then Tweezy lifted up his wise and polite old head. His affliction

makes him bashful as a rule, but he is ever the most courteous of

horses.

“Excuse me, suh,” he said slowly, “but, unless I have been misinfohmed,

most of your prominent siahs, suh, are impo’ted from Kentucky; an’

_I_’m from Paduky.”

There was the least little touch of pride in the last words.

“Any horse dat knows beans,” said Muldoon, suddenly (he had been

standing with his hairy chin on Tweezy’s broad quarters), “gits outer

Kansas ’fore dey crip his shoes. I blew in dere from Ioway in de days

o’ me youth an’ innocence, an’ I wuz grateful when dey boxed me fer N’

York. You can’t tell _me_ anything about Kansas I don’t wanter fergit.

De Belt Line stables ain’t no Hoffman House, but dey’re Vanderbilts

’longside o’ Kansas.”

“What the horses o’ Kansas think to-day, the horses of America will

think to-morrow; an’ I tell _you_ that when the horses of America rise

in their might, the day o’ the Oppressor is ended.”

There was a pause, till Rick said, with a little grunt:

“Ef you put it that way, every one of us has riz in his might, ’cep’

Marcus, mebbe. Marky, ’j ever rise in yer might?”

“Nope,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thoughtfully quidding over a

mouthful of grass. “I seen a heap o’ fools try, though.”

“You admit that you riz?” said the Kansas horse, excitedly. “Then

why—why in Kansas did you ever go under again?”

“Horse can’t walk on his hind legs _all_ the time,” said the Deacon.

“Not when he’s jerked over on his back ’fore he knows what fetched him.

We’ve all done it, Boney,” said Rick. “Nip an’ Tuck they tried it,

spite o’ what the Deacon told ’em; an’ the Deacon he tried it, spite o’

what me an’ Rod told him; an’ me an’ Rod tried it, spite o’ what

Grandee told us; an’ I guess Grandee he tried it, spite o’ what his dam

told him. It’s the same old circus from generation to generation. ’Colt

can’t see why he’s called on to back. Same old rearin’ on end—straight

up. Same old feelin’ that you’ve bested ’em this time. Same old little

yank at your mouth when you’re up good an’ tall. Same old Pegasus-act,

wonderin’ where you’ll ’light. Same old wop when you hit the dirt with

your head where your tail should be, and your in’ards shook up like a

bran-mash. Same old voice in your ear: ‘Waal, ye little fool, an’ what

did you reckon to make by that?’ We’re through with risin’ in our might

on this farm. We go to pole er single, accordin’ ez we’re hitched.”

“An’ Man the Oppressor sets an’ gloats over you, same as he’s settin’

now. Hain’t that been your experience, madam?”

This last remark was addressed to Tedda; and any one could see with

half an eye that poor, old anxious, fidgety Tedda, stamping at the

flies, must have left a wild and tumultuous youth behind her.

“’Pends on the man,” she answered, shifting from one foot to the other,

and addressing herself to the home horses. “They abused me dreffle when

I was young. I guess I was sperrity an’ nervous some, but they didn’t

allow for that. ’Twas in Monroe County, Noo York, an’ sence then till I

come here, I’ve run away with more men than ’u’d fill a boardin’-house.

Why, the man that sold me here he says to the boss, s’ he: ‘Mind, now,

I’ve warned you. ’Twon’t be none of my fault if she sheds you daown the

road. Don’t you drive her in a top-buggy, ner ’thout winkers,’ s’ he,

‘ner ’thout this bit ef you look to come home behind her.’ ’N’ the fust

thing the boss did was to git the top-buggy.

“Can’t say as I like top-buggies,” said Rick; “they don’t balance

good.”

“Suit me to a ha’ar,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Top-buggy means

the baby’s in behind, an’ I kin stop while she gathers the pretty

flowers—yes, an’ pick a maouthful, too. The women-folk all say I hev to

be humoured, an’ I don’t kerry things to the sweatin’-point.”

“’Course I’ve no pre_jud_ice against a top-buggy s’ long’s I can see

it,” Tedda went on quickly. “It’s ha’f-seein’ the pesky thing bobbin’

an’ balancin’ behind the winkers gits on _my_ nerves. Then the boss

looked at the bit they’d sold with me, an’ s’ he: ‘Jiminy Christmas!

This ’u’d make a clothes-horse stan’ ’n end!’ Then he gave me a plain

bar bit, an’ fitted it’s if there was some feelin’ to my maouth.”

“Hain’t ye got any, Miss Tedda?” said Tuck, who has a mouth like

velvet, and knows it.

“Might ’a’ had, Miss Tuck, but I’ve forgot. Then he give me an open

bridle,—my style’s an open bridle—an’—I dunno as I ought to tell this

by rights—he—give—me—a kiss.”

“My!” said Tuck, “I can’t tell fer the shoes o’ me what makes some men

so fresh.”

“Pshaw, sis,” said Nip, “what’s the sense in actin’ so? _You_ git a

kiss reg’lar’s hitchin’-up time.”

“Well, you needn’t tell, smarty,” said Tuck, with a squeal and a kick.

“I’d heard o’ kisses, o’ course,” Tedda went on, “but they hadn’t come

my way specially. I don’t mind tellin’ I was that took aback at that

man’s doin’s he might ha’ lit fire-crackers on my saddle. Then we went

out jest’s if a kiss was nothin’, an’ I wasn’t three strides into my

gait ’fore I felt the boss knoo his business, an’ was trustin’ me. So I

studied to please him, an’ he never took the whip from the dash—a whip

drives me plumb distracted—an’ the upshot was that—waal, I’ve come up

the Back Pasture to-day, an’ the coupé’s tipped clear over twice, an’

I’ve waited till ’twuz fixed each time. You kin judge for yourselves. I

don’t set up to be no better than my neighbours,—specially with my tail

snipped off the way ’tis,—but I want you all to know Tedda’s quit

fightin’ in harness or out of it, ’cep’ when there’s a born fool in the

pasture, stuffin’ his stummick with board that ain’t rightly hisn,

’cause he hain’t earned it.”

“Meanin’ me, madam?” said the yellow horse.

“Ef the shoe fits, clinch it,” said Tedda, snorting. “_I_ named no

names, though, to be sure, some folks are mean enough an’ greedy enough

to do ’thout ’em.”

“There’s a deal to be forgiven to ignorance,” said the yellow horse,

with an ugly look in his blue eye.

“Seemin’ly, yes; or some folks ’u’d ha’ been kicked raound the pasture

’bout onct a minute sence they came—board er no board.”

“But what you do _not_ understand, if you will excuse me, madam, is

that the whole principle o’ servitood, which includes keep an’ feed,

starts from a radically false basis; an’ I am proud to say that me an’

the majority o’ the horses o’ Kansas think the entire concern should be

relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. I say we’re too

progressive for that. I say we’re too enlightened for that. ’Twas good

enough’s long’s we didn’t think, but naow—but naow—a new loominary has

arisen on the horizon!”

“Meanin’ you?” said the Deacon.

“The horses o’ Kansas are behind me with their multitoodinous

thunderin’ hooves, an’ we say, simply but grandly, that we take our

stand with all four feet on the inalienable rights of the horse, pure

and simple,—the high-toned child o’ nature, fed by the same wavin’

grass, cooled by the same ripplin’ brook—yes, an’ warmed by the same

gen’rous sun as falls impartially on the outside an’ the _in_side of

the pampered machine o’ the trottin’-track, or the bloated coupé-horses

o’ these yere Eastern cities. Are we not the same flesh an’ blood?”

“Not by a bushel an’ a half,” said the Deacon, under his breath.

“Grandee never was in Kansas.”

“My! Ain’t that elegant, though, abaout the wavin’ grass an’ the

ripplin’ brooks?” Tuck whispered in Nip’s ear. “The gentleman’s real

convincin’, _I_ think.”

“I say we _are_ the same flesh an’ blood! Are we to be separated, horse

from horse, by the artificial barriers of a trottin’-record, or are we

to look down upon each other on the strength o’ the gifts o’ nature—an

extry inch below the knee, or slightly more powerful quarters? What’s

the use o’ them advantages to you? Man the Oppressor comes along, an’

sees you’re likely an’ good-lookin’, an’ grinds you to the face o’ the

earth. What for? For his own pleasure: for his own convenience! Young

an’ old, black an’ bay, white an’ grey, there’s no distinctions made

between us. We’re ground up together under the remorseless teeth o’ the

engines of oppression!”

“Guess his breechin’ must ha’ broke goin’ daown-hill,” said the Deacon.

“Slippery road, maybe, an’ the buggy come onter him, an’ he didn’t know

’nough to hold back. That don’t feel like teeth, though. Maybe he

busted a shaft, an’ it pricked him.”

“An’ I come to you from Kansas, wavin’ the tail o’ friendship to all

an’ sundry, an’ in the name of the uncounted millions o’ pure-minded,

high-toned horses now strugglin’ towards the light o’ freedom, I say to

you, Rub noses with us in our sacred an’ holy cause. The power is

yourn. Without you, I say, Man the Oppressor cannot move himself from

place to place. Without you he cannot reap, he cannot sow, he cannot

plough.”

“Mighty odd place, Kansas!” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Seemin’ly

they reap in the spring an’ plough in the fall. ’Guess it’s right fer

them, but ’twould make me kinder giddy.”

“The produc’s of your untirin’ industry would rot on the ground if you

did not weakly consent to help him. _Let_ ’em rot, I say! Let him call

you to the stables in vain an’ nevermore! Let him shake his ensnarin’

oats under your nose in vain! Let the Brahmas roost in the buggy, an’

the rats run riot round the reaper! Let him walk on his two hind feet

till they blame well drop off! Win no more soul-destroin’ races for his

pleasure! Then, an’ not till then, will Man the Oppressor know where

he’s at. Quit workin’, fellow-sufferers an’ slaves! Kick! Rear! Plunge!

Lie down on the shafts, an’ woller! Smash an’ destroy! The conflict

will be but short, an’ the victory is certain. After that we can press

our inalienable rights to eight quarts o’ oats a day, two good

blankets, an’ a fly-net an’ the best o’ stablin’.”

The yellow horse shut his yellow teeth with a triumphant snap; and Tuck

said, with a sigh: “Seems’s if somethin’ ought to be done. Don’t seem

right, somehow,—oppressin’ us an all,—to my way o’ thinkin’.”

Said Muldoon, in a far-away and sleepy voice:

“Who in Vermont’s goin’ to haul de inalienable oats? Dey weigh like Sam

Hill, an’ sixty bushel at dat allowance ain’t goin’ to last t’ree weeks

here. An’ dere’s de winter hay for five mont’s!”

“We can settle those minor details when the great cause is won,” said

the yellow horse. “Let us return simply but grandly to our inalienable

rights—the right o’ freedom on these yere verdant hills, an’ no

invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree:”

“What in stables ’jer call an invijjus distinction?” said the Deacon,

stiffly.

“Fer one thing, bein’ a bloated, pampered trotter jest because you

happen to be raised that way, an’ couldn’t no more help trottin’ than

eatin’.”

“Do ye know anythin’ about trotters?” said the Deacon.

“I’ve seen ’em trot. That was enough for me. _I_ don’t want to know any

more. Trottin’s immoral.”