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.