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

That was the time when eight years of clean living and hard condition
told, though a man's head were ringing like a bell from the cinchona,
and the earth swayed under his feet when he stood and under his bed
when he slept. If Hawkins had seen fit to make him a bullock-driver,
that, he thought, was entirely Hawkins's own affair. There were men
in the North who would know what he had done; men of thirty years'
service in his own department who would say that it was 'not half
bad'; and above, immeasurably above all men of all grades, there was
William in the thick of the fight, who would approve because she
understood. He had so trained his mind that it would hold fast to the