‘Oh, no, he won’t,’ said William.

‘How do you know, dear?’

‘It’ll take him off his work.  He won’t have time.’

‘He’ll make it,’ said Mrs. Jim, with a twinkle.

’It depends on his own judgment.  There’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t, if he thinks fit,’ said Jim.

‘He won’t see fit,’ William replied, without sorrow or emotion.  ’It wouldn’t be him if he did.’

‘One certainly gets to know people rather well in times like these,’ said Jim, drily; but William’s face was serene as ever, and, even as she prophesied, Scott did not appear.

The Rains fell at last, late, but heavily; and the dry, gashed earth was red mud, and servants killed snakes in the camp, where every one was weather-bound for a fortnight—­all except Hawkins, who took horse and splashed about in the wet, rejoicing.  Now the Government decreed that seed-grain should be distributed to the people, as well as 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 mechanical routine of the day, though his own voice sounded strange in his own ears, and his hands, when he wrote, grew large as pillows or small as peas at the end of his wrists.  That steadfastness bore his body to the telegraph-office at the railway-station, and dictated a telegram to Hawkins, saying that the Khanda district was, in his judgment, now safe, and he ‘waited further orders.’