“One hour for diner!” called the guard, walking limply along the train. 
 “Just an hour for dinner!  Dinner waiting!”

He was not at all a usual-looking guard.  He was dressed in riding breeches and puttee leggings, and wore a worn-out horsey air as if in protest against the obligation to work in a black man’s land.  In countries where the half-breed and the black man live for and almost monopolize government employment few white men take kindly to braid and brass buttons.  That fellow’s contempt for his job was equaled only by the babu station master’s scorn of him and his own for the station master.  Yet both men did their jobs efficiently.

“Only an hour for dinner, gents—­train starts on time!”

“Guard!” called a female voice we all three recognized—­“Guard!  Come here at once, I want you!”

We left Brown of Lumbwa snoring a good imitation of the Battle of Waterloo on the upper berth, and filed out to the dimly-lighted platform.  A space in the center was roofed with corrugated iron and under that the yellow lamplight cast a maze of moving shadows as the passengers swarmed toward the dining-room.  The smell of greasy cooking blended with the reek of axle and lamp oil.  At the platform’s forward end shadowy figures were throwing cord-wood into the tender, and the thump-thump-thump of that sounded like impatience; everything else suggested lethargy.

“Guard!” called the voice again.  “Come here, guard!”

He stopped in passing to close our windows and lock our compartment door against railway thieves.

“There’s a man asleep in there,” I said.

“The ’eat ’ll sober ’im!” he grinned, slamming the last window down.  “What’ll you bet ’er ’ighness don’t want me to fetch dinner to ’er?  She was in the train in Mombasa two hours afore startin’ time, an’ the things she ordered me to do ’ud have made a ’alf-breed think ’e was demeaning of ’imself!  I ’aven’t seen the color of ’er money yet.  If she wants dinner she gets out and walks or ’er maid fetches it—­you watch!”

Coutlass, the other Greek and the Goanese staggered out beside us on to the platform, drunk enough not to know whether Hassan was with them or not.  He came out and stood beside them in a sort of alert defensive attitude.

“Guard!” called the voice again.  “Where is the man?”

We followed the last of the crowd through the screened doors, and took seats at a table marked “First Class Only!” There were four men there ahead of us, two government officials disinclined to talk; a missionary in a gray flannel shirt, suffering from fever and too suspicious to say good evening; and a man in charge of that section of the line, who checked the station master’s accounts and counted money in a tray between mouthfuls.  Between us and the second-class tables was a wooden screen on short legs, and beyond that arose babel.  Second-class is democratic always, and talks with its mouth full.  In addition to our privilege of paying more for exactly the same food, we enjoyed exclusiveness, a dirty table-cloth, and the extra smell from the kitchen door. (The table-cloth was dirty because the barefoot Goanese waiters invariably stubbed their feet against a break in the floor and spilt soup exactly in the same place.)