But there are few men in the world who attend to nothing but their rightful business, and there are even more in India than elsewhere who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among others.  There are few fighting-men among that host.  They are priests for the most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed and shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk roads, where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen marching in eight-hundred-man battalions.  They prefer to dream along the byways, and set other people dreaming.  They lead, when the crash comes, from behind.

Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled; and though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed to read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command, still, there were other men who found themselves groping, at least two years before the Mutiny of ’57.  They were groping for something intangible and noiseless and threatening which they felt was there in a darkness, but which one could not see.

Baines was one of them—­Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at Bholat.  His troops were in the center of a spider’s web of roads that criss-crossed and drained a province.  There were big trunk arteries, which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass of winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks.  He could feel, if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising, and he was placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the right spot, should the knife be needed.

He was like a surgeon, though, who holds a lancet and can use it, but who lacks permission.  The poison in India’s system lay deep, and the fever was slow in showing itself.  And meanwhile the men who had the ordering of things could see neither necessity nor excuse for so much as a parade of strength.  They refused, point-blank and absolutely, to admit that there was, or, could be, any symptom of unrest.

He dared not make new posts for officers, for officers would grumble at enforced exile in the country districts, and the Government would get to hear of it, and countermand.  But there were non-commissioned officers in plenty, and it was not difficult to choose the best of them—­three men—­and send them, with minute detachments, to three different points of vantage.  Non-commissioned officers don’t grumble, or if they do no one gets to hear of it, or minds.  And they are just as good as officers at watching crossroads and reporting what they see and hear.

So where a little cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles from Bholat, Bill Brown—­swordsman and sergeant and strictest of martinets, as well as sentimentalist—­had been set to watch and listen and report.