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'Room for the Queen of Delhi and her Prime Minister the grey monkey climbing up his own sword! Another cart loaded with bark for a down-country tannery followed close behind, and its driver added a few compliments as the ruth-bullocks backed and backed again. From behind the shaking curtains came one volley of invective.
Otherwise there was nothing to do, and the men got drunk, gambled, and quarrelled. They were a sickly crew, for a junior subaltern is by custom saddled with the worst men. Cottar endured their rioting as long as he could, and then sent down-country for a dozen pairs of boxing-gloves. "I wouldn't blame you for fightin'," said he, "if you only knew how to use your hands; but you don't.
He arrived in due course: a stop-gap from an obscure down-country station; a man of hide-bound conventionalism, who brought with him three children and a washed-out, subdued-looking wife, and who spoke magnanimously of Norton as "a clever fellow, of course, but deplorably casual officially." With such haphazard shifting of pawns on the chess-board is the momentous game of Empire played.
It must also be remembered that the feat was accomplished without the help of a single soldier from home; reinforcements had arrived in the country, but they were hundreds of miles distant when the news reached them of the capture of Delhi: and it is not too much to say that the success which followed the subsequent operations down-country was due mainly to the fact that all danger from the north-west had virtually ceased, and the mutiny had already received a crushing blow from the capture of the great city of rebellion.
'If the worst comes to the worst, I shall tell Yankling Sahib, who is a man of a merry mind, and he will laugh. We are not doing any wrong to any Sahibs whom we know. They are priest-beaters. They frightened us. We fled! Who knows where we dropped the baggage? Do ye think Yankling Sahib will permit down-country police to wander all over the hills, disturbing his game?
For the first week or ten days after the outbreak at Ferozepore we knew very little of what was occurring down-country, as well as throughout the Punjab, the province of the "Five Rivers" to our north.
They were dark clean faces, grooved by much patient endurance, strong with self-mastery and those fainter lines that have light in them and only come from years of service for others. Cadman certainly had no scorn for these men. He had passed days and nights with their kind in one of the down-country districts. His tone was slow and gentle when he spoke of that period.
Then the brother pointed aloof with his finger and said: "Lo you! fair lord, how bale speaks to bale all along the headlands of the down-country, and below there in the thorps by the river!"
As for Ralph, he walked up and down the ranks of the stout men of the Down-country, and saw how they had but little armour for defence, though their weapons for cutting and thrusting looked fell and handy.
Down-country, it is quite pleasant to be thirsty, for it makes a drink taste so nice; but desert thirst or "perishing", as it is called is caused by the drying up of the moisture of the body till the organs inside actually cease to work, and the blood clogs in the arteries because it is not liquid enough. It was such terrible thirst that Sax and Vaughan were experiencing.
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