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Peroo nodded with bright eyes. "In a little in a little the Sahib will find that he thinks well again. I too will " He dived into his treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier, and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson stood with his chin on his chest, thinking.
He had been bearded by an English tutor of sporting tastes for some five or six years, and was now royally wasting the revenues accumulated during his minority by the Indian Government. His steam-launch, with its silver-plated rails, striped silk awning, and mahogany decks, was a new toy which Findlayson had found horribly in the way when the Rao came to look at the bridge works.
It is no more than opium clean Malwa opium!" Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand, and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least a good guard against fever the fever that was creeping upon him out of the wet mud and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
"This is some island of last year's indigo-crop," he went on. "We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully." Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any merely human emotion.
There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks' work on the girders of the three middle piers his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka permanent to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, had perished. Practically, the thing was done.
Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. "She cannot live," he grunted. "Her seams open already.
"The flood lessens even now," it cried. "Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!" "My bridge," said Findlayson to himself "That must be very old work now. What have the Gods to do with my bridge?" His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar.
If she were even a dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson Sahib, she fills." "Accha! I am going away. Come thou also." In his mind, Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot.
Somewhere in the night of time he had built a bridge a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.
I have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports, but" Peroo looked at the damp, discoloured shrine under the peopul "never man has seen that we saw here." "What?" "Has the Sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?" "There was a fever upon me." Findlayson was still looking uneasily across the water.
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