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Pigji! Dogji! What do these fat slugs from Calcutta know? He draws and draws and draws, and talks and talks and talks, and his maps are all wrong. I, Janki, know that this is so. When a man has been shut up in the dark for thirty years, God gives him knowledge. The old gallery that Tibu's gang made is not six feet from Number Five."
Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil just as if he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness.
Janki was in my veranda all this morning, telling me that Kundoo had eloped with his wife Unda or Anda, I think her name was. 'Hillo! And those were the cattle that you risked your life to clear out of Twenty-Two! 'No I was thinking of the Company's props, not the Company's men. 'Sounds better to say so now; but I don't believe you, old fellow.
'I knew these workings before you were born, Janki Meah used to reply: 'I don't want the light to get my coal out by, and I am not going to help you. The oil is mine, and I intend to keep it. A strange man in many ways was Janki Meah, the white-haired, hot-tempered, sightless weaver who had turned pitman.
They could hear her heart beating in thick, sick bumps. 'Slowly, slowly, said Janki. 'I am an old man, and I forget many things. This is Tibu's gallery, but where are the four bricks where they used to put their huqa fire on when the Sahibs never saw? Slowly, slowly, O you people behind. They heard his hands disturbing the small coal on the floor of the gallery and then a dull sound.
A fakir hung about Bronckhorst's compound for twelve days. Then a sweeper appeared, and when Biel heard of him, he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged. Whether the sweeper made love to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst's ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland exclusively. He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly, 'You spoke the truth, Biel.
"Water has come into Twenty-Two. God knows where are the others. I have brought these men from Tibu's gallery in our cutting; making connection through the north side of the gallery. Take us to the cage," said Janki Meah. At the pit-bank of Twenty-Two, some thousand people clamored and wept and shouted. One hundred men one thousand men had been drowned in the cutting.
At Home, where they undercut the coal and bring it down in crashing avalanches from the roof, he would never have been allowed to set foot in a pit. He was not a popular man, because of his oil-savings; but all the gangs admitted that Janki knew all the khads, or workings, that had ever been sunk or worked since the Jimahari Company first started operations on the Tarachunda fields.
This was Kundoo's grievance, and he spoke in the name of all the five men who, with Janki Meah, composed the gang in Number Seven gallery of Twenty-Two. Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar.
Between his terror of Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed, weeping. Then began the panic among the witnesses. Janki, the ayah, leering chastely behind her veil, turned gray, and the bearer left the Court. He said that his Mamma was dying and that it was not wholesome for any man to lie unthriftily in the presence of "Estreeken Sahib."
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