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If your bits aren't easy, rear, and let the saises know whether your boots are tight." Each pony had his sais, his groom, who lived and ate and slept with the animal, and had betted a good deal more than he could afford on the result of the game. There was no chance of anything going wrong, but to make sure, each sais was shampooing the legs of his pony to the last minute.
Means tightened his cinch, and shook his rope loose and coiled it up again. Loveless said he was ready. One of the saises produced the Colonel's horse from behind another clump of scrub, and Kearton dismounted and began creeping forward with his camera. "Don't start him up till I get my position," he cautioned. "I'll wave my hand."
It was their duty to carry the camp from place to place, each porter carrying sixty pounds on his head. When they arrive at the spot selected for camp they put up the tents, get in firewood, and carry in what game may later be shot by the white men. Then, lowest in the social scale, are the saises, or grooms. There is one for each mule or horse, of which we had four.
Saises are almost the most prolific source of rumor, but he had a means of stilling their tongues. There was little to say during the dark drive. They were affectionate, those two, without too many words when it came to leave-taking, each knowing the other's undivided love.
The head-man and the four gunbearers get seventy-five rupees a month, the askaris fifteen rupees, the cook forty rupees, the tent boys twenty and twenty-five rupees, depending upon experience, the porters ten rupees, and the saises twelve rupees. The totos get nothing except food and lodging, as well as experience, which may be valuable when they grow up to be porters at ten rupees a month.
From the darkness came the low talk of the saises, rolled in their blankets on the ground at the end of the picket line. Most of the men stood with their backs to the flames, gazing vacantly at the horses, the trees, or the stars. For a while not a word was said. Means threw another log on the fire and then squatted on his heels and silently watched the flames catch the bark and flare up brightly.
Kittiwynk, seeing that Polaris had joined Corks in the chase for the ball up the ground, dropped into Polaris' place, and then "time" was called. The Skidars' ponies wasted no time in kicking or fuming. They knew that each minute's rest meant so much gain, and trotted off to the rails, and their saises began to scrape and blanket and rub them at once.
He obtained great insight into the ways and thefts of saises enough, he says, to have summarily convicted half the chamar population of the Punjab if he had been on business.
Our gunbearers are waiting and the saises with the mules are in readiness. So we start off, usually walking the first hour or two, with gunbearers and saises and mules trailing along behind. Soon afterward we look back to see the long procession of porters following along in single file.
Later he drove Tess down-hill in the dog-cart, first changing his own disguise for American clothes because the saises might be up and about when he returned at dawn, and for them to see him in the costume of a sais would only have added to the risk of putting Gungadhura's men on the scent of Yasmini.
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