"Ice—ice!" the lady cried dashing through the bamboo chick and almost tearing it from its fastenings. "Give me ice quickly." She looked haggard and distracted. Dark circles ringed her eyes; her sleeves rolled above the elbows revealed rounded arms from which water dripped; her skirt was splashed; her blouse and hair were in disarray.
"There is none, huzur," said the bearer in Hindustani. "Hourly is it expected from Muktiarbad, but as yet it is not in sight."
"What is he saying?" she cried vaguely in her distress, refusing to believe that there was none, which the corroborating action of a hand had implied.
"No ice got it, Memsahib," volunteered the khansaman in his best English, learned from a teacher in the Station bazaar. "All finish—melting fast—making saw-dust one porridge."
"No ice?—my God! My child will die if I cannot have ice." She disappeared within the tent, wringing her hands, leaving the servants to hold council together on what was the best course to pursue.
"Without doubt the little one is in a fit," ventured the cook. "Such is sometimes the case when the teeth press their way through the gums."
"What folly," sneered the khansaman, "when the infant is barely three months old!"
"Without doubt it is a fit," the cook repeated, "else why the hot bath? Such is the treatment the doctor-babu ordered for the son of Amir Khan, my relative in Benares when, from fever, his eyes fixed and his limbs grew rigid."
"Thou speakest true words," said the waterman approaching the group in visible excitement. "To see the limbs twisting and the eyes strained upward turns my stomach. Assuredly it will die—and the master away!—ai ma!—what a calamity!"
"It will die, and we shall all be blamed because there was no ice," sighed the bearer feeling the weight of his responsibility.