"Leave them to me, mai Suttu!" shrieked Shâhbâsh, in an ecstasy of rage over this calm appropriation. "Lo, I will give them a crop of blows if they come down. If not, let them starve and drop like bats in the cold. I am in no hurry." He squatted himself on the matting and helped himself to the gathered dates with both hands. But Suttu saw further than the immediate present, and knew a protest must be raised, and that quickly. She turned at once to that confidence in the power of personal appeal which, thank Heaven, still lingers in India, despite Western attempts to strangle it with red tape and smother it with sealing-wax.
"Yea, watch thou," she cried, "while I go to the big sahib's house and cry for justice. He listens to the poor."
"Wâh! wâh!" assented the clingers, "but see us safe first, O mother!"
"Let them be," said Shâhbâsh, confidentially, "else they may make away with the dates they have picked. Lo, they are safer there till the police come."
So there they clung, while the fakeerni, her indignation increasing at every swinging stride, made her way to the deputy-commissioner's bungalow.
He was a small, fair English lad, put in charge--with many instructions to telegraph to headquarters if he saw signs of the millennium or another mutiny--during the absence on three weeks' leave of a senior man. He was just mounting his polo pony in order to keep his hand in by chivying a ball round a stick, when wronged womanhood appeared and flung out a pair of remarkably beautiful arms for justice. Perhaps the fact that the complainant was superbly handsome and struck a most impressive attitude had something to do with the readiness with which he turned to the red-coated orderlies for a translation of her patois petition.
"'Tis Suttu, the fakeerni, and she comes to tell the Protector of the Poor that contractors are feloniously picking her dates."
"Send and stop 'em. And, and--what the deuce is the right thing to do. Oh, yes. Tell the police to report as usual." Then, as he rode off, he nodded affably to Suttu. "Take comfort, mother; I'll see to it."
He had been swished at Harrow quite an incredibly short time before, but he did the part of Providence neatly, while men for whom he had fagged were enjoying the inestimable privilege of sitting on a vestry--or the knife-board of an omnibus conveying them citywards to act as copying-machines for the term of their natural lives.
Suttu's apparent triumph, however, dwindled in Shâhbâsh's eyes to ignominious defeat when the police refused permission for any one to pick the dates until the petition of Hussan for the land on behalf of his son Murghub should be decided.