The ticket-collector shook his head, and Raheem, with a dazed look, turned away quietly.
"Trra!" came the voice of the drum-player sententiously and safely from the window of a carriage. "He hath lost the inside; that comes of a cover. Well, well, prayers are over; up with the carpet! But he is Hâjji already, my masters, so 'tis not as though it were one of us sinners."
"Keep thy sins to thyself, chatterer," retorted his next neighbour tartly, as the train moved on. "We be virtuous men enough."
"If you haven't money to go on, you must go back. The booking-office is over there, and the up-mail will be in in a few hours."
This official view of the question, given by the authorities as they gathered round the disappointed pilgrim, was simplicity itself, even to Raheem. He never thought of connecting his ticketless cover with Deena's coverless ticket. The fact that his chance was gone absorbed him utterly; he had lost salvation, for the very thought of taking back his gift to Hoshyar was impossible to him. That was the outcome of it all. So he sat patiently waiting for his train to come in; sat patiently, after he had found a place in it, waiting for it to go on, so absolutely absorbed in his loss, that he did not even hear his neighbours' comments on the delay.
"Line clear at last!" said the guard joyfully to the driver as he came out of the telegraph-office, where but one instant before the welcome signal had echoed. "Steam away all you know, sonny, and make up lost time. I promised my girl to be punctual; there's a hop on at her house."
So, with a shriek, they were off for a twenty-mile scamper across the desert; out with a bump over the points, out with a whistle past the last signal, out with a flash by the telegraph-posts. But something else was flashing by the posts also; for a message came clicking into the station they had left not a minute ago, "Mistake--line blocked--down-mail."
"My God!" said the station-master in a thick voice, standing up blindly. He was an old Mutiny man, but he was white as a sheet.
"It isn't our fault, father," began his son, a slim young fellow, showing mixed blood.
"D----n it all, sir," shouted the other furiously, "what does it matter whose fault it is? What's to be done?"