"Die? Rubbish!" said Dr. Westlake, cheerfully. "Not from this, at any rate, and we will do what we can for the lungs afterwards."
Raheem's face did not lose its anxiety. "And when, if the Huzoor will say, shall I be able to walk again?" As he lay in the comfortable bed he had been making up his mind to sacrifice all comfort, to leave life behind him, and start on foot for death, with his face towards Mecca.
"Walk?" echoed the doctor, with a significant look at his assistant. Then he sat down on the edge of the cot, and told the truth.
Raheem heard it, looking incredulously at the cradle; and then suddenly he interrupted a platitude about its being better to be a cripple than to die, with an eager question: "Then the Huzoor means that I shall never be able to walk again?"
The doctor nodded.
"May God reward the Huzoor for ever and ever," said Raheem in a whisper, raising both hands in a salute; and his face was one radiant smile.
Dr. Westlake looked at his assistant as they passed on to the next cot. "They are an incomprehensible people," he said in rather an injured tone. "I never expected to hear a man thank me rapturously for cutting off both his feet."
He did not know that cripples are especially exempted from the duty of pilgrimage, and that the patient was repeating his version of the text: "It is better to enter halt into life, than, having two feet, to be cast into hell."
[THE KING'S WELL]
This is one of poor Craddock's many stories which he told me when we were in the wilderness together, engaged--like another Moses and Aaron--in preparing a way for a Western people across the desert, and dividing its sand waves by a pathway of red-brick ballast edged with steel. In other words, in making the railway on which he afterwards met his death in trying to prevent a survival of past ages from being in the permanent way of civilisation.