"Halt! by your right--single file!"
The order came, far back, from the widest street, and it was full ten minutes ere Lance Carlyon, with a following of Sikh pioneers, armed with spades and picks, could edge through the crowd, though it still yielded room to authority without a murmur. He had been on his way with a fatigue party to finish clearing the camp, when the assistant superintendent of police had met him, in the bazaar, and told him he was wanted.
"Send four of your men to clear the mud from the crevices of the stones," said the police officer, seizing on a possible diversion gladly, "it will serve to keep the crowd amused till Dering brings his men down."
As the four stalwart pioneers stepped to their work of making miracles, a stir of expectation ran through those first rows who could see. "Surely," they said to each other, "if the Masters took the job in hand, the Gods must needs send the water."
"Of a surety!" said Shiv-deo, catching the comment. "Do not the Gods always befriend the bold? Do not we, of Harriana, find the sacred river which the devils hid, though we have to dig three-hundred-feet wells to find it?"
This allusion to the extraordinarily deep wells dug by the peasantry in the almost rainless tract beneath which, so the legend goes, the river Saraswati still runs, passed from mouth to mouth consolingly.
Yea, if devils hid water, men found it.
Why not these men? since nothing was impossible to a miracle.
The sun was shining broadly now, as if it had been up for hours, and showed, far as the eye could reach down every lane and street and alley, nothing but that sea of upturned faces converging to one centre; wonderfully still, wonderfully patient.
"I wish someone would stop that cursed drum," said Lance, suddenly, "it's enough to give anyone the fidgets. I feel myself--" he broke off, and his memory going back to his jesting remark to Erda, his young face clouded. Was it possible he should never see her again? Was it possible that the Reverend David was to claim his paradise? He felt savage at the very thought, impatient, full of an almost righteous anger at everything, especially the drum-banger for making such an infernal noise.