And, in truth, each of these hardy hunters, bore a bamboo on which were strung the dead bodies of many rodents, young and old. Undoubtedly Job Charnock had a genius for organisation; and, with a mournful prescience of what would be the answer, I asked the nearest Sansi what he was to get for his rats.
It was half the Government rate: but the broad grin on the man's face showed him satisfied. Yes! Job Charnock had the gift of the Empire-builder!
"Look here!" I said to the doctor, "that man hasn't committed an indictable offence. He diagnosed his complaint as plague--that is not indictable; he went to your Department for advice and got confirmation of his suspicions; that was not his fault; and all he's done since then, is what ought to have been done under the circumstances."
"Except the brandy," expostulated the doctor. "Brandy is not in the dietary for plague, and he's drunk up the year's supply! That amounts to stealing."
"Pardon me! You can have the dresser up for misuse of supplies, if you like," I said stoutly, "but every drop of that brandy was drunk out of one of your blessed measuring glasses." I pointed to the inverted crystal cone with cabalistic signs on it which lay beside the bottle. "He couldn't have taken more than an ounce at a time, and that to a man of his habits is strictly a medicinal dose, and for that your dresser is responsible. No! send him in to me when he sobers. I'll settle him up."
I did so to the best of my ability, but there was no question that Job Charnock was, as the doctor had said, "a bit looney" at times, especially when he had any drink on board, though no one could have called him a habitual drunkard. Still, there was little use in getting him employment. He always drifted out of it again. Then, for a while, he would disappear, only to return after a few months with his usual, "I don't want to do no 'arm to anyone. I wants to be seggergated, for I've got the plague, so 'elp me Gawd I 'ave." He was always, then, at the last point of destitution; more than once even the "hart banner" for the ticca ghari was not his, and he would come skulking into the office almost starving and barefoot. For he looked on me as a friend in need; and, indeed, I used sometimes to wonder if hunger were not as much responsible for the recurrence of his delusion as drink.
Then I was transferred to Rajputana, and apparently left Job Charnock behind me, until one hot weather morning when, in order to catch a train, I was galloping across a short cut of the wild Bar land which lay between the railway and the out-of-the-way-place where I was stationed. It is a strange desert, this Bar land, of wild caper bushes, stunted jund trees, and hard resilient limestone soil, baked by the sun to whiteness. A horse's hoofs resounds over it for miles, but a man, if he left visible path, might, without the aid of the sun, lose his way in it almost any moment. Even I had to glance at the whereabouts of that luminary when a few moment's abstraction caused me to divert my eye from the faint traces of previous passages which was all there was of path.
As I did so, my eye was caught by something curious in the gnarled branches of a jund tree some fifty yards further away. It looked like a red cross. Instinctively I rode towards it. It was a red cross. Two strips of red Turkey cotton had been carefully tied crosswise between the branches. What did it mean? And why had that shallow trench--a mere scraping on the hard soil--been traced between that tree and the next!
And--yes!--that was another red cross in its branches also! I rode on only to find that here again the trench trended at right angles towards a further tree where yet another red cross showed.
The grey, green, leafless triangle of caper bushes, all set with tiny coral bud-flowers, had so far prevented my seeing anything within the traced square; but now I came upon a definite opening. Across it, however, from bush to bush, stretched a pair of men's braces, and pinned to this was a bit of paper on which something was written in what looked suspiciously like blood.