I jumped off my horse and bent to look at it. Though written in large characters it was barely decipherable, and seemed to have been drawn with difficulty by a pointed stick. This much I could read:
"Trespussers will be persecuted
No Thoroughfare
Case of Plague within s'elp me Gawd."
Segregation! by all that was holy!
I tied my horse to the inarched root of a jund tree, set aside the braces, and made my way through the bushes.
It was quite a comfortable secluded spot. The grey-green set-with-scarlet brocade of the caper bushes formed a curtain round it, the floor of it was hard and white as marble; but in the middle of the little open space there was, as one sees so often in this Bar land, a tiny hillock of sand that had been whirled thither and left by the wild dust storms which sweep over the Rajputana desert. And on this sand Job Charnock lay, his face turned up to the sky. He cannot have been dead long, for his body was untouched by wild birds or beasts, but he was quite dead. Perhaps though, the sleeves of his turkey-red shirt--the rest of it having evidently gone to the making of crosses--which were hung on sticks set in the sand at his head and his feet might, so far, have frightened away the animals. They might have been put there for the purpose; on the other hand they might have been meant as a last danger signal, not to prevent harm being done to him, but to prevent him from "'arming anybody." His bare body showed terribly emaciated; but his face was calm; it almost had a smile upon it.
Had he really died of the plague; or, in coming, it might be, to see me, had he lost his way, as a stranger might well do, in the pathless Bar, and fallen a victim to starvation? And had the recurrence of hunger brought on his curious hallucination once more?
Who could say? Plague was very prevalent. It might be one; it might be the other.
I stood looking at the peaceful face for a minute or two; then I made up my mind. He should have his wish; no one this time should interfere with his desire to "do no 'arm to nobody."
So, covering the body for the time with the doubled blanket I always use as a saddle cloth, I rode off to the nearest village, some six miles off, and returned with two men, pickaxes and shovels.
It took some time to dig a grave in that hard white soil; but when the coolies had done patting down the dry dust and limestone nodules into the long mound of earth which is the outward sign that a human body lies beneath, I lingered to peg one of the red crosses over it.