"Ate it?" I echoed. "You don't mean to say----"
"Huzoor!" he interrupted cheerfully, "this is how it was. After your Honour left, it was the time of evening prayer. So I went, after my usual custom, to the House of God, to await the cry of the Muazzim and prepare myself for the presence of the Most High by the necessary ablutions. And as I sat squatted on the edge of the Pool of Purification, my hands in the cool water, I felt as if naught could cleanse me from that accursed paper that lay folded in my breast. So I cried in my heart to the prophet that he should show me a way, and then in one moment I saw where the error lay. I was arrogating to myself decisions that should be left to the Almighty. So I did what I do ever when life and death are at issue; when even the mighty skill of medicine has to stand on one side and do nothing.
"I took my stylus, and I wrote all over that paper the attributes of the Most High--His mercy, His truth, His wisdom, His great loving-kindness. And then, Huzoor, I crushed it into the form of a bolus, covered it with silver foil, and swallowed it as a pill.
"It hath done me much good. I am now free from anxiety. The decision of all things rests with the Most Mighty."
[THE SALT OF THE EARTH]
"The Huzoor is the salt of the earth," said Hoshyari Mull, submissively. He had been educated, he asserted, at a mission school: thus the words of Scripture came handy to him. So also did a variety of other things.
"And you are the biggest scoundrel unhung. I know that, though I can't find you out--yet," retorted the Boy, almost savagely. He was really a Boy, a round-faced, fresh-coloured English Boy, though his years numbered twenty-four, and he was a full-blown Salt Patrol on the Great Customs Hedge, which, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, still stretched between the river Indus, as it flows to the Arabian Sea, and the Mahanuddi river that finds its way to the Bay of Bengal; in other words, stretched for fifteen hundred miles across the vast continent of India. It was a strange, weird barrier, this vast hedge of cactus and thorny acacia, of prickly palms, and still more prickly agaves, that thrust out their spiked swords boldly from a buckler of spine-set thicket. It was fully fourteen feet high, and of its width one could only guess, in passing through the break, every ten miles or so, where some first-class road claimed a long passage-way through it. Here it was that the Patrols had their bungalows, and it was at one of these that the Boy lived. It was a very important post, because it was, so to speak, the gateway between the South-West and the North-East; that is to say, between Bombay and the Central Provinces, and Delhi, Oude, Bengal. Then, lying as it did, right in the Rajputana Desert, with no other roadway within twenty miles of it on either side, it needed a sharp look out all along the line to prevent isolated attempts at smuggling. But the Boy was quick at his work, and spent all his youthful energy in preserving the intactness of his Customs Hedge. The life, however, was as strange and weird as was the barrier. Absolute loneliness, absolute isolation. For long months together not one word of your mother-tongue. With luck, a weekly post. No books, no newspapers, no civilisation of any kind. On the other hand there was endless sport, unfailing interest for those who loved wild things. And the Boy had never been one for books. Harrow had left him, one may say, uncontaminated by them; examinations had passed him by; so, though both his grandfathers had been high Indian officials, he had drifted naturally into the Salt Department; the last refuge, not of the incompetent, but the unlearned. There, to be a man was all that was asked of you. Without manhood the salt had lost its savour; there was no possibility of salting it with all the 'ologies in existence.
Hoshyari Mull paused in his deft winding-on of the Huzoor's putties, to say submissively, "The Salt of the Earth speaks truth." Whereat the Boy laughed.
He and Hoshyari were at once friends and enemies. The latter was chief native supervisor, a man of about forty, above middle height, smooth faced and lissome. There was nothing, the Boy soon found out, which he could not do; which, in fact, he did not do. An excellent accountant, he was also an excellent shot. If he knew, or said he knew, every smuggler of salt between Attock and Cuttack, he also knew every bird and beast and butterfly by name, and could tell you the habits of all and sundry. He knew the history of Ancient India by heart, and could pour forth legend and tale by the yard. He was a magnificent swordsman, and could teach the Boy, who had learnt singlestick, many cuts and thrusts.
In short, he was all things to the Boy; without him, life in the Patrol bungalow would, indeed, have lost its savour. And yet the Boy mistrusted him, for no reason, except vaguely that he was too clever by half. Hoshyari, for his part, regarded the Boy as he had regarded no other master. He had been, as it were, impresario of amusement to several Huzoors of the ordinary type. This one was different. This one was as the Angels of God. That is how Hoshyari put it to himself, and, on the whole, it was a sufficiently comprehensive description, and led to thoroughly wholesome treatment. Here was no necessity for itr of rose, no distilled waters of any description, save the dew of heaven, as it gathered on the gram fields where the black buck lay, or hung like a diamond on a cactus flower over which some rare butterfly hovered.