The trousers, well aimed, ended his speech suddenly as I reached dry land. After that I worked with wide-open eyes; and before I was through with my washing I saw as many as fourteen of the river gods of India.
We reached the station in time for the train, and arrived in Allahabad late that night. After walking half a mile from the station we found “The Strangers’ Rest,” a home for wanderers, closed. But the Irish superintendent was a light sleeper, and we were soon weighing down two charpoys under the trees.
After breakfast the next morning I set out to explore the city alone, while my companion called on the commissioner. When evening came I was again sitting under the spreading trees near the “Rest,” when I looked up and saw Marten turning slowly and sorrowfully in at the gate. He had been to ask the commissioner for a ticket. According to our plan, he had promised to ask for a pass to Kurachee, a city at the mouth of the Indus River. But he had made a mistake and had blurted out the familiar name of Bombay. He had received, therefore, a ticket to the city on the west coast.
Marten did not want to go to Bombay, because I had refused to go there with him. But he had the ticket, and the law required that he leave by the first train. Even if it had not, there was no one else to whom he could apply. He felt very sad about it—so much so, indeed, that he began to cry. To dry his tears I agreed to accompany him to the capital of the next district, where he could ask for a ticket that would take him my way.
Before the night was over we had reached the town of Jubbulpore, where we passed a sharp-cornered rest in the station. Marten told a carefully worded story to the commissioner of that district, and received a ticket to Jhansi. To get there he had to take a train southward until he reached the main line, where he could change cars and go northwest. I wished to go by another line that would take me through a wilder part of India. So we separated, promising to meet again at Bina.
The train on which I traveled was run by a Eurasian driver, who gave me a compartment in the car all to myself. The country we passed through was covered with hills and ridges, over which the train rose and fell like a ship crossing the waves of the ocean. On both sides of the track stretched a jungle where the vines and trees grew so thick and close together that even the sunshine could not pierce its way into the woods. The villages we passed were merely clusters of huts behind the railway station. Every time our train stopped at one of these places, the people flocked to the station to greet us. Now and then, as we went on, I caught sight of some kind of deer bounding away through the shrubbery; and once I saw that dreaded beast of India—a tiger. He was a lean, lively beast, more dingy in color than those we see in cages. He moved toward the track rapidly, yet cautiously, vaulting over the low jungle shrubbery in long, easy bounds. On the track he halted a moment, gazed scornfully at our slowly moving engine, then sprang into the thicket and was gone.
We halted at noon at the station of Damoh. Never thinking that anyone would enter my compartment, I left my knapsack on a bench, and went to eat lunch in the station buffet. When I returned a strange sight greeted my eyes. Before the door of my compartment was grouped the population of Damoh. Inside stood a Hindu policeman, in khaki uniform and red turban. Under one arm he held my guide-book, a spool of film, and my lunch wrapped in a leaf, that he had taken from my knapsack. The sack itself, half a dozen letters, and my camera cover lay on the floor at his feet. In some way he had found the springs that opened the back of the camera, and, having laid that on the bench beside him, was cheerfully turning the screw that unwound the ruined film while his fellow countrymen looked on with delight. All the pictures I had taken on that trip were lost to me because of his meddling.
The natives fled when they saw me coming, and the policeman dropped my possessions on the floor and dashed for the shelter of the station-master’s office. I followed after to make complaint, and came upon him cowering behind a heap of baggage, with his hands tightly clasped over the badge that bore his number.
“He says,” explained the Eurasian station-agent, “that it is his duty to look in empty compartments for lost articles, but that he has not taken the littlest thing, not even a box of matches, and asks that you forgive him. If you cannot put the queer machine together again, he will.”
I went on to Bina, where I stayed three days without seeing anything of Marten. For some time I supposed he had failed to find me there and had gone on without me. But three days later, when I arrived in Agra, I found in a letter-rack at the station a post-card across which my name was misspelled in bold blue letters. On the back was scrawled this simple message: