The Hindu turned to his superior, all but choking himself over his convulsive utterance. Tears were streaming down his tawny cheeks.
“He says,” cried the babu, when the cook fell silent at last, “in the charpoy is much blood. Have you become wounded?”
“It was only a blood-sucker,” I explained, “but where does the register come in?”
“The cook asks that you will write all the story of the blood in it, very careful.”
“What nonsense,” I answered, when James’ mirth had subsided. “I’ll pay for the damage to the charpoy.”
“Oh! It is no dam-máge,” protested the babu, “no dam-máge at all. He is not ask for pay. But when the inspector is coming and seeing the much blood in the charpoy, he is thinking the cook have kill a man who have sleep here, and he is taking him to Kawkeriek and making him shot. Very bad. So cook cry. Please, sir, write you the story in the register book.”
I sat down at the veranda table and inscribed a dramatic tale for the visiting inspector. Only when I had filled the page below our names and half the next one, did the Hindu acknowledge himself contented, and carry away the book for safe keeping.
We stowed away our dry garments and donned the rags and tatters we had stretched along the ceiling the evening before. They were still clammy wet. As for our footwear, we despaired for a time of getting into it, or of being able to walk if once we did. Our feet were blistered and swollen to the ankles, the shoes shrunken and wrinkled until the leather was as inflexible as sheet-iron. We got them on at last, however, and hobbled down the veranda steps and away. For the first hour we advanced by spasmodic bursts, picking our way as across a field of burning coals. James was in even more uncomfortable straits than I. The football buskins, theoretically just the thing for jungle tramping, had, in actual use, proved quite the opposite. The day before, the Australian had slipped and stumbled over the rubble like a man learning to skate. In drying, the shoes had wrinkled and twisted into a shape that gave anything but a firm foothold, and the heavy leather chafed like emery paper. Wherever he came upon a sharp stone, the sufferer halted to chop viciously at one of the cleats, cursing the missionary’s judgment and snarling like one wreaking his pent-up vengeance on a mortal enemy. Before noonday came, he had pounded off the last cleat, not without inflicting serious injury to the soles; and at the first opportunity he borrowed a knife and transformed the shoes into a decidedly low pair of oxfords. But even after these radical alterations he was uncomfortably shod. I much doubt whether the white man has yet devised the proper footwear for jungle tramping. To be foot-sore seems to be one of the inevitable hardships of those who walk in the tropics. We, at least, suffered more or less pain at every step from Kawkeriek to the end of our journey.
Thenganyenam was no great distance from the frontier village. Our guide of the day before had turned westward, but the pathway between the adjacent hamlets was distinctly enough marked to be followed. It was not yet noon when we reached Myáwadi. A few showers had visited their fury upon us; but the brilliant sunshine was again flooding the world about us. Myáwadi was a more populous thorp than that we had left in the morning, pitched along the bank of the stream that marks the limit of old England’s sway. An air of lazy, soul-filling contentment hovered over the tiny jungle oasis. With every puff of the soft summer breeze the tinkling of the little silver bells at the top of the pagoda came musically clear to our ears. Here and there a villager was stretched out on his back in the grass. It seemed ill-mannered to break the peaceful repose of the inhabitants.
Besides the stone and mud sanctuary soaring above the brilliant vegetation, the most imposing edifice was a bamboo barracks, housing a little garrison of native soldiers. Here we stopped, as was our duty before crossing the frontier. The sepoys were childish, good-hearted fellows who made known their astonishment and offered their condolences in expressive pantomime, and did their best to make as appetizing as possible the dinner of rice and jungle vegetables they offered. It was fortunate that they were so open-handed, for we could not have purchased food in the village. This jungle land has not yet reached the commercial stage.