CHAPTER XII
THE LONG DAY
One travels dak by relays casually disposed along the route at the whim of the native contractor. Between Badshah Junction and Kuttarpur there were ten stages, of which the conclusion of the first was at hand—Amber having all but abandoned belief in its existence.
Slamming recklessly down the bed of an ancient watercourse, the tonga spun suddenly upon one wheel round a shoulder of the banks and dashed out upon a rolling plain, across which the trail snaked to other farther hills that lay dim and low, a wavy line of blue, upon the horizon—the hills in whose heart Kuttarpur itself lay occult. And, by the roadside, in a compound fenced with camel-thorn, sat an aged and indigent dak-bungalow, marking the end of the first stage, the beginning of the second.
It wore a look of Heaven to the traveller. In the shade of its veranda he read an urgent invitation to rest and surcease of sunlight. He approved it thoroughly; the ramshackle rest-house itself, the sheds in the rear for the accommodation of relays, the syce squatting asleep in the sunshine, the few scrawny chickens squabbling and scratching over their precarious sustenance in the deep hot dust of the compound, even the broken tonga reposing with its shafts uplifted at a piteous angle of decrepitude—all these Amber surveyed with a kindly eye.
Ram Nath reined in with a flourish and lifted a raucous voice, hailing the syce, while Amber, painfully disengaging his cramped limbs, climbed down and stumbled toward the veranda. The abrupt transition from violent and erratic motion to a solid and substantial footing affected him unpleasantly, with an undeniable qualm; the earth seemed to rock and flow beneath him as if under the influence of an antic earthquake. He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he was to share his tonga, or associated the white-clad figure in the dark doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.
"Where is that tonga-wallah who deserted me here last night?" the woman was demanding of Ram Nath, too preoccupied with her resentment to have eyes for the other traveller, who at sight of her had stopped and removed his pith helmet and now stood staring as if he had come from a land in which there were no women. "Where," she continued, with an imperative stamp of a daintily-shod foot, "is that wretched tonga-wallah?"
"Sahiba," protested Ram Nath, with a great show of deference, "how should I know? Belike he is in Badshah Junction, whither he returned very late last night, being travel-worn and weary, and where I left him, being sent with this excellent tonga to take his place."
"You were? And why have I been detained here, alone and unprotected, this long night? Simply because that other tonga-wallah was a fool, am I to be imposed upon in this fashion?"
"What am I," whimpered Ram Nath, "to endure the wrath of the sahiba for a fault that is none of mine?"