"Thank God for my good dinner!" Desmond muttered with a wry face as he put down his money. "You must supplement it out of Lenox's rations, old lady. Hukm hai . . . sumja?" [2]
She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Having won the victory that mattered, she could afford to be submissive over trifles.
An hour or so before midnight, they clanked into Lahore station—a big-bastioned building, whose solid masonry breathed fire, as literally as any dragon of romance. Within was a great darkness, partially dispelled by hanging oil-lamps; and babel enough to wake the Seven Sleepers. The uninitiated arriving at an Indian railway station are apt to imagine that a riot of some sort must be in progress. But it is only the third-class passenger, whose name is legion, fighting, tooth and nail, for the foot of space due to every possessor of the precious morsel of cardboard tucked into the folds of his belt: because he knows, from harsh experience, that when the train moves on more than a few will be left disconsolate, to watch its unwinking eye vanish out of their ken:—bewildered adventurers, for many of whom the "fire-carriage" still remains a new-fangled god, who feeds on coal and water, and can only be propitiated by repeated offerings of that wonder-working hieroglyph—the tikkut.
At Lahore passengers to Dera change into the night mail for Mooltan: and almost before the train drew up Desmond was out on the platform, pushing his way, purposefully, through a mass of jostling, shouting, perspiring humanity:—Sikhs, Punjabi farmers, moneylenders, 'fat and scant of breath,' women of all ages, with apathetic babies, in round cap and necklet, astride upon their hips. In the station-master's office he found the fateful red envelope awaiting him; and broke the seal with a shaking hand.
"Crisis over. Condition more hopeful. Will wire Jhung."
"Thank God!" he muttered, choking down a lump that had risen in his throat. Then, elbowing his way back to where Honor and Lenox stood guard over a disordered pile of luggage, he thrust the paper into her hand.
"We'll bring him round between us, you and I," he said, as she looked up; and she nodded contentedly, her eyes deep in his. He could no longer regret having given way to her; and she knew it!
They were not the only English passengers in the Mooltan train. Two Dera subalterns, who had fled posthaste from Simla, stood smoking outside their carriage:—Hodson, the 'slacker' of the Battery, a small sallow individual, with heavy-lidded eyes, and a disagreeable mouth; and Major Olliver's 'sub,' Bobby Nixon, who answered indiscriminately to half a dozen names, but was officially registered as The Chicken, a tribute to his cheerful lack of wisdom, worldly or otherworldly, and to the sparse crop of 'down' that surmounted an extensive freckled face, and shadowed a mouth whose one beauty lay in its readiness to smile capaciously upon the world at large.
As Honor and Lenox came towards him, the said mouth screwed itself into a low whistle.
"Great Scott, Mrs Desmond, . . but this is flagrant heroism! Who'd have dreamt of meeting you here?"