But Quita's letter, written in her 'garden' on a boulder, before breakfast, had transported Lenox many hundred miles away from it all. The cluttering of squirrels, and the cries of poor Miriam Bibi entered his ears; but the spirit of him was back among the mountains; the scent of warm pine-needles was is his nostrils, the spell of his wife's face and voice upon his heart.
A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead. And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the significance of those five words.
Lenox straightened himself with an oath. "Kencho.[1] . . . you son of a jackal!" he thundered; at the same time jerking the punkah frill, an effective means of reanimating the long-suffering punkah coolie, who has a trick of twisting the rope round his arm, that he may jerk it the more easily in his dreams.
But Lenox's vigorous pull merely brought a great length of rope through the wall; and his command was answered by the groans of a man in torment. Springing up, he wrenched open the glass door; and a blast as from a furnace struck him across the face. The coolie, a brown, distorted mass, writhed upon the hot stones in mortal agony. At the Sahib's approach, he struggled to his knees with a rush of incoherent detail; while Lenox shouted for Zyarulla, and the dogcart; flung a word of encouragement to the stricken man, and went in again for his helmet.
Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born—mere dust of the earth. None the less, at the Sahib's order he gingerly helped the dust of the earth into the trap, where Lenox put his one available arm round the writhing body; and the sais, who showed small relish for the situation, was ordered to get up and drive from behind. The which he did; leaning over the back seat, and keeping ostentatiously clear of the misbegotten son of a pig who had broken his midday sleep.
In this fashion they journeyed, awkwardly enough, to the temporary cholera hospital; a handful of tents and grass huts on the outskirts of the station. Betwixt the clutches of cramp, and the abject humility of his kind, the coolie slithered from the seat on to the mat; and Lenox had some ado to prevent his falling headlong from the cart. But in due time he was handed over safely to a suave, coffee-coloured hospital assistant, and carried shrieking into a tent crammed with sights unfit to be told; whence he emerged, two hours later, without protest of voice or limb, to swell the intermittent stream of fellow-corpses that flowed from the hospital to the burning ghatt or the Mahommedal burial-ground outside the station.
When Lenox staggered back into the hall, dizzy with headache, and half-blinded with glare, he was met by Desmond, who, noticing a slight lurch as he entered, took hold of his arm.
"Zyarulla told me what happened," he said, a great gentleness in his voice. "Come on to your room, old man. Take a rousing dose of phenacetin, and lie down till tiffin. I'll bring you a lime-squash."
"Thanks. You are a damned good sort, Desmond. The sun's touched me up, I fancy. I shall be all right in a couple at hours."
But before two hours were out, Desmond's orderly was speeding through the dust to the Doctor Sahib's house; and Desmond himself had gone hurriedly to his wife's room, where she too was lying down after her morning's duties. She rose at his coming, holding out both hands. For she read disaster in his eyes.