There were a good many technicalities and difficulties to be surmounted, too, in the question of getting inward as far as the precaution lines, that would have discouraged anyone less determined than Trevelyan. It had seemed simple enough—to get there—after the journey had once been begun, but the actual reaching Mackenzie was another matter.
The delay, under which he fretted inexpressibly, only brought more serious accounts of the spread of the disease. A score of natives had sickened and died—traced directly to the foulness of the water used—and later there were contradictory reports as to the appearance of the scourge within the barracks. The waiting days became a torture to Trevelyan, and it was not until he had scaled the wall of obstacles, and was well on the other side, pressing onward to Mackenzie, that the torture lifted. The fear—half formed and never acknowledged—of possibly not getting to Mackenzie, fell from him as mile after mile took him further from Patna and nearer to the garrison, and once or twice he laughed a little as he kept picturing to himself Mackenzie's surprise at this personal answering of his letter.
There were other pictures that would force themselves on him at this time, but he fought them from him with a strength grown with much usage. There were pictures of Cary's face—white with the whiteness of the moon upon it and sweeter than the fairest flower—there were pictures of home and old Mactier, mourning for him, and visions of the sea beating against the high, gray crags. It seemed to him he could hear and see it even then, inland as he was, until he would force himself back to present things and the desolate waste land through which he was journeying; the stricken section to which he was going; the cholera and Mackenzie. And he would hold his wandering thoughts sternly in check, as years ago he had held in check the stallion he had conquered and was wont to ride. And so the day would pass in a desperate struggle against self, or his desire to press onward to Mackenzie.
It had needed all his powers of eloquence; all his strategy; all the hard discipline of repression taught by the Woolwich years, to get him so far on his journey, and he had thought with a certain grim satisfaction that all the Woolwich years were paying back their debt to him, at last.
It was early in the morning when he reached the small inland Station. His presence caused a good deal of comment among the troopers he passed on his way to Mackenzie and the improvised hospital that had been erected a long distance from the barracks. The whole thing was strange; the new faces that he met; the awful sense of a growing horror that brooded like a bird of prey over the Station with its handful of men—placed out here by order of government officials far away and safe enough in London—struggling against the threatened devastation to the ranks.
He found Mackenzie in the small ill-constructed apothecary shop and he stood still a minute, studying his friend's haggard face and heavy eyes, before the surgeon was aware of his presence. Mackenzie was weighing morphia, and three times Trevelyan saw his hand shake and spill the white powder before he was able to divide it in correct proportions.
"Mackenzie," he said evenly, not wishing to startle him.
The surgeon turned sharply and looked at him. Then he leaned against the table, his back to it, his hands gripping its edge. He leaned forward a little, frowning. He had had a hard night of it, but—
"Mackenzie—it's I—Trevelyan. Don't you remember me?"
Trevelyan went forward.