“A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohe! Ohe! Look at that camel with the muzzle on his nose!”
A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner as a fleet rounds a cape.
“Ho, Malik! Why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough,” Adam cried.
“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool at the beginning,” said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the leading beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.
“That is true,” said Adam solemnly, and they laughed again.
At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, the loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated, Adam hardly able to be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” I found them both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a calf on a tight rope just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were pretending that he was a raja’s elephant who had gone mad; and they shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of crushing Victor’s repeated reminders to me that he and not “that other” was the owner of the calf, said, “It is true I have no cow’s child; but a great dacoity [robbery] has been done on my father.”
“We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing,” I said.
“It was my mother’s horse. She has been dacoited with beating and blows, and now is so thin.” He held his hands an inch apart. “My father is at the telegraph-house sending telegrams. Imam Din will cut off all their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah for my elephant. Give it me!”
This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph office and found Strickland in a black temper among many telegraph forms. A dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner whimpering at intervals. He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as “Be-shakl, be-ukl, be-ank” [ugly, stupid, eyeless]. It seemed that Strickland had sent his wife’s horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight’s march, in the groom’s charge. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foothills, near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had robbed the groom of the bucket and blanket, and all his money—eleven rupees, nine annas. Last, they had left him for dead by the way-side, where some woodcutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed man howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. “They asked me if I was Strickland Sahib’s servant, and I, thinking the Protection of the Name would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously.”
“H’m!” said Strickland. “I thought they wouldn’t dacoit as a business on the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally—sheer badmashi [impudence]. All right.”