"As I swung first one side of my legs, and then the other over the sweet sand desert, I could feel the Baboo thumping up and down on my back, for he was clinging to the saddle with both hands. Sometimes he abused me, and sometimes he begged me to stop; that I was a good Unt—his Father and Mother, and his greatest friend. As he would not be shaken off because of his fear of Dera Khan's knife, I carried him into a jhil of much water; there he was forced to let go, and when he got to the bank, if it had not been for a Sahib he would most surely have been killed by my Master. Hathi has told us of the fear-look he has seen in the faces of the Men-kind, and there was much of this in the eyes of that Baboo. I remained in the jhil until my Master had lost the fierce kill-look, then I came out, and save for some of the old abuse there was nothing done to me.
"But we all went to the Bolan Pass, carrying food for those that labored there making a path for the Fire Caravan, the bearer of burdens that is neither Bullock, nor Unt, nor aught that I know of."
"It was a railroad," Sa'-zada, the Keeper, explained.
"Perhaps," grunted Unt, licking his pendulous upper lip; "perhaps, but we Unts spoke of it as the Fire Caravan. Still it was an evil thing, a destroyer of lives, many lives, for never in that whole land of sand-hills and desert was there so much heat and so much death.
"First the Bail (Bullocks) died as though Bagh the Killer had taken each one by the throat; then those of my kind fell down by the fire-path and could not rise again. And the air, that is always so sweet on the hot sand plains, became like the evil breath of the place wherein nests Boar."
"Ugh, ugh!" grunted Wild Boar, "even there, by this stupid tale of Unt's, there was something evil to be likened to my kind."
"The water that had been sweet ran full of a sickness because of all this, and the Men that drank of it were stricken with the Black Death. At first it was those of the Black-kind, and then the others, the Sahibs, became possessed of it. And then the Burra-Sahib, Huzoor the Governor, was taken with it; so said one of the Sahibs who came to Dera Khan just as he was tying a rope about my foreleg so that I could not rise and wander in the night.
"'It is sixty miles to Sibi,' this Sahib, who was but young, said to my Master.
"'By the Grace of Allah, it is more,' Dera answered him.
"'The Big Sahib, who is my friend, is stricken with the Black Death,' said the young Sahib, 'and also the Baboo Doctor is the same, being close to his death; and unless I get a Healer from Sibi to-morrow, the Sahib who is my friend will surely die.'