Early the next morning Cairns awoke, doubtless missing Bedient
subconsciously. It was in the first gray, an hour before Healy kicked
his outfit awake. Bedient was back in camp in time to start breakfast,
having made a big detour to reach the base of the gorge. It wasn't a
thing to speak about, but he had made a pilgrimage to the pit where the
farrier had fallen.... Another time, Cairns awoke in the same way. It
was the absence of Bedient, not the actual leaving, that aroused him.
The Train had camped in a little nameless town. Cairns, this time,
found his companion playing with a child, at the doorway of one of the
shacks of the village. Inside, was an old man sick with
_beri-beri_--swollen, features erased, unconscious; and an old woman
who also had been too weak to flee before the American party. These
two, the child, and a few pariah dogs were all that remained. You could
have put the tiny one in a haversack comfortably. A poor little mongrel
head that shone bare and scabby in places, but big black eyes, full of
puzzles and wonderings; and upon his arms and legs, those deep humors
which come from scratching in the night. The infant sat upon a banana
leaf--brown and naked and wonderful as possible--and Bedient knelt
before him smiling happily, and feeding hard-tack that had been
softened in bacon-gravy.

Cairns saw the old woman's face. It was sullen, haggard. The eyes were
no strangers to hunger nor hatred. She watched the two Americans, as
might a crippled tigress, that had learned at last how weak was her
fury against chains. He saw that same look many times afterward in the
eyes of these women of the riverbanks--as the white troops moved past.
There was not even a sex-interest to complicate their hatred.

One day Thirteen overtook a big infantry column making a wide ford in
the river before Bamban. It was high noon, but they found during the