not eat and lie down? Take these, then. They are meat and good
toddy together, and they kill all weariness, besides the fever
that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing else to-day at all."

He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and
thrust it into Findlayson's hand, saying: "Nay, do not be
afraid. It is no more than opium - clean Malwa opium.

Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his
hand, and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff
was at least a good guard against fever -the fever that was
creeping upon him out of the wet mud -and he had seen what Peroo
could do in the stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose
from the tin box.

Peroo nodded with bright eyes. "In a little - in a little the
Sahib will find that he thinks well again. I too will -" He
dived into his treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his
head, and squatted down to watch the boats. It was too dark now
to see beyond the first pier, and the night seemed to have given
the river new strength. Findlayson stood with his chin on his
chest, thinking. There was one point about one of the piers -
the seventh - that he had not fully settled in his mind. The
figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one
and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and
mellow in his ears like the deepest note of a double-bass - an
entrancing sound upon which he pondered for several hours, as it
seemed. Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser
had snapped and the stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the
fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire