his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness
to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by the
half-hundred--fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway
workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to
direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen--but none knew better
than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to
be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises--by slipping
of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of
the river--but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom
Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as remorselessly
as they worked them-selves. Findlayson thought it over from the
beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when the
Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of
the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and
so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations--and Hitchcock,
new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the
futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one,
only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that followed
the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that
followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to
another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor
little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own
tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till
Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner table, and--he feared
the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was the
cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works; and
after the cholera smote the small-pox. The fever they had always with
them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class