was a long, long reverie, and it covered storm, sudden freshets,
death in every manner and shape, violent and awful rage against red
tape half frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other
things; drought, sanitation, finance; birth, wedding, burial, and
riot in the village of twenty warring castes; argument, expostulation,
persuasion, and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon,
thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind
everything rose the black frame of the Kashi Bridge - plate by plate,
girder by girder, span by span-and each pier of it recalled
Hitchcock, the all-round man, who had stood by his chief without
failing from the very first to this last.

So the bridge was two men's work - unless one counted Peroo, as Peroo
certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar,
familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who had
risen to the rank of sarang on the British India boats, but wearying
of routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up the service and
gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment. For
his knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy weights, Peroo was
worth almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services;
but custom decreed the wage of the overhead men, and Peroo was not
within many silver pieces of his proper value. Neither running
water nor extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an ex-serang, he
knew how to hold authority. No piece of iron was so big or so badly
placed that Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it - a
loose-ended, sagging arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount
of talking, but perfectly equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo
who had saved the girder of Number Seven pier from destruction when
the new wire rope jammed in the eye of the crane, and the huge plate
tilted in its slings, threatening to slide out sideways. Then the