native workmen lost their heads with great shoutings, and Hitchcock's
right arm was broken by a falling T-plate, and he buttoned it up in
his coat and swooned, and came to and directed for four hours till
Peroo, from the top of the crane, reported "All's well," and the
plate swung home. There was no one like Peroo, serang, to lash, and
guy, and hold to control the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen
locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit into which it had tumbled;
to strip, and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete blocks round
the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure
up-stream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the
embankment-facings. He would interrupt the field-councils of
Findlayson and Hitchcock without fear, till his wonderful English,
or his still more wonderful lingua franca, half Portuguese and half
Malay, ran out and he was forced to take string and show the knots
that he would recommend. He controlled his own gang of tacklemen
- mysterious relatives from Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month
and tried to the uttermost. No consideration of family or kin
allowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a giddy head on the pay-roll.
"My honour is the honour of this bridge," he would say to the
about-to-bedismissed. "What do I care for your honour? Go and
work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for."

The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred
round the tattered dwelling of a sea-priest - one who had never set
foot on black water, but had been chosen as ghostly counsellor by
two generations of sea-rovers all unaffected by port missions or
those creeds which are thrust upon sailors by agencies along Thames
bank. The priest of the Lascara had nothing to do with their caste,
or indeed with anything at all. He ate the offerings of his church,
and slept and smoked, and slept again "for," said Peroo, who had