Baines was one of them--Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at Bholat.
His troops were in the center of a spider's web of roads that
criss-crossed and drained a province. There were big trunk arteries,
which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass
of winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks. He
could feel, if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising,
and he was placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the
right spot, should the knife be needed.

He was like a surgeon, though, who holds a lancet and can use it,
but who lacks permission. The poison in India's system lay deep,
and the fever was slow in showing itself. And meanwhile the men
who had the ordering of things could see neither necessity nor excuse
for so much as a parade of strength. They refused, point-blank and
absolutely, to admit that there was, or, could be, any symptom of
unrest.

He dared not make new posts for officers, for officers would grumble
at enforced exile in the country districts, and the Government would
get to hear of it, and countermand. But there were non-commissioned
officers in plenty, and it was not difficult to choose the best of
them--three men--and send them, with minute detachments, to three
different points of vantage. Non-commissioned officers don't grumble,
or if they do no one gets to hear of it, or minds. And they are just
as good as officers at watching crossroads and reporting what they
see and hear.

So where a little cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right
angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles