Then there was the
cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works;
and after the cholera smote the Smallpox. The fever they had
always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of
the third class with whipping powers, for the better government of
the community, and Findlayson watched him wield his powers
temperately, learning what to overlook and what to look after. It
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.
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