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“Sahib! sahib!” it cried, “we are the Sarkar’s poor ryots! Why do you kill us?”

This time the parley was granted, and Ferrers learned too late that the men he had attacked were the inhabitants of the village to which the field belonged, that they had brought their weapons with them owing to a warning that the people of another village intended to attack them and carry off their harvest, and that the second village had revenged itself for its disappointment by sending Ferrers the information which had led him wrong. There was nothing to be done but to rebuke the village elders severely for not warning him of the intended attack instead of taking the law into their own hands, assuage the sufferings of the wounded by distributing among them all the money he had about him, and return drearily to Shah Nawaz to draw up a report of the occurrence. It was his luck all over, he told himself, ignoring the reminder that he had not attempted to avert the fight—in fact, that he had hurried it on for the mere sake of fighting. It was all the fault of the life at this wretched outpost, where there was nothing a man could do but fight, and that was forbidden him. It was little comfort to remember that Major Keeling, in his place, would have found the day all too short for the innumerable things to be done. He would have been in the saddle from morning till night, visiting the villages, holding impromptu courts of justice, looking for traces of old irrigation-works or planning new ones, and filling up any odds and ends of time by instituting shooting-competitions among his troopers, or making experiments in gardening. Ferrers was a very different man from his Commandant, though he could be brave enough when there was fighting to be done, and owed his captaincy to his gallantry on a hard-won field. Without the stimulus of excitement he was prone to fits of indolence, when the monotonous round of daily duty was intolerably irksome; and he was further handicapped by the fact that whereas the change to the frontier had been intended to cut him off from his old life, he had, unknown to the older men who were trying to direct his course anew, succeeded in bringing a portion of his past with him.