Government order as to babies.  Scott spoke forcefully to Faiz Ullah and the two policemen, and bade them capture goats where they could find them.  This they most joyfully did, for it was a recreation, and many ownerless goats were driven in.  Once fed, the poor brutes were willing enough to follow the carts, and a few days’ good food—­food such as human beings died for lack of—­set them in milk again.

‘But I am no goatherd,’ said Faiz Ullah.  ’It is against my izzat [my honour].’

‘When we cross the Bias River again we will talk of izzat,’ Scott replied.  ’Till that day thou and the policemen shall be sweepers to the camp, if I give the order.’

‘Thus, then, it is done,’ grunted Faiz Ullah, ’if the Sahib will have it so’; and he showed how a goat should be milked, while Scott stood over him.

‘Now we will feed them,’ said Scott; ’thrice a day we will feed them’; and he bowed his back to the milking, and took a horrible cramp.

When you have to keep connection unbroken between a restless mother of kids and a baby who is at the point of death, you suffer in all your system.  But the babies were fed.  Morning, noon and evening Scott would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags under the cart-tilts.  There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked.  Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would struggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating his step to their weaknesses.  All this was sufficiently absurd, and he felt the absurdity keenly; but at least he was saving life, and when the women saw that their children did not die, they made shift to eat a little of the strange foods, and crawled after the carts, blessing the master of the goats.

‘Give the women something to live for,’ said Scott to himself, as he sneezed in the dust of a hundred little feet, ’and they’ll hang on somehow.  But this beats William’s condensed milk trick all to pieces.  I shall never live it down, though.’

He reached his destination very slowly, found that a rice-ship had come in from Burmah, and that stores of paddy were available; found also an overworked Englishman in charge of the shed, and, loading the carts, set back to cover the ground he had already passed.  He left some of the children and half his goats at the famine-shed.  For this he was not thanked by the Englishman, who had already more stray babies than he knew what to do with.  Scott’s back was suppled to stooping now, and he went on with his wayside ministrations in addition to distributing the paddy.  More babies and more goats were added unto him; but now some of the babies wore rags, and beads round their wrists or necks. ‘That,’ said the interpreter, as though Scott did not know, ’signifies that their mothers hope in eventual contingency to resume them offeecially.’