Page:The Days Work (1899).djvu/145

 "But what of the Satpura Bhils? What means the sign for them?"

"Nothing. It is only night-running, as I have said. He rides to see if they obey the Government, as he taught them to do in his first life."

"And what if they do not?"

"He did not say."

The light went out in Chinn' s quarters.

"Look," said Bukta. "Now he goes away. None the less it is a good ghost, as he has said. How shall we fear Jan Chinn, who made the Bhil a man? His protection is on us; and ye know Jan Chinn never broke a protection spoken or written on paper. When he is older and has found him a wife he will lie in his bed till morning."

A commanding officer is generally aware of the regimental state of mind a little before the men; and this is why the Colonel said, a few days later, that some one had been putting the Fear of God into the Wuddars. As he was the only person officially entitled to do this, it distressed him to see such unanimous virtue. "It 's too good to last," he said. "I only wish I could find out what the little chaps mean."

The explanation, as it seemed to him, came at the change of the moon, when he received orders to hold himself in readiness to "allay any possible excitement" among the Satpura Bhils, who were, to put it mildly, uneasy because a paternal Government had sent up against them a Mahratta State-educated vaccinator, with lancets, lymph, and an officially registered calf. In the language of State, they had " manifested a strong