It was my good fortune to find employment the next morning. The job was suggestive of the spy and the tattle-tale, but the most indolent of vagabonds could not have dreamed of a more ideal means of amassing a fortune. I had merely to sit still and do nothing—and draw three rupees a day for doing it. Almost the only condition imposed upon me was that the sitting must be done on a street car.

Let me explain. The electric tramways of the city of Madras are numerous and well-patronized. The company does not dare to entrust the position on the front platform to aborigines; for in case of emergency the Hindu has a remarkable faculty of being anywhere but at his post, and of doing anything but the right thing. But as conductor, a native or Eurasian of some slight education does as well as a real man. He has only to poke the pice and annas into the cash register he wears about his neck and punch and deliver a ticket. Yet it is surprising, nay, sad, to find how many accidents befall him while engaged in this simple task. He will forget, for instance, to give the passenger the ticket that is his receipt for fare paid; coppers will cling tenaciously to his fingers in spite of his best efforts to dislodge them; he has even been known, in his absent-mindedness, to overlook his friends on his tour of collection through the car. Don’t, for a moment, fancy that he is dishonest. It is merely because he is a Hindu and was born that way.

To correct these unimportant little faults, the corporation has a force of inspectors, occasionally sahibs, commonly Eurasians, clad in khaki uniforms and armed with report pads, who spring out unexpectedly from obscure side streets to offer expert assistance to passing conductors.

But, of course, mathematical experts do not dodge in and out of the sun-baked alleyways of Madras for the good of their health. The spirit of India is sure to attack them sooner or later, even if it has not been with them since birth. Cases of friendship between inspectors 310and conductors are not unknown, and it is not the way of the Oriental to attempt to reduce his friend’s income. In short, the auditors must be audited, and, all unknown to them or its other servants, the corporation employs a small select band of men who do not wear uniforms, and who do not line up before the wicket on pay day.

It was by merest chance that I learned of this state of affairs and found my way to a small office that no one would have suspected of being in any way connected with the transportation system of Madras. An Englishman who was ostensibly a private broker deemed my answers to his cross-examination satisfactory, and I was initiated at once into the mysterious masonry of inspector of inspectors. The broker warned me not to build hopes of an extended engagement, rather to anticipate an early dismissal; for the uniformed employés were famed for lynx-eyed vigilance, and my usefulness to the company, obviously, could not endure beyond the few days that might elapse before I was “spotted.” He did not add that a longer period might give me opportunity to form too intimate acquaintances, but he wore the air of a man who had not exhausted his subject.

My duties began forthwith. The Englishman supplied me with a handful of coppers that were to return to the corporation through its cash registers. I was to board a tramway, find place of observation in a back seat, and pay my fare as an ordinary passenger. The distance I should travel on each car, the routes I should follow, my changes from one line to another, were left to my own discretion. Upon alighting, I was to stroll far enough away from the line to allay suspicion and return to hail another car. The company required only that I make out each evening, in the private office, a report of my observations, with the numbers of the cars, and sign a statement to the effect that I had devoted the eight hours to the interests of the corporation. What could have been more entirely mon affaire? If there was a nook or corner of Madras that I did not visit during the few days that followed, it was not within strolling distance of any streetcar line.

Among the sights of the city must be noted her human bullocks. Horses are rare in Madras. The transportation of freight falls to a company of leather-skinned, rice-fed coolies whose strength and endurance pass belief. Their carts are massive, two-wheeled vehicles, as cumbersome as ever burdened a yoke of oxen. The virtues of axle-grease they know not, and through the streets of Madras resounds a 311droning as of the Egyptian sakkas on the plain of Thebes. Yet two of these emaciated creatures will drag a wagon, laden with great bales from the ships, or a dozen steel rails, for miles over hills and hollows, with fewer breathing spells than a truckman would allow a team of horses.

My devotion to corporate interests brought me the surprise supreme of my Oriental wanderings. At the corner of the Maidan, where the tramway swings round towards the harbor, a gang of coolies was repairing the roadway. That, in itself, was no cause for wonder. But among the workmen, dressed like the others in a ragged loin-cloth, swinging his rammer as stolidly, gazing as abjectly at the ground as his companions, was a white man! There could be no doubt of it. Under the tan of an Indian sun his skin was as fair as a Norseman’s, his shock of unkempt hair was a fiery red, and his eyes were blue! But a white man ramming macadam! A sahib so unmindful of his high origin as to join the ranks of the most miserable, the most debased, the most abhorred of human creatures! To become a sudra and ram macadam in the public streets, dressed in a clout! Here was the final, lasciate ogni speranza end. A terror came upon me, a longing to flee while yet there was time, from the blighted land in which a man of my own flesh and blood could fall to this.

Again and again my rounds of the city brought me back to the corner of the Maidan. The renegade toiled stolidly on, bending dejectedly over his task, never raising his head to glance at the passing throng. Twice I was moved to alight and speak, to learn his dreadful story, but the car had rumbled on before I gathered courage. Leaving the broker’s office as twilight fell, I passed that way again. A babu loitering on the curb drew me into conversation and I put a question to him.

“What! That?” he said, following the direction of my finger. “Why, that’s a Hindu albino.”

I turned away to an eating-shop, the proprietor of which had long since alienated his fellow-countrymen by professing conversion to Christianity, and sat down for supper. It was the official “bums’ retreat” of Madras. A half-dozen white wanderers were gathered. I looked for Marten among them; but he had found pleasure, evidently, in the company of his chocolate-colored cousins, and when the last yarn was spun he had not put in an appearance. I stepped out again into the night to find a lodging.

Had I imagined that I alone, of all Madras, was planning to sleep 312beneath the stars, I should have been doomed to disappointment. For an hour I roamed the city, seeking a bit of open space. If there was a passageway or a platband too small to accommodate a coolie or a street urchin, it was occupied by a mongrel cur. The night was black. There was danger of running upon some huddled family in the darkness, and the pollution of touch might prove mutual. I left the close-packed town behind and struck off across the Maidan. Here was room and to spare; but the law forbade, and if officers did not enforce the ordinance, sneak thieves did—Hindu thieves who can travel on their bellies faster than an honest man can walk, making less noise than the gentle southern breeze, and steal the teeth from a sleeper’s mouth and the eyes from under his lids ere he wakes. I kept on, stumbling over a knoll now and then, falling flat in a dry ditch, and fetching up against a fence. Groping along it, I came upon the highway that leads southward along the shore of the sea. A furlong beyond was a grove of high trees, with wide-spreading branches, like the pine; and beneath them soft beach sand. I halted there. A landward breeze had tempered the oppressive heat; the boughs above whispered hoarsely together. At regular intervals through the night, the sepulchral voice of the Bay of Bengal spoke faintly across the barren strand.

When I awoke, it was broad daylight, and Sunday. The day of rest brings small change to the teeming hordes of India, but conductors and inspectors were permitted to whisper together unobserved, and I took advantage of the holiday to put my wardrobe in the hands of a dhoby. A dhoby, in any language but Hindustanee, is a laundryman. But the word fails dismally as a translation. Within those two syllables lurks a volume of meaning to the sahib who has dwelt in the land of India. The editors of Anglo-Indian newspapers, who may only write and endure, are undecided whether to style him a fiend or a raving maniac. Youthful philosophers and poets, grown eloquent under the inspiration of a newly returned basket, fill more columns than the reporter of the viceroy’s council.

For the dhoby is a man of energy. High above his head, like a flail, he swings each streaming garment and brings it down on his flat stone as if his principal desire in life were to split it to bits. Not once, but as long as strength endures, and when he can swing no more he flings down the tog and jumps fiendishly upon it. His bare feet tread a wild Terpsichorean orgie, and when he can dance no longer he falls upon the unoffending rag and tugs and strains and twists and 313pulls, as though determined that it shall come to be washed no more. Flying buttons are his glee. If he can reduce the garment to the component parts in which the maker cut it, his joy is complete. When the power to beat and tramp and tug fails him, he tosses the shreds disdainfully into the stream or cistern and attacks the wardrobe of another helpless client. Yet he is strictly honest. At nightfall he bears back to its owner the dirt he carried away, and the threads that hold it together. When all other words of vituperation seem weak and insipid, the Anglo-Indian calls his enemy a dhoby.

The cook of the rendezvous offered, for three annas, to wash all that I owned, save my shoes and the inner workings of my pith helmet. In a more commonplace land the possessor of a single suit would have been bedridden until the task was done. But not in India. A large handkerchief was ample attire within the “bums’ retreat.” The beachcombers gathered in the dining-room saw in the costume cause for envy, not ridicule; for few could boast of as much when wash-day came for them, and the hours that might have been spent under sheets and blankets in a sterner clime passed quickly in the writing of letters.

From the back yard, for a time, came the shrieks of maltreated garments. Then all fell silent. In fear and trembling, I ventured forth to take inventory of my indispensable raiment. But as a dhoby the cook was a bungler. There were a few rents in the gear arrayed on the eaves gutter, a button was missing here and there, and there was no evidence of snowy whiteness. But every garment could still be easily identified, and an hour with a ship’s needle, when the blazing sun had done its work, sufficed to heal the wounds, though not the scars, of combat.

Not a word of Haywood had reached me since the police station had swallowed him up. Evidently he was still forcibly separated from society; but had he escaped with a light sentence or fallen victim to “five years of the lock-step?” When my Monday report had been filed, I set out to find the answer to that question. Such cases, they told me, were tried at a court in a distant section of the city. Its officials knew nothing of the New Yorker however, and I tramped to the suburban station where the “crime” had been committed. Inquiry seemed futile. The vendor was there, as blithesome as ever, and his bananas were hoary with age, but the fourteen words of Hindustanee I had picked up were those he did not know. The policeman on the 314platform had heard some discussion of the case, but had no definite information to offer. Then came the relief squad, and the officer who had made the arrest directed me to another distant court.

There were several buildings of judicial aspect scattered over the great campus, but they were closed for the night. The door of a hut, such as servants dwell in, stood ajar, and I entered. A high-caste native was gathering together books and papers from the desk of a miniature court room. I made known my errand.

“Haywood?” answered the Hindu, “Ah! Yes, I know about him. I know all about him, for he was tried before me.”

The New Yorker had swallowed his pride, indeed, to consent to being tried by a “nigger” rather than to come into contact with white officers.

“And what did you hand him?” I ventured.

The justice, striving to appear at ease in a pompous dignity that was as much too large for him as the enormous blue and white turban that bellied out above his thin face like an un-reefed mainsail in a stiff breeze, chose a ledger from the desk and turned over the leaves.

“Ah, here it is,” he exclaimed, pointing out an entry; “Richard Haywood, Englishman. Charge, assault. Found in his possession, four annas, three pice, one pocketknife, one pipe, three cigarettes, two buttons.” They were nothing if not exact, but they had overlooked one of the uses of the bands on pith helmets. “Plea, guilty. Sentence, five rupees fine. Prisoner alleging indigence, sentence was changed to one week in the Presidency jail.”

“Suppose I pay his fine?” I asked. “Will he be released at once?”

“Yes, but the case has passed out of my jurisdiction. You must pay it to the warden.”

No sojourner in Madras need make inquiry for the great white building that houses her felons. I reached it in time to find the massive gate still unlocked and gained admittance to the warden’s office. He denied my request for an interview with Haywood, however, on the ground that prisoners for so brief a period were not allowed visitors. I opened my mouth to mention the fine, then stopped. Perhaps the New Yorker had some secret reason for choosing to swelter seven days in an Indian prison. If he was anxious to be free, he had only to take down his hat and, like the magician, produce from it the money that would set him at liberty. I resolved to run no risk of upsetting subtle plans, and turned back into the city.

Two days later, the broker confided to me the sad news that I 315had been “spotted.” Marten, who had joined me in the grove lodging, the night before, proposed to apply at once to the secretary of the Friend-in-Need Society for a ticket northward. Eager to investigate the Home which the society operates in Madras, I accompanied him. The secretary was an English magistrate who held court in a building facing the harbor. The court room was crowded to suffocation. While we waited for the native policeman to return with an answer to our note I caught enough of the interpreter’s words to learn that the perspiring Briton under the punkahs was weighing the momentous question of the damages due a shopkeeper for temporary loss of caste.

The attaché, after long absence, brought the information that the trial was at its climax and that he dared not disturb proceedings. But Marten, familiar with the “ropes” of official India, snorted in disgust and led the way down a passage that brought us to an anteroom behind the judgment seat. Beckoning to me to follow, he pushed aside the officers who would have barred our progress, and marched boldly into the court room, halting before the stenographer’s table. I anticipated immediate imprisonment for contempt of court; but the magistrate, eager, as who would not have been, for a moment’s relief from native hair-splitting, signed to the interpreter to stay the case, and, sliding down in his da?s until he was all but lying on his back, bade us step up beside him. Marten, who had transferred to Calcutta the phantom ship he was pursuing, applied for a through ticket; I, for admission to the Society Home.

“I’ll give you both a chit to the manager for to-night,” said the justice, when we had spun our yarns. “The Home is rather overcrowded, but we always try to find a place for Englishmen, even if we can’t accommodate all the Germans, Italians, and Turks that turn up.”

“But we’re not Englishmen,” I put in.

“Nonsense,” yawned the judge. “When I say Englishmen of course I include Americans, but as to you”—he turned to Marten—“I can’t give you a ticket to Calcutta. That’s more than a thousand miles. I’ll have the manager ship you to Vizagapatam in the morning. That is half way, and the commissioner there will send you on.”

He made out the notes and we departed. As we passed the street entrance, the corpulent babu was again pouring forth the woes of the polluted plaintiff.

But for a sign over the entrance, the Home might have been taken for the estate of an English gentleman of modest income. The grounds were extensive and well-wooded. The gate was guarded by a 316lodge, beyond which the Home itself, a low, rambling bungalow, peeped through the trees. A score of vagabonds, burned brown in face and garb, loitered in the shade along the curb. Half were Eurasians. There is no more irreclaimable vagrant under the sun’s rays than the tropical half-breed when once he joins the fraternity of the Great Unwashed. Reputation or personal appearance are to him matters of utter indifference. A threadbare jacket and trousers—sad commentaries of the willfulness of the dhoby—mark his social superiority to the coolie; but he goes barefooted by choice, often bareheaded, and in his abhorrence of unnecessary activity is as truly a Hindu as his maternal ancestor. Like the native, too, he is indifferent to bodily affliction—so it bring no pain—and laughs at encroaching disease as though he shared with the Brahmin the conviction that his present form is only one of hundreds that he will inhabit.

At our arrival a youth of this class was entertaining the assembled wanderers with a spicy tale. His language was the lazy, half-enunciated English of the tropical hybrid, and he chuckled with glee as often as his companions. Yet he was a victim of the dread “elephantiasis” so common among natives. His left foot and leg below the knee were swollen to four times their natural size, and to accommodate the abnormal limb his trouser leg was split to the thigh. As the gate opened, he rose and dragged his incurable affliction with him, leaving in the sand footprints like the nest of a mongrel cur.

The manager was a bullet-headed Irishman, chosen, like many another, for his knowledge of the wily ways of the vagrant, gleaned in many a year “on the road.” The Home, though more ambitious in its scope, resembled the Asile Rudolph of Cairo. The meals, consisting of native food, were served in the same generous portions, and the cots, in spite of the unconventional habits of the inmates, were as scrupulously clean. Adjoining the quarters of the transient guests, the society provided a permanent home for aged and crippled beachcombers. We sat late under the veranda, listening to strange tales of the road of earlier days from a score of old cronies who quarreled for a pinch of tobacco and wept when their words were discredited. Sad fate, indeed, for those who, in the years of their strength and inspiration, had made the world their playground, to be sentenced thus to end their days in the meager bit of space to which sightless eyes or paralyzed limbs confined them, while they wandered on in spirit over boundless seas and trackless land.

Early the next morning the manager led the way to the Beach station 317and, having supplied Marten with a ticket to Vizagapatam and a day’s “batter,” bade us bon voyage. The journey was long; it might also have been uneventful but for my companion’s incorrigible longing to annoy his fellow-beings. The weak point in Marten’s make-up was his head. Years before, during his days before the mast, he had gone ashore in a disreputable port after paying off from a voyage of several months’ duration and, overladen with good cheer, had been so successfully sand-bagged that he not only lost his earnings but emerged from the encounter with a broken head. At the hospital it was found necessary to trepan his skull. But the metal plate had proved a poor substitute for sound bone; and the ex-pearl-fisher was wont to warn every new acquaintance to beware “horse-play,” as a blow on the head might result in serious injury.

The favorite occupation of the Hindu on his travels is sleeping. If there is an alien voyager in his compartment he sits stiffly in his place, on guard against a loss of caste. When his companions are all of his own class, he stretches out on his back and slumbers, open-mouthed, like a dead fish. But the benches are short. The native, therefore, seeks relief by sticking his feet out the window. An Indian train bristles from engine to guard-van with bare, brown legs that give it the aspect of a battery of small guns.

Our express had halted, late in the afternoon, on a switch beside a train southward bound. Marten, chancing to have a straw in his possession, leaned out of the window and fell to tickling the soles of a pair of protruding feet. Their owner was a sound sleeper. For several moments he did not stir. As our train started, he awoke suddenly and sprang up with so startling a whoop that my companion recoiled in surprise and struck his head sharply on the top of the window.

The native was quickly avenged. For a moment his tormentor clung to the casement, straining in every limb, then fell to the floor, writhing in agony. Plainly he had lost consciousness, but he thrashed about the compartment like a captive boa constrictor, twisting body and limbs in racking contortions, and foaming at the mouth until his ashy face was covered with spume, and dirt from the floor. His strength was supernatural. To attempt to control him was useless,—forbidden, in fact, on the day that he had warned me of his injury. I took refuge on one of the benches to escape his convulsions.

The express sped on in the falling darkness. The next station was far distant. Before me rose a vision of myself surrounded by stern officials and attempting in vain to explain the presence of a corpse in 318my compartm............