Perhaps that was the reason why he was such a conspicuous success
in civil life. They still talk of how Bill Brown, with Jane his wife
and Juggut Khan the Rajput to advise him, was Resident Political
Adviser to a Maharajah, and of how the Maharajah loathed him, and
looked sidewise at him--but obeyed. That, though, is not a war-story.
It is a story of the saving of a war, and shall go on record, some
day, beneath a title of its own.
For The Salt He Had Eaten
Prologue
To the northward of Hanadra, blue in the sweltering heat-haze, lay
Siroeh, walled in with sun-baked mud and listless. Through a wooden
gate at one end of the village filed a string of women with their
water-pots. Oxen, tethered underneath the thatched eaves or by the
thirsty-looking trees, lay chewing the cud, almost too lazy to flick
the flies away. Even the village goats seemed overcome with lassitude.
Here and there a pariah dog sneaked in and out among the shadows or
lay and licked his sores beside an offal-heap; but there seemed to
be no energy in anything.
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