Rujub, the Juggler | Page 6

not so sure of that," the other said. "He is a man with opinions of
his own, and all sorts of crotchets and fads. He has been in hot water
with the Chief Commissioner more than once. When I was over at
Lucknow last I was chatting with two or three men, and his name
happened to crop up, and one of them said, 'Bathurst is a sort of knight
errant, an official Don Quixote. Perhaps the best officer in the province
in some respects, but hopelessly impracticable.'"
"Yes, that I can quite understand, Garnet. That sort of man is never
popular with the higher official, whose likings go to the man who does
neither too much nor too little, who does his work without questioning,
and never thinks of making suggestions, and is a mere official machine.
Men of Bathurst's type, who go to the bottom of things, protest against
what they consider unfair decisions, and send in memorandums
showing that their superiors are hopelessly ignorant and idiotically
wrong, are always cordially disliked. Still, they generally work their
way to the front in the long run. Well, I must be off."
Bathurst rode to Narkeet without drawing rein. His horse at times
slackened its pace on its own accord, but an almost mechanical motion
from its rider's heel soon started it off again at the rapid pace at which
its rider ordinarily traveled. From the time he left Deennugghur to his
arrival at Narkeet no thought of the dreaded man eater entered
Bathurst's mind. He was deeply meditating on a memorandum he was
about to draw up, respecting a decision that had been arrived at in a
case between a Talookdar in his district and the Government, and in
which, as it appeared to him, a wholly erroneous and unjust view had
been taken as to the merits of the case; and he only roused himself
when the horse broke into a walk as it entered the village. Two or three
of the head men, with many bows and salutations of respect, came out
to receive him.
"My lord sahib has seen nothing of the tiger?" the head man said; "our
hearts were melted with fear, for the evil beast was heard roaring in the
jungle not far from the road early this morning."

"I never gave it a thought, one way or the other," Bathurst said, as he
dismounted. "I fancy the horse would have let me know if the brute had
been anywhere near. See that he is tied up in the shed, and has food and
water, and put a boy to keep the flies from worrying him. And now let
us get to business. First of all, I must go through the village records and
documents; after that I will question four or five of the oldest
inhabitants, and then we must go over the ground. The whole question
turns, you know, upon whether the irrigation ditch mentioned in the
Talookdar's grant is the one that runs across at the foot of the rising
ground on his side, or whether it is the one that sweeps round on this
side of the grove with the little temple in it. Unfortunately most of the
best land lies between those ditches."
For hours Bathurst listened to the statements of the old people of the
village, cross questioning them closely, and sparing no efforts to sift
the truth from their confused and often contradictory evidence. Then he
spent two hours going over the ground and endeavoring to satisfy
himself which of the two ditches was the one named in the village
records. He had two days before taken equal pains in sifting the
evidence on the other side.
"I trust that my lord sees there can be no doubt as to the justice of our
claim," the head man said humbly, as he prepared to mount again.
"According to your point of view, there is no doubt about it, Childee;
but then there is equally no doubt the other way, according to the
statements they put forward. But that is generally the way in all these
land disputes. For good hard swearing your Hindoo cultivator can be
matched against the world. Unfortunately there is nothing either in your
grant or in your neighbors' that specifies unmistakably which of these
ancient ditches is the one referred to. My present impression is that it is
essentially a case for a compromise, but you know the final decision
does not rest on me. I shall be out here again next week, and I shall
write to the Talookdar to meet me here, and we will go over the ground
together again, and see if we cannot arrange some line that will be fair
to both parties. If we can do that, the