His family did not report his death to the Municipality, for they desired to keep Imam Din with them. Therefore, they buried him under the flagging in the court-yard, secretly and by night. Twelve days later, Imam Din had made connection with the well of the house, and there was typhus among the women in the zenana, but no one knew anything about it--some died and some did not; and Ari Booj, the Faquir, added to the interest of the proceedings by joining the funeral procession and distributing gratis the more malignant forms of smallpox, from which he was just recovering. He had come all the way from Delhi, and had slept on no less than fifteen different charpoys; and that was how they got the smallpox into Bahadurgarh. But Eshmith Sahib's Dhobi picked it up from Ari Booj when Imam Din's wife was being buried--for he was a merry man, and sent home a beautiful sample among the Sunday shirts. So Eshmith Sahib died. He was only a link in the chain which crawled from the highest to the lowest. The wonder was not that men died like sheep, but that they did not die like flies; for their lives and their surroundings, their deaths, were part of a huge conspiracy against cleanliness. And the people loved to have it so. They huddled together in frowsy clusters, while Death mowed his way through them till the scythe blunted against the unresisting flesh, and he had to get a new one. They died by fever, tens of thousands in a month; they died by cholera a thousand in a week; they died of smallpox, scores in the mohulla, and by dysentery by tens in a house; and when all other deaths failed they laid them down and died because their hands were too weak to hold on to life. To and fro stamped the Englishman, who is everlastingly at war with the scheme of things. "You shall not die," he said, and he decreed that there should be no more famines. He poured grain down their throats, and when all failed he went down into the strife and died with them, swearing, and toiling, and working till the last. He fought the famine and put it to flight. Then he wiped his forehead, and attacked the pestilence that walketh in the darkness. Death's scythe swept to and fro, around and about him; but he only planted his feet more firmly in the way of it, and fought off Death with a dog-whip. "Live, you ruffian!" said the Englishman to Ram Buksh as he rode through the reeking village. "_Jenab!_" said Ram Buksh, "it is as it was in the days of our fathers!" "Then stand back while I alter it," said the Englishman; and by force, and cunning, and a brutal disregard of vested interests, he strove to keep Ram Buksh alive. "Clean your mohullas; pay for clean water; keep your streets swept; and see that your food is sound, or I'll make your life a burden to you," said the Englishman. Sometimes he died; but more often Ram Buksh went down, and the Englishman regarded each death as a personal insult.