"His good temper and quiet way of rebuking people was, I have always thought, remarkable. {154} I remember a field-day when an officer had got a company in a very badly chosen spot. The General, in his usual innocent sort of way, went up to him to gather, as it were, information. He always did that: he looked as if he was dying to learn, while really he was leading on the man to talk and show what he knew, or else to convict him out of his own mouth. The Major had no good reason for his dispositions, and when cornered began to quote the drill-book. The General quietly said: 'It's not very good form to throw the drill-book at your General.'" On a similar occasion, at an outpost parade, the captain in charge of the picquet was unaccountably nervous, and had great difficulty in explaining the "idea." With two words the General put him out of his pain and signalised his incompetence: "You're shot," he said. "Who is next in command?" On the Sind-Pishin Railway, as the branch line is called that runs from Ruk Junction on the Indus through Quetta and on to Chaman, there is only one train in each direction in the twenty-four hours. The railroad runs for miles over the wildest and most desolate tracts. It is 150 miles from Quetta to Sibi, and Sibi is 100 miles north of Jacobabad. The roadside stations consist merely of a few planks as platform, a hut for the station-master, who is commonly an Eurasian, and a standpipe; sometimes there is a second hut, in which a bunnia does business in food-stuffs and other simple trading. [Sidenote: A massacre] Sunari Station, lying about 100 miles east of Quetta, must have been a place of slightly more {155} importance, for when the Marris fell upon it they found fifteen persons to murder. Unfortunately for him, a European youth, named Canning, a sub-inspector of the line, and son of the station-master at Sibi, happened to be there that fatal morning. As the daily train approached the station between 9 and 10 a.m., the engine-driver was puzzled at not receiving the customary greeting on the signals, but decided to crawl on carefully into the station. It was only too clear that a wholesale slaughter with swords had been perpetrated; the place was strewn with dead bodies, terribly slashed about, and the bunnia's shop had been set on fire. The terrified driver and guard found the station-master with his arm cut off, but still breathing, and carefully laid him on the train, but even this sole survivor of this unparalleled outrage died before the next station was reached. In the meantime the pointsman had fled on foot to the next station, and telegraphed the startling news from there to Quetta.