On the strength of this concession and his accumulated oil-savings, Janki Meah took a second wife—a girl of the Jolaha main stock of the Meahs, and singularly beautiful. Janki Meah could not see her beauty; wherefore he took her on trust, and forbade her to go down the pit. He had not worked for thirty years in the dark without knowing that the pit was no place for pretty women. He loaded her with ornaments—not brass or pewter, but real silver ones—and she rewarded him by flirting outrageously with Kundoo of Number Seven gallery gang. Kundoo was really the gang-head, but Janki Meah insisted upon all the work being entered in his own name, and chose the men that he worked with. Custom—stronger even than the Jimahari Company—dictated that Janki, by right of his years, should manage these things, and should, also, work despite his blindness. In Indian mines, where they cut into the solid coal with the pick and clear it out from floor to ceiling, he could come to no great harm. At Home, where they undercut the coal and bring it down in crashing avalanches from the roof, he would never have been allowed to set foot in a pit. He was not a popular man, because of his oil-savings; but all the gangs admitted that Janki knew all the _khads_, or workings, that had ever been sunk or worked since the Jimahari Company first started operations on the Tarachunda fields. Pretty little Unda only knew that her old husband was a fool who could be managed. She took no interest in the collieries except in so far as they swallowed up Kundoo five days out of the seven, and covered him with coal-dust. Kundoo was a great workman, and did his best not to get drunk, because, when he had saved forty rupees, Unda was to steal everything that she could find in Janki’s house and run with Kundoo to a land where there were no mines, and every one kept three fat bullocks and a milch-buffalo. While this scheme ripened it was his custom to drop in upon Janki and worry him about the oil-savings. Unda sat in a corner and nodded approval. On the night when Kundoo had quoted that objectionable proverb about weavers, Janki grew angry. “Listen, you pig,” said he, “blind I am, and old I am, but, before ever you were born, I was gray among the coal. Even in the days when the Twenty-Two _khad_ was unsunk and there were not two thousand men here, I was known to have all knowledge of the pits. What _khad_ is there that I do not know, from the bottom of the shaft to the end of the last drive? Is it the Baromba _khad_, the oldest, or the Twenty-Two where Tibu’s gallery runs up to Number Five?” “Hear the old fool talk!” said Kundoo, nodding to Unda. “No gallery of Twenty-Two will cut into Five before the end of the Rains. We have a month’s solid coal before us. The Babuji says so.”