Udaipur; and it was as perverse and rocky a place as any man would desire to see. He politely expressed doubt. “I tell you my tongas go anywhere,” said Ram Baksh testily. A hay-waggon--they cut and stack their hay in these parts--blocked the road. Ram Baksh ran the tonga to one side, into a rut, fetched up on a tree-stump, rebounded on to a rock, and struck the kunkur. “Observe,” said Ram Baksh; “but that is nothing. You wait till we get on the Boondi road and I’ll make you shake, shake like a _botal_.” “Is it _very_ bad?” “I’ve never been to Boondi myself, but I hear it is all rocks--great rocks as big as the tonga.” But though he boasted of himself and his horses nearly all the way, he could not reach Deoli in anything like the time he had set forth. “If I am not at Boondi by four,” he had said, at six in the morning, “let me go without my fare.” But by mid-day he was still far from Deoli, and Boondi lay twenty-eight miles beyond that station. “What can I do?” said he. “I’ve laid out lots of horses--any amount. But the fact is I’ve never been to Boondi. I shan’t go there in the night.” Ram Baksh’s “lots of horses” were three pair between Nasirabad and Deoli--three pair of undersized ponies who did wonders. One place, after he had quitted a cotton waggon, a drove of _Bunjaras_ and a man on horseback, with his carbine across his saddle-bow, the Englishman came to a stretch of road, so utterly desolate that he said:--“Now I am clear of everybody who ever knew me. This is the beginning of the waste into which the scape-goat was sent.” From a bush by the road side sprang up a fat man who cried aloud in English:--“How does Your Honour do? I met Your Honour in Simla this year! Are you quite well? Ya-as, I am here. Your Honour remembers me? I am travelling. Ya-as. Ha! Ha!” and he went on, leaving His Honour bemazed. It was a Babu--a Simla Babu, of that there could be no doubt; but who he was or what he was doing, thirty miles from anywhere, His Honour could not make out. The native moves about more than most folk, except railway people, imagine. The big banking firms of Upper India naturally keep in close touch with their great change-houses in Ajmir, despatching and receiving messengers regularly. So it comes to pass that the necessitous circumstances of Lieutenant McRannamack, of the Tyneside Tail-twisters, quartered on the Frontier, are thoroughly known and discussed, a thousand miles south of the cantonment where the light-hearted Lieutenant goes to the “beastly _shroff_.”