Faiz Ullah opined it was the will of God that these foreigners should die, and it remained only to give orders to burn the dead. None the less there was no reason why the Sahib should lack his comforts, and Faiz Ullah, a campaigner of experience, had picked up a few lean goats and had added them to the procession. That they might give milk for the morning meal, he was feeding them on the good grain that these imbeciles rejected. “Yes,” said Faiz Ullah; “if the Sahib thought fit, a little milk might be given to some of the babies”; but, as the Sahib well knew, babies were cheap, and, for his own part, Faiz Ullah held that there was no Government order as to babies. Scott spoke forcefully to Faiz Ullah and the two policemen, and bade them capture goats where they could find them. This they most joyfully did, for it was a recreation, and many ownerless goats were driven in. Once fed, the poor brutes were willing enough to follow the carts, and a few days’ good food—food such as human beings died for lack of—set them in milk again. “But I am no goatherd,” said Faiz Ullah. “It is against my _izzat_ [my honour].” “When we cross the Bias River again we will talk of _izzat_,” Scott replied. “Till that day thou and the policemen shall be sweepers to the camp, if I give the order.” “Thus, then, it is done,” grunted Faiz Ullah, “if the Sahib will have it so”; and he showed how a goat should be milked, while Scott stood over him. “Now we will feed them,” said Scott; “twice a day we will feed them”; and he bowed his back to the milking, and took a horrible cramp. When you have to keep connection unbroken between a restless mother of kids and a baby who is at the point of death, you suffer in all your system. But the babies were fed. Each morning and evening Scott would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would straggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating his step to their weaknesses. All this was sufficiently absurd, and he felt the absurdity keenly; but at least he was saving life, and when the women saw that their children did not die, they made shift to eat a little of the strange foods, and crawled after the carts, blessing the master of the goats. “Give the women something to live for,” said Scott to himself, as he sneezed in the dust of a hundred little feet, “and they’ll hang on somehow. This beats William’s condensed-milk trick all to pieces. I shall never live it down, though.”