And while indefatigable soldiers fought the enemy in camp and in the Lines, Dudley Norton, O.S.I., Deputy Commissioner, and ruler-in-chief of the station, fought him no less energetically in the bazaar and native city; an even more heart-breaking task. For here was no disciplined body of men, but a swarm of prejudiced individuals, caring nothing for infection, and everything for the sanctity of house and caste. Precautions and sanitary measures had to be carried at the point of the bayonet; and they were so carried. For Dudley Norton, no novice at Frontier work, had long since made himself wholesomely feared and respected throughout the Derajat; while, among the Maliks of his district, his hawk-like eyes gleaming under heavy brows were accredited with the power of watching a man's thoughts at their birth. A reputation too useful to be discouraged! Like all detached frontier civilians, he practically lived at the station mess; except on fugitive occasions, when a placidly handsome woman, bearing his name, vouchsafed him a flying visit from home; for no other reason--said the evil-minded--than to establish a right-of-way over her property. At these times Norton welcomed, and entertained his wife with a scrupulous politeness and concern for her physical well-being that was a tragedy in itself; and eventually 'saw her off' at the nearest railway station with a sigh of relief. For, once--in a former life, it seemed--he had been in love with her; and the ghost of a dead passion is an ill companion at bed and board. At the present moment, he had seen neither her nor his only son for more than five years; and of the small daughter, whose coming had transfigured his life, there remained only a cross in Kohat cemetery, and a faded photo of the flagrantly unnatural type that prevailed in the late 'seventies. But the man who gives his heart to the Indian Borderland must steel himself to forgo much that, in the arrogance of youth, he has deemed indispensable to happiness, or even to living at all. Frontier service begets closer contact between soldier and civilian, both in work and play, than cantonment life down country; most often to the uprooting of prejudice on both sides; and Norton was one of the few men in the station who had achieved comparative intimacy with Lenox. Those formidable eyes of his had been quick to detect in the taciturn Gunner, who had done so much, and had so little to say about it, a coming 'political' of no mean quality, a man of ideas and ambitions, for whom the great country of his service was something more than a vast playground, or shooting-box; in effect, a man after his own heart.