The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on the gamooty rope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extra chupa of paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchant sahib on the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how he holds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of young lallang grass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.
The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.
As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of the syce's arms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests on either hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Our syce translates. "He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great American sahib angry."