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LONG and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal), and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service, and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends. Otherwise he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure’s sake.If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate. He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place was full of schoolboys—sons of Anglo-Indians whom the Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper’s heart.

But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.

Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks are coming for to-night-with their boy.”

“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,” I said. “Is he in the Service?”

“No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate. He’s Assistant-Commissioner at Dupe—wherever that is. Somaliland, ain’t it, Stalky?” asked the Infant.

Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You’re only three thousand miles out. Look at the atlas.”

“Anyhow, he’s as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,” said the Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he’s bringing a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable room.”

“Why? Is he a Yao—like the fellow Wade brought here—when your housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some odd things.

“No. He’s one of old Strickland’s Punjabi policemen—and quite European—I believe.”

“Hooray! Haven’t talked Punjabi for three months—and a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin’.”

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man’s placid way, to at least eight designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

“You didn’t send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might have taken a chill.”

“It’s quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front? “

“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother’s smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to me. There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since.”

“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.

“The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib’s body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.”

“And—and you white men wait at table on horseback?” Stalky pointed to the man’s spurs.

“These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England,” said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said “Six months.”

“But he’ll take another six on medical certificate,” said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

“You don’t want to—eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing.” Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

“Ah!” said the Infant. “I’ve only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We’re just ourselves. What flower is your honour’s ladyship commanding for the table?”

“Just ourselves?” she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall. “Then let’s have marigolds the little cemetery ones.”

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam’s servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din—shoeless, out of respect to the floors—brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

“Now what d’you expect to get out of your country?” the Infant asked, when—our India laid aside we talked Adam’s Africa. It roused him at once.

“Rubber—nuts—gums—and so on,” he said. “But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”

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“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”

“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.”

“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.

“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.”

“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

“The best man alive—absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him”—Adam jerked out some heathen phrase—“that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.”

“I’m glad of that. Because I’ve heard from other quarters” Stalky’s sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father’s policemen twenty years before, and his mother’s eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man’s first love or loyalty.

A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.

“I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our shirts,” said the voice of Imam Din.

“Does he know as much English as that?” cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.

We all admired the cotton for Adam’s sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.

“It’s—it’s only an experiment,” he said. “We’re such awful paupers we can’t even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that”—he patted the stuff—“by a pure fluke.”

“How much did it cost?” asked Strickland.

“With seed and machinery—about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals.”

“That sounds promising.” Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.

“No, thank you,” said Agnes. “I’ve been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I’ll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday’s hymns.”

She lifted the boy’s hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant’s ancestors’ banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians’ gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.

“There’s an abominable self-playing attachment here!” she called.

“Me!” the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder. “That’s how I play Parsifal.”

“I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.”

We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.

“Now for the direct expression,” said Stalky, and moved on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich fever-thinned blood.

“It’s nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We haven’t been able to prove cannibalism against that tribe in the courts; but when a Sheshaheli offers you four pounds of woman’s breast, tattoo marks and all, skewered up in a plantain leaf before breakfast, you—”

“Naturally burn the villages before lunch,” said Stalky.

Adam shook his head. “No troops,” he sighed. “I told my Chief about it, and he said we must wait till they chopped a white man. He advised me if ever I felt like it not to commit a—a barren felo de se, but to let the Sheshaheli do it. Then he could report, and then we could mop ’em up!”

“Most immoral! That’s how we got—” Stalky quoted the name of a province won by just such a sacrifice.

“Yes, but the beasts dominated one end of my cotton-belt like anything. They chivied me out of it when I went to take soil for analysis—me and Imam Din.”

“Sahib! Is there a need?” The voice came out of the darkness, and the eyes shone over Adam’s shoulder ere it ceased.

“None. The name was taken in talk.” Adam abolished him with a turn of the finger. “I couldn’t make a casus belli of it just then, because my Chief had taken all the troops to hammer a gang of slave kings up north. Did you ever hear of our war against Ibn Makarrah? He precious nearly lost us the Protectorate at one time, though he’s an ally of ours now.”

“Wasn’t he rather a pernicious brute, even as they go?” said Stalky. “Wade told me about him last year.”

“Well, his nickname all through the country was ‘The Merciful,’ and he didn’t get that for nothing. None of our people ever breathed his proper name. They said ‘He’ or ‘That One,’ and they didn’t say it aloud, either. He fought us for eight months.”

“I remember. There was a paragraph about it in one of the papers,” I said.

“We broke him, though. No—the slavers don’t come our way, because our men have the reputation of dying too much, the first month after they’re captured. That knocks down profits, you see.”

“What about your charming friends, the Sheshahelis?” said the Infant.

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“There’s no market for Sheshaheli. People would as soon buy crocodiles. I believe, before we annexed the country, Ibn Makarrah dropped down on ’em once—to train his young men—and simply hewed ’em in pieces. The bulk of my people are agriculturists just the right stamp for cotton-growers. What’s Mother playing?—‘Once in royal’?”

The organ that had been crooning as happily as a woman over her babe restored, steadied to a tune.

“Magnificent! Oh, magnificent! “ said the Infant loyally. I had never heard him sing but once, and then, though it was early in the tolerant morning, his mess had rolled him into a lotus pond.

“How did you get your cannibals to work for you?” asked Strickland.

“They got converted to civilization after my Chief smashed Ibn Makarrah—just at the time I wanted ’em. You see my Chief had promised me in writing that if I could scrape up a surplus he would not bag it for his roads this time, but I might have it for my cotton game. I only needed two hundred pounds. Our revenues didn’t run to it.”

“What is your revenue?” Stalky asked in the vernacular.

“With hut-tax, traders’ game and mining licenses, not more than fourteen thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked months ahead.” Adam sighed.

“Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib’s camp. Last year it exceeded three rupees,” Imam Din said quietly.

“Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were rather strict on fines. I worked up my native clerk—Bulaki Ram—to a ferocious pitch of enthusiasm. He used to calculate the profits of our cotton-scheme to three points of decimals, after office. I tell you I envied your magistrates here hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about meet, and I was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds for my cotton. That sort of thing grows on a chap when he’s alone—and talks aloud!”

“Hul-lo! Have you been there already?” the father said, and Adam nodded.

“Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of ‘Marmion’ to a tree, sir. Well then my luck turned. One evening an English-speaking nigger came in towing a corpse by the feet. (You get used to little things like that.) He said he’d found it, and please would I identify, because if it was one of Ibn Makarrah’s men there might be a reward. It was an old Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab—a smallboned, bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like—like the dog in ‘Tom Sawyer,’ when he sat on the what’s-its-name beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could see it had been sarkied. (That’s a sort of gum-poison, pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with my shaving soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.

“I’d seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled off his feet, and he stopped sneezing, I knew he’d live. He was bad, though; lay like a log for a week while Imam Din and I massaged the paralysis out of him. Then he told us he was a Hajji—had been three times to Mecca—come in from French Africa, and that he’d met the nigger by the wayside—just like a case of thuggee, in India—and the nigger had poisoned him. That seemed reasonable enough by what I knew of Coast niggers.”

“You believed him?” said his father keenly.

“There was no reason I shouldn’t. The nigger never came back, and the old man stayed with me for two months,” Adam returned. “You know what the best type of a Mohammedan gentleman can be, pater? He was that.”

“None finer, none finer,” was the answer.

“Except a Sikh,” Stalky grunted.

“He’d been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out; he could quote poetry and the Koran all day long. He played chess—you don’t know what that meant to me—like a master. We used to talk about the regeneration of Turkey and the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed in slavery, of course, but he quite saw that it would have to die out. That’s why he agreed with me about developing the resources of the district by cotton-growing, you know.”

“You talked of that too?” said Strickland.

“Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don’t know what it meant to me. A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our Hajji marvellous?”

“Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we found the money for our cotton-play.” Imam Din had moved, I fancy, behind Strickland’s chair.

“Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too. He brought me news when I was down with fever at Dupe that one of Ibn Makarrah’s men was parading through my District with a bunch of slaves—in the Fork!”

“What’s the matter with the Fork, that you can’t abide it?” said Stalky. Adam’s voice had risen at the last word.

“Local etiquette, sir,” he replied, too earnest to notice Stalky’s atrocious pun. “If a slaver runs slaves through British territory he ought to pretend that they’re his servants. Hawkin’ ’em about in the Fork—the forked stick that you put round their necks, you know—is insolence—same as not backing your topsails in the old days. Besides, it unsettles the District.”

“I thought you said slavers didn’t come your way,” I put in.

“They don’t. But my Chief was smoking ’em out of the North all that season, and they were bolting into French territory any road they could find. My orders were to take no notice so long as they circulated, but open slave-dealing in the Fork, was too much. I couldn’t go myself, so I told a couple of our Makalali police and Imam Din to make talk with the gentleman one time. It was rather risky, and it might have been expensive, but it turned up trumps. They were back in a few days with the slaver (he didn’t show fight) and a whole crowd of witnesses, and we tried him in my bedroom, and fined him properly. Just to show you how demoralized the brute must have been (Arabs often go dotty after a defeat), he’d snapped up four or five utterly useless Sheshaheli, and was offering ’em to all and sundry along the road. Why, he offered ’em to you, didn’t he, Imam Din?”

“I was witness that he offered man-eaters’ for sale,” said Imam Din.

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“Luckily for my cotton-scheme, that landed, him both ways. You see, he had slaved and exposed slaves for sale in British territory. That meant the double fine if I could get it out of him.”

“What was his defence?” said Strickland, late of the Punjab Police.

“As far as I remember—but I had a temperature of 104 degrees at the time—he’d mistaken the meridians of longitude. Thought he was in French territory. Said he’d never do it again, if we’d let him off with a fine. I could have shaken hands with the brute for that. He paid up cash like a motorist and went off one time.”

“Did you see him?”

“Ye-es. Didn’t I, Imam Din?”

“Assuredly the Sahib both saw and spoke to the slaver. And the Sahib also made a speech to the man-eaters when he freed them, and they swore to supply him with labour for all his cotton-play. The Sahib leaned on his own servant’s shoulder the while.”

“I remember something of that. I remember Bulaki Ram giving me the papers to sign, and I distinctly remember him locking up the money in the safe—two hundred and ten beautiful English sovereigns. You don’t know what that meant to me! I believe it cured my fever; and as soon as I could, I staggered off with the Hajji to interview the Sheshaheli about labour. Then I found out why they had been so keen to work! It wasn’t gratitude. Their big village had been hit by lightning and burned out a week or two before, and they lay flat in rows around me asking me for a job. I gave it ’em.”

“And so you were very happy?” His mother had stolen up behind us. “You liked your cotton, dear?” She tidied the lump away.

“By Jove, I was happy!” Adam yawned. “Now if any one,” he looked at the Infant, “cares to put a little money into the scheme, it’ll be the making of my District. I can’t give you figures, sir, but I assure—”

“You’ll take your arsenic, and Imam Din’ll take you up to bed, and I’ll come and tuck you in.”

Agnes leaned forward, her rounded elbows on his shoulders, hands joined across his dark hair, and “Isn’t he a darling?” she said to us, with just the same heart-rending lift to the left eyebrow and the same break of her voice as sent Strickland mad among the horses in the year ’84. We were quiet when they were gone. We waited till Imam Din returned to us from above and coughed at the door, as only dark-hearted Asia can.

“Now,” said Strickland, “tell us what truly befell, son of my servant.”

“All befell as our Sahib has said. Only—only there was an arrangement—a little arrangement on account of his cotton-play.”

“Tell! Sit! I beg your pardon, Infant,” said Strickland.

But the Infant had already made the sign, and we heard Imam Din hunker down on the floor: One gets little out of the East at attention.

“When the fever came on our Sahib in our roofed house at Dupe,” he began, “the Hajji listened intently to his talk. He expected the names of women; though I had already told him that Our virtue was beyond belief or compare, and that Our sole desire was this cotton-play. Being at last convinced, the Hajji breathed on our Sahib’s forehead, to sink into his brain news concerning a slave-dealer in his district who had made a mock of the law. Sahib,” Imam Din turned to Strickland, “our Sahib answered to those false words as a horse of blood answers to the spur. He sat up. He issued orders for the apprehension of the slave-dealer. Then he fell back. Then we left him.”

“Alone—servant of my son, and son of my servant?” said his father.

“There was an old woman which belonged to the Hajji. She had come in with the Hajji’s money-belt. The Hajji told her that if our Sahib died, she would die with him. And truly our Sahib had given me orders to depart.”

“Being mad with fever—eh?”

“What could we do, Sahib? This cotton-play was his heart’s desire. He talked of it in his fever. Therefore it was his heart’s desire that the Hajji went to fetch. Doubtless the Hajji could have given him money enough out of hand for ten cottonplays; but in this respect also our Sahib’s virtue was beyond belief or compare. Great Ones do not exchange moneys. Therefore the Hajji said—and I helped with my counsel—that we must make arrangements to get the money in all respects conformable with the English Law. It was great trouble to us, but—the Law is the Law. And the Hajji showed the old woman the knife by which she would die if our Sahib died. So I accompanied the Hajji.”

“Knowing who he was?” said Strickland.

“No! Fearing the man. A virtue went out from him overbearing the virtue of lesser persons. The Hajji told Bulaki Ram the clerk to occupy the seat of government at Dupe till our return. Bulaki Ram feared the Hajji, because the Hajji had often gloatingly appraised his skill in figures at five thousand rupees upon any slave-block. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Come, and we will make the man-eaters play the cotton-game for my delight’s delight’ The Hajji loved our Sahib with the love of a father for his son, of a saved for his saviour, of a Great One for a Great One. But I said: ‘We cannot go to that Sheshaheli place without a hundred rifles. We have here five.’ The Hajji said: ‘I have untied as knot in my head-handkerchief which will be more to us than a thousand.’ I saw that he had so loosed it that it lay flagwise on his shoulder. Then I knew that he was a Great One with virtue in him.

“We came to the highlands of the Sheshaheli on the dawn of the second day—about the time of the stirring of the cold wind. The Hajji walked delicately across the open place where their filth is, and scratched upon the gate which was shut. When it opened I saw the man-eaters lying on their cots under the eaves of the huts. They rolled off: they rose up, one behind the other the length of the street, and the fear on their faces was as leaves whitening to a breeze. The Hajji stood in the gate guarding his skirts from defilement. The Hajji said: ‘I am here once again. Give me six and yoke up.’ They zealously then pushed to us with poles six, and yoked them with a heavy tree. The Hajji then said: “Fetch fire from the morning hearth, and come to windward.’ The wind is strong on those headlands at sunrise, so when each had emptied his crock of fire in front of that which was before him, the broadside of the town roared into flame, and all went. The Hajji then said: ‘At the end of a time there will come here the white man ye once chased for sport. He will demand labour to plant such and such stuff. Ye are that labour, and your spawn after you.’ They said, lifting their heads a very little from the edge of the ashes: ‘ We are that labour, and our spawn after us.’ The Hajji said: ‘What is also my name?’ They said: ‘Thy name is also The Merciful’ The Hajji said: ‘Praise then my mercy’; and while they did this, the Hajji walked away, I following.”

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The Infant made some noise in his throat, and reached for more Burgundy.

“About noon one of our six fell dead. Fright only frights Sahib! None had—none could—touch him. Since they were in pairs, and the other of the Fork was mad and sang foolishly, we waited for some heathen to do what was needful. There came at last Angari men with goats. The Hajji said: ‘What do ye see? They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, we neither see nor hear.’ The Hajji said: ‘But I command ye to see and to hear and to say.’ They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, it is to our commanded eyes as though slaves stood in a Fork.’ The Hajji said: ‘So testify before the officer who waits you in the town of Dupe.’ They said: ‘What shall come to us after?’ The Hajji said: ‘The just reward for the informer. But if ye do not testify, then a punishment which shall cause birds, to fall from the trees in terror and monkeys to scream for pity.’ Hearing this, the Angari men hastened to Dupe. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Are those things sufficient to establish our case, or must I drive in a village full?’ I said that three witnesses amply established any case, but as yet, I said, the Hajji had not offered his slaves for sale. It is true, as our Sahib said just now, there is one fine for catching slaves, and yet another for making to sell them. And it was the double fine that we needed, Sahib, for our Sahib’s cotton-play. We had fore-arranged all this with Bulaki Ram, who knows the English Law, and, I thought the Hajji remembered, but he grew angry, and cried out: ‘O God, Refuge of the Afflicted, must I, who am what I am, peddle this’ dog’s meat by the roadside to gain his delight for my heart’s delight?” None the less, he admitted it was the English Law, and so he offered me the six—five—in a small voice, with an averted head. The Sheshaheli do not smell of sour milk as heathen should. They smell like leopards, Sahib. This is because they eat men.”

“Maybe,” said Strickland. “But where were thy wits? One witness is not sufficient to establish the fact of a sale.”

“What could we do, Sahib? There was the Hajji’s reputation to consider. We could not have called in a heathen witness for such a thing. And, moreover, the Sahib forgets that the defendant himself was making this case. He would not contest his own evidence. Otherwise, I know the law of evidence well enough.

“So then we went to Dupe, and while Bulaki Ram waited among the Angari men, ‘I ran to see our Sahib in bed. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was full of upside-down orders, but the old woman had not loosened her hair for death. The Hajji said: ‘Be quick with my trial. I am not Job!’ The Hajji was a learned man. We made the trial swiftly to a sound of soothing voices round the bed. Yet—yet, because no man can be sure whether a Sahib of that blood sees, or does not see, we made it strictly in the manner of the forms of the English Law. Only the witnesses and the slaves and the prisoner we kept without for his nose’s sake.”

“Then he did not see the prisoner?” said Strickland.

“I stood by to shackle up an Angari in case he should demand it, but by God’s favour he was too far fevered to ask for one. It is quite true he signed the papers. It is quite true he saw the money put away in the safe—two hundred and ten English pounds and it is quite true that the gold wrought on him as a strong cure. But as to his seeing the prisoner, and having speech with the man-eaters—the Hajji breathed all that on his forehead to sink into his sick brain. A little, as ye have heard, has remained . . . . Ah, but when the fever broke, and our Sahib called for the fine-book, and the thin little picture-books from Europe with the pictures of ploughs and hoes, and cotton mills—ah, then he laughed as he used to laugh, Sahib. It was his heart’s desire, this cotton-play. The Hajji loved him, as who does not? It was a little, little arrangement, Sahib, of which—is it necessary to tell all the world?”

“And when didst thou know who the Hajji was?” said Strickland.

“Not for a certainty till he and our Sahib had returned from their visit to the Sheshaheli country. It is quite true as our Sahib says, the man-eaters lay, flat around his feet, and asked for spades to cultivate cotton. That very night, when I was cooking the dinner, the Hajji said to me: ‘I go to my own place, though God knows whether the Man with the Stone Eyes have left me an ox, a slave, or a woman.’ I said: ‘Thou art then That One?’ The Hajji said: ‘I am ten thousand rupees reward into thy hand. Shall we make another law-case and get more cotton machines for the boy?’ I said: ‘What dog am I to do this? May God prolong thy life a thousand years!’ The Hajji said: ‘Who has seen to-morrow? God has given me as it were a son in my old age, and I praise Him. See that the breed is not lost!’

“He walked then from the cooking-place to our Sahib’s office-table under the tree, where our Sahib held in his hand a blue envelope of Service newly come in by runner from the North. At this, fearing evil news for the Hajji, I would have restrained him, but he said: ‘We be both Great Ones. Neither of us will fail.’ Our Sahib looked up to invite the Hajji to approach before he opened the letter, but the Hajji stood off till our Sahib had well opened and well read the letter. Then the Hajji said: ‘Is it permitted to say farewell?’ Our Sahib stabbed the letter on the file with a deep and joyful breath and cried a welcome. The Hajji said: ‘I go to my own place,’ and he loosed from his neck a chained heart of ambergris set in soft gold and held it forth. Our Sahib snatched it swiftly in the closed fist, down turned, and said ‘If thy name be written hereon, it is needless, for a name is already engraved on my heart.’ The Hajji said: ‘And on mine also is a name engraved; but there is no name on the amulet.’ The Hajji stooped to our Sahib’s feet, but our Sahib raised and embraced him, and the Hajji covered his mouth with his shoulder-cloth, because it worked, and so he went away.”

“And what order was in the Service letter?” Stalky murmured.

“Only an order for our Sahib to write a report on some new cattle sickness. But all orders come in the same make of envelope. We could not tell what order it might have been.”

“When he opened the letter—my son—made he no sign? A cough? An oath?” Strickland asked.

“None, Sahib. I watched his hands. They did not shake. Afterward he wiped his face, but he was sweating before from the heat.”

“Did he know? Did he know who the Hajji was?” said the Infant in English.

“I am a poor man. Who can say what a Sahib of that get knows or does not know? But the Hajji is right. The breed should not be lost. It is not very hot for little children in Dupe, and as regards nurses, my sister’s cousin at Jull—”

“H’m! That is the boy’s own concern. I wonder if his Chief ever knew?” said Strickland.

“Assuredly,” said Imam Din. “On the night before our Sahib went down to the sea, the Great Sahib—the Man with the Stone Eyes—dined with him in his camp, I being in charge of the table. They talked a long while and the Great Sahib said: ‘What didst thou think of That One?’ (We do not say Ibn Makarrah yonder.) Our Sahib said: ‘Which one?’ The Great Sahib said: ‘That One which taught thy man-eaters to grow cotton for thee. He was in thy District three months to my certain knowledge, and I looked by every runner that thou wouldst send me in his head.’ Our Sahib said: ‘If his head had been needed, another man should have been appointed to govern my District, for he was my friend.’ The Great Sahib laughed and said: ‘If I had needed a lesser man in thy place be sure I would have sent him, as, if I had needed the head of That One, be sure I would have sent men to bring it to me. But tell me now, by what means didst thou twist him to thy use and our profit in this cotton-play?’ Our Sahib said: ‘By God, I did not use that man in any fashion whatever. He was my friend.’ The Great Sahib said: ‘ ’Toh Vac! (Bosh!) Tell!’ Our Sahib shook his head as he does—as he did when a child—and they looked at each other like sword-play men in the ring at a fair. The Great Sahib dropped his eyes first and he said: ‘So be it. I should perhaps have answered thus in my youth. No matter. I have made treaty with That One as an ally of the State. Some day he shall tell me the tale.’ Then I brought in fresh coffee, and they ceased. But I do not think That One will tell the Great Sahib more than our Sahib told him.”

“Wherefore?” I asked.

“Because they are both Great Ones, and I have observed in my life that Great Ones employ words very little between each other in their dealings; still less when they speak to a third concerning those dealings. Also they profit by silence . . . . Now I think that the mother has come down from the room, and I will go rub his feet till he sleeps.”

His ears had caught Agnes’s step at the stair-head and presently she passed us on her way to the music room humming the Magnificat.

[a short tale]

When Man and Woman are agreed, 
what can the Kazi do?
(Proverb)

SOME people say that there is no romance in India. Those people are wrong. Our lives hold quite as much romance as is good for us. Sometimes more.

Strickland was in the Police, and people did not understand him ; so they said he was a doubtful sort of man and passed by on the other side. Strickland had himself to thank for this. He held the extraordinary theory that a Policeman in India should try to know as much about the natives as the natives themselves. Now, in the whole of Upper India there is only one man who can pass for Hindu or Mahommedan, hide-dresser or priest, as he pleases. He is feared and respected by the natives from the Ghor Kathri to the Jamma Musjid ; and he is supposed to have the gift of invisibility and executive control over many Devils. But this has done him no good in the eyes of the Indian Government.

Strickland was foolish enough to take that man for his model; and, following out his absurd theory, dabbled in unsavoury places no respectable man would think of exploring—all among the native riff-raff. He educated himself in this peculiar way for seven years, and people could not appreciate it. He was perpetually ‘going Fantee’ among natives, which, of course, no man with any sense believes in. He was initiated into the Sat Bhai at Allahabad once, when he was on leave; he knew the Lizzard-Song of the Sansis, and the Hálli-Hukk dance, which is a religious can-can of a startling kind. When a man knows who dance the Hálli-Hukk, and how, and when, and where, he knows something to be proud of. He has gone deeper than the skin. But Strickland was not proud, though he had helped once, at Jagadhri, at the Painting of the Death Bull, which no Englishman must even look upon; had mastered the thieves’-patter of the chángars ; had taken a Eusufzai horse-thief alone near Attock ; and had stood under the sounding-board of a Border mosque and conducted service in the manner of a Sunni Mollah.

His crowning achievement was spending eleven days as a faquir or priest in the gardens of Baba Atal at Amritsar, and there picking up the threads of the great Nasiban Murder Case. But people said, justly enough, I Why on earth can’t Strickland sit in his office and write up his diary, and recruit, and keep quiet, instead of showing up the incapacity of his seniors ?’ So the Nasiban Murder Case did him no good departmentally ; but, after his first feeling of wrath, he returned to his outlandish custom of prying into native life. When a man once acquires a taste for this particular amusement, it abides with him all his days. It is the most fascinating thing in the world—Love not excepted. Where other men took ten days to the Hills, Strickland took leave for what he called shikar, put on the disguise that appealed to him at the time, stepped down into the brown crowd, and was swallowed up for a while. He was a quiet, dark young fellow—spare, black-eyed—and, when he was not thinking of something else, a very interesting companion. Strickland on Native Progress as he had seen it was worth hearing. Natives hated Strickland ; but they were afraid of him. He knew too much.

When the Youghals came into the station, Strickland—very gravely, as he did everything—fell in love with Miss Youghal ; and she, after a while, fell in love with him because she could not understand him. Then Strickland told the parents; but Mrs. Youghal said she was not going to throw her daughter into the worst paid Department in the Empire, and old Youghal said, in so many words, that he mistrusted Strickland’s ways and works, and would thank him not to speak or write to his daughter any more. ‘Very well,’ said Strickland, for he did not wish to make his ladylove’s life a burden. After one long talk with Miss Youghal he dropped the business entirely.

The Youghals went up to Simla in April.

In July Strickland secured three months’ leave on ‘urgent private affairs.’ He locked up his house-though not a native in the Province would wittingly have touched ‘Estreekin Sahib’s’ gear for the world—and went down to see a friend of his, an old dyer, at Tarn Taran.

Here all trace of him was lost, until a sais or groom met me on the Simla Mall with this extraordinary note:—

DEAR OLD MAN,
Please give bearer a box of cheroots
-Supers, No. I, for preference. They 
are freshest at the Club. I’ll repay 
when I reappear; but at present 
I’m out of society, 
Yours, E. STRICKLAND.

I ordered two boxes, and handed them over to the sais with my love. That sais was Strickland, and he was in old Youghal’s employ, attached to Miss Youghal’s Arab. The poor fellow was suffering for an English smoke, and knew that, whatever happened, I should hold my tongue till the business was over.

Later on, Mrs. Youghal, who was wrapped up in her servants, began talking at houses where she called of her paragon among saises—the man who was never too busy to get up in the morning and pick flowers for the breakfast-table, and who blacked—actually blacked—the hoofs of his horse like a London coachman! The turnout of Miss Youghal’s Arab was a wonder and a delight. Strickland—Dulloo, I mean—found his reward in the pretty things that Miss Youghal said to him when she went out riding. Her parents were pleased to find she had forgotten all her foolishness for young Strickland and said she was a good girl.

Strickland vows that the two months of his service were the most rigid mental discipline he has ever gone through. Quite apart from the little fact that the wife of one of his fellow-saises fell in love with him and then tried to poison him with arsenic because he would have nothing to do with her, he had to school himself into keeping quiet when Miss Youghal went out riding with some man who tried to flirt with her, and he was forced to trot behind carrying the blanket and hearing every word ! Also, he had to keep his temper when he was slanged in the theatre porch by a policeman—especially once when he was abused by a Naik he had himself recruited from Isser Jang village—or, worse still, when a young subaltern called him a pig for not making way quickly enough.

But the life had its compensations. He obtained great insight into the ways and thefts of saises—enough, he says, to have summarily convicted half the population of the Punjab if he had been on business. He became one of the leading players at knuckle-bones, which all jhampánis and many saises play while they are waiting outside the Government House or the Gaiety Theatre of nights ; he learned to smoke tobacco that was three-fourths cowdung ; and he heard the wisdom of the grizzled Jemadar of the Government House grooms. Whose words are valuable. He saw many things which amused him ; and he states, on honour, that no man can appreciate Simla properly till he has seen it from the sais’s point of view. He also says that, if he chose to write all he saw his head would be broken in several places.

Strickland’s account of the agony he endured on wet nights, hearing the music and seeing the lights in ‘Benmore,’ with his toes tingling for a waltz and his head in a horse-blanket, is rather amusing. One of these days Strickland is going to write a little book on his experiences. That book will be worth buying, and even more worth suppressing.

Thus he served faithfully as Jacob served for Rachel; and his leave was nearly at an end when the explosion came. He had really done his best to keep his temper in the hearing of the flirtations I have mentioned ; but he broke down at last. An old and very distinguished General took Miss Youghal for a ride, and began that specially offensive’ you’re-only-a-little-girl’ sort of flirtation—most difficult for a woman to, turn aside deftly, and most maddening to listen to. Miss Youghal was shaking with fear at the things he said in the hearing of her sais. Dulloo—Strickland—stood it as long as he could. Then he caught hold of the General’s bridle, and, in most fluent English, invited him to step off and be flung over the cliff. Next minute Miss Youghal began to cry, and Strickland saw that he had hopelessly given himself away, and everything was over.

The General nearly had a fit, while Miss Youghal was sobbing out the story of the disguise and the engagement that was not recognised by the parents. Strickland was furiously angry with himself, and more angry with the General for forcing his hand ; so he said nothing, but held the horse’s head and prepared to thrash the General as some sort of satisfaction. But when the General had thoroughly grasped the story, and knew who Strickland was, he began to puff and blow in the saddle, and nearly rolled off with laughing. He said Strickland deserved a V.C., if it were only for putting on a sais’s blanket. Then he called himself names, and vowed that he deserved a thrashing, but he was too old to take it from Strickland. Then he complimented Miss Youghal on her lover. The scandal of the business never struck him ; for he was a nice old man, with a weakness for flirtations. Then he laughed again, and said that old Youghal was a fool. Strickland let go of the cob’s head, and suggested that the General had better help them if that was his opinion. Strickland knew Youghal’s weakness for men with titles and letters after their names and high official position.’ It’s rather like a forty-minute farce,’ said the General, ‘but, begad, I will help, if it’s only to escape that tremendous thrashing I deserve. Go along to your home, my sais-Policeman, and change into decent kit, and I’ll attack Mr. Youghal. Miss Youghal, may I ask you to canter home and wait?’

About seven minutes later there was a wild hurroosh at the Club. A sais, with blanket and head-rope, was asking all the men he knew : ‘For Heaven’s sake lend me decent clothes!’ As the men did not recognise him, there were some peculiar scenes before Strickland could get a hot bath, with soda in it, in one room, a shirt here, a collar there, a pair of trousers elsewhere, and so on. He galloped off, with half the Club wardrobe on his back, and an utter stranger’s pony under him, to the house of old Youghal. The General, arrayed in purple and fine linen, was before him. What the General had said Strickland never knew, but Youghal received Strickland with moderate civility ; and Mrs. Youghal, touched by the devotion of the transformed Dulloo, was almost kind. The General beamed and chuckled, and Miss Youghal came in, and, almost before old Youghal knew where he was, the parental consent had been wrenched out, and Strickland had departed with Miss Youghal to the Telegraph Office to wire for his European kit. The final embarrassment was when a stranger attacked him on the Mall and asked for the stolen pony.

In the end, Strickland and Miss Youghal were married, on the strict understanding that Strickland should drop his old ways, and stick to Departmental routine, which pays best and leads to Simla. Strickland was far too fond of his wife, just then, to break his word, but it was a sore trial to him ;for the streets and the bazars, and the sounds in them, were full of meaning to Strickland, and these called to him to come back and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day I will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar’s cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the under-currents, which, if a man would master, he must always continue to learn.

But he fills in his Departmental returns beautifully.

(a short tale)

In the daytime, when she moved about me,
In the night, when she was sleeping at my side,—
I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence,
Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her—
Would God that she or I had died!
(Confessions)

THERE was a man called Bronckhorst—a three-cornered, middle-aged man in the Army—gray as a badger, and, some people said, with a touch of country-blood in him. That, however, cannot be proved. Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger than her husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy eyelids over weak eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the lights fell on it.

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many things—including actual assault with the clenched fist—that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear—as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore—with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not what she has been, and—worst of all—the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon, when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so go to the other extreme to express their feelings. A similar impulse makes a man say, ‘Hutt, you old beast!’ when a favourite horse nuzzles his coat-front. Unluckily, when the reaction of marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say. But Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her ‘Teddy’ as she called him. Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps—this is only a theory to account for his infamous behaviour later on—he gave way to the queer, savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years married, when he sees, across the table, the same, same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until the day of its death or his own. Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three breaths as a rule, must be a ‘throw-back’ to times when men and women were rather worse than they are now, and is too unpleasant to be discussed.

Dinner at the Bronckhorsts’ was an infliction few men cared to undergo. Bronckhorst took a pleasure in saying things that made his wife wince. When their little boy came in at dessert, Bronckhorst used to give him half a glass of wine, and, naturally enough, the poor little mite got first, riotous, next miserable, and was removed screaming. Bronckhorst asked if that was the way Teddy usually behaved, and whether Mrs. Bronckhorst could not spare some of her time ‘to teach the little beggar decency.’ Mrs. Bronckhorst, who loved the boy more than her own life, tried not to cry—her spirit seemed to have been broken by her marriage. Lastly, Bronckhorst used to say, ‘There! That’ll do, that’ll do. For God’s sake try to behave like a rational woman. Go into the drawing-room.’ Mrs. Bronckhorst would go, trying to carry it all off with a smile; and the guest of the evening would feel angry and uncomfortable.

After three years of this cheerful life—for Mrs. Bronckhorst had no women-friends to talk to—the Station was startled by the news that Bronckhorst had instituted proceedings on the criminal count, against a man called Biel, who certainly had been rather attentive to Mrs. Bronckhorst whenever she had appeared in public. The utter want of reserve with which Bronckhorst treated his own dishonour helped us to know that the evidence against Biel would be entirely circumstantial and native. There were no letters; but Bronckhorst said openly that he would rack Heaven and Earth until he saw Biel superintending the manufacture of carpets in the Central Jail. Mrs. Bronckhorst kept entirely to her house, and let charitable folks say what they pleased. Opinions were divided. Some two-thirds of the Station jumped at once to the conclusion that Biel was guilty; but a dozen men who knew and liked him held by him. Biel was furious and surprised. He denied the whole thing, and vowed that he would thrash Bronckhorst within an inch of his life. No jury, we knew, would convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees; but Biel did not care to scrape through by the benefit of a doubt. He wanted the whole thing cleared; but, as he said one night—‘He can prove anything with servants’ evidence, and I’ve only my bare word.’ This was almost a month before the case came on; and beyond agreeing with Biel, we could do little. All that we could be sure of was that the native evidence would be bad enough to blast Biel’s character for the rest of his service; for when a native begins perjury he perjures himself thoroughly. He does not boggle over details.

Some genius at the end of the table whereat the affair was being talked over, said, ‘Look here! I don’t believe lawyers are any good. Get a man to wire to Strickland, and beg him to come down and pull us through.’

Strickland was about a hundred and eighty miles up the line. He had not long been married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the telegram a chance of return to the old detective work that his soul lusted after, and next night he came in and heard our story. He finished his pipe and said oracularly, ‘We must get at the evidence. Oorya bearer, Mussulman khit and sweeper ayah, I suppose, are the pillars of the charge. I am on in this piece; but I’m afraid I’m getting rusty in my talk.’

He rose and went into Biel’s bedroom, where his trunk had been put, and shut the door. An hour later, we heard him say, ‘I hadn’t the heart to part with my old make-ups when I married. Will this do?’ There was a lothely faquir salaaming in the doorway.

‘Now lend me fifty rupees,’ said Strickland, ‘and give me your Words of Honour that you won’t tell my wife.’

He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table drank his health. What he did only he himself knows. A faquir hung about Bronckhorst’s compound for twelve days. Then a sweeper appeared, and when Biel heard of him, he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged. Whether the sweeper made love to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst’s ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland exclusively.

He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly, ‘You spoke the truth, Biel. The whole business is put up from beginning to end. ’Jove! It almost astonishes me! That Bronckhorst-beast isn’t fit to live.’

There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said, ‘How are you going to prove it? You can’t say that you’ve been trespassing on Bronckhorst’s compound in disguise!’

‘No,’ said Strickland. ‘Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to get up something strong about “inherent improbabilities” and “discrepancies of evidence.” He won’t have to speak, but it will make him happy. I’m going to run this business.’

Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would happen. They trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men. When the case came off the Court was crowded. Strickland hung about in the verandah of the Court, till he met the Mahommedan khitmatgar. Then he murmured a faquir’s blessing in his ear, and asked him how his second wife did. The man spun round, and, as he looked into the eyes of ‘Estreeken Sahib,’ his jaw dropped. You must remember that before Strickland was married, he was, as I have told you already, a power among natives. Strickland whispered a rather coarse vernacular proverb to the effect that he was abreast of all that was going on, and went into the Court armed with a gut trainer’s-whip.

The Mahommedan was the first witness and, Strickland beamed upon him from the back of the Court. The man moistened his lips with his tongue and, in his abject fear of ‘Estreeken Sahib,’ the faquir, went back on every detail of his evidence—said he was a poor man, and God was his witness that he had forgotten everything that Bronckhorst Sahib had told him to say. Between his terror of Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed weeping.

Then began the panic among the witnesses. Janki, the ayah, leering chastely behind her veil, turned gray, and the bearer left the Court. He said that his Mamma was dying, and that it was not wholesome for any man to lie unthriftily in the presence of ‘Estreeken Sahib.’

Biel said politely to Bronckhorst, ‘Your witnesses don’t seem to work. Haven’t you any forged letters to produce?’ But Bronckhorst was swaying to and fro in his chair, and there was a dead pause after Biel had been called to order.

Bronckhorst’s Counsel saw the look on his client’s face, and without more ado, pitched his papers on the little green baize table, and mumbled something about having been misinformed. The whole court applauded wildly, like soldiers at a theatre, and the Judge began to say what he thought.

Biel came out of the Court, and Strickland dropped a gut trainer’s-whip in the verandah. Ten minutes later, Biel was cutting Bronckhorst into ribbons behind the old Court cells, quietly and without scandal. What was left of Bronckhorst was sent home in a carriage; and his wife wept over it and nursed it into a man again.

Later on, after Biel had managed to hush up the counter-charge against Bronckhorst of fabricating false evidence, Mrs. Bronckhorst, with her faint, watery smile, said that there had been a mistake, but it wasn’t her Teddy’s fault altogether. She would wait till her Teddy came back to her. Perhaps he had grown tired of her, or she had tried his patience, and perhaps we wouldn’t cut her any more, and perhaps the mothers would let their children play with ‘little Teddy’ again. He was so lonely. Then the Station invited Mrs. Bronckhorst everywhere, until Bronckhorst was fit to appear in public, when he went Home and took his wife with him. According to latest advices, her Teddy did come back to her, and they are moderately happy. Though, of course, he can never forgive her the thrashing that she was the indirect means of getting for him.

What Biel wants to know is, ‘Why didn’t I press home the charge against the Bronckhorst-brute, and have him run in?’

What Mrs. Strickland wants to know is, ‘How did my husband bring such a lovely, lovely Waler from your Station? I know all his money-affairs; and I’m certain he didn’t buy it.’

What I want to know is, ‘How do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst come to marry men like Bronckhorst?’

And my conundrum is the most unanswerable of the three.

page 1 of 4

EAST of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen. This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary horrors of life in India: it may be stretched to explain my story.

My friend Strickland of the Police, who knows as much of natives of India as is good for any man, can bear witness to the facts of the case. Dumoise, our doctor, also saw what Strickland and I saw. The inference which he drew from the evidence was entirely incorrect. He is dead now; he died in a rather curious manner, which has been elsewhere described.

When Fleete came to India he owned a little money and some land in the Himalayas, near a place called Dharmsala. Both properties had been left him by an uncle, and he came out to finance them. He was a big, heavy, genial, and inoffensive man. His knowledge of natives was, of course, limited, and he complained of the difficulties of the language.

He rode in from his place in the hills to spend New Year in the station, and he stayed with Strickland. On New Year’s Eve there was a big dinner at the club, and the night was excusably wet. When men foregather from the uttermost ends of the Empire they have a right to be riotous. The Frontier had sent down a contingent o’ Catch-’em-Alive-O’s who had not seen twenty white faces for a year, and were used to ride fifteen miles to dinner at the next Fort at the risk of a Khyberee bullet where their drinks should lie. They profited by their new security, for they tried to play pool with a curled-up hedgehog found in the garden, and one of them carried the marker round the room in his teeth. Half a dozen planters had come in from the south and were talking ‘horse’ to the Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once. Everybody was there, and there was a general closing up of ranks and taking stock of our losses in dead or disabled that had fallen during the past year. It was a very wet night, and I remember that we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with our feet in the Polo Championship Cup, and our heads among the stars, and swore that we were all dear friends. Then some of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to open up the Soudan and were opened up by Fuzzies in that cruel scrub outside Suakim, and some found stars and medals, and some were married, which was bad, and some did other things which were worse, and the others of us stayed in our chains and strove to make money on insufficient experiences.

Fleete began the night with sherry and bitters, drank champagne steadily up to dessert, then raw, rasping Capri with all the strength of whisky, took Benedictine with his coffee, four or five whiskies and sodas to improve his pool strokes, beer and bones at half-past two, winding up with old brandy. Consequently, when he came out, at half-past three in the morning, into fourteen degrees of frost, he was very angry with his horse for coughing, and tried to leapfrog into the saddle. The horse broke away and went to his stables; so Strickland and I formed a Guard of Dishonour to take Fleete home.

Our road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people—the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

There was a light in the temple, and as we passed we could hear voices of men chanting hymns. In a native temple the priests rise at all hours of the night to do honour to their god. Before we could stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, patted two priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt in to the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman. Strickland tried to drag him out, but he sat down and said solemnly:

“Shee that? ’Mark of the B—beasht! I made it. Ishn’t it fine?”

In half a minute the temple was alive and noisy, and Strickland, who knew what came of polluting gods, said that things might occur. He, by virtue of his official position, long residence in the country, and weakness for going among the natives, was known to the priests and he felt unhappy. Fleete sat on the ground and refused to move. He said that ‘good old Hanuman’ made a very soft pillow.

Then, without any warning, a Silver Man came out of a recess behind the image of the god. He was perfectly naked in that bitter, bitter cold, and his body shone like frosted silver, for he was what the Bible calls ‘a leper as white as snow.’ Also he had no face, because he was a leper of some years’ standing, and his disease was heavy upon him. We two stooped to haul Fleete up, and the temple was filling and filling with folk who seemed to spring from the earth, when the Silver Man ran in under our arms, making a noise exactly like the mewing of an otter, caught Fleete round the body and dropped his head on Fleete’s breast before we could wrench him away. Then he retired to a corner and sat mewing while the crowd blocked all the doors.

The priests were very angry until the Silver Man touched Fleete. That nuzzling seemed to sober them.

At the end of a few minutes’ silence one of the priests came to Strickland and said, in perfect English, “Take your friend away. He has done with Hanuman but Hanuman has not done with him.” The crowd gave room and we carried Fleete into the road.

Strickland was very angry. He said that we might all three have been knifed, and that Fleete should thank his stars that he had escaped without injury.

Fleete thanked no one. He said that he wanted to go to bed. He was gorgeously drunk.

We moved on, Strickland silent and wrathful, until Fleete was taken with violent shivering fits and sweating. He said that the smells of the bazaar were overpowering, and he wondered why slaughter-houses were permitted so near English residences. “Can’t you smell the blood?” said Fleete.

We put him to bed at last, just as the dawn was breaking, and Strickland invited me to have another whisky and soda. While we were drinking he talked of the trouble in the temple, and admitted that it baffled him completely. Strickland hates being mystified by natives, because his business in life is to overmatch them with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress.

“They should have mauled us,” he said, “instead of mewing at us. I wonder what they meant. I don’t like it one little bit.”

I said that the Managing Committee of the temple would in all probability bring a criminal action against us for insulting their religion. There was a section of the Indian Penal Code which exactly met Fleete’s offence. Strickland said he only hoped and prayed that they would do this. Before I left I looked into Fleete’s room, and saw him lying on his right side, scratching his left breast. Then I went to bed cold, depressed, and unhappy, at seven o’clock in the morning.

At one o’clock I rode over to Strickland’s house to inquire after Fleete’s head. I imagined that it would be a sore one. Fleete was breakfasting and seemed unwell. His temper was gone, for he was abusing the cook for not supplying him with an underdone chop. A man who can eat raw meat after a wet night is a curiosity. I told Fleete this and he laughed.

“You breed queer mosquitoes in these parts,” he said. “I’ve been bitten to pieces, but only in one place.”

page 2

“Let’s have a look at the bite,” said Strickland. “It may have gone down since this morning.”

While the chops were being cooked, Fleete opened his shirt and showed us, just over his left breast, a mark, the perfect double of the black rosettes—the five or six irregular blotches arranged in a circle—on a leopard’s hide. Strickland looked and said, “It was only pink this morning. It’s grown black now.”

Fleete ran to a glass.

“By Jove!” he said, “this is nasty. What is it?”

We could not answer. Here the chops came in, all red and juicy, and Fleete bolted three in a most offensive manner. He ate on his right grinders only, and threw his head over his right shoulder as he snapped the meat. When he had finished, it struck him that he had been behaving strangely, for he said apologetically, “I don’t think I ever felt so hungry in my life. I’ve bolted like an ostrich.”

After breakfast Strickland said to me, “Don’t go. Stay here, and stay for the night.”

Seeing that my house was not three miles from Strickland’s, this request was absurd. But Strickland insisted, and was going to say something, when Fleete interrupted by declaring in a shame-faced way that he felt hungry again. Strickland sent a man to my house to fetch over my bedding and a horse, and we three went down to Strickland’s stables to pass the hours until it was time to go out for a ride. The man who has a weakness for horses never wearies of inspecting them; and when two men are killing time in this way they gather knowledge and lies the one from the other.

There were five horses in the stables, and I shall never forget the scene as we tried to look them over. They seemed to have gone mad. They reared and screamed and nearly tore up their pickets; they sweated and shivered and lathered and were distraught with fear. Strickland’s horses used to know him as well as his dogs; which made the matter more curious. We left the stable for fear of the brutes throwing themselves in their panic. Then Strickland turned back and called me. The horses were still frightened, but they let us ‘gentle’ and make much of them, and put their heads in our bosoms.

“They aren’t afraid of us,” said Strickland. “D’you know, I’d give three months’ pay if Outrage here could talk.”

But Outrage was dumb, and could only cuddle up to his master and blow out his nostrils, as is the custom of horses when they wish to explain things but can’t. Fleete came up when we were in the stalls, and as soon as the horses saw him, their fright broke out afresh. It was all that we could do to escape from the place unkicked. Strickland said, “They don’t seem to love you, Fleete.”

“Nonsense,” said Fleete; “my mare will follow me like a dog.” He went to her; she was in a loose-box; but as he slipped the bars she plunged, knocked him down, and broke away into the garden. I laughed, but Strickland was not amused. He took his moustache in both fists and pulled at it till it nearly came out. Fleete, instead of going off to chase his property, yawned, saying that he felt sleepy. He went to the house to lie down, which was a foolish way of spending New Year’s Day.

Strickland sat with me in the stables and asked if I had noticed anything peculiar in Fleete’s manner. I said that he ate his food like a beast; but that this might have been the result of living alone in the hills out of the reach of society as refined and elevating as ours for instance. Strickland was not amused. I do not think that he listened to me, for his next sentence referred to the mark on Fleete’s breast, and I said that it might have been caused by blister-flies, or that it was possibly a birth-mark newly born and now visible for the first time. We both agreed that it was unpleasant to look at, and Strickland found occasion to say that I was a fool.

“I can’t tell you what I think now,” said he, “because you would call me a madman; but you must stay with me for the next few days, if you can. I want you to watch Fleete, but don’t tell me what you think till I have made up my mind.”

“But I am dining out to-night,” I said.

“So am I,” said Strickland, “and so is Fleete. At least if he doesn’t change his mind.”

We walked about the garden smoking, but saying nothing—because we were friends, and talking spoils good tobacco—till our pipes were out. Then we went to wake up Fleete. He was wide awake and fidgeting about his room.

“I say, I want some more chops,” he said. “Can I get them?”

We laughed and said, “Go and change. The ponies will be round in a minute.”

“All right,” said Fleete. “I’ll go when I get the chops—underdone ones, mind.”

He seemed to be quite in earnest. It was four o’clock, and we had had breakfast at one; still, for a long time, he demanded those underdone chops. Then he changed into riding clothes and went out into the verandah. His pony—the mare had not been caught—would not let him come near. All three horses were unmanageable—mad with fear—and finally Fleete said that he would stay at home and get something to eat. Strickland and I rode out wondering. As we passed the temple of Hanuman the Silver Man came out and mewed at us.

“He is not one of the regular priests of the temple,” said Strickland. “I think I should peculiarly like to lay my hands on him.”

There was no spring in our gallop on the racecourse that evening. The horses were stale, and moved as though they had been ridden out.

“The fright after breakfast has been too much for them,” said Strickland.

That was the only remark he made through the remainder of the ride. Once or twice, I think, he swore to himself; but that did not count.

We came back in the dark at seven o’clock, and saw that there were no lights in the bungalow. “Careless ruffians my servants are!” said Strickland.

My horse reared at something on the carriage drive, and Fleete stood up under its nose.

“What are you doing, grovelling about the garden?” said Strickland.

But both horses bolted and nearly threw us. We dismounted by the stables and returned to Fleete, who was on his hands and knees under the orange-bushes.

“What the devil’s wrong with you?” said Strickland.

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“Nothing, nothing in the world,” said Fleete, speaking very quickly and thickly. “I’ve been gardening—botanising, you know. The smell of the earth is delightful. I think I’m going for a walk—a long walk—all night.”

Then I saw that there was something excessively out of order somewhere, and I said to Strickland, “I am not dining out.”

“Bless you!” said Strickland. “Here, Fleete, get up. You’ll catch fever there. Come in to dinner and let’s have the lamps lit. We’ll all dine at home.”

Fleete stood up unwillingly, and said, “No lamps—no lamps. It’s much nicer here. Let’s dine outside and have some more chops—lots of ’em and underdone—bloody ones with gristle.”

Now a December evening in Northern India is bitterly cold, and Fleete’s suggestion was that of a maniac.

“Come in,” said Strickland sternly. “Come in at once.”

Fleete came, and when the lamps were brought, we saw that he was literally plastered with dirt from head to foot. He must have been rolling in the garden. He shrank from the light and went to his room. His eyes were horrible to look at. There was a green light behind them, not in them, if you understand, and the man’s lower lip hung down.

Strickland said, “There is going to be trouble—big trouble—to-night. Don’t you change your riding-things.”

We waited and waited for Fleete’s reappearance, and ordered dinner in the meantime. We could hear him moving about his own room, but there was no light there. Presently from the room came the long-drawn howl of a wolf.

People write and talk lightly of blood running cold and hair standing up, and things of that kind. Both sensations are too horrible to be trifled with.

My heart stopped as though a knife had been driven through it, and Strickland turned as white as the tablecloth.

The howl was repeated, and was answered by another howl far across the fields.

That set the gilded roof on the horror. Strickland dashed into Fleete’s room. I followed, and we saw Fleete getting out of the window. He made beast-noises in the back of his throat. He could not answer us when we shouted at him. He spat.

I don’t quite remember what followed, but I think that Strickland must have stunned him with the long boot-jack, or else I should never have been able to sit on his chest. Fleete could not speak, he could only snarl, and his snarls were those of a wolf, not of a man. The human spirit must have been giving way all day and have died out with the twilight. We were dealing with a beast that had once been Fleete.

The affair was beyond any human and rational experience. I tried to say ‘Hydrophobia,’ but the word wouldn’t come, because I knew that I was lying.

We bound this beast with leather thongs of the punkah-rope, and tied its thumbs and big toes together, and gagged it with a shoe-horn, which makes a very efficient gag if you know how to arrange it. Then we carried it into the dining-room, and sent a man to Dumoise, the doctor, telling him to come over at once. After we had despatched the messenger and were drawing breath, Strickland said, “It’s no good. This isn’t any doctor’s work.” I, also, knew that he spoke the truth.

The beast’s head was free, and it threw it about from side to side. Any one entering the room would have believed that we were curing a wolf’s pelt. That was the most loathsome accessory of all.

Strickland sat with his chin in the heel of his fist, watching the beast as it wriggled on the ground, but saying nothing. The shirt had been torn open in the scuffle and showed the black rosette mark on the left breast. It stood out like a blister.

In the silence of the watching we heard something without—mewing like a she-otter. We both rose to our feet, and, I answer for myself, not Strickland, felt sick—actually and physically sick. We told each other, as did the men in Pinafore, that it was the cat.

Dumoise arrived, and I never saw a little man so unprofessionally shocked. He said that it was a heart-rending case of hydrophobia, and that nothing could be done. At least any palliative measures would only prolong the agony. The beast was foaming at the mouth. Fleete, as we told Dumoise, had been bitten by dogs once or twice. Any man who keeps half a dozen terriers must expect a nip now and again. Dumoise could offer no help. He could only certify that Fleete was dying of hydrophobia. The beast was then howling, for it had managed to spit out the shoe-horn. Dumoise said that he would be ready to certify to the cause of death, and that the end was certain. He was a good little man, and he offered to remain with us; but Strickland refused the kindness. He did not wish to poison Dumoise’s New Year. He would only ask him not to give the real cause of Fleete’s death to the public.

So Dumoise left, deeply agitated; and as soon as the noise of the cart-wheels had died away, Strickland told me, in a whisper, his suspicions. They were so wildly improbable that he dared not say them out aloud; and I, who entertained all Strickland’s beliefs, was so ashamed of owning to them that I pretended to disbelieve.

“Even if the Silver Man had bewitched Fleete for polluting the image of Hanuman, the punishment could not have fallen so quickly.”

As I was whispering this the cry outside the house rose again, and the beast fell into a fresh paroxysm of struggling till we were afraid that the thongs that held it would give way.

“Watch!” said Strickland. “If this happens six times I shall take the law into my own hands. I order you to help me.”

He went into his room and came out in a few minutes with the barrels of an old shot-gun, a piece of fishing-line, some thick cord, and his heavy wooden bedstead. I reported that the convulsions had followed the cry by two seconds in each case, and the beast seemed perceptibly weaker.

Strickland muttered, “But he can’t take away the life! He can’t take away the life!”

I said, though I knew that I was arguing against myself, “It may be a cat. It must be a cat. If the Silver Man is responsible, why does he dare to come here?”

Strickland arranged the wood on the hearth, put the gun-barrels into the glow of the fire, spread the twine on the table, and broke a walking stick in two. There was one yard of fishing line, gut lapped with wire, such as is used for mahseer-fishing, and he tied the two ends together in a loop.

Then he said, “How can we catch him? He must be taken alive and unhurt.”

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I said that we must trust in Providence, and go out softly with polo-sticks into the shrubbery at the front of the house. The man or animal that made the cry was evidently moving round the house as regularly as a night-watchman. We could wait in the bushes till he came by and knock him over.

Strickland accepted this suggestion, and we slipped out from a bath-room window into the front verandah and then across the carriage drive into the bushes.

In the moonlight we could see the leper coming round the corner of the house. He was perfectly naked, and from time to time he mewed and stopped to dance with his shadow. It was an unattractive sight, and thinking of poor Fleete, brought to such degradation by so foul a creature, I put away all my doubts and resolved to help Strickland from the heated gun-barrels to the loop of twine—from the loins to the head and back again—with all tortures that might be needful.

The leper halted in the front porch for a moment and we jumped out on him with the sticks. He was wonderfully strong, and we were afraid that he might escape or be fatally injured before we caught him. We had an idea that lepers were frail creatures, but this proved to be incorrect. Strickland knocked his legs from under him and I put my foot on his neck. He mewed hideously, and even through my riding-boots I could feel that his flesh was not the flesh of a clean man.

He struck at us with his hand and feet-stumps. We looped the lash of a dog-whip round him, under the arm-pits, and dragged him backwards into the hall and so into the dining-room where the beast lay. There we tied him with trunk-straps. He made no attempt to escape, but mewed.

When we confronted him with the beast the scene was beyond description. The beast doubled backwards into a bow as though he had been poisoned with strychnine, and moaned in the most pitiable fashion. Several other things happened also, but they cannot be put down here.

“I think I was right,” said Strickland. “Now we will ask him to cure this case.”

But the leper only mewed. Strickland wrapped a towel round his hand and took the gun-barrels out of the fire. I put the half of the broken walking stick through the loop of fishing-line and buckled the leper comfortably to Strickland’s bedstead. I understood then how men and women and little children can endure to see a witch burnt alive; for the beast was moaning on the floor, and though the Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings passing through the slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat play across red-hot iron—gun-barrels for instance.

Strickland shaded his eyes with his hands for a moment and we got to work. This part is not to be printed.

The dawn was beginning to break when the leper spoke. His mewings had not been satisfactory up to that point. The beast had fainted from exhaustion and the house was very still. We unstrapped the leper and told him to take away the evil spirit. He crawled to the beast and laid his hand upon the left breast. That was all. Then he fell face down and whined, drawing in his breath as he did so.

We watched the face of the beast, and saw the soul of Fleete coming back into the eyes. Then a sweat broke out on the forehead and the eyes—they were human eyes—closed. We waited for an hour, but Fleete still slept. We carried him to his room and bade the leper go, giving him the bedstead, and the sheet on the bedstead to cover his nakedness, the gloves and the towels with which we had touched him, and the whip that had been hooked round his body. He put the sheet about him and went out into the early morning without speaking or mewing.

Strickland wiped his face and sat down. A night-gong, far away in the city, made seven o’clock.

“Exactly four-and-twenty hours!” said Strickland. “And I’ve done enough to ensure my dismissal from the service, besides permanent quarters in a lunatic asylum. Do you believe that we are awake?”

The red-hot gun-barrel had fallen on the floor and was singeing the carpet. The smell was entirely real.

That morning at eleven we two together went to wake up Fleete. We looked and saw that the black leopard-rosette on his chest had disappeared. He was very drowsy and tired, but as soon as he saw us, he said, “Oh! Confound you fellows. Happy New Year to you. Never mix your liquors. I’m nearly dead.”

“Thanks for your kindness, but you’re over time,” said Strickland. “To-day is the morning of the second. You’ve slept the clock round with a vengeance.”

The door opened, and little Dumoise put his head in. He had come on foot, and fancied that we were laying out Fleete.

“I’ve brought a nurse,” said Dumoise. “I suppose that she can come in for … what is necessary.”

“By all means,” said Fleete cheerily, sitting up in bed. “Bring on your nurses.”

Dumoise was dumb. Strickland led him out and explained that there must have been a mistake in the diagnosis. Dumoise remained dumb and left the house hastily. He considered that his professional reputation had been injured, and was inclined to make a personal matter of the recovery. Strickland went out too. When he came back, he said that he had been to call on the Temple of Hanuman to offer redress for the pollution of the god, and had been solemnly assured that no white man had ever touched the idol, and that he was an incarnation of all the virtues labouring under a delusion. “What do you think?” said Strickland.

I said, “There are more things …”

But Strickland hates that quotation. He says that I have worn it threadbare.

One other curious thing happened which frightened me as much as anything in all the night’s work. When Fleete was dressed he came into the dining-room and sniffed. He had a quaint trick of moving his nose when he sniffed. “Horrid doggy smell, here,” said he. “You should really keep those terriers of yours in better order. Try sulphur, Strick.”

But Strickland did not answer. He caught hold of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went into an amazing fit of hysterics. It is terrible to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria. Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen for ever, and I laughed and gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as Strickland, while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad. We never told him what we had done.

Some years later, when Strickland had married and was a church-going member of society for his wife’s sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and Strickland suggested that I should put it before the public.

I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the second, it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.

by Rudyard Kipling

Background + Notes

“IT IS a queer name,” Mrs. Strickland admitted, “and none of our family have ever borne it, but, you see, he is the first man to us.”

So he was called Adam, and to that world about him he was the first of men—a man-child alone. Heaven sent him no Eve for a companion, but all earth, horse and foot, was at his feet. As soon as he was old enough to appear in public, he held a levée; and Strickland’s sixty policemen, with their sixty clanking sabres, bowed to the dust before him. When his fingers closed a little on Imam Din’s sword-hilt, they rose and roared—till Adam roared, too, and was withdrawn.

“Now, that was no cry of fear,” said Imam Din, afterwards, speaking to his companions in the Police Lines. “He was angry—and so young! Brothers, he will make a very strong Police officer.”

“Does the Memsahib give him the breast?” said a new Phillour recruit, the dye smell not yet out of his yellow cotton uniform.

“Ho!” said an up-country Naik, scornfully. “It has not been known for more than ten days that my woman suckles him.” He curled his moustaches as lordly as ever an Inspector could afford to do, for he knew that the husband of the foster-mother of the son of the District Superintendent of Police was a man sure of consideration.

“I am glad,” said Imam Din, loosening his belt. “Those who drink our blood become of our own blood, and I have seen, in these thirty years, that the sons of the Sahibs, once being born here, return when they are men. Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe].”

“And what do they do in Belait?” asked the recruit, respectfully.

“Get instruction—which thou hast not,” returned the Naik. “Also they drink of belaitee-panee [soda-water], enough to give them that devil’s restlessness which endures for all their lives. Whence we of Hind have trouble.”

“My father’s uncle,” said Imam Din, slowly, with importance, “was Ressaldar of the Long Coat Horse; and the Empress called him to Belait in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. He said (and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink common water, even as do we; and that the belaitee-panee does not run in all the rivers.

“He said also that there was a Shish Mahal—half a glass palace—half a koss in length and that the rail-gharri ran under the roads, and that there are boats bigger than a village. He is a great talker.” The Naik spoke scornfully. He had no well-born uncles.

“He is a man of good birth,” said Imam Din, with the least possible emphasis on the first word, and the Naik was silent.

“Ho! ho!” Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling until his fat sides shook again. “Strickland Sahib’s foster-mother was the wife of an Arain in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then, ploughing while the English fought. This child will also be suckled here, and he will have double wisdom, and when he is a Police officer it will be very bad for the thieves in this illakha.”

“There will be no English in the land then. They are asking permission of clerks and low-caste men to continue their rule even now,” said the Naik.

“All but foolish men—such as those clerks are—would know that this asking is but an excuse for making trouble, and thus holding the country more strictly. Now, in an investigation, is it not our custom to permit the villagers to talk loosely and give us abuse for a little time? Then do we not grow hot, and walk them to the thana two by two—as these clerks will be walked? Thus do I read the new talk.”

“So do not I,” said the Naik, who borrowed the native newspapers.

“Because thou art young, and wast born in time of peace. I saw the year that was to end the English rule. Men said it was ended, indeed, and that all could now take their neighbour’s cattle. This I saw ploughing, and I was minded to fight too, being a young man. My father sent me to Gurgaon to buy cattle, and I saw the tents of Van Corlin Sahib in the wheat, and I saw that he was going up and down collecting the revenue, neither abating nor increasing it, though Delhi was all afire, and the Sahibs lay dead about the fields. I have seen what I have seen. This Raj will not be talked down; and he who builds on the present madness of the Sahib-log, which, O Naik, covers great cunning, builds for himself a lock-up. My father’s uncle has seen their country, and he says that he is afraid as never he feared before. So Strickland Sahib’s boy will come back to this country, and his son after him. Naik, have they named him yet?”

“The butler spoke to my household, having heard the talk at table, and he says that they will call him Adam, and no jaw-splitting English name. Ud-daam. The padre will name him at their church in due time.”

“Who can tell the ways of Sahibs? Now, Strickland Sahib knows more of the Faith than ever I had time to learn—prayers, charms, names, and stories of the Blessed Ones. Yet he is not a Musalman,” said Imam Din, thoughtfully.

“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atall, a fakir among fakirs, for ten days: whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of the dancing-girl on the night of the great earthquake,” said the Naik.

“True—it is true—and yet . . . they are one day so wise, the Sahibs, and another so foolish. But he has named the child well: Adam. Huzrut Adam! Ho! ho! Father Adam we must call him.”

“And all who minister to the child,” said the Naik, quietly, but with meaning, “will come to great honour.”

Adam throve, being prayed over before the gods of at least three creeds, in a garden almost as fair as Eden. There were gigantic clumps of bamboo that talked continually, and enormous plantains on whose soft paper skin he could scratch with his nails; green domes of mango-trees as huge as the dome of St. Paul’s, full of parrots as big as cassowaries, and grey squirrels the size of foxes. At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than any-thing in the world, because, childlike, Adam’s eye could not carry to the tops of the mango-trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see. A nurse who talked continually about snakes and pulled him back from the mouth of a fascinating dry well, and a mother who believed that the sun hurt little heads, were the only drawbacks to this loveliness. But, as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart—three feet of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden—he could come into a ready-made kingdom where every one was his slave. Imam Din showed him the way one evening, and the police troopers cooking their supper received him with rapture, and gave him pieces of very indigestible but altogether delightful spiced bread.

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Here he sat or sprawled in the horse-feed where the police horses were picketed in a double line, and he named them, men and beasts together, according to his ideas and experiences, as his First Father had done before him. In those days everything had a name, from the mud mangers to the heel-ropes; for things were people to Adam, exactly as people are things to folk in their second childhood. Through all the conferences—one hand twisted into Imam Din’s beard, and the other on his polished belt-buckle—there were two other people who came and went across the talk—Death and Sickness—persons stronger than Imam Din, and stronger than the heel-roped stallions. There was Mata, the small-pox, a woman in some way connected with pigs; and Heza, the cholera, a black man, according to Adam; and Booka, starvation; and Kismet, who quietly settled all questions, from the choking of a pet mungoose in the kitchen drain, to the absence of a young policeman who once missed a parade and never came back. It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking over; for a child’s mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse’s view of the road is limited by blinkers. Between all these objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong arms, and Mata and Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet might do so, because—and this was a mystery no staring into the looking-glass would solve—Kismet, who was a man, was also written, like police orders for the day, in or on Adam’s head. Imam Din could not explain how this might be, and it was from that grey fat Muhammadan that Adam learned through every inflection the Khuda janta [God knows] that settled everything in his mind.

Beyond the fact that “Khuda” [God] was a very good man and kept lions, Adam’s theology did not run far. Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle, he said, upheld the world, and one-half the adventures of Huzrut Nu [Father Noah] had never been told. If Mamma wanted to hear them, she must ask Imam Din. Adam had heard of a saint who had made wooden cakes and pressed them to his stomach when he felt hungry, and the Feeding of the Multitude did not impress him. So it came about that a reading of miracle stories generally ended in a monologue by Adam on other and much more astonishing miracles.

“It’s awful,” said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, “to think of his growing up like a little heathen.” Mrs. Strickland (Miss Youghal that was, if you remember her) had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand things.

“Let him alone,” said Strickland; “he’ll grow out of it all, or it will only come back to him in dreams.”

“Are you sure?” said his wife, to whom Strickland’s least word was pure truth.

“Quite. I was sent home when I was seven, and they flicked it out of me with a wet towel at Harrow. Public schools don’t encourage anything that isn’t quite English.”

Mrs. Strickland shuddered, for she had been trying not to think of the separation that follows motherhood in India, and makes life there, for all that is written to the contrary, not quite the most desirable thing in the world. Adam trotted out to hear about more miracles, and his nurse must have worried him beyond bounds, for she came back weeping, saying that Adam Baba was in danger of being eaten alive by wild horses.

As a matter of fact, he had shaken off Juma by bolting between a couple of picketed horses and lying down under their bellies. That they were personal friends of his, Juma did not understand, nor Strickland either. Adam was settled at ease when his father arrived, breathless and white, and the stallions put back their ears and squealed.

“If you come here,” said Adam, “they will hit you kicks. Tell Juma I have eaten my rice and wish to be alone.”

“Come out at once,” said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to paw violently.

“Why should I obey Juma’s order? She is afraid of horses.”

“It is not Juma’s order. It is mine. Obey!”

“Ho!” said Adam, “Juma did not tell me that.” And he crawled out on all fours among the shod feet. Mrs. Strickland was crying bitterly with fear and excitement, and as a sacrifice to the home gods Adam had to be whipped. He said with perfect justice:—

“There was no order that I should not sit with the horses, and they are my horses. Why is there this tamasha [fuss]?”

Strickland’s face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child turned white. Mother-like, Mrs. Strickland left the room, but Juma, the foster-mother, stayed to see.

“Am I to be whipped here?” he gasped.

“Of course.”

“Before that woman? Father, I am a man—I am not afraid. It is my izzat—my honour.”

Strickland only laughed (to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding-cane that was whipping sufficient for his years.

When it was all over, Adam said quietly: “I am little, and you are big. If I stayed among my horse folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there.”

The merest chance led me to Strickland’s house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me, without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen that in the grey of morning when it bent above a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.

“Let me go!” he screamed, and he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. “Let me go!”

“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a new-haltered colt.

“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before women! Let me go!” He tried to bite my hand.

“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”

“Thou hast never been beaten,” he said savagely.

“Indeed I have. Times past counting.”

“Before women?”

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“My mother and the ayah saw. By women too, for that matter. What of it?”

“What didst thou do?” He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.

“It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is but a jest to be talked of”

Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland’s eyes when Strickland gave orders.

“Ho! Imam Din.”

The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing to attention.

“Hast thou ever been beaten?” said Adam.

“Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.”

“Wherefore?”

“Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and had said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me, to show that no seeing of the world changed father and son.”

“And thou?”

“I stood up. He was my father.”

“Good,” said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.

Imam Din looked after him. “An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet I am glad I am no father of tuskers,” said he.

“What is it all?” I asked.

“His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!”

Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.

“When there was talk of beating I knew that one who sat among horses, such as ours, was not like to kiss his father’s hand. So I lay down in this place.” We both stood still looking at the well-curb.

Adam came back along the garden path to us. “I have spoken to my father,” he said simply. “Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my service.”

“Huzoor! [Your Highness!]” said Imam Din, stooping low.

“For no fault of hers.”

“Protector of the Poor!”

“And today.”

“Khodawund! [Heaven-born!]”

“It is an order! Go!”

Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, and rocking to and fro in his chair, repeated “Good God!” half a dozen times.

“Do you know that he was going to chuck himself down the well—because I tapped him just now?” he said helplessly.

“I ought to,” I replied. “He has just dismissed his nurse—on his own authority, I suppose?”

“He told me just now that he wouldn’t have her for a nurse any more. I never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she’ll have to go.”

It is written elsewhere that Strickland was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.

Adam returned, halting outside the verandah, very white about the lips.

“I have sent away Juma because she saw that—that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come in the house,” he said.

“But to send away thy foster-mother—” said Strickland, with reproach.

“I do not send her away. It is thy blame, and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. “I will not obey her; I will not eat from her hand, and I will not sleep with her. Send her away.”

Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.

“This folly has lasted long enough,” he said. “Come, now, and be wise.”

“I am little, and you are big,” said Adam, between set teeth. “You can beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will not have Juma for my ayah any more. I will not eat till she goes. I swear it by—my father’s head.”

Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of weeping, and Adam’s voice saying nothing more than, “Send Juma away.” Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, “It is no fault of thine, but go!”

And the end of it was that Juma went, with all her belongings, and Adam fought his own way alone into his little clothes until a new ayah came. His address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: “If I do wrong send me to my father. If you strike me I will try to kill you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice.”

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From that day Adam forswore the society of ayahs and small native girls as much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends of the police. The Naik, Juma’s husband, had been presuming not a little on his position, and when Adam’s favour was withdrawn from his wife he judged it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.

Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child’s temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.

If the other men had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.

“He knows what honour means,” said Imam Din; “he has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father’s household as a child of the blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger’s cub.” The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the line, Imam Din, and by consequence all the others, stood upon their feet, with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, “Salaam, Babajee,” and other disrespectful things.

But Strickland took long counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank-account, and they decided that Adam must go “home” to his aunts. But England is not home to a child that has been born in India, and it never becomes home-like unless he spends all his youth there. The bank-book showed that if they economised through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla, where Mrs. Strickland’s parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the powers, they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done. In India all the money that people in other lands save against a rainy day runs off in loss by exchange, which today cuts a man’s income down almost exactly to one-half. There is nothing to show for money when all is put by, and that is what makes married life there so hard. Strickland used to say, sometimes, that he envied the convicts in the jail. They had no position to keep up, and the ball and chain that the worst of them wore was only a few pounds weight of iron.

Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations;—Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.

Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name the most of the Tonga drivers from Kalka to Tara Deva; but this new plan disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking, step for step, as his father walked.

“There will be none of my bhai-bund [Brotherhood] up there,” said he, disconsolately, “and they say that I must lie still in a doolie [palanquin] for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie.”

I told him that there was a small boy called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.

“First,” said he, “I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow’s child. If he is muggra [ill-conditioned] I shall tell my policemen to take it away.”

“But that is unjust,” said Strickland, “and there is no order that the Police should do injustice.”

“When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?” he replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din, and Strickland’s eyebrows went up.

“You talk too much to the Police, my son,” he said.

“Always, about everything,” said Adam, promptly. “They say that when I am an officer I shall know as much as my father.”

“God forbid, little one!”

“They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan [the Evil One] to know things.”

“They say that, do they?” said Strickland, looking pleased. His pay was small, but he had his reputation, and that was dear to him.

“They say also—not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind the wall—that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman [Solomon], who was cheated by Shaitan.”

This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence, launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his side Shaitan sent “a little devil of low caste,” as Adam put it, who cheated him utterly, and put him to shame before “all the other Rajas.”

“By Jove!” said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din’s story. I did not wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.

That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or palanquin, along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the doolie with his mother,and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a hot night among the rice and poppy fields.

It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance—notably about a fish that jumped on a wayside pond. “Now I know,” he shouted, “how Khuda puts them there. First He makes them and then He drops them down. That was a new one.” Then, lifting his head to the stars, he cried, “O God, do it again, but slowly, that I, Adam, may see.”

But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping rag torches, and Adam’s eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven months’ hard work.

At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds of the mountain ahead. At the changing stations the voice of Adam, the first of men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the fresh relays of bearers shambled from their cots, and the relief-pony with them.

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Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland’s saddle. So we went up from the date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say: “Wife, my overcoat, please,” and Adam, fretfully: “Where is Dalhousie, and the cow’s child?” and then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o’clock, and I stepped into the splendour of a cool hill day, the plains sweltering twenty miles back and three thousand feet below. Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys, and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every wood-cutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a staging-house. After breakfast, being a child, he went out to play with a train of bullock-drivers haltered by the road-side, and we had to chase him out of a native liquor-shop where he was bargaining with a naked seven-year-old for a mynah in a bamboo cage.

Said he, wriggling on my pommel, as we went on again: “There were four men behosh [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men grow behosh from drinking?”

“It is the nature of the water,” I said, and calling back: “Strick, what’s that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It’s a temptation to any one’s servants.”

“Dunno,” said a sleepy voice in the doolie. “This is Kennedy’s district. ’Twasn’t here in my time.”

“Truly the water smells bad,” Adam went on. “I smelt it, but I did not get the mynah even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love-gift, that I found, playing near the verandah.”

“And what was the gift, Father Adam?”

“A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohé! ohé! Look at that camel with a bag on his nose.”

A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner, as a fleet rounds a cape.

“Ho, Malik! why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough,” Adam cried.

“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool from the beginning,” said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the led beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.

“That is true,” said Adam, and they laughed again.

At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated.Adam hardly could be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” I found them both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a calf on a taut line just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were pretending that he was a Raja’s elephant who had gone mad. But it was my horse that nearly went mad, and they shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of crushing Victor’s repeated reminders that he and not “that other” was the owner of the calf, said: “It is true I have no cow’s child, but a great dacoity [robbery] has been done on my father.”

“We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing,” I said.

“It was my mother’s horse. She has been dacoited with beating and blows, and now it is so thin.” He held his hands an inch apart. “My father is at the tar-house sending tars. Imam Din will cut off all their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah to my elephant. Give it me.”

This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph-office and found Strickland in a bad temper among many telegraph-forms. A dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner, whimpering at intervals. He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as “Be-shakl be-ukl, be-ank” [ugly, stupid, eyeless]. It seemed, according to Strickland, that he had sent his wife’s horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight’s march. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foot-hills near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had robbed the groom of the bucket, and all his money eleven rupees, nine annas, three pie. Last, they had left him for dead by the wayside, where wood-cutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. “They asked me if I was Strickland Sahib’s servant, and I, thinking the protection of the name would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously.”

“Hm!” said Strickland. “I thought they wouldn’t dacoit as a business on the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally—sheer badmashi [impudence]. All right.”

In justice to a very hard-working class, it must be said that the thieves of Upper India have the keenest sense of humour. The last compliment that they can pay a Police officer is to rob him, and if, as once they did, they can loot a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, on the eve of his retirement, of everything except the clothes on his back, their joy is complete. They cause letters of derision and telegrams of condolence to be sent to the victim; for of all men, thieves are most compelled to keep up with modern progress.

Strickland was a man of few words where his business was concerned. I had never seen a Police officer robbed before, and I expected some excitement; but Strickland held his tongue. He took the groom’s deposition and retired into himself for a time, evolving thieves. Then he sent Kennedy, of the Pathankot charge, an official letter and an unofficial note. Kennedy’s reply was purely unofficial, and it ran thus: “This seems a compliment solely intended for you. My wonder is, you didn’t get it before. The men are probably back in your district by this time. The Dhunnera and foot-hill people are highly respectable cultivators, and seeing my Assistant is an unlicked pup, and I can’t trust my Inspector out of my sight, I am not going to turn their harvest upside down with a police investigation. I am run off my feet with vaccination police work. You’d better look at home. The Shubkudder Gang were through here a fortnight back. They laid up at the Amritsar Serai, and then worked down. No cases against them in my charge, but remember you lagged their malik for receiving in Prub Dyal’s burglary. They owe you one.”

“Exactly what I thought,” said Strickland. “I had a notion it was the Shubkudder Gang from the first. We must make it pleasant for them at Peshawur, and in my district too. They are just the kind that would lie up under Imam Din’s shadow.”

From this point onward the wires began to he worked heavily. Strickland had a very fair knowledge of the Shubkudder Gang, gathered at first hand.

They were the same syndicate that had once stolen a Deputy Commissioner’s cow, put horse-shoes on her, and taken her forty miles into the jungle before they lost interest in the joke. They added insult to insult by writing that the Deputy Commissioner’s cows and horses were so much alike that it took them two days to find out the difference, and they would not lift the like of such cattle any more.

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The District Superintendent at Peshawur replied to Strickland that he was expecting the gang, and Strickland’s Assistant in his own district, being young and full of zeal, sent up the most amazing clues.

“Now that’s just what I want that young fool not to do,” said Strickland. “He hasn’t passed the lower standard yet, and he’s an English boy born and bred, and his father before him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won’t work quietly under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years give a man a pull that lasts him his life. Adam, if you were only old enough to be my ‘Stunt’!” He looked down at the little fellow on the verandah. Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a picture on the white wall of the verandah showing the different towns in which policemen were on the lookout for the thieves. They were Amritsar, Jullundur, Phillour, Gurgaon, in case the gang were moving south; Rawal Pindi and Peshawur, with Multan. Adam looked up at the picture as he answered—

“There has been great dikh [trouble] in this case.”

“Very great trouble. I wish thou wert a young man and my assistant to help me.”

“Dost thou need help, my father?” Adam asked curiously, with his head on one side.

“Very much.”

“Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything.”

“That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end.”

“Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not know who did the dacoity?”

Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and I answered it in the same way.

“What foolish people!” he said, and turned his back on us. He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his work-room and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than if he had been in office on the plains.

“And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap’s laughing at me. It’s an awful thing to have a son. You see, he’s your own and his own, and between the two you don’t know quite how to handle him,” said Strickland. “I wonder what in the world he thinks about?”

I asked Adam this on my own account. He put his head on one side for a moment and replied: “In these days I think about great things; I do not play with Victor and the cow’s child any more. He is only a baba.”

At the end of the third week of Strickland’s leave the result of Strickland’s labours—labours that had made Mrs. Strickland more indignant against dacoits than any one else—came to hand. The police at Peshawur reported that half the Shubkudder Gang were held at Peshawur to account for the possession of some blankets and a horse-bucket. Strickland’s Assistant had also four men under suspicion in his charge; and Imam Din must have stirred up Strickland’s Inspector to investigations on his own account, for a string of incoherent telegrams came in from the Club Secretary, in which he entreated, exhorted, and commanded Strickland to take his “mangy havildars” off the club premises. “Your men, in servants’ quarters here, examining cook. Marker indignant. Steward threatens resignation. Members furious. Saises stopped on roads. Shut up, or my resignation goes to committee.”

“Now, I shouldn’t in the least wonder,” said Strickland, thoughtfully, to his wife, “if the club was not just the place where a man would lie up. Bill Watson isn’t at all pleased, though. I think I shall have to cut my leave by a week and go down there. If there’s anything to be told, the men will tell me. It will never do for the gang to think they can dacoit my belongings.”

That was in the forenoon, and Strickland asked me to tiff in to leave me some instructions about his big dog, with authority to rebuke those who did not attend to her. Tietens was growing too old and too fat to live in the plains in summer. When I came, Adam had climbed into his high chair at the table, and Mrs. Strickland seemed ready to weep at any moment over the general misery of things.

“I go down the hill tomorrow, little son,” said Strickland.

“Wherefore?” said Adam, reaching out for a ripe mango and burying his head in it.

“Imam Din has caught the men who did the dacoity, and there are also others at Peshawur under suspicion. I must go to see.”

“Bus! [enough]” said Adam, between the sucks at his mango, as Mrs. Strickland tucked the napkin round his neck. “It is enough. Imam Din speaks lies. Do not go.”

“It is necessary. There has been great dikh-dari (trouble-giving].”

Adam came out of the fruit for a minute and laughed. Then, returning, he spoke between slow and deliberate mouthfuls.

“The dacoits live in Beshakl’s head. They will never be caught. All people know that. The cook knows, and the scullion, and Rahim Baksh here.”

“Nay,” said the butler behind his chair, hastily. “What should I know? Nothing at all does the servant of the Presence know.”

“Accha [good],” said Adam, and sucked on. “Only it is known.”

“Speak, then,” said Strickland. “What dost thou know? Remember the sais was beaten insensible.”

“That was in the bad-water shop where I played when we came here. The boy who would not sell me the mynah [parrot] for six annas told me that a one-eyed man had come there and drunk the bad waters and gone mad. He broke bedsteads. They hit him with a bamboo till he fell senseless, and, fearing he was dead, they nursed him on milk—like a little baba. When I was playing first with the cow’s child I asked Beshakl if he were that man, and he said no. But I knew, because many wood-cutters asked him whether his head were whole now.”

“But why,” I interrupted, “did Beshakl tell lies?”

“Oh! He is a low-caste man, and desired consideration. Now he is a witness in a great law-case, and men will go to the jail-khana on his account. It was to give trouble and obtain notice.”

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“Was it all lies?” said Strickland,

“Ask him,” said Adam, cheerily, through the mango-juice.

Strickland passed through the door; there was a howl of despair in the servants’ quarters up the hill, and he returned with the one-eyed groom.

“Now,” said Strickland, “it is known. Declare!”

“Beshakl,” said Adam, while the man gasped. “Imam Din has caught four men, and there are some more at Peshawur. Bus! Bus! Bus! Tell about the mare and how she rolled.”

“Thou didst get drunk by the wayside, and didst make a false case to cover it. Speak!”

Like many other men, Strickland, in possession of a few facts, was irresistible. The groom groaned.

“I—I did not get drunk—till—till—Protector of the Poor, the mare rolled.”

“All horses roll at Dhunnera. The road is too narrow before that, and they smell where the other horses have rolled. This the bullock-drivers told me when they came there,” said Adam.

“She rolled. The saddle was cut, and the curb-chain was lost.”

“See!” said Adam, tugging a curb-chain from his pocket. “That woman in the shop gave it to me for a love-gift. Beshakl said it was not his when I showed it. But I knew.”

“Then they in the grog-shop, knowing that I was the servant of the Presence, said that unless I drank and spent money they would tell.”

“A lie. A lie,” said Strickland. “Son of an owl, speak truth now at least.”

“Then I was afraid because I had lost the curb-chain, so I cut the saddle across and about.”

“She did not roll, then?” said Strickland, bewildered and very angry.

“It was the curb-chain that was lost. That was the beginning of all. I cut the saddle to look as though she had rolled, and went to drink in the shop. I drank, and there was a fray. The rest I have forgotten, till I was recovered.”

“And the mare the while? What of the mare?”

The man looked at Strickland, and collapsed. “I will speak truth.

“She bore fagots for a wood-cutter for a week.”

“Oh, poor Diamond!” said Mrs. Strickland.

“And Beshaki was paid four annas for her hire three days ago by the wood-cutter’s brother, who is the left-hand man of the jhampanis here,” said Adam, in a loud and joyful voice. “We all knew. We all knew. I and all the servants.”

Strickland was silent. His wife stared helplessly at the child—the soul called out of the Nowhere, that went its own way alone.

“Did no man help thee with the lies?” I asked of the groom.

“None, Protector of the Poor—not one.”

“They grew, then?”

“As a tale grows in the telling. Alas! I am a very bad man,” and he blinked his one eye dole-fully.

“Now four men are held at my station on thy account, and God knows how many more at Peshawur, besides the questions at Multan, and my izzat is lost, and the mare has been pack-pony to a wood-cutter. Son of devils, what canst thou do to make amends?”

There was just a little break in Strickland’s voice, and the man caught it. Bending low, he answered in the abject, fawning whine that confounds right and wrong more surely even than most modern creeds, “Protector of the Poor, is the police service shut to—an honest man?”

“Out!” cried Strickland, and swiftly as the groom departed he must have heard our shout of laughter behind him.

“If you dismiss that man, Strick, I shall engage him. He’s a genius,” I said. “It will take you months to put this mess right, and Billy Watson won’t give you a minute’s peace.”

“You aren’t going to tell him?” said Strickland, appealingly.

“I couldn’t keep this to myself if you were my own brother. Four men held in your district—four or forty at Peshawur—and what was that you said about Multan?”

“Oh, nothing. Only some camel men there have been—”

“On account of a curb-chain. Oh, my aunt!”

“And whose memsahib was thy aunt?” said Adam, with the mango stone in his fist. We began to laugh again.

“But here,” said Strickland, pulling his face together, “is a very bad child who has caused his father to lose honour before all the policemen of the Punjab.”

“Oh, they know,” said Adam. “It was only for the sake of show that they caught the people. Assuredly they all knew it was benowti [make-up].”

“And since when hast thou known?” said the first policeman in India to his son.

“Four days after we came here—after the wood-cutter had asked Beshakl of the health of his head. Beshaki all but slew a wood-cutter at that bad-water place.”

“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done very wrong. But perhaps thou didst not think?”

“Nay, but I did think. Father, my honour was lost when that happened that—that happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”

And, with the most enchanting smile in the world, Adam climbed on to his father’s lap.