I 
 
 
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 I recognized"t1ie head ol nrc man of Marwar Junction 
 ^p&jav^eUfe John Andi .iltyktliaginal by \V. <£illij»8fl8k 

 
 a i; i n *j 1 1 i 
 
 bnA nrfol v<l 91
 
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 Cijr Jlotttntrtjam ^ocittp 
 
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 |)rjilaticlrjrjta 
 
 Chicago 
 
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 tuition it Huic 
 
 PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY 
 LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND SETS 
 
 Copyright, 1909 
 
 BY THE KIHNKIIMUI SOCIETY
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 P«GK 
 
 The Phantom 'Rickshaw i 
 
 My Own True Ghost Story 43 
 
 The Strange Ride of Morrowbie 
 
 Jukes 61 
 
 The Man Who Would be King 105 
 
 "The Finest Story in the World" . . 173 
 
 rickshaw
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 I Recognized the Head of the Man 
 of Marwar Junction. (Sec page 
 169) Frontispiece 
 
 Photogravure by John Andrew & Son after 
 original by IV. Kirkpatriek 
 
 She Learned that I was Sick of Her 
 
 Presence 7 
 
 Mezzogravure by John Andrew & Son after 
 original by IV. Kirkpatriek 
 
 I Struggled Clear, Sweating with 
 
 Terror 89 
 
 Mezzogravure by John Andrew & Son after 
 original by IV. Kirkpatriek 
 
 She had Never Been Kissed by a Man 
 
 Before 225 
 
 Mezzogravure by John Andrczv & Son after 
 original by IV. Kirkpatriek 
 
 RICKSHAW
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 May no ill dreams disturb my rest, 
 Nor Powers of Darkness me molest. 
 
 — Evening Hymn. 
 
 ONE of the few advantages that India has 
 over England is a great Km inability. 
 After five years' service a man is directly or in- 
 directly acquainted with the two or three hun- 
 dred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes 
 of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries, and 
 some fifteen hundred other people of the non- 
 official caste. In ten years his knowledge 
 should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he 
 knows, or knows something about, every Eng- 
 lishman in the Empire, and may travel any- 
 where and everywhere without paying hotel- 
 bills. 
 
 Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as 
 a right, have, even within my memory, blunted 
 this open-heartedness, but none the less to-day, 
 if you belong to the Inner Circle and are 
 neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses 
 are open to you, and our small world is very 
 kind and helpful. 
 
 I
 
 2 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of 
 Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He meant to 
 stay two nights, but was knocked down by 
 rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorgan- 
 ized Polder's establishment, stopped Polder's 
 work, and nearly died in Polder's bedroom. 
 Polder behaves as though he had been placed 
 under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly 
 sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and 
 toys. It is the same everywhere. The men 
 who do not take the trouble to conceal from 
 you their opinion that you are an incompetent 
 ass, and the women who blacken your charac- 
 ter and misunderstand your wife's amuse- 
 ments, will work themselves to the bone in your 
 behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble. 
 
 Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition 
 to his regular practice, a hospital on his pri- 
 vate account — an arrangement of loose boxes 
 for Incurables, his friends called it— but it was 
 really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that 
 had been damaged by stress of weather. The 
 weather in India is often sultry, and since the 
 tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, and 
 the only liberty allowed is permission to work 
 overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally 
 break down and become as mixed as the meta- 
 phors in this sentence.
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 3 
 
 Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever 
 was, and his invariable prescription to all his 
 patients is, "lie low, go slow, and keep cool." 
 He says that more men are killed by overwork 
 than the importance of this world justifies. 
 He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who 
 died under his hands about three years ago. 
 He has, of course, the right to speak authorita- 
 tively, and he laughs at my theory that there 
 was a crack in Pansay's head and a little bit 
 of the Dark World came through and pressed 
 him to death. "Pansay went off the handle," 
 says Heatherlegh, "after the stimulus of long 
 leave at Home. He may or he may not have 
 behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith- Wes- 
 sington. My notion is that the work of the 
 Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, 
 and that he took to brooding and making much 
 of an ordinary P. & O. flirtation. He cer- 
 tainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and 
 she certainly broke off the engagement. Then 
 he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense 
 about ghosts developed. Overwork started his 
 illness, kept it alight, and killed him, poor 
 devil. Write him off to the System — one man 
 to take the work of two and a half men." 
 
 I do not believe this. I used to sit up with 
 Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh was
 
 4 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 called out to patients, and I happened to be 
 within claim. The man would make me most 
 unhappy by describing in a low, even voice, 
 the procession that was always passing at the 
 bottom of his bed. He had a sick man's com- 
 mand of language. When he recovered I sug- 
 gested that he should write out the whole af- 
 fair from beginning to end, knowing that ink 
 might assist him to ease his mind. When little 
 boys have learned a new bad word they are 
 never happy till they have chalked it up on a 
 door. And this also is Literature. 
 
 He was in a high fever while he was writ- 
 ing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine dic- 
 tion he adopted did not calm him. Two 
 months afterward he was reported fit for duty, 
 but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently 
 needed to help an undermanned Commission 
 stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; 
 vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I 
 got his manuscript before he died, and this is 
 his version of the affair, dated 1885 : 
 
 My doctor tells me that I need rest and 
 change of air. It is not improbable that I shall 
 get both ere long — rest that neither the red- 
 coated messenger nor the midday gun can 
 break, and change of air far beyond that
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 5 
 
 which any homeward-bound steamer can give 
 me. In the meantime 1 am resolved to stay- 
 where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doc- 
 tor's orders, to take all the world into my con- 
 fidence. You shall learn for yourselves the 
 precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, 
 judge for yourselves whether any man born of 
 woman on this weary earth was ever so tor- 
 mented as I. 
 
 Speaking now as a condemned criminal 
 might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my 
 story, wild and hideously improbable as it may 
 appear, demands at least attention. That it 
 will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. 
 Two months ago I should have scouted as mad 
 or drunk the man who had dared tell me the 
 like. Two months ago I was the happiest man 
 in India. To-day, from Peshawur to the sea, 
 there is no one more wretched. My doctor 
 and I are the only two who know this. His 
 explanation is, that my brain, digestion, and 
 eyesight are all slightly affected ; giving rise to 
 my frequent and persistent "delusions." De- 
 lusions, indeed! I call him a fool; but he at- 
 tends me still with the same unwearied smile, 
 the same bland professional manner, the same 
 neatly trimmed red whiskers, till T begin to 
 suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered 
 invalid. But you shall ]v<\^e for yourselves.
 
 6 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 Three years ago it was my fortune — my 
 great misfortune — to sail from Gravesend to 
 Bombay, on return from long leave, with one 
 Agnes Keith- Wessington, wife of an officer 
 on the Bombay side. It does not in the least 
 concern you to know what manner of woman 
 she was. Be content with the knowledge that, 
 ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were 
 desperately and unreasoningly in love with one 
 another. Heaven knows that I can make the 
 admission now without one particle of vanity. 
 In matters of this sort there is always one 
 who gives and another who accepts. From 
 the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I 
 was conscious that Agnes's passion was a 
 stronger, a more dominant, and — if I may use 
 the expression — a purer sentiment than mine. 
 Whether she recognized the fact then, I do not 
 know. Afterward it was bitterly plain to both 
 of us. 
 
 Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the 
 year, we went our respective ways, to meet no 
 more for the next three or four months, when 
 my leave and her love took us both to Simla. 
 There we spent the season together ; and there 
 my fire of straw burned itself out to a pitiful 
 end with the closing year. I attempt no ex- 
 cuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington
 
 -I) bamwl sri8 
 
 uicl X d 9UTVST80K9M
 
 6 PHANTOM 'RI' K^HAW 
 
 ee years ago it was i rtune — my 
 
 tune — to sail fr< vesend to 
 
 on return from lon^ with one 
 
 3 Keith-Wessin. in officer 
 
 on the Bombay side. the least 
 
 concern you to know woman 
 
 she was. Be content e that, 
 
 ere the voyage had ei 1 were 
 
 desperately an ith one 
 
 another. Heave; 1 ke the 
 
 admission now \ le o t vanity. 
 
 In matters of t; • is always one 
 
 who gives and <. ^epts. From 
 
 the first day of i tachment, I 
 
 was conscious tb es'j ion was a 
 stronger, a more d< 
 
 the expression — a ; sitimei 
 
 Whether she i t 
 
 know. After- erly plain to 
 of us. 
 
 Arrived at of the 
 
 year, we went eet no 
 
 more for the n< or i hs, when 
 
 my leave and to Simla. 
 
 There we spen; tog er; and there 
 
 my fire of straw -'tself out to a pitiful 
 
 \'ith the cl r. I attempt no ex- 
 I make no apology. Mrs. Wessingt" 
 
 She learned that I was sick of her presence 
 Mexzogravure by John Andrew & Son after original by W. Kirkpatnck
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 7 
 
 had given up much for my sake, and was pre- 
 pared to give up all. From my own lips, in 
 August, 1882, she learned that I was sick of 
 her presence, tired of her company, and weary 
 of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women 
 out of a hundred would have wearied of me as 
 I wearied of them; seventy-five of that num- 
 ber would have promptly avenged themselves 
 by active and obtrusive flirtation with other 
 men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. 
 On her neither my openly expressed aversion 
 nor the cutting brutalities with which I gar- 
 nished our interviews had the least effect. 
 
 "Jack, darling!" was her one eternal cuckoo 
 cry: "I'm sure it's all a mistake — a hideous 
 mistake ; and we'll be good friends again some 
 day. Please forgive me, Jack, dear." 
 
 I was the offender, and I knew it. That 
 knowledge transformed my pity into passive 
 endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate — 
 the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a 
 man to savagely stamp on the spider he has 
 but half killed. And with this hate in my 
 bosom the season of 1882 came to an end. 
 
 Next year we met again at Simla — she with 
 her monotonous face and timid attempts at 
 reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in 
 every fibre of my frame. Several times I
 
 8 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 could not avoid meeting her alone ; and on each 
 occasion her words were identically the same. 
 Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a 
 "mistake"; and still the hope of eventually 
 "making friends." I might have seen had I 
 cared to look, that that hope only was keeping 
 her alive. She grew more wan and thin month 
 by month. You will agree with me, at least, 
 that such conduct would have driven any one 
 to despair. It was uncalled for ; childish ; un- 
 womanly. I maintain that she was much to 
 blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, 
 fever-stricken night-watches, I have begun to 
 think that I might have been a little kinder to 
 her. But that really is a "delusion." I could 
 not have continued pretending to love her 
 when I didn't; could I? It would have been 
 unfair to us both. 
 
 Last year we met again — on the same terms 
 as before. The same weary appeals, and the 
 same curt answers from my lips. At least I 
 would make her see how wholly wrong and 
 hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old 
 relationship. As the season wore on, we fell 
 apart — that is to say, she found it difficult to 
 meet me, for I had other and more absorbing 
 interests to attend to. When I think it over 
 quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 9 
 
 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and 
 shade were fantastically intermingled — my 
 courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, 
 doubts, and fears; our lung rides together; my 
 trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; 
 and now and again a vision of a white face 
 flitting by in the 'rickshaw with the black and 
 white liveries I once watched for so earnestly ; 
 the wave of Mrs. Wessington's gloved hand ; 
 and, when she met me alone, which was but 
 seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. 
 I loved Kitty Mannering; honestly, heartily 
 loved her, and with my love for her grew my 
 hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty and I 
 were engaged. The next day I met those ac- 
 cursed "magpie" jhampanies at the back of 
 Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment 
 of pity, stopped to tell Mrs. Wessington every- 
 thing. She knew it already. 
 
 "So I hear you're engaged, Jack, dear." 
 Then, without a moment's pause : — "I'm sure 
 it's all a mistake — a hideous mistake. We 
 shall be as good friends some day, Jack, as we 
 ever were." 
 
 My answer might have made even a man 
 wince. It cut the dying woman before me 
 like the blow of a whip. "Please forgive me, 
 Jack; I didn't mean to make you angry; but 
 it's true, it's true!"
 
 io THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 And Mrs. Wessington broke down com- 
 pletely. I turned away and left her to finish 
 her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a 
 moment or two, that I had been an unutterably 
 mean hound. I looked back, and saw that she 
 had turned her 'rickshaw with the idea, I sup- 
 pose, of overtaking me. 
 
 The scene and its surroundings were photo- 
 graphed on my memory. The rain-swept sky 
 (we were at the end of the wet weather), the 
 sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the 
 black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy 
 background against which the black and white 
 liveries of the jhampanies, the yellow-paneled 
 'rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington's down-bowed 
 golden head stood out clearly. She was hold- 
 ing her handkerchief in her left hand and 
 was leaning back exhausted against the 'rick- 
 shaw cushions. I turned my horse up a by- 
 path near the Sanjowlie Reservoir and literally 
 ran away. Once I fancied I heard a faint call 
 of "Jadd" This may have been imagination. 
 I never stopped to verify it. Ten minutes 
 later I came across Kitty on horseback; and, 
 in the delight of a long ride with her, forgot 
 all about the interview. 
 
 A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the 
 inexpressible burden of her existence was re-
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW i r 
 
 moved from my life. 1 went Plainsward per- 
 fectly happy. Before three months were over 
 I had forgotten all about her, excepl that at 
 times the discovery of some of her old letters 
 reminded me unpleasantly of our bygone re- 
 lationship. By January I had disinterred 
 what was left of our correspondence from 
 among my scattered belongings and had 
 burned it. At the beginning of April of this 
 year, 1885, I was at Simla — semi-deserted 
 Simla — once more, and was deep in lover's 
 talks and walks with Kitty. It was decided 
 that we should be married at the end of June. 
 You will understand, therefore, that, loving 
 Kitty as I did, I am not saying too much when 
 I pronounce myself to have been, at that time, 
 the happiest man in India. 
 
 Fourteen delightful days passed almost be- 
 fore I noticed their flight. Then, aroused to 
 the sense of what was proper among mortals 
 circumstanced as we were, I pointed out to 
 Kitty that an engagement ring was the out- 
 ward and visible sign of her dignity as an en- 
 gaged girl ; and that she must forthwith come 
 to Hamilton's to be measured for one. Up to 
 that moment, I give you my word, we had 
 completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To 
 Hamilton's we accordingly went on the 15th
 
 12 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 of April, 1885. Remember that — whatever 
 my doctor may say to the contrary — I was 
 then in perfect health, enjoying a well-balanced 
 mind and an absolutely tranquil spirit. Kitty 
 and I entered Hamilton's shop together, and 
 there, regardless of the order of affairs, I 
 measured Kitty for the ring in the presence of 
 the amused assistant. The ring was a sap- 
 phire with two diamonds. We then rode out 
 clown the slope that leads to the Combermere 
 Bridge and Peliti's shop. 
 
 While my Waler was cautiously feeling his 
 way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laugh- 
 ing and chattering at my side — while all Simla, 
 that is to say as much of it as had then come 
 from the Plains, was grouped round the Read- 
 ing-room and Peliti's veranda, — I was aware 
 that some one, apparently at a vast distance, 
 was calling me by my Christian name. It 
 struck me that I had heard the voice before, 
 but when and where I could not at once deter- 
 mine. In the short space it took to cover the 
 road between the path from Hamilton's shop 
 and the first plank of the Combermere Bridge 
 I had thought over half a dozen people who 
 might have committed such a solecism, and 
 had eventually decided that it must have been 
 singing in my ears. Immediately opposite
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW [3 
 
 Peliti's shop my eye was arrested by the sight 
 of four jhampanies in "magpie" livery, pulling 
 a yellow-paneled, cheap, bazar 'rickshaw. In 
 a moment my mind Hew back to the previous 
 season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense oi 
 irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that 
 the woman was dead and done with, without 
 her black and white servitors reappearing to 
 spoil the day's happiness? Whoever employ) d 
 them now I thought I would call upon, and ask- 
 as a personal favor to change her jhampanies' 
 livery. I would hire the men myself, and, if 
 necessary, buy their coats from off their backs. 
 It is impossible to say here what a flood of un- 
 desirable memories their presence evoked. 
 
 "Kitty," I cried, "there are poor Mrs. Wes- 
 sington's jhampanies turned up again! I won- 
 der who has them now?" 
 
 Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly 
 last season, and had always been interested in 
 the sickly woman. 
 
 "What? Where?" she asked. "I can't see 
 them anywhere." 
 
 Even as she spoke, her horse, swerving from 
 a laden mule, threw himself directly in front 
 of the advancing 'rickshaw. I had scarcely 
 time to utter a word of warning when, to my 
 unutterable horror, horse and rider passed
 
 14 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 through men and carriage as if they had been 
 thin air. 
 
 "What's the matter?" cried Kitty; "what 
 made you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am 
 engaged I don't want all creation to know 
 about it. There was lots of space between the 
 mule and the veranda; and, if you think I can't 
 ride— There!" 
 
 Whereupon wilful Kitty set off, her dainty 
 little head in the air, at a hand-gallop in the 
 direction of the Band-stand; fully expecting, 
 as she herself afterward told me, that I should 
 follow her. What was the matter? Nothing 
 indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk, or 
 that Simla was haunted with devils. I reined 
 in my impatient cob, and turned round. The 
 'rickshaw had turned too, and now stood im- 
 mediately facing me, near the left railing of 
 the Combermere Bridge. 
 
 "Jack! Jack, darling!" (There was no mis- 
 take about the words this time : they rang 
 through my brain as if they had been shouted 
 •in my ear.) "It's some hideous mistake, I'm 
 sure. Please forgive me, Jack, and let's be 
 friends again." 
 
 The 'rickshaw-hood had fallen back, and in- 
 side, as I hope and pray daily for the death I 
 dread by night, sat Mrs. Keith-Wessington,
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 15 
 
 handkerchief in hand, and golden head bowed 
 on her breast. 
 
 How long I stared motionless I do not 
 know. Finally, I was aroused by my syce tak- 
 ing the Waler's bridle and asking whether I 
 was ill. From the horrible to the common- 
 place is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and 
 dashed, half fainting, into Peliti's for a glass 
 of cherry brandy. There two or three couples 
 were gathered round the coffee-tables discuss- 
 ing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities 
 were more comforting to me just then than the 
 consolations of religion could have been. I 
 plunged into the midst of the conversation at 
 once; chatted, laughed, and jested with a face 
 (when T caught a glimpse of it in a mirror) as 
 white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three 
 or four men noticed my condition ; and, evi- 
 dently setting it down to the results of over- 
 many pegs, charitably endeavored to draw me 
 apart from the rest of the loungers. But I re- 
 fused to be led away. I wanted the company 
 of my kind — as a child rushes into the midst 
 of the dinner-party after a fright in the dark. 
 I must have talked for about ten minutes or 
 so, though it seemed an eternity to me, when I 
 heard Kitty's clear voice outside inquiring for 
 me. In another minute she had entered the
 
 1 6 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 shop, prepared to roundly upbraid me for fail- 
 ing so signally in my duties. Something in 
 my face stopped her. 
 
 "Why, Jack," she cried, "what have you 
 been doing? What has happened? Are you 
 ill?" Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that 
 the sun had been a little too much for me. It 
 was close upon five o'clock of a cloudy April 
 afternoon, and the sun had been hidden all 
 day. I saw my mistake as soon as the words 
 were out of my mouth : attempted to recover 
 it; blundered hopelessly and followed Kitty in 
 a regal rage, out of doors, amid the smiles of 
 my acquaintances. I made some excuse (I 
 have forgotten what) on the score of my feel- 
 ing faint ; and cantered away to my hotel, leav- 
 ing Kitty to finish the ride by herself. 
 
 In my room I sat down and tried calmly to 
 reason out the matter. Here was I, Theobald 
 Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian 
 in the year of grace 1885, presumably sane, 
 certainly healthy, driven in terror from my 
 sweetheart's side by the apparition of a woman 
 who had been dead and buried eight months 
 ago. These were facts that I could not blink. 
 Nothing was further from my thought than 
 any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty 
 and I left Hamilton's shop. Nothing was
 
 THE PHANTOM 'KICKSHAW 17 
 
 more utterly commonplace than the stretch of 
 wall opposite Peliti's. It was broad daylight. 
 The road was full of people; and yet here, look 
 you, in defiance of every law of probability, in 
 direct outrage of Nature's ordinance, there had 
 appeared to me a face from the grave. 
 
 kitty's Aral) had gone through the 'rick- 
 shaw: SO that my first hope thai some woman 
 marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired 
 the carriage and the coolies with their old 
 livery was lost. Again and again I went round 
 this treadmill of thought; and again and again 
 gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was 
 as inexplicable as the apparition. I had ori- 
 ginally some wild notion of confiding it all to 
 Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; 
 and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant 
 of the 'rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the 
 presence of the 'rickshaw is in itself enough to 
 prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One 
 may see ghosts of men and women, but surely 
 never of coolies and carriages. The whole 
 thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a 
 hillman!" 
 
 Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, 
 imploring her to overlook my strange conduct 
 of the previous afternoon. My Divinity was 
 still very wroth, and a personal apology was
 
 18 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 necessary. I explained, with a fluency born of 
 night-long pondering over a falsehood, that I 
 had been attacked with a sudden palpitation of 
 the heart — the result of indigestion. This emi- 
 nently practical solution had its effect ; and 
 Kitty and I rode out that afternoon with the 
 shadow of my first lie dividing us. 
 
 Nothing would please her save a canter 
 round Jakko. With my nerves still unstrung 
 from the previous night I feebly protested 
 against the notion, suggesting Observatory 
 Hill, Jutogh, the Boileaugunge road — any- 
 thing rather than the Jakko round. Kitty was 
 angry and a little hurt : so I yielded from fear 
 of provoking further misunderstanding, and 
 we set out together toward Chota Simla. We 
 walked a greater part of the way, and, accord- 
 ing to our custom, cantered from a mile or so 
 below the Convent to the stretch of level road 
 by the Sanjowlie Reservoir. The wretched 
 horses appeared to fly, and my heart beat 
 quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of 
 the ascent. My mind had been full of Mrs. 
 Wessington all the afternoon; and every inch 
 of the Jakko road bore witness to our old-time 
 walks and talks. The bowlders were full of 
 it; the pines sang it aloud overhead; the rain- 
 fed torrents giggled and chuckled unseen over
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 19 
 
 the shameful story; and the wind in my cars 
 chanted the iniquity aloud. 
 
 As a fitting climax, in the middle of the level 
 men call the Ladies' Mile the Horror was 
 awaiting me. No other 'rickshaw was in sight 
 — only the four black and white jhampanies, 
 the yellow-paneled carriage, and the golden 
 head of the woman within — all apparently just 
 as I had left them eight months and one fort- 
 night ago ! For an instant I fancied that Kitty 
 must see what I saw — we were so marvelously 
 sympathetic in all things. Her next words un- 
 deceived me — "Not a soul in sight! Come 
 along, Jack, and I'll race you to the Reservoir 
 buildings !" Her wiry little Arab was off like 
 a bird, my Waler following close behind, and 
 in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half 
 a minute brought us within fifty yards of the 
 'rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a 
 little. The 'rickshaw was directly in the middle 
 of the road ; and once more the Arab passed 
 through it, my horse following. "Jack! Jack 
 dear! Please forgive me," rang with a wail 
 in my ears, and, after an interval : — "It's all a 
 mistake, a hideous mistake!" 
 
 I spurred my horse like a man possessed. 
 When I turned my head at the Reservoir 
 w T orks, the black and white liveries were still
 
 20 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 waiting — patiently waiting — under the grey 
 hillside, and the wind brought me a mocking 
 echo of the words I had just heard. Kitty 
 bantered me a good deal on my silence 
 throughout the remainder of the ride. I had 
 been talking up till then wildly and at random. 
 To save my life I could not speak afterward 
 naturally, and from Sanjowlie to the Church 
 wisely held my tongue. 
 
 I was to dine with the Mannerings that 
 night, and had barely time to canter home to 
 dress. On the road to Elysium Hill I over- 
 heard two men talking together in the dusk. — 
 "It's a curious thing," said one, "how com- 
 pletely all trace of it disappeared. You know 
 my wife was insanely fond of the woman 
 (never could see anything in her myself), and 
 wanted me to pick up her old 'rickshaw and 
 coolies if they were to be got for love or 
 money. Morbid sort of fancy I call it; but 
 I've got to do what the Memsahib tells me. 
 Would you believe that the man she hired it 
 from tells me that all four of the men — they 
 were brothers — died of cholera on the way to 
 Hardwar, poor devils; and the 'rickshaw has 
 been broken up by the man himself. 'Told me 
 he never used a dead Memsahib's 'rickshaw. 
 'Spoiled his luck. Queer notion, wasn't it?
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 21 
 
 Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling any 
 one's luck except her own!" I laughed aloud 
 at this point ; and my laugh jarred on me as I 
 uttered it. So there were ghosts of 'rickshaws 
 after all, and ghostly employments in the other 
 world ! How much did Mrs. Wessington give 
 her men? What were their hours? Where 
 did they go ? 
 
 And for visible answer to my last question I 
 saw the infernal Thing blocking my path in the 
 twilight. The dead travel fast, and by short 
 cuts unknown to ordinary coolies. I laughed 
 aloud a second time and checked my laughter 
 suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. 
 Mad to a certain extent I must have been, for 
 I recollect that I reined in my horse at the head 
 of the 'rickshaw, and politely wished Mrs. 
 Wessington "Good-evening." Her answer 
 was one I knew only too well. I listened to 
 the end; and replied that I had heard it all 
 before, but should be delighted if she had any- 
 thing further to say. Some malignant devil 
 stronger than I must have entered into me that 
 evening, for I have a dim recollection of talk- 
 ing the commonplaces of the day for five min- 
 utes to the thing in front of me. 
 
 "Mad as a hatter, poor devil — or drunk. 
 Max, try and get him to come home."
 
 22 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington's 
 voice ! The two men had overheard me speak- 
 ing to the empty air, and had returned to look 
 after me. They were very kind and consid- 
 erate, and from their words evidently gathered 
 that I was extremely drunk. I thanked them 
 confusedly and cantered away to my hotel, 
 there changed, and arrived at the Manner ings' 
 ten minutes late. I pleaded the darkness of the 
 night as an excuse; was rebuked by Kitty for 
 my unlover-like tardiness; and sat down. 
 
 The conversation had already become gen- 
 eral; and under cover of it, I was addressing 
 some tender small talk to my sweetheart when 
 I was aware that at the further end of the table 
 a short red-whiskered man was describing, 
 with much broidery, his encounter with a mad 
 unknown that evening. 
 
 A few sentences convinced me that he was 
 repeating the incident of half an hour ago. In 
 the middle of the story he looked round 
 for applause, as professional story-tellers do, 
 caught my eye, and straightway collapsed. 
 There was a moment's awkward silence, and 
 the red-whiskered man muttered something to 
 the effect that he had "forgotten the rest," 
 thereby sacrificing a reputation as a good story- 
 teller which he had built up for six seasons
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 23 
 
 past. I blessed him from the bottom of my 
 heart, and — went on with my fish. 
 
 In the fulness of time that dinner came to 
 an end; and with genuine regret I tore myself 
 away from Kitty — as certain as I was of my 
 own existence that It would be waiting for me 
 outside the door. The red-whiskered man, 
 who had been introduced to me as Doctor 
 Heatherlegh of Simla, volunteered to bear me 
 company as far as our roads lay together. I 
 accepted his offer with gratitude. 
 
 My instinct had not deceived me. It lay in 
 readiness in the Mall, and, in what seemed 
 devilish mockery of our ways, with a lighted 
 head-lamp. The red-whiskered man went to 
 the point at once, in a manner that showed he 
 had been thinking over it all dinner time. 
 
 "I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the mat- 
 ter with you this evening on the Elysium 
 road?" The suddenness of the question 
 wrenched an answer from me before I was 
 aware. 
 
 "That!" said I, pointing to It. 
 
 "That may be either D. T. or Eyes for aught 
 I know. Now you don't liquor. I saw as 
 much at dinner, so it can't be D. T. There's 
 nothing whatever where you're pointing, 
 though you're sweating and trembling with
 
 24 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 fright like a scared pony. Therefore, I con- 
 clude that it's Eyes. And I ought to under- 
 stand all about them. Come along home with 
 me. I'm on the Blessington lower road." 
 
 To my intense delight the 'rickshaw instead 
 of waiting for us kept about twenty yards 
 ahead — and this, too, whether we walked, 
 trotted, or cantered. In the course of that 
 long night ride I had told my companion 
 almost as much as I have told you here. 
 
 "Well, you've spoiled one of the best tales 
 I've ever laid tongue to," said he, "but I'll for- 
 give you for the sake of what you've gone 
 through. Now come home and do what I tell 
 you ; and when I've cured you, young man, let 
 this be a lesson to you to steer clear of women 
 and indigestible food till the day of your 
 death." 
 
 The 'rickshaw kept steady in front; and my 
 red-whiskered friend seemed to derive great 
 pleasure from my account of its exact where- 
 abouts. 
 
 "Eyes, Pansay — all Eyes, Brain, and Stom- 
 ach. And the greatest of these three is 
 Stomach. You've too much conceited Brain, 
 too little Stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy 
 Eyes. Get your Stomach straight and the rest 
 follows. And all that's French for a liver pill.
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 ~o 
 
 I'll take sole medical charge of you from this 
 hour! for you're too interesting a phenomenon 
 
 to be passed over." 
 
 By this time we were deep in the shadow of 
 the Blessington lower road and tin- 'rickshaw 
 came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, over- 
 hanging shale cliff. Instinctively 1 halted too, 
 giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out an 
 oath. 
 
 "Now, if you think I'm going- to spend a cold 
 night on the hillside for the sake of a Stomach- 
 ciDii-Rra'm-cMm-TLye illusion . . . Lord, 
 ha' mercy! What's that?" 
 
 There was a muffled report, a blinding 
 smother of dust just in front of us, a crack, 
 the noise of rent boughs, and about ten yards 
 of the cliff-side — pines, undergrowth, and all — • 
 slid down into the road below, completely 
 blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed 
 and tottered for a moment like drunken giants 
 in the gloom, and then fell prone among their 
 fellows with a thunderous crash. Our two 
 horses stood motionless and sweating with 
 fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth and 
 stone had subsided, my companion muttered : — 
 "Man, if we'd gone forward we should have 
 been ten feet deep in ottr graves by now. 
 'There are more things in heaven and earth.'
 
 26 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 Come home, Pansay, and thank 
 God. I want a peg badly." 
 
 We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, 
 and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh's house 
 shortly after midnight. 
 
 His attempts toward my cure commenced 
 almost immediately, and for a week I never left 
 his sight. Many a time in the course of that 
 week did I bless the good-fortune which had 
 thrown me in contact with Simla's best and 
 kindest doctor. Day by day my spirits grew 
 lighter and more equable. Day by day, too, I 
 became more and more inclined to fall in with 
 Heatherlegh's "spectral illusion" theory, im- 
 plicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to 
 Kitty, telling her that a slight sprain caused by 
 a fall from my horse kept me indoors for a few 
 days ; and that I should be recovered before she 
 had time to regret my absence. 
 
 Heatherlegh's treatment was simple to a de- 
 gree. It consisted of liver pills, cold-water 
 baths, and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or 
 at early dawn — for, as he sagely observed: — 
 "A man with a sprained ankle doesn't walk a 
 dozen miles a day, and your young woman 
 might be wondering if she saw you." 
 
 At the end of the week, after much exami- 
 nation of pupil and pulse, and strict injunctions
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 27 
 
 as to diel and pedestrianism, Heatherlegh dis- 
 missed me as brusquely as he had taken charge 
 of me Here is his parting benediction: — 
 "Man, I certify to your mental cure, and that's 
 as much as to say I've cured most of your 
 bodily ailments. Now, gel your traps out of 
 this as soon as yon can; and be <>ft to make love 
 to Miss Kilty." 
 
 I was endeavoring to express my thanks for 
 his kindness. He cnt me short. 
 
 "Don't think T did this hecanse I like you. I 
 gather that you've behaved like a blackguard all 
 through. But, all the same, you're a phenome- 
 non, and as queer a phenomenon as you are a 
 blackguard. No !" — checking me a second time 
 — "not a rupee please. Go out and see if you 
 can find the eyes-brain-and-stomach business 
 again. I'll give you a lakh for each time you 
 see it." 
 
 Half an hour later I was in the Mannerings' 
 drawing-room with Kitty — drunk with the in- 
 toxication of present happiness and the fore- 
 knowledge that I should never more be troubled 
 with Its hideous presence. Strong in the 
 sense of my new-found security, I proposed a 
 ride at once ; and, by preference, a canter round 
 Jakko. 
 
 Never had I felt so well, so overladen with
 
 28 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 vitality and mere animal spirits, as I did on the 
 afternoon of the 30th of April. Kitty was 
 delighted at the change in my appearance, and 
 complimented me on it in her delightfully frank 
 and outspoken manner. We left the Manner- 
 ings' house together, laughing and talking, and 
 cantered along the Choto Simla road as of old. 
 
 I was in haste to reach the Sanjowlie Reser- 
 voir and there make my assurance doubly sure. 
 The horses did their best, but seemed all too 
 slow to my impatient mind. Kitty was aston- 
 ished at my boisterousness. "Why, Jack!" 
 she cried at last, "you are behaving like a child. 
 What are you doing?" 
 
 We were just below the Convent, and from 
 sheer wantonness I was making my Waler 
 plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it 
 with the loop of my riding-whip. 
 
 "Doing?" I answered; "nothing, dear. 
 That's just it. If you'd been doing nothing 
 for a week except lie up, you'd be as riotous 
 as I. 
 " 'Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth, 
 Joying to feel yourself alive; 
 Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible Earth, 
 Lord of the senses five.' " 
 
 My quotation was hardly out of my lips
 
 THE PHANTOM 'KICKSHAW 29 
 
 before we had rounded the corner above the 
 Convent; and a few yards further on could see 
 across to Sanjowlie. In the centre of the level 
 road stood the black and white liveries, the 
 yellow-paneled 'rickshaw, and Mrs. ECeith-Wes- 
 sington. I pulled up, looked, rubbed my eyes, 
 and, I believe, must have said something. The 
 next thing I knew was that I was lying face 
 downward on the road, with Kitty kneeling 
 above me in tears. 
 
 "Has it gone, child !" I gasped. Kitty only 
 wept more bitterly. 
 
 "Has what gone, Jack dear? what does it all 
 mean? There must be a mistake somewhere, 
 Jack. A hideous mistake." Her last words 
 brought me to my feet — mad — raving for the 
 time being. 
 
 "Yes, there is a mistake somewhere," I re- 
 peated, "a hideous mistake. Come and look at 
 It." 
 
 I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty 
 by the wrist along the road up to where Tt 
 stood, and implored her for pity's sake to speak 
 to It; to tell It that we were betrothed; that 
 neither Death nor Hell could break the tie be- 
 tween us: and Kitty only knows how much 
 more to the same effect. Now and again I 
 appealed passionately to the Terror in the 'rick-
 
 30 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 shaw to bear witness to all I had said, and to 
 release me from a torture that was killing me. 
 As I talked I suppose I must have told Kitty 
 of my old relations with Mrs. Wessington, for 
 I saw her listen intently with white face and 
 blazing eyes. 
 
 "Thank you, Mr. Pansay," she said, "that's 
 quite enough. Syce ghora lao." 
 
 The syces, impassive as Orientals always are, 
 had come up with recaptured horses; and as 
 Kitty sprang into her saddle I caught hold of 
 the bridle, entreating her to hear me out and 
 forgive. My answer was the cut of her riding- 
 whip across my face from mouth to eye, and a 
 word or two of farewell that even now I cannot 
 write down. So I judged, and judged rightly, 
 that Kitty knew all; and I staggered back to 
 the side of the 'rickshaw. My face was cut and 
 bleeding, and the blow of the riding-whip had 
 raised a livid blue wheal on it. I had no self- 
 respect. Just then, Heatherlegh, who must 
 have been following Kitty and me at a distance, 
 cantered up. 
 
 "Doctor," I said, pointing to my face, "here's 
 Miss Mannering's signature to my order of 
 dismissal and . . . I'll thank you for 
 that lakh as soon as convenient." 
 
 Heatherlegh's face, even in my abject 
 misery, moved me to laughter.
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 3 1 
 
 "I'll stake my professional reputation" — he 
 
 began. "Don't be a fool," I whispered. "I've 
 lost my life's happiness and you'd better take 
 me home." 
 
 As I spoke the 'rickshaw was gone. Then I 
 lost all knowledge of what was passing. The 
 crest of Jakko seemed to heave and roll like the 
 crest of a cloud and fall in upon me. 
 
 Seven days later (on the 7th of May, that is 
 to say) I was aware that I was lying in 
 Heatherlegh's room as weak as a little child. 
 Heatherlegh was watching me intently from 
 behind the papers on his writing-table. His 
 first words were not encouraging; but I was 
 too far spent to be much moved by them. 
 
 "Here's Miss Kitty has sent back your 
 letters. You corresponded a good deal, you 
 young people. Here's a packet that looks like a 
 ring, and a cheerful sort of a note from Man- 
 nering Papa, which I've taken the liberty of 
 reading and burning. The old gentleman's not 
 pleased with you." 
 
 "And Kitty?" I asked, dully. 
 
 "Rather more drawn than her father, from 
 what she says. By the same token you must 
 have been letting out any number of queer 
 reminiscences just before I met you. 'Says 
 that a man who would have behaved to a
 
 32 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 woman as you did to Mrs. Wessington ought to 
 kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. 
 She's a hot-headed little virago, your mash. 
 'Will have it too that you were suffering from 
 D. T. when that row on the Jakko road turned 
 up. 'Says she'll die before she ever speaks to 
 you again." 
 
 I groaned and turned over on the other side. 
 
 "Now you've got your choice, my friend. 
 This engagement has to be broken off ; and the 
 Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. 
 Was it broken through D. T. or epileptic fits? 
 Sorry I can't offer you a better exchange unless 
 you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word 
 and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All Simla knows about 
 that scene on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll 
 give you five minutes to think it over." 
 
 During those five minutes I believe that I ex- 
 plored thoroughly the lowest circles of the In- 
 ferno which it is permitted man to tread on 
 earth. And at the same time I myself was 
 watching myself faltering through the dark 
 labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. 
 I wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair might 
 have wondered, which dreadful alternative I 
 should adopt. Presently I heard myself an- 
 swering in a voice that I hardly recognized, — 
 
 "They're confoundedly particular about
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 33 
 
 morality in these parts. Give 'em fits, Heather- 
 legh, and my love. Now let me sleep a bit 
 longer." 
 
 Then my two selves joined, and it was only I 
 (half crazed, devil-driven I ) that tossed in my 
 bed, tracing step by step the history of the past 
 1111 »iith. 
 
 "But I am in Simla," I kept repeating to my- 
 self. "I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there 
 are no ghosts here. It's unreasonable of that 
 woman to pretend there are. Why couldn't 
 Agnes have left me alone? I never did her 
 any harm. It might just as well have been me 
 as Agnes. Only I'd never have come back on 
 purpose to kill her. Why can't I be left alone 
 — left alone and happy?" 
 
 It was high noon when I first awoke: and 
 the sun was low in the sky before I slept — 
 slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, 
 too worn to feel further pain. 
 
 Next day I could not leave my bed. 
 Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he 
 had received an answer from Mr. Manncring, 
 and that, thanks to his ( Heatherlegh V) 
 friendly offices, the story of my affliction had 
 traveled through the length and breadth of 
 Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied. 
 
 "And that's rather more than you deserve,"
 
 34 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 he concluded, pleasantly, "though the Lord 
 knows you've been going through a pretty 
 severe mill. Never mind; we'll cure you yet, 
 you perverse phenomenon." 
 
 I declined firmly to be cured. "You've been 
 much too good to me already, old man," said I ; 
 "but I don't think I need trouble you further." 
 
 In my heart I knew that nothing Heather- 
 legh could do would lighten the burden that 
 had been laid upon me. 
 
 With that knowledge came also a sense of 
 hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unrea- 
 sonableness of it all. There were scores of 
 men no better than I whose punishments had 
 at least been reserved for another world ; and I 
 felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I 
 alone should have been singled out for so hide- 
 ous a fate. This mood would in time give 
 place to another where it seemed that the 'rick- 
 shaw and I were the only realities in a world 
 of shadows ; that Kitty was a ghost ; that 
 Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other 
 men and women I knew were all ghosts; and 
 the great, grey hills themselves but vain 
 shadows devised to torture me. From mood 
 to mood I tossed backward and forward for 
 seven weary days; my body growing daily 
 stronger and stronger, until the bedroom look-
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 35 
 
 ing-glass told me that T had returned to every- 
 day life, and was as other men once more. 
 Curiously enough my face showed no signs of 
 the struggle I had gone through. It was pale 
 indeed, but as expressionless and commonplace 
 as ever. I had expected some permanent alter- 
 ation — visible evidence of the disease that was 
 eating me away. I found nothing. 
 
 On the 15th of May I left Heatherlegh's 
 house at eleven o'clock in the morning; and 
 the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the 
 Club. There I found that every man knew my 
 story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in 
 clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. 
 Nevertheless I recognized that for the rest of 
 my natural life I should be among but not of 
 my fellows; and I envied very bitterly indeed 
 the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I 
 lunched at the Club, and at four o'clock wan- 
 dered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague 
 hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the Band- 
 stand the black and white liveries joined me; 
 and I heard Mrs. Wessington's old appeal at 
 my side. I had been expecting this ever since 
 I came out; and was only surprised at her de- 
 lay. The phantom 'rickshaw and I went side 
 by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. 
 Close to the bazar, Kitty and a man on horse-
 
 36 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 back overtook and passed us. For any sign 
 she gave I might have been a dog in the road. 
 She did not even pay me the compliment of 
 quickening her pace; though the rainy after- 
 noon had served for an excuse. 
 
 So Kitty and her companion, and I and my 
 ghostly Light-o'-Love, crept round Jakko in 
 couples. The road was streaming with water ; 
 the pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks 
 below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain. 
 Two or three times I found myself saying to 
 myself almost aloud: "I'm Jack Pansay on 
 leave at Simla — at Simla! Everyday, ordinary 
 Simla. I mustn't forget that — I mustn't for- 
 get that." Then I would try to recollect some 
 of the gossip I had heard at the Club : the 
 prices of So-and-So's horses — anything, in 
 fact, that related to the workaday Anglo- 
 Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated 
 the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to 
 make quite sure that I was not taking leave 
 of my senses. It gave me much comfort ; and 
 must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wes- 
 sington for a time. 
 
 Once more I wearily climbed the Convent 
 slope and entered the level road. Here Kitty 
 and the man started off at a canter, and I was 
 left alone with Mrs. Wessington. "Agnes,"
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 37 
 
 said I, "will yon put back your hood and tell 
 me what it all means?" The hood dropped 
 noiselessly, and I was face to face with my 
 dead and buried mistress. She was wearing 
 the dress in which I had last seen her alive; 
 carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right 
 hand; and the same cardcase in her left. (A 
 woman eight months dead with a cardcase!) 
 I had to pin myself down to the multiplication- 
 table, and to set both hands on the stone 
 parapet of the road, to assure myself that that 
 at least was real. 
 
 "Agnes," I repeated, "for pity's sake tell me 
 what it all means." Mrs. Wessington leaned 
 forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head 
 I used to know so well, and spoke. 
 
 If my story had not already so madly over- 
 leaped the bounds of all human belief I should 
 apologize to you now. As I know that no one 
 — no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as 
 some sort of justification of my conduct — will 
 believe me, I will go on. Airs. Wessington 
 spoke and I walked with her from the San- 
 jowlie road to the turning below the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief's house as I might walk by 
 the side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep 
 in conversation. The second and most tor- 
 menting of my moods of sickness had suddenly
 
 38 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 laid hold upon me, and like the Prince in 
 Tennyson's poem, "I seemed to move amid a 
 world of ghosts." There had been a garden- 
 party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we 
 two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. 
 As I saw them then it seemed that they were 
 the shadows — impalpable, fantastic shadows — 
 that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw 
 to pass through. What we said during the 
 course of that weird interview I cannot — in- 
 deed, dare not — tell. Heatherlegh's comment 
 would have been a short laugh and a remark 
 that I had been "mashing a brain-eye-and- 
 stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet 
 in some indefinable way a marvelously dear 
 experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, 
 that I was in this life to woo a second time the 
 woman I had killed by my own neglect and 
 cruelty ? 
 
 I met Kitty on the homeward road — a 
 shadow among shadows. 
 
 If I were to describe all the incidents of the 
 next fortnight in their order, my story would 
 never come to an end ; and your patience would 
 be exhausted. Morning after morning and 
 evening after evening the ghostly 'rickshaw 
 and I used to wander through Simla together. 
 Wherever I went, there the four black and
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 39 
 
 white liveries followed me and bore me com- 
 pany to and from my hotel. At the Theatre I 
 found them amid the crowd of yelling jliam- 
 panies; outside the Club veranda, after a long 
 evening of whist ; at the Birthday Ball, wailing 
 patiently for my reappearance; and in broad 
 daylight when I went calling. Save that it 
 cast no shadow, the 'rickshaw was in every 
 respect as real to look upon as one of wood and 
 iron. More than once, indeed, I have had to 
 check myself from warning some hard-riding 
 friend against cantering over it. More than 
 once I have walked down the Mall deep in 
 conversation with Mrs. Wessington to the un- 
 speakable amazement of the passers-by. 
 
 Before I had been out and about a week I 
 learned that the "fit" theory had been discarded 
 in favor of insanity. However, I made no 
 change in my mode of life. I called, rode, and 
 dined out as freely as ever. I had a passion 
 for the society of my kind which I had never 
 felt before; I hungered to be among the 
 realities of life; and at the same time I felt 
 vaguely unhappy when I had been separated 
 too long from my ghostly companion. It 
 would be almost impossible to describe my 
 varying moods from the 15th of May up to 
 to-day.
 
 40 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 The presence of the 'rickshaw filled me by 
 turns with horror, blind fear, a dim sort of 
 pleasure, and utter despair. I dared not leave 
 Simla; and I knew that my stay there was 
 killing me. I knew, moreover, that it was my 
 destiny to die slowly and a little every day. 
 My only anxiety was to get the penance over 
 as quietly as might be. Alternately I hungered 
 for a sight of Kitty and watched her out- 
 rageous flirtations with my successor — to 
 speak more accurately, my successors — with 
 amused interest. She was as much out of my 
 life as I was out of hers. By day I wandered 
 with Mrs. Wessington almost content. By 
 night I implored Heaven to let me return to 
 the world as I used to know it. Above all 
 these varying moods lay the sensation of dull, 
 numbing wonder that the Seen and the Unseen 
 should mingle so strangely on this earth to 
 hound one poor soul to its grave. 
 
 August 27. — Heatherlegh has been inde- 
 fatigable in his attendance on me; and only 
 yesterday told me that I ought to send in an 
 application for sick leave. An application to 
 escape the company of a phantom ! A request 
 that the Government would graciously permit
 
 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 41 
 
 me to get rid of five ghosts and an airy 'rick- 
 shaw by going to England ! Heatherlegh's 
 proposition moved me to almost hysterical 
 laughter. I told him that I should await the 
 end quietly at Simla; and I am sure that the 
 end is not far off. Believe me that I dread its 
 advent more than any word can say; and I 
 torture myself nightly with a thousand specu- 
 lations as to the manner of my death. 
 
 Shall I die in my bed decently and as an 
 English gentleman should die; or, in one last 
 walk on the Mall, will my soul be wrenched 
 from me to take its place forever and ever by 
 the side of that ghastly phantasm? Shall I 
 return to my old lost allegiance in the next 
 world, or shall I meet Agnes loathing her and 
 bound to her side through all eternity? Shall 
 we two hover over the scene of our lives till the 
 end of Time? As the day of my death draws 
 nearer, the intense horror that all living flesh 
 feels toward escaped spirits from beyond the 
 grave grows more and more powerful. It is 
 an awful thing to go down quick among the 
 dead with scarcely one-half of your life com- 
 pleted. It is a thousand times more awful to 
 wait as I do in your midst, for I know not 
 what unimaginable terror. Pity me, at least 
 on the score of my "delusion," for I know you
 
 42 THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW 
 
 will never believe what I have written here. 
 Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death 
 by the Powers of Darkness I am that man. 
 
 In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as 
 ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. 
 Wessington. And the last portion of my pun- 
 ishment is even now upon me.
 
 MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY
 
 MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY 
 
 As I came through the Desert thus it was — 
 As I came through the Desert. 
 
 — The City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 SOMEWHERE in the Other World, where 
 there are books and pictures and plays 
 and shop-windows to look at, and thousands 
 of men who spend their lives in building up all 
 four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories 
 about the real insides of people; and his name 
 is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon 
 treating his ghosts — he has published half a 
 workshopful of them — with levity. He makes 
 his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some 
 cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. 
 You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a 
 Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must 
 behave reverently toward a ghost, and particu- 
 larly an Indian one. 
 
 There are, in this land, ghosts who take the 
 form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in 
 trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. 
 Then they drop upon his neck and remain. 
 There are also terrible ghosts of women who 
 45
 
 46 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 have died in child-bed. These wander along 
 the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near 
 a village, and call seductively. But to answer 
 their call is death in this world and the next. 
 Their feet are turned backward that all sober 
 men may recognize them. There are ghosts 
 of little children who have been thrown into 
 wells. These haunt well-curbs and the fringes 
 of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch 
 women by the wrist and beg to be taken up 
 and carried. These and the corpse-ghosts, 
 however, are only vernacular articles and do 
 not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet 
 been authentically reported to have frightened 
 an Englishman ; but many English ghosts have 
 scared the life out of both white and black. 
 
 Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. 
 There are said to be two at Simla, not count- 
 ing the woman who blows the bellows at Syree 
 dak-bungalow on the Old Road: Mnssoorie 
 has a house haunted of a very lively Thing ; a 
 White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman 
 round a house in £ahore ; Dalhousie says that 
 one of her houses "repeats" on autumn even- 
 ings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and- 
 precipice accident : Murree has a merry ghost, 
 and, now that she has been swept by cholera, 
 will have room for a sorrowful one ; there are
 
 GHOST STORY 47 
 
 Officers' Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors 
 open without reason, and whose furniture is 
 guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June 
 but with the weight of Invisibles who come to 
 lounge in the chair ; Peshawur possesses houses 
 that none will willingly rent ; and there is some- 
 thing — not fever — wrong with a big bungalow 
 in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply 
 bristle with haunted houses, and march phan- 
 tom armies along their main thoroughfares. 
 
 Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand 
 Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in 
 their compound — witnesses to the "changes 
 and chances of this mortal life" in the days 
 when men drove from Calcutta to the North- 
 west. These bungalows are objectionable 
 places to put up in. They are generally very 
 old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as 
 ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters 
 senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. 
 In both moods he is useless. If you get angry 
 with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and 
 buried these thirty years, and says that when 
 he was in that Sahib's service not a khansamah 
 in the Province could touch him. Then he 
 jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets 
 among the dishes, and you repent of your 
 irritation.
 
 48 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most 
 likely to be found, and when found, they 
 should be made a note of. Not long ago it was 
 my business to live in dak-bungalows. I never 
 inhabited the same house for three nights run- 
 ning, and grew to be learned in the breed. I 
 lived in Government-built ones with red brick 
 walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the 
 furniture posted in every room, and an excited 
 snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived 
 in "converted" ones — old houses officiating as 
 dak-bungalows — where nothing was in its 
 proper place and there wasn't even a fowl for 
 dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where 
 the wind blew through open-work marble 
 tracery just as uncomfortably as through a 
 broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where 
 the last entry in the visitors' book was fifteen 
 months old, and where they slashed off the 
 curry-kid's head with a sword. It was my 
 good-luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober 
 traveling missionaries and deserters flying 
 from British Regiments, to drunken loafers 
 who threw whiskey bottles at all who passed; 
 and my still greater good-fortune just to escape 
 a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion 
 of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself 
 in dak-bungalows, I wondered that I had met
 
 GHOST STORY 49 
 
 no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily 
 hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of 
 course; but so many men have died mad in 
 dak-bungalows that there must be a fair per- 
 centage of lunatic ghosts. 
 
 In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts 
 rather, for there were two of them. Up till 
 that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's 
 method of handling them, as shown in u The 
 Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and other 
 Stories." I am now in the Opposition. 
 
 We will call the bungalow Katmal dak- 
 bungalow. But that was the smallest part of 
 the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has 
 no right to sleep in dak-bungalows. He should 
 marry. Katmal dak-bungalow was old and 
 rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn 
 brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows 
 were nearly black with grime. It stood on a 
 by-path largely used by native Sub-Deputy 
 Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to 
 Forests ; but real Sahibs were rare. The 
 khansamah, who was nearly bent double with 
 age, said so. 
 
 When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided 
 rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a 
 restless wind, and every gust made a noise like 
 the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy-
 
 50 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 palms outside. The khansamah completely lost 
 his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib 
 once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me 
 the name of a well-known man who had been 
 buried for more than a quarter of a century, 
 and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of 
 that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen 
 a steel engraving of him at the head of a 
 double volume of Memoirs a month before, and 
 I felt ancient beyond telling. 
 
 The day shut in and the khansamah went to 
 get me food. He did not go through the pre- 
 tence of calling it "khana" — man's victuals. 
 He said "ratub" and that means, among other 
 things, "grub" — dog's rations. There was no 
 insult in his choice of the term. He had for- 
 gotten the other word, I suppose. 
 
 While he was cutting up the dead bodies of 
 animals, I settled myself down, after exploring 
 the dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, 
 beside my own, which was a corner kennel, 
 each giving into the other through dingy white 
 doors fastened with long iron bars. The 
 bungalow was a very solid one, but the parti- 
 tion-walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built 
 in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a 
 trunk echoed from my room down the other 
 three, and every footfall came back tremulously
 
 GHOST STORY 51 
 
 from the far walls. For this reason I shut the 
 door. There were no lamps — only candles in 
 long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the 
 bath-room. 
 
 For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak- 
 bungalow was the worst of the many that I had 
 ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and 
 the windows would not open; so a brazier of 
 charcoal would have been useless. The rain 
 and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned 
 round the house, and the toddy-palms rattled 
 and roared. Half a dozen jackals went 
 through the compound singing, and a hyena 
 stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena 
 would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection 
 of the Dead — the worst sort of Dead. Then 
 came the ratub — a curious meal, half native 
 and half English in composition — with the old 
 khansamah babbling behind my chair about 
 dead and gone English people, and the wind- 
 blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with 
 the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was 
 just the sort of dinner and evening to make a 
 man think of every single one of his past sins, 
 and of all the others that he intended to com- 
 mit if he lived. 
 
 Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not 
 easy. The lamp in the bath-room threw the
 
 52 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 most absurd shadows into the room, and the 
 wind was beginning to talk nonsense. 
 
 Just when the reasons were drowsy with 
 blood-sucking I heard the regular — "Let-us- 
 take-and-heave-him-over" grunt of doolie- 
 bearers in the compound. First one doolie 
 came in, then a second, and then a third. I 
 heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and 
 the shutter in front of my door shook. "That's 
 some one trying to come in," I said. But no 
 one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was 
 the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next 
 to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner 
 door opened. "That's some Sub-Deputy As- 
 sistant," I said, "and he has brought his 
 friends with him. Now they'll talk and spit 
 and smoke for an hour." 
 
 But there were no voices and no footsteps. 
 No one was putting his luggage into the next 
 room. The door shut, and I thanked Provi- 
 dence that I was to be left in peace. But I was 
 curious to know where the doolies had gone. I 
 got out of bed and looked into the darkness. 
 There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I 
 was getting into bed again, I heard, in the 
 next room, the sound that no man in his senses 
 can possibly mistake — the whir of a billiard 
 ball down the length of the slates when the
 
 GHOST STORY 53 
 
 striker is stringing for break. No other sound 
 is like it. A minute afterward there was an- 
 other whir, and I got into bed. I was not 
 frightened — indeed I was not. I was very 
 curious to know what had become of the 
 doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason. 
 
 Next minute I heard the double click of a 
 cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to 
 say that hair stands up. The skin of the head 
 tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly 
 bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair 
 sitting up. There was a whir and a click, and 
 both sounds could only have been made by one 
 thing — a billiard ball. I argued the matter out 
 at great length with myself; and the more I 
 argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, 
 one table, and two chairs — all the furniture of 
 the room next to mine — could so exactly dupli- 
 cate the sounds of a game of billiards. After 
 another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge 
 by the whir, I argued no more. I had found 
 my ghost and would have given worlds to have 
 escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened, 
 and with each listen the game grew clearer. 
 There was whir on whir and click on click. 
 Sometimes there was a double click and a whir 
 and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, 
 people were playing billiards in the next room.
 
 54 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 And the next room was not big enough to hold 
 a billiard table! 
 
 Between the pauses of the wind I heard the 
 game go forward — stroke after stroke. I tried 
 to believe that I could not hear voices ; but that 
 attempt was a failure. 
 
 Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary- 
 fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, 
 quivering dread of something that you cannot 
 see — fear that dries the inside of the mouth 
 and half of the throat — fear that makes you 
 sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in 
 order to keep the uvula at work? This is a 
 fine Fear — a great cowardice, and must be felt 
 to be appreciated. The very improbability of 
 billiards in a dak-bungalow proved the reality 
 of the thing. No man — drunk or sober — could 
 imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spit- 
 ting crack of a "screw-cannon." 
 
 A severe course of dak-bungalows has this 
 disadvantage — it breeds infinite credulity. If 
 a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow- 
 haunter : — "There is a corpse in the next room, 
 and there's a mad girl in the next but one, and 
 the woman and man on that camel have just 
 eloped from a place sixty miles away," the 
 hearer would not disbelieve because he would 
 know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or 
 horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.
 
 GHOST STORY 55 
 
 This credulity, unfortunately, extends to 
 ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own 
 house would have turned on his side and slept. 
 I did not. So surely as I was given up as a 
 bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed 
 because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, 
 so surely did I hear every stroke of a long 
 game at billiards played in the echoing room 
 behind the iron-barred door. My dominant 
 fear was that the players might want a marker. 
 It was an absurd fear; because creatures who 
 could play in the dark would be above such 
 superfluities. I only know that that was my 
 terror; and it was real. 
 
 After a long while, the game stopped, and 
 the door banged. I slept because I was dead 
 tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to 
 have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia 
 would I have dropped the door-bar and peered 
 into the dark of the next room. 
 
 When the morning came, I considered that I 
 had done well and wisely, and inquired for the 
 means of departure. 
 
 "By the way, khansamah" I said, "what 
 were those three doolies doing in my compound 
 in the night?" 
 
 "There were no doolies," said the khan- 
 samah.
 
 56 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 I went into the next room and the daylight 
 streamed through the open door. I was im- 
 mensely brave. I would, at that hour, have 
 played Black Pool with the owner of the big 
 Black Pool down below. 
 
 "Has this place always been a dak-bunga- 
 low?" I asked. 
 
 "No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty 
 years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a 
 billiard-room." 
 
 "A how much?" 
 
 "A billiard-room for the Sahibs who built 
 the Railway. I was khansamah then in the big 
 house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and 
 I used to come across with brandy-shrab. 
 These three rooms were all one, and they held 
 a big table on which the Sahibs played every 
 evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, 
 and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to 
 Kabul." 
 
 "Do you remember anything about the 
 Sahibs?" 
 
 "It is long ago, but I remember that one 
 Sahib, a fat man and always angry, was play- 
 ing here one night, and he said to me : — 
 'Mangal Khan, brandy-/>am' do' and I filled 
 the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, 
 and his head fell lower and lower till it hit the
 
 GHOST STORY 57 
 
 table, and his spectacles came off, and when we 
 — the Sahibs and I myself — ran to lift him he 
 was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, 
 he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, 
 old Mangal Khan, am still living, by your 
 favor." 
 
 That was more than enough ! I had my 
 ghost — a first-hand, authenticated article. I 
 would write to the Society for Psychical Re- 
 search — I would paralyze the Empire with the 
 news ! But I would, first of all, put eighty 
 miles of assessed crop-land between myself and 
 that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The 
 Society might send their regular agent to in- 
 vestigate later on. 
 
 I went into my own room and prepared to 
 pack after noting down the facts of the case. 
 As I smoked I heard the game begin again — 
 with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was 
 a short one. 
 
 The door was open and I could see into the 
 room. Click — click! That was a cannon. I 
 entered the room without fear, for there was 
 sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. 
 The unseen game was going on at a tremen- 
 dous rate. And well it might, when a restless 
 little rat was running to and fro inside the 
 dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose
 
 58 MY OWN TRUE 
 
 window-sash was making fifty breaks off the 
 window-bolt as it shook in the breeze ! 
 
 Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard 
 balls ! Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball 
 over the slate ! But I was to be excused. Even 
 when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was 
 marvelously like that of a fast game. 
 
 Entered angrily the faithful partner of my 
 sorrows, Kadir Baksh. 
 
 "This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! 
 No wonder the Presence was disturbed and is 
 speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to 
 the bungalow late last night when I was sleep- 
 ing outside, and said that it was their custom 
 to rest in the rooms set apart for the English 
 people! What honor has the khansamahf 
 They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No 
 wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that 
 the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, 
 and the work of a dirty man!" 
 
 Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken 
 from each gang two annas for rent in advance, 
 and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them 
 with the big green umbrella whose use I could 
 never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no 
 notions of morality. 
 
 There was an interview with the khansamah, 
 but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave
 
 GHOST STORY 59 
 
 place to pity, and pity led to a long conversa- 
 tion, in the course of which he put the fat En- 
 gineer-Sahib's tragic death in three separate 
 stations — two of them fifty miles away. The 
 third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib 
 died while driving a dog-cart. 
 
 If I had encouraged him the khansamah 
 would have wandered all through Bengal with 
 his corpse. 
 
 I did not go away as soon as I intended. I 
 stayed for the night, while the wind and the 
 rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a 
 ding-dong "hundred and fifty up." Then the 
 wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I 
 felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall- 
 marked ghost story. 
 
 Had I only stopped at the proper time, I 
 could have made anything out of it. 
 
 That was the bitterest thought of all!
 
 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE 
 JUKES
 
 THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE 
 JUKES 
 
 Alive or dead — there is no other way. — Native Proverb. 
 
 THERE is, as the conjurors say, no decep- 
 tion about this tale. Jukes by accident 
 stumbled upon a village that is well known to 
 exist, though he is the only Englishman who 
 has been there. A somewhat similar institu- 
 tion used to flourish on the outskirts of Cal- 
 cutta, and there is a story that if you go into 
 the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart of 
 the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across 
 not a village but a town where the Dead who 
 did not die but may not live have established 
 their headquarters. And, since it is perfectly 
 true that in the same Desert is a wonderful 
 city where all the rich money-lenders retreat 
 after they have made their fortunes (fortunes 
 so vast that the owners cannot trust even the 
 strong hand of the Government to protect 
 them, but take refuge in the waterless sands), 
 and drive sumptuous C-spring barouches, and 
 buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces 
 63
 
 64 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 with gold and ivory and Minton tiles and 
 mother-o'-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's tale 
 should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, 
 with a head for plans and distances and things 
 of that kind, and he certainly would not take 
 the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He 
 could earn more by doing his legitimate work. 
 He never varies the tale in the telling, and 
 grows very hot and indignant when he thinks 
 of the disrespectful treatment he received. He 
 wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but 
 he has since touched it up in places and in- 
 troduced Moral Reflections, thus : 
 
 In the beginning it all arose from a slight at- 
 tack of fever. My work necessitated my being 
 in camp for some months between Pakpattan 
 and Mubarakpur — a desolate sandy stretch of 
 country as every one who has had the misfor- 
 tune to go there may know. My coolies were 
 neither more nor less exasperating than other 
 gangs, and my work demanded sufficient atten- 
 tion to keep me from moping, had I been in- 
 clined to so unmanly a weakness. 
 
 On the 23d December, 1884, I felt a little 
 feverish. There was a full moon at the time, 
 and, in consequence, every dog near my tent 
 was baying it. The brutes assembled in twos 
 and threes and drove me frantic. A few days
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 65 
 
 previously I had shot one loud-mouthed singer 
 and suspended his carcass in terrorcm about 
 fifty yards from my tent-door. But his friends 
 fell upon, fought for, and ultimately devoured 
 the body: and, as it seemed to me, sang their 
 hymns of thanksgiving afterward with re- 
 newed energy. 
 
 The lightheadedness which accompanies 
 fever acts differently on different men. Mv 
 irritation gave way, after a short time, to a 
 fixed determination to slaughter one huge 
 black and white beast who had been foremost 
 in song and first in flight throughout the even- 
 ing. Thanks to a shaking hand and a giddy 
 head I had already missed him twice with both 
 barrels of my shotgun, when it struck me that 
 my best plan would be to ride him down in the 
 open and finish him off with a hog-spear. 
 This, of course, was merely the semi-delirious 
 notion of a fever patient ; but I remember that 
 it struck me at the time as being eminently 
 practical and feasible. 
 
 I therefore ordered my groom to saddle Por- 
 nic and bring him round quietly to the rear of 
 my tent. When the pony was ready, I stood 
 at his head prepared to mount and dash out as 
 soon as the dog should again lift up his voice. 
 Pornic, by the way, had not been out of his
 
 66 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 pickets for a couple of days; the night air was 
 crisp and chilly; and I was armed with a spe- 
 cially long and sharp pair of persuaders with 
 which I had been rousing a sluggish cob that 
 afternoon. You will easily believe, then, that 
 when he was let go he went quickly. In one 
 moment, for the brute bolted as straight as a 
 die, the tent was left far behind, and we were 
 flying over the smooth sandy soil at racing 
 speed. In another we had passed the wretched 
 dog, and I had almost forgotten why it was 
 that I had taken horse and hog-spear. 
 
 The delirium of fever and the excitement of 
 rapid motion through the air must have taken 
 away the remnant of my senses. I have a faint 
 recollection of standing upright in my stirrups, 
 and of brandishing my hog-spear at the great 
 white Moon that looked down so calmly on my 
 mad gallop; and of shouting challenges to the 
 camel-thorn bushes as they whizzed past. 
 Once or twice, I believe, I swayed forward on 
 Pontic's neck, and literally hung on by my 
 spurs — as the marks next morning showed. 
 
 The wretched beast went forward like a 
 thing possessed, over what seemed to be a lim- 
 itless expanse of moonlit sand. Next, I re- 
 member, the ground rose suddenly in front of 
 us, and as we topped the ascent I saw the
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 67 
 
 waters of the Sutlej shining like a silver bar 
 below. Then Pornic blundered heavily on his 
 nose, and we rolled together down some un- 
 seen slope. 
 
 I must have lost consciousness, for when I 
 recovered I was lying on my stomach in a heap 
 of soft white sand, and the dawn was begin- 
 ning to break dimly over the edge of the slope 
 down which I had fallen. As the light grew 
 stronger I saw that I was at the bottom of a 
 horseshoe-shaped crater of sand, opening on 
 one side directly on to the shoals of the Sutlej. 
 My fever had altogether left me, and, with the 
 exception of a slight dizziness in the head, I 
 felt no bad effects from the fall over night. 
 
 Pornic, who was standing a few yards 
 away, was naturally a good deal exhausted, 
 but had not hurt himself in the least. His 
 saddle, a favorite polo one. was much knocked 
 about, and had been twisted under his belly. 
 It took me some time to put him to rights, and 
 in the meantime I had ample opportunities of 
 observing the spot into which I had so fool- 
 ishly dropped. 
 
 At the risk of being considered tedious, I 
 must describe it at length ; inasmuch as an ac- 
 curate mental picture of its peculiarities will 
 be of material assistance in enabling the reader 
 to understand what follows.
 
 68 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 Imagine then, as I have said before, a horse- 
 shoe-shaped crater of sand with steeply graded 
 sand walls about thirty-five feet high. (The 
 slope, I fancy, must have been about 65°. ) 
 This crater enclosed a level piece of ground 
 about fifty yards long by thirty at its broadest 
 part, with a rude well in the centre. Round 
 the bottom of the crater, about three feet from 
 the level of the ground proper, ran a series of 
 eighty-three semicircular, ovoid, square, and 
 multilateral holes, all about three feet at the 
 mouth. Each hole on inspection showed that 
 it was carefully shored internally with drift- 
 wood and bamboos, and over the mouth a 
 wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of 
 a jockey's cap, for two feet. No sign of life 
 was visible in these tunnels, but a most sicken- 
 ing stench pervaded the entire amphitheatre — 
 a stench fouler than any which my wanderings 
 in Indian villages have introduced me to. 
 
 Having remounted Pornic, who was as anx- 
 ious as I to get back to camp, I rode round 
 the base of the horseshoe to find some place 
 whence an exit would be practicable. The in- 
 habitants, whoever they might be, had not 
 thought fit to put in an appearance, so I was 
 left to my own devices. My first attempt to 
 "rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 69 
 
 me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the 
 same model as that which the ant-lion sets for 
 its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured 
 down from above in tons, and rattled on the 
 drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A 
 couple of ineffectual charges sent us both roll- 
 ing down to the bottom, half choked with the 
 torrents of sand ; and I was constrained to turn 
 my attention to the river-bank. 
 
 Here everything seemed easy enough. The 
 sand hills ran down to the river edge, it is true, 
 but there were plenty of shoals and shallows 
 across which I could gallop Pornic, and find 
 my way back to terra firma by turning sharply 
 to the right or the left. As I led Pornic over 
 the sands I was startled by the faint pop of a 
 rifle across the river ; and at the same moment 
 a bullet dropped with a sharp "whit" close to 
 Pornic's head. 
 
 There was no mistaking the nature of the 
 missile — a regulation Martini-Henry "picket." 
 About five hundred yards away a country-boat 
 was anchored in midstream ; and a jet of smoke 
 drifting away from its bows in the still morn- 
 ing air showed me whence the delicate atten- 
 tion had come. Was ever a respectable gentle- 
 man in such an impasse? The treacherous 
 sand slope allowed no escape from a spot
 
 jo THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 which I had visited most involuntarily, and a 
 promenade on the river frontage was the sig- 
 nal for a bombardment from some insane na- 
 tive in a boat. I'm afraid that I lost my tem- 
 per very much indeed. 
 
 Another bullet reminded me that I had better 
 save my breath to cool my porridge ; and I re- 
 treated hastily up the sands and back to the 
 horseshoe, where I saw that the noise of the 
 rifle had drawn sixty-five human beings from 
 the badger-holes which I had up till that point 
 supposed to be untenanted. I found myself 
 in the midst of a crowd of spectators — about 
 forty men, twenty women, and one child who 
 could not have been more than five years old. 
 They were all scantily clothed in that salmon- 
 colored cloth which one associates with Hindu 
 mendicants, and, at first sight, gave me the im- 
 pression of a band of loathsome fakirs. The 
 filth and repulsiveness of the assembly were 
 beyond all description, and I shuddered to 
 think what their life in the badger-holes must 
 be. 
 
 Even in these days, when local self-govern- 
 ment has destroyed the greater part of a na- 
 tive's respect for a Sahib, I have been accus- 
 tomed to a certain amount of civility from my 
 inferiors, and on approaching the crowd nat-
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 71 
 
 urally expected that there would be some rec- 
 ognition of my presence. As a matter of fact 
 there was ; but it was by no means what I had 
 looked for. 
 
 The ragged crew actually laughed at me — 
 such laughter I hope I may never hear again. 
 They cackled, yelled, whistled, and howled as 
 I walked into their midst; some of them liter- 
 ally throwing themselves down on the ground 
 in convulsions of unholy mirth. In a moment 
 I had let go Pornic's head, and, irritated be- 
 yond expression at the morning's adventure, 
 commenced cuffing those nearest to me with 
 all the force I could. The wretches dropped 
 under my blows like nine-pins, and the laugh- 
 ter gave place to wails for mercy ; while those 
 yet untouched clasped me round the knees, im- 
 ploring me in all sorts of uncouth tongues to 
 spare them. 
 
 In the tumult, and just when I was feeling 
 very much ashamed of myself for having thus 
 easily given way to my temper, a thin, high 
 voice murmured in English from behind my 
 shoulder: — "Sahib! Sahib! Do you not 
 know me? Sahib, it is Gunga Dass, the tele- 
 graph-master." 
 
 I spun round quickly and faced the speaker. 
 
 Gunga Dass (I have, of course, no hesita-
 
 72 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 tion in mentioning the man's real name) I had 
 known four years before as a Deccanee Brah- 
 min loaned by the Punjab Government to one 
 of the Khalsia States. He was in charge of a 
 branch telegraph-office there, and when I had 
 last met him was a jovial, full-stomached, 
 portly Government servant with a marvelous 
 capacity for making bad puns in English — a 
 peculiarity which made me remember him long 
 after I had forgotten his services to me in his 
 official capacity. It is seldom that a Hindu 
 makes English puns. 
 
 Now, however, the man was changed be- 
 yond all recognition. Caste-mark, stomach, 
 slate-colored continuations, and unctuous 
 speech were all gone. I looked at a withered 
 skeleton, turbanless and almost naked, with 
 long matted hair and deep-set codfish-eyes. 
 But for a crescent-shaped scar on the left 
 cheek — the result of an accident for which I 
 was responsible — I should never have known 
 him. But it was indubitably Gunga Dass, and 
 — for this I was thankful — an English-speak- 
 ing native who might at least tell me the mean- 
 ing of all that I had gone through that day. 
 
 The crowd retreated to some distance as I 
 turned toward the miserable figure, and or- 
 dered him to show me some method of escap-
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 73 
 
 ing from the crater. He held a freshly plucked 
 crow in his hand, and in reply to my question 
 climbed slowly on a platform of sand which 
 ran in front of the holes, and commenced 
 lighting a fire there in silence. Dried bents, 
 sand-poppies, and driftwood burn quickly ; and 
 I derived much consolation from the fact that 
 he lit them with an ordinary sulphur-match. 
 When they were in a bright glow, and the 
 crow was neatly spitted in front thereof, 
 Gunda Dass began without a word of pre- 
 amble : 1 
 
 "There are only two kinds of men, Sar. 
 The alive and the dead. When you are dead 
 you are dead, but when you are alive you live." 
 (Here the crow demanded his attention for an 
 instant as it twirled before the fire in danger 
 of being burned to a cinder.) "If you die at 
 home and do not die when you come to the 
 ghat to be burned you come here." 
 
 The nature of the reeking village was made 
 plain now, and all that I had known or read of 
 the grotesque and the horrible paled before the 
 fact just communicated by the ex-Brahmin. 
 Sixteen years ago, when I first landed in Bom- 
 bay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian 
 of the existence, somewhere in India, of a 
 place to which such Hindus as had the misfor-
 
 74 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 tune to recover from trance or catalepsy were 
 conveyed and kept, and I recollect laughing 
 heartily at what I was then pleased to consider 
 a traveler's tale. Sitting at the bottom of the 
 sand-trap, the memory of Watson's Hotel, 
 with its swinging punkahs, white-robed at- 
 tendants, and the sallow-faced Armenian, rose 
 up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and 
 I burst into a loud fit of laughter. The con- 
 trast was too absurd ! 
 
 Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean 
 bird, watched me curiously. Hindus seldom 
 laugh, and his surroundings were not such as 
 to move Gunga Dass to any undue excess of 
 hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly from 
 the wooden spit and as solemnly devoured it. 
 Then he continued his story, which I give in 
 his own words : 
 
 "In epidemics of the cholera you are carried 
 to be burned almost before you are dead. 
 When you come to the riverside the cold air, 
 perhaps, makes you alive, and then, if you are 
 only little alive, mud is put on your nose and 
 mouth and you die conclusively. If you are 
 rather more alive, more mud is put; but if you 
 are too lively they let you go and take you 
 away. I was too lively, and made protestation 
 with anger against the indignities that they en-
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 75 
 
 deavored to press upon me. In those days I 
 was Brahmin and proud man. Now I am 
 dead man and eat" — here he eyed the well- 
 gnawed breast bone with the first sign of emo- 
 tion that I had seen in him since we met — 
 "crows, and other things. They took me from 
 my sheets when they saw that I was too lively 
 and gave me medicines for one week, and I 
 survived successfully. Then they sent me by 
 rail from my place to Okara Station, with a 
 man to take care of me ; and at Okara Station 
 we met two other men, and they conducted 
 we three on camels, in the night, from Okara 
 Station to this place, and they propelled me 
 from the top to the bottom, and the other two 
 succeeded, and I have been here ever since two 
 and a half years. Once I was Brahmin and 
 proud man, and now I eat crows." 
 
 "There is no way of getting out?" 
 
 "None of what kind at all. When I first 
 came I made experiments frequently and all 
 the others also, but we have always succumbed 
 to the sand which is precipitated upon our 
 heads." 
 
 "But surely," I broke in at this point, "the 
 river-front is open, and it is worth while dodg- 
 ing the bullets; while at night" — 
 
 I had already matured a rough plan of es-
 
 76 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 cape which a natural instinct of selfishness for- 
 bade me sharing with Gunga Dass. He, how- 
 ever, divined my unspoken thought almost as 
 soon as it was formed ; and, to my intense as- 
 tonishment, gave vent to a long low chuckle of 
 derision — the laughter, be it understood, of a 
 superior or at least of an equal. 
 
 "You will not" — he had dropped the Sir 
 completely after his opening sentence — "make 
 any escape that way. But you can try. I have 
 tried. Once only." 
 
 The sensation of nameless terror and abject 
 fear which I had in vain attempted to strive 
 against overmastered me completely. My long 
 fast — it was now close upon ten o'clock, and 
 I had eaten nothing since tiffin on the previous 
 day — combined with the violent and unnatural 
 agitation of the ride had exhausted me, and I 
 verily believe that, for a few minutes, I acted 
 as one mad. I hurled myself against the piti- 
 less sand-slope. I ran round the base of the 
 crater, blaspheming and praying by turns. I 
 crawled out among the sedges of the river- 
 front, only to be driven back each time in an 
 agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets 
 which cut up the sand round me — for I dared 
 not face the death of a mad dog among that 
 hideous crowd — and finally fell, spent and rav-
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 77 
 
 ing, at the curb of the well. No one had taken 
 the slightest notice of an exhibition which 
 makes me blush hotly even when I think of it 
 now. 
 
 Two or three men trod on my panting body 
 as they drew water, but they were evidently 
 used to this sort of thing, and had no time to 
 waste upon me. The situation was humiliat- 
 ing. Gunga Dass, indeed, when he had banked 
 the embers of his fire with sand, was at some 
 pains to throw half a cupful of fetid water 
 over my head, an attention for which I could 
 have fallen on my knees and thanked him, but 
 he was laughing all the while in the same 
 mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my 
 first attempt to force the shoals. And so, in a 
 semi-comatose condition, I lay till noon. Then, 
 being only a man after all, I felt hungry, and 
 intimated as much to Gunga Dass, whom I 
 had begun to regard as my natural protector. 
 Following the impulse of the outer world when 
 dealing with natives, I put my hand into my 
 pocket and drew out four annas. The ab- 
 surdity of the gift struck me at once, and I 
 was about to replace the money. 
 
 Gunga Dass, however, was of a different 
 opinion. "Give me the money," said he; "all 
 you have, or I will get help, and we will kill
 
 78 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 you!" All this as if it were the most natural 
 thing in the world! 
 
 A Briton's first impulse, I believe, is to 
 guard the contents of his pockets; but a mo- 
 ment's reflection convinced me of the futility 
 of differing with the one man who had it in 
 his power to make me comfortable; and with 
 whose help it was possible that I might even- 
 tually escape from the crater. I gave him all 
 the money in my possession, Rs. 9-8-5 — 
 nine rupees eight annas and five pie — for I al- 
 ways keep small change as bakshish when I am 
 in camp. Gunga Dass clutched the coins, and 
 hid them at once in his ragged loin-cloth, his 
 expression changing to something diabolical 
 as he looked round to assure himself that no 
 one had observed us. 
 
 "Now I will give you something to eat," 
 said he. 
 
 What pleasure the possession of my money 
 could have afforded him I am unable to say; 
 but inasmuch as it did give him evident delight 
 I was not sorry that I had parted with it so 
 readily, for I had no doubt that he would have 
 had me killed if I had refused. One does not 
 protest against the vagaries of a den of wild 
 beasts; and my companions were lower than 
 any beasts. While I devoured what Gunga
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 79 
 
 Dass had provided, a coarse chapatti and a 
 cupful of the foul well-water, the people 
 showed not the faintest sign of curiosity — that 
 curiosity which is so rampant, as a rule, in an 
 Indian village. 
 
 I could even fancy that they despised me. 
 At all events they treated me with the most 
 chilling indifference, and Gunga Dass was 
 nearly as bad. I plied him with questions 
 about the terrible village, and received ex- 
 tremely unsatisfactory answers. So far as 
 I could gather, it had been in existence from 
 time immemorial — whence I concluded that it 
 was at least a century old — and during that 
 time no one had ever been known to escape 
 from it. [I had to control myself here with 
 both hands, lest the blind terror should lay 
 hold of me a second time and drive me raving 
 round the crater.] Gunga Dass took a mali- 
 cious pleasure in emphasizing this point and in 
 watching me wince. Nothing that I could do 
 would induce him to tell me who the mysteri- 
 ous "They" were. 
 
 "It is so ordered," he would reply, "and I 
 do not yet know any one who has disobeyed 
 the orders." 
 
 "Only wait till my servants find that I am 
 missing," I retorted, "and I promise you that
 
 80 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 this place shall be cleared off the face of the 
 earth, and I'll give you a lesson in civility, too, 
 my friend." 
 
 "Your servants would be torn in pieces be- 
 fore they came near this place; and, besides, 
 you are dead, my dear friend. It is not your 
 fault, of course, but none the less you are dead 
 and buried." 
 
 At irregular intervals supplies of food, I 
 was told, were dropped down from the land 
 side into the amphitheatre, and the inhabitants 
 fought for them like wild beasts. When a 
 man felt his death coming on he retreated to 
 his lair and died there. The body was some- 
 times dragged out of the hole and thrown on 
 to the sand, or allowed to rot where it lay. 
 
 The phrase "thrown on to the sand" caught 
 my attention, and I asked Gunga Dass whether 
 this sort of thing was not likely to breed a pes- 
 tilence. 
 
 "That," said he, with another of his wheezy 
 chuckles, "you may see for yourself subse- 
 quently. You will have much time to make 
 observations." 
 
 Whereat, to his great delight, I winced once 
 more and hastily continued the conversation : — 
 "And how do you live here from day to day? 
 What do you do?" The question elicited ex-
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 81 
 
 actly the same answer as before — coupled with 
 the information that "this place is like your 
 European heaven; there is neither marrying 
 nor giving in marriage." 
 
 Gunga Dass has been educated at a Mission 
 School, and, as he himself admitted, had he 
 only changed his religion "like a wise man," 
 might have avoided the living grave which was 
 now his portion. But as long as I was with 
 him I fancy he was happy. 
 
 Here was a Sahib, a representative of the 
 dominant race, helpless as a child and com- 
 pletely at the mercy of his native neighbors. 
 In a deliberate lazy way he set himself to tor- 
 ture me as a schoolboy would devote a raptur- 
 ous half-hour to watching the agonies of an 
 impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow 
 might glue himself comfortably to the neck of 
 a rabbit. The burden of his conversation was 
 that there was no escape "of no kind what- 
 ever," and that I should stay here till I died 
 and was "thrown on to the sand." If it were 
 possible to forejudge the conversation of the 
 Damned on the advent of a new soul in their 
 abode, I should say that they would speak as 
 Gunga Dass did to me throughout that long 
 afternoon. I was powerless to protest or an- 
 swer; all my energies being devoted to a strug-
 
 82 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 gle against the inexplicable terror that threat- 
 ened to overwhelm me again and again. I 
 can compare the feeling to nothing except the 
 struggles of a man against the overpowering 
 nausea of the Channel passage — only my 
 agony was of the spirit and infinitely more ter- 
 rible. 
 
 As the day wore on, the inhabitants began 
 to appear in full strength to catch the rays of 
 the afternoon sun, which were now sloping in 
 at the mouth of the crater. They assembled in 
 little knots, and talked among themselves with- 
 out even throwing a glance in my direction. 
 About four o'clock, as far as I could judge, 
 Gunga Dass rose and dived into his lair for a 
 moment, emerging with a live crow in his 
 hands. The wretched bird was in a most 
 draggled and deplorable condition, but seemed 
 to be in no way afraid of its master. Advanc- 
 ing cautiously to the river front, Gunga Dass 
 stepped from tussock to tussock until he had 
 reached a smooth patch of sand directly in the 
 line of the boat's fire. The occupants of the 
 boat took no notice. Here he stopped, and, 
 with a couple of dexterous turns of the wrist, 
 pegged the bird on its back with outstretched 
 wings. As was only natural, the crow began 
 to shriek at once and beat the air with its claws.
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 83 
 
 In a few seconds the clamor had attracted the 
 attention of a bevy of wild crows on a shoal a 
 few hundred yards away, where they were dis- 
 cussing something that looked like a corpse. 
 Half a dozen crows flew over at once to see 
 what was going on, and also, as it proved, to 
 attack the pinioned bird. Gunga Dass, who 
 had lain down on a tussock, motioned to me to 
 be quiet, though I fancy this was a needless 
 precaution. In a moment, and before I could 
 see how it happened, a wild crow, who had 
 grappled with the shrieking and helpless bird, 
 was entangled in the latter's claws, swiftly dis- 
 engaged by Gunga Dass, and pegged down 
 beside its companion in adversity. Curiosity, 
 it seemed, overpowered the rest of the flock, 
 and almost before Gunga Dass and I had time 
 to withdraw to the tussock, two more captives 
 were struggling in the upturned claws of the 
 decoys. So the chase — if I can give it so dig- 
 nified a name — continued until Gunga Dass 
 had captured seven crows. Five of them he 
 throttled at once, reserving two for further 
 operations another day. I was a good deal 
 impressed by this, to me, novel method of se- 
 curing food, and complimented Gunga Dass on 
 his skill. 
 
 "It is nothing to do," said he. "To-morrow
 
 84 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 you must do it for me. You are stronger than 
 I am." 
 
 This calm assumption of superiority upset 
 me not a little, and I answered peremptorily; 
 — "Indeed, you old ruffian! What do you 
 think I have given you money for?" 
 
 "Very well," was the unmoved reply. "Per- 
 haps not to-morrow, nor the day after, nor 
 subsequently; but in the end, and for many 
 years, you will catch crows and eat crows, and 
 you will thank your European God that you 
 have crows to catch and eat." 
 
 I could have cheerfully strangled him for 
 this ; but judged it best under the circum- 
 stances to smother my resentment. An hour 
 later I was eating one of the crows ; and, as 
 Gunga Dass had said, thanking my God that 
 I had a crow to eat. Never as long as I live 
 shall I forget that evening meal. The whole 
 population were squatting on the hard sand 
 platform opposite their dens, huddled over tiny 
 fires of refuse and dried rushes. Death, hav- 
 ing once laid his hand upon these men and for- 
 borne to strike, seemed to stand aloof from 
 them now ; for most of our company were old 
 men, bent and worn and twisted with years, 
 and women aged to all appearance as the Fates 
 themselves. They sat together in knots and
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 85 
 
 talked — God only knows what they found to 
 discuss — in low equable tones, curiously in 
 contrast to the strident babble with which na- 
 tives are accustomed to make day hideous. 
 Now and then an access of that sudden fury 
 which had possessed me in the morning would 
 lay hold on a man or woman; and with yells 
 and imprecations the sufferer would attack the 
 steep slope until, baffled and bleeding, he fell 
 back on the platform incapable of moving a 
 limb. The others would never even raise their 
 eyes when this happened, as men too well 
 aware of the futility of their fellows' attempts 
 and wearied with their useless repetition. I 
 saw four such outbursts in the course of that 
 evening. 
 
 Gunga Dass took an eminently business-like 
 view 7 of my situation, and while we were din- 
 ing — I can afford to laugh at the recollection 
 now, but it was painful enough at the time — 
 propounded the terms on which he would con- 
 sent to "do" for me. My nine rupees eight 
 annas, he argued, at the rate of three annas a 
 day, would provide me with food for fifty- 
 one days, or about seven weeks ; that is to say, 
 he would be willing to cater for me for that 
 length of time. At the end of it I was to look 
 after myself. For a further consideration —
 
 86 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 videlicet my boots — he would be willing to al- 
 low me to occupy the den next to his own, and 
 would supply me with as much dried grass for 
 bedding as he could spare. 
 
 "Very well, Gunga Dass," I replied ; "to the 
 first terms I cheerfully agree, but, as there is 
 nothing on earth to prevent my killing you as 
 you sit here and taking everything that you 
 have" (I thought of the two invaluable crows 
 at the time), "I flatly refuse to give you my 
 boots and shall take whichever den I please." 
 
 The stroke was a bold one, and I was glad 
 when I saw that it had succeeded. Gunga Dass 
 changed his tone immediately, and disavowed 
 all intention of asking for my boots. At the 
 time it did not strike me as at all strange that 
 I, a Civil Engineer, a man of thirteen years' 
 standing in the Service, and, I trust, an aver- 
 age Englishman, should thus calmly threaten 
 murder and violence against the man who had, 
 for a consideration it is true, taken me under 
 his wing. I had left the world, it seemed, for 
 centuries. I was as certain then as I am now 
 of my own existence, that in the accursed set- 
 tlement there was no law save that of the 
 strongest ; that the living dead men had thrown 
 behind them every canon of the world which 
 had cast them out; and that I had to depend
 
 MORROWBIK JUKES 87 
 
 for my own life on my strength and vigilance 
 alone. The crew of the ill-fated Mignonette 
 are the only men who would understand my 
 frame of mind. "At present," 1 argued to 
 myself, "I am strong and a match for six of 
 these wretches. It is imperatively necessary 
 that I should, for my own sake, keep both 
 health and strength until the hour of my re- 
 lease comes — if it ever does." 
 
 Fortified with these resolutions, I ate and 
 drank as much as I could, and made Gunga 
 Dass understand that I intended to be his mas- 
 ter, and that the least sign of insubordination 
 on his part would be visited with the only pun- 
 ishment I had it in my power to inflict — sudden 
 and violent death. Shortly after this I went 
 to bed. That is to say, Gunga Dass gave me 
 a double armful of dried bents which I thrust 
 down the mouth of the lair to the right of his, 
 and followed myself, feet foremost; the hole 
 running about nine feet into the sand with a 
 slight downward inclination, and being neatly 
 shored with timbers. From my den, which 
 faced the river-front, I was able to watch the 
 waters of the Sutlej flowing past under the 
 light of a young moon and compose myself 
 to sleep as best I might. 
 
 The horrors of that night I shall never for-
 
 88 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 get. My den was nearly as narrow as a coffin, 
 and the sides had been worn smooth and 
 greasy by the contact of innumerable naked 
 bodies, added to which it smelled abominably. 
 Sleep was altogether out of the question to one 
 in my excited frame of mind. As the night 
 wore on, it seemed that the entire amphitheatre 
 was filled with legions of unclean devils that, 
 trooping up from the shoals below, mocked 
 the unfortunates in their lairs. 
 
 Personally I am not of an imaginative tem- 
 perament, — very few Engineers are, — but on 
 that occasion I was as completely prostrated 
 with nervous terror as any woman. After 
 half an hour or so, however, I was able once 
 more to calmly review my chances of escape. 
 Any exit by the steep sand walls was, of 
 course, impracticable. I had been thoroughly 
 convinced of this some time before. It was 
 possible, just possible, that I might, in the un- 
 certain moonlight, safely run the gauntlet of 
 the rifle shots. The place was so full of terror 
 for me that I was prepared to undergo any 
 risk in leaving it. Imagine my delight, then, 
 when after creeping stealthily to the river- 
 front I found that the infernal boat was not 
 there. My freedom lay before me in the next 
 few steps!
 
 
 * 
 
 ttOM&Ol .W <d iBniaho „,U noH £ wsibnA urlul yd S^m*****
 
 THE STRAY- OF 
 
 My den was nearly . »w as a coffin, 
 
 and the sides had ; >oth and 
 
 greasy by the contac le naked 
 
 bodies, added to which it abominably. 
 
 Sleep was altogether .estion to one 
 
 in my excited frame of mill the night 
 
 wore on, it seemed thi rire amphitheatre 
 
 was filled with legions of unclean devils that, 
 trooping up from the shoals below, mocked 
 the unfortunates in their la. 
 
 Personally I am not of an imaginative tem- 
 perament, — very few Engineers are, — but on 
 that occasion I was as completely prostrated 
 with nervous terror woman. After 
 
 half an hour or so, I I was able once 
 
 more to calmly re nances of escape. 
 
 Any exit by the ste 1 walls was, of 
 
 course, impracticable been thoroughly 
 
 convinced of this soi before. It was 
 
 possible, just possible, that I might, in the un- 
 certain moonlight run the gauntlet of 
 the rifle shots. Th was so full of terror 
 for me that I w red to undergo any 
 risk in leaving me my delight, then, 
 when after creej Ithily to the river- 
 front I found tl ial boat was not 
 there. My freed' e me in the next 
 few steps! 
 
 I struggled clear, sweating with terror 
 Mezzogravure by John Andrew & Son after original by W. Kirkpatrick


 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 89 
 
 By walking out to the first shallow pool that 
 lay at the foot of the projecting left horn of 
 the horseshoe, I could wade across, turn the 
 flank of the crater, and make my way inland. 
 Without a moment's hesitation I marched 
 briskly past the tussocks where Gunga Dass 
 had snared the crows, and out in the direction 
 of the smooth white sand beyond. My first 
 step from the tufts of dried grass showed me 
 how utterly futile was any hope of escape ; for 
 as I put my foot down, I felt an indescribable 
 drawing, sucking motion of the sand below. 
 Another moment and my leg was swallowed 
 up nearly to the knee. In the moonlight the 
 whole surface of the sand seemed to be shaken 
 with devilish delight at my disappointment. 
 I struggled clear, sweating with terror and ex- 
 ertion, back to the tussocks behind me and fell 
 on my face. 
 
 My only means of escape from the semicir- 
 cle was protected with a quicksand! 
 
 How long I lay I have not the faintest idea ; 
 but I was roused at last by the malevolent 
 chuckle of Gunga Dass at my ear. "I would 
 advise you, Protector of the Poor" (the ruffian 
 was speaking English) "to return to your 
 house. It is unhealthy to lie down here. 
 Moreover, when the boat returns, you will
 
 90 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 most certainly be rifled at." He stood over 
 me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling 
 and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first 
 impulse to catch the man by the neck and 
 throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly 
 and followed him to the platform below the 
 burrows. 
 
 Suddenly, and futilely as I thought while I 
 spoke, I asked : — "Gunga Dass, what is the 
 good of the boat if I can't get out anyhow?" 
 I recollect that even in my deepest trouble I 
 had been speculating vaguely on the waste of 
 ammunition in guarding an already well pro- 
 tected foreshore. 
 
 Gunga Dass laughed again and made an- 
 swer: — "They have the boat only in daytime. 
 It is for the reason that there is a way. I hope 
 we shall have the pleasure of your company 
 for much longer time. It is a pleasant spot 
 when you have been here some years and eaten 
 roast crow long enough." 
 
 I staggered, numbed and helpless, toward 
 the fetid burrow allotted to me, and fell asleep. 
 An hour or so later I was awakened by a 
 piercing scream — the shrill, high-pitched 
 scream of a horse in pain. Those who have 
 once heard that will never forget the sound. 
 I found some little difficulty in scrambling out
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 91 
 
 of the burrow. When I was in the open, I saw 
 Pornic, my poor old Pornic, lying dead on the 
 sandy soil. How they had killed him 1 cannol 
 guess. Gunga Dass explained that horse was 
 better than crow, and "greatesl good of great- 
 est number is political maxim. We arc now 
 Republic, Mister Jukes, and you are entitled to 
 a fair share of the beast. If you like, we will 
 pass a vote of thanks. Shall I propose?" 
 
 Yes, we were a Republic indeed! A Repub- 
 lic of wild beasts penned at the bottom of a 
 pit, to eat and fight and sleep till we died. I 
 attempted no protest of any kind, but sat clown 
 and stared at the hideous sight in front of me. 
 In less time almost than it takes me to write 
 this, Pornic's body was divided, in some un- 
 clean way or other; the men and women had 
 dragged the fragments on to the platform and 
 were preparing their morning meal. Gunga 
 Dass cooked mine. The almost irresistible im- 
 pulse to fly at the sand walls until I was wear- 
 ied laid hold of me afresh, and I had to strug- 
 gle against it with all my might. Gunga Dass 
 was offensively jocular till I told him that if 
 he addressed another remark of any kind 
 whatever to me I should strangle him where he 
 sat. This silenced him till silence became in- 
 supportable, and I bade him say something.
 
 92 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 "You will live here till you die like the other 
 Feringhi," he said coolly, watching me over 
 the fragment of gristle that he was gnawing. 
 
 "What other Sahib, you swine? Speak at 
 once, and don't stop to tell me a lie." 
 
 "He is over there," answered Gunga Dass, 
 pointing to a burrow-mouth about four doors 
 to the left of my own. "You can see for your- 
 self. He died in the burrow as you will die, 
 and I will die, and as all these men and women 
 and the one child will also die." 
 
 "For pity's sake tell me all you know about 
 him. Who was he? When did he come, and 
 when did he die?" 
 
 This appeal was a weak step on my part. 
 Gunga Dass only leered and replied : — "I will 
 not — unless you give me something first." 
 
 Then I recollected where I was, and struck 
 the man between the eyes, partially stunning 
 him. He stepped down from the platform at 
 once, and, cringing and fawning and weeping 
 and attempting to embrace my feet, led me 
 round to the burrow which he had indicated. 
 
 "I know nothing whatever about the gentle- 
 man. Your God be my witness that I do not. 
 He was as anxious to escape as you were, and 
 he was shot from the boat, though we all did 
 things to prevent him from attempting. He
 
 MOUROWBIE JUKES 93 
 
 was shot here." Gunga Dass laid his hand on 
 his lean stomach and bowed i<> the earth. 
 
 "Well, and what then? Go on!" 
 
 "And then — and then, Yonr Honor, we car- 
 ried him to his house and gave him water, and 
 put wet cloths on the wound, and he laid down 
 in his house and gave up the ghost." 
 
 "In how long? In how long?" 
 
 "About half an hour after he received his 
 wound. I call Vishnu to witness," yelled the 
 wretched man, "that I did everything for him. 
 Everything which was possible, that I did!" 
 
 He threw himself down on the ground and 
 clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts about 
 Gunga Dass's benevolence, and kicked him off 
 as he lay protesting. 
 
 "I believe you robbed him of everything he 
 had. But I can find out in a minute or two. 
 How long was the Sahib here?" 
 
 "Nearly a year and a half. I think he must 
 have gone mad. But hear me swear, Protec- 
 tor of the Poor ! Won't Your Honor hear me 
 swear that I never touched an article that be- 
 longed to him? What is Your Worship go- 
 ing to do?" 
 
 I had taken Gunga Dass by the waist and 
 had hauled him on to the platform opposite 
 the deserted burrow. As I did so I thought
 
 94 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 of my wretched fellow-prisoner's unspeakable 
 misery among all these horrors for eighteen 
 months, and the final agony of dying like a 
 rat in a hole, with a bullet-wound in the stom- 
 ach. Gunga Dass fancied I was going to kill 
 him and howled pitifully. The rest of the 
 population, in the plethora that follows a full 
 flesh meal, watched us without stirring. 
 
 "Go inside, Gunga Dass/' said I, "and fetch 
 it out." 
 
 I was feeling sick and faint with horror 
 now. Gunga Dass nearly rolled off the plat- 
 form and howled aloud. 
 
 "But I am Brahmin, Sahib — a high-caste 
 Brahmin. By your soul, by your father's soul, 
 do not make me do this thing !" 
 
 "Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and 
 my father's soul, in you go!" I said, and, seiz- 
 ing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head 
 into the mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest 
 of him in, and, sitting down, covered my face 
 with my hands. 
 
 At the end of a few minutes I heard a rustle 
 and a creak; then Gunga Dass in a sobbing, 
 choking whisper speaking to himself; then a 
 soft thud — and I uncovered my eyes. 
 
 The dry sand had turned the corpse en- 
 trusted to its keeping into a yellow-brown
 
 MORROWBIE JUKES 9$ 
 
 mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while 
 I examined it. The body — clad in an olive- 
 green hunting-suit much stained and worn, 
 with leather pads on the shoulders — was that 
 of a man betwen thirty and forty, above mid- 
 dle height, with light, sandy hair, long mous- 
 tache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left 
 canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a 
 portion of the lobe of the right ear was gone. 
 On the second finger of the left hand was a 
 ring — a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, 
 with a monogram that might have been either 
 "B.K." or "B.L." On the third finger of the 
 right hand was a silver ring in the shape of a 
 coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. 
 Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he 
 had picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, 
 covering the face of the body with my hand- 
 kerchief, I turned to examine these. I give 
 the full list in the hope that it may lead to the 
 identification of the unfortunate man : 
 
 i. Bowl of briarwood pipe, serrated at the 
 edge; much worn and blackened; bound with 
 string at the screw. 
 
 2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both 
 broken. 
 
 3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver 
 or nickel, name-plate, marked with monogram 
 "B.K."
 
 96 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 4. Envelope, postmark undecipherable, 
 bearing a Victorian stamp, addressed to "Miss 
 Mon— " (rest illegible)— "ham"— "nt." 
 
 5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with 
 pencil. First forty-five pages blank ; four and 
 a-half illegible; fifteen others filled with pri- 
 vate memoranda relating chiefly to three per- 
 sons — a Mrs. L. Singleton, abbreviated several 
 times to "Lot Single," "Mrs. S. May," and 
 "Garmison," referred to in places as "Jerry" 
 or "Jack." 
 
 6. Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. 
 Blade snapped short. Buck's horn, diamond 
 cut, with swivel and ring on the butt; frag- 
 ment of cotton cord attached. 
 
 It must not be supposed that I inventoried 
 all these things on the spot as fully as I have 
 here written them down. The notebook first 
 attracted my attention, and I put it in my 
 pocket with a view to studying it later on. 
 The rest of the articles I conveyed to my bur- 
 row for safety's sake, and there, being a me- 
 thodical man, I inventoried them. I then re- 
 turned to the corpse and ordered Gunga Dass 
 to help me to carry it out to the river-front. 
 While we were engaged in this, the exploded 
 shell of an old brown cartridge dropped out of 
 one of the pockets and rolled at my feet.
 
 MORROWMH JUKES 97 
 
 Gunga Dass had not seen it; and I fell to 
 thinking 1 that a man does not carry exploded 
 cartridge-cases, especially "browns," which 
 will not bear loading twice, aboul with him 
 when shooting. Tn other words, that cart- 
 ridge-case has been fired inside the crater. 
 Consequently there must be a gun somewhere. 
 I was on the verge of asking Gunga Dass, but 
 checked myself, knowing thai he would lie. 
 We laid the body down on the edge of the 
 quicksand by the tussocks. It was my inten- 
 tion to push it out and let it be swallowed up 
 — the only possible mode of burial that I could 
 think of. I ordered Gunga Dass to go away. 
 Then I gingerly put the corpse out on the 
 quicksand. In doing so, it was lying face 
 downward, I tore the frail and rotten khaki 
 shooting-coat open, disclosing a hideous cav- 
 ity in the back. I have already told you that 
 the dry sand had, as it were, mummified the 
 body. A moment's glance showed that the 
 gaping hole had been caused by a gun-shot 
 wound ; the gun must have been fired with the 
 muzzle almost touching the back. The shoot- 
 ing-coat, being intact, had been drawn over 
 the body after death, which must have been 
 instantaneous. The secret of the poor wretch's 
 death was plain to me in a flash. Some one
 
 98 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 of the crater, presumably Gunga Dass, must 
 have shot him with his own gun — the gun that 
 fitted the brown cartridges. He had never 
 attempted to escape in the face of the rifle-fire 
 from the boat. 
 
 I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it 
 sink from sight literally in a few seconds. I 
 shuddered as I watched. In a dazed, half- 
 conscious way I turned to peruse the notebook. 
 A stained and discolored slip of paper had been 
 inserted between the binding and the back, and 
 dropped out as I opened the pages. This is what 
 it contained: — "Four out from crow clump: 
 three left; nine out; two right; three back; two 
 left; fourteen out; two left; seven out; one 
 left; nine back; two right; six back; four 
 right; seven back." The paper had been 
 burned and charred at the edges. What it 
 meant I could not understand. I sat down on 
 the dried bents turning it over and over be- 
 tween my fingers, until I was aware of Gunga 
 Dass standing immediately behind me with 
 glowing eyes and outstretched hands. 
 
 "Have you got it?" he panted. "Will you 
 not let me look at it also? I swear that I will 
 return it." 
 
 "Got what? Return what?" I asked. 
 
 "That which you have in your hands. It
 
 MORHOWlUi: JUKES 99 
 
 will help us both." He stretched out his long, 
 bird-like talons, trembling with eagerness. 
 
 "I could never find it," he continued. "He 
 had secreted it about his person. Therefore 
 I shot him, but nevertheless I was unable to 
 obtain it." 
 
 Gunga Dass had quite forgotten his little 
 fiction about the rifle-bullet. 1 received the 
 information perfectly calmly. Morality is 
 blunted by consorting with the Dead who are 
 alive. 
 
 "What on earth are you raving about? 
 What is it you want me to give you?" 
 
 "The piece of paper in the notebook. It 
 will help us both. Oh, you fool! You fool! 
 Can you not see what it will do for us? We 
 shall escape!" 
 
 His voice rose almost to a scream, and he 
 danced with excitement before me. I own I 
 was moved at the chance of getting away. 
 
 "Don't skip! Explain yourself. Do you 
 mean to say that this slip of paper will help 
 us? What does it mean?" 
 
 "Read it aloud ! Read it aloud ! I beg and 
 I pray you to read it aloud." 
 
 I did so. Gunga Dass listened delightedly, 
 and drew an irregular line in the sand with his 
 fingers.
 
 ioo THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 "See now ! It was the length of his gun- 
 barrels without the stock. I have those bar- 
 rels. Four gun-barrels out from the place 
 where I caught crows. Straight out ; do you 
 follow me? Then three left — Ah! how well 
 I remember when that man worked it out night 
 after night. Then nine out, and so on. Out 
 is always straight before you across the quick- 
 sand. He told me so before I killed him." 
 
 "But if you knew all this why didn't you 
 get out before?" 
 
 "I did not know it. He told me that he was 
 working it out a year and a half ago, and how 
 he was working it out night after night when 
 the boat had gone away, and he could get out 
 near the quicksand safely. Then he said that 
 we would get away together. But I was afraid 
 that he would leave me behind one night when 
 he had worked it all out, and so I shot him. 
 Besides, it is not advisable that the men who 
 once get in here should escape. Only I, and / 
 am a Brahmin." 
 
 The prospect of escape had brought Gunga 
 Dass's caste back to him. He stood up, 
 walked about and gesticulated violently. 
 Eventually I managed to make him talk so- 
 berly, and he told me how this Englishman 
 had spent six months night after night in ex-
 
 MORROW BIE JUKES 101 
 
 ploring, inch by inch, the passage across the 
 quicksand; how he had declared it to be sim- 
 plicity itself up to within about twenty van Is 
 of the river bank after turning the flank of 
 the left horn of the horseshoe. This much he 
 had evidently not completed when Gunga Dass 
 shot him with his own gun. 
 
 In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities 
 of escape I recollect shaking hands effusively 
 with Gunga Dass, after we had decided that 
 w e were to make an attempt to get away that 
 very night. It was weary work waiting 
 throughout the afternoon. 
 
 About ten o'clock, as far as I could judge, 
 when the Moon had just risen above the lip 
 of the crater, Gunga Dass made a move for 
 his burrow to bring out the gun-barrels 
 whereby to measure our path. All the other 
 wretched inhabitants had retired to their lairs 
 long ago. The guardian boat drifted down- 
 stream some hours before, and we were utterly 
 alone by the crow-clump. Gunga Dass, while 
 carrying the gun-barrels, let slip the piece of 
 paper which was to be our guide. I stooped 
 down hastily to recover it, and, as I did so, 
 I was aware that the diabolical Brahmin was 
 aiming a violent blow at the back of my head 
 with the gun-barrels. It was too late to turn
 
 102 THE STRANGE RIDE OF 
 
 round. I must have received the blow some- 
 where on the nape of my neck. A hundred 
 thousand fiery stars danced before my eyes, 
 and I fell forward senseless at the edge of the 
 quicksand. 
 
 When I recovered consciousness, the Moon 
 was going down, and I was sensible of intoler- 
 able pain in the back of my head. Gunga Dass 
 had disappeared and my mouth was full of 
 blood. I lay down again and prayed that I 
 might die without more ado. Then the unrea- 
 soning fury which I have before mentioned 
 laid hold upon me, and I staggered inland 
 toward the walls of the crater. It seemed that 
 some one was calling to me in a whisper — 
 "Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!" exactly as my bearer 
 used to call me in the mornings. I fancied that 
 I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at 
 my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head 
 peering down into the amphitheatre — the head 
 of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my 
 collies. As soon as he had attracted my at- 
 tention, he held up his hand and showed a 
 rope. I motioned, staggering to and fro the 
 while, that he should throw it down. It was a 
 couple of leather punkah-ropes knotted to- 
 gether, with a loop at one end. I slipped the 
 loop over my head and under my arms ; heard 
 Dunnoo urge something forward ; was con-
 
 MORROW HI I : JUKES 103 
 
 scions that I was being dragged, face down- 
 ward up the Step sand slope, and the next in- 
 stant found myself choked and half fainting 
 on the sand hills overlooking the crater. 1 >un- 
 noo, with his face ashy grey in the moonlight, 
 implored me not to stay bnt to get back to my 
 tent at once. 
 
 It seems that he had tracked Pornic's foot- 
 prints fourteen miles across the sands to the 
 crater; had returned and told my servants, 
 who flatly refused to meddle with any one, 
 white or black, once fallen into the hideous 
 Village of the Dead ; whereupon Dunnoo had 
 taken one of my ponies and a couple of pun- 
 kah-ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled 
 me out as I have described. 
 
 To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now 
 my personal servant on a gold mohnr a month 
 — a sum which I still think far too little for 
 the services he has rendered. Nothing on 
 earth will induce me to go near that devilish 
 spot again, or to reveal its whereabouts more 
 clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass T 
 have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. 
 My sole motive in giving this to be published 
 is the hope that some one may possibly iden- 
 tify, from the details and the inventory which 
 I have given above, the corpse of the man in 
 the olive-green hunting-suit.
 
 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
 
 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 
 
 "Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be 
 found worthy." 
 
 THE law, as quoted, lays down a fair con- 
 duct of life, and one not easy to follow. 
 I have been fellow to a beggar again and again 
 under circumstances which prevented either of 
 us finding out whether the other was worthy. 
 I have still to be brother to a Prince, though 
 I once came near to kinship with what might 
 have been a veritable King and was promised 
 the reversion of a Kingdom — army, law- 
 courts, revenue and policy all complete. But, 
 to-day, I greatly fear that my King is dead, 
 and if I want a crown I must go and hunt it 
 for myself. 
 
 The beginning of everything was in a rail- 
 way train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. 
 There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which 
 necessitated traveling, not Second-class, which 
 is only half as dear as First-class, but by In- 
 termediate, which is very awful indeed. There 
 are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and 
 the population are either Intermediate, which 
 
 107
 
 108 THE MAN WHO 
 
 is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night 
 journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing 
 though intoxicated. Intermediates do not 
 patronize refreshment-rooms. They carry 
 their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets 
 from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink 
 the roadside water. That is why in the hot 
 weather Intermediates are taken out of the 
 carriages dead, and in all weathers are most 
 properly looked down upon. 
 
 My particular Intermediate happened to be 
 empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge 
 gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, follow- 
 ing the custom of Intermediates, passed the 
 time of day. He was a wanderer and a vaga- 
 bond like myself, but with an educated taste 
 for whiskey. He told tales of things he had 
 seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of 
 the Empire into which he had penetrated, and 
 of adventures in which he risked his life for 
 a few days' food. "If India was rilled with 
 men like you and me, not knowing more than 
 the crows where they'd get their next day's 
 rations, it isn't seventy millions of revenue the 
 land would be paying — it's seven hundred mil- 
 lions," said he; and as I looked at his mouth 
 and chin I was disposed to agree with him. 
 We talked politics — the politics of Loaferdom
 
 WOULD BE KING 109 
 
 that sees things from the underside where the 
 lath and plaster is not smoothed off — and we 
 talked postal arrangements because my friend 
 wanted to send a telegram back from the next 
 station to Ajmir, which is the turning-off 
 place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as 
 you travel westward. My friend had no money 
 beyond eight annas which he wanted for din- 
 ner, and I had no money at all, owing to the 
 hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Fur- 
 ther, I was going into a wilderness where, 
 though I should resume touch with the Treas- 
 ury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, 
 therefore, unable to help him in any way. 
 
 "We might threaten a Station-master, and 
 make him send a wire on tick," said my friend, 
 "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me, 
 and I've got my hands full these days. Did 
 you say you are traveling back along this line 
 within any days?" 
 
 "Within ten," I said. 
 
 "Can't you make it eight?" said he. "Mine 
 is rather urgent business." 
 
 "I can send your telegram within ten days if 
 that will serve you," I said. 
 
 "I couldn't trust the wire to fetch him now I 
 think of it. It's this way. He leaves Delhi on 
 the 23d for Bombay. That means he'll be run-
 
 no THE MAN WHO 
 
 ning through Ajmir about the night of the 
 23d." 
 
 "But I'm going into the Indian Desert," I 
 explained. 
 
 "Well and good," said he. "You'll be 
 changing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodh- 
 pore territory — you must do that — and he'll be 
 coming through Marwar Junction in the early 
 morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can 
 you be at Marwar Junction on that time? 
 'Twon't be inconveniencing you because I know 
 that there's precious few pickings to be got 
 out of these Central India States — even though 
 you pretend to be correspondent of the Back- 
 woodsman." 
 
 "Have you ever tried that trick ?" I asked. 
 
 "Again and again, but the Residents find 
 you out, and then you get escorted to the Bor- 
 der before you've time to get your knife into 
 them. But about my friend here. I must give 
 him a word o' mouth to tell him what's come to 
 me or else he won't know where to go. I would 
 take it more than kind of you if you was to 
 come out of Central India in time to catch him 
 at Marwar Junction, and say to him : — 'He has 
 gone South for the week.' He'll know what 
 that means. He's a big man with a red beard, 
 and a great swell he is. You'll find him sleep-
 
 WOULD BE KING in 
 
 ing like a gentleman with all his luggage round 
 him in a Second-class compartment. But don't 
 you be afraid. Slip down the window, and 
 say: — 'He has gone South for the week,' and 
 he'll tumble. It's only cutting your time of 
 stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as 
 a stranger — going to the West," he said, with 
 emphasis. 
 
 "Where have you come from?" said I. 
 
 "From the East," said he, "and I am hoping 
 that you will give him the message on the 
 Square — for the sake of my Mother as well 
 as your own." 
 
 Englishmen are not usually softened by ap- 
 peals to the memory of their mothers, but for 
 certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I 
 saw fit to agree. 
 
 "It's more than a little matter," said he, 
 "and that's why I ask you to do it — and now I 
 know that I can depend on you doing it. A 
 Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and 
 a red-haired man asleep in it. You'll be sure 
 to remember. I get out at the next station, and 
 I must hold on there till he comes or sends me 
 what I want." 
 
 "I'll give the message if I catch him," I said, 
 "and for the sake of your Mother as well as 
 mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't
 
 H2 THE MAN WHO 
 
 try to run the Central India States just now. as 
 the correspondent of the Backwoodsman. 
 There's a real one knocking about here, and it 
 might lead to trouble." 
 
 "Thank you," said he, simply, "and when 
 will the swine be gone? I can't starve because 
 he's ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of 
 the Degumber Rajah down here about his 
 father's widow, and give him a jump." 
 
 "What did he do to his father's widow, 
 then?" 
 
 "Filled her up with red pepper and slippered 
 her to death as she hung from a beam. I found 
 that out myself, and I'm the only man that 
 would dare going into the State to get hush- 
 money for it. They'll try to poison me, same 
 as they did in Chortumna when I went on the 
 loot there. But you'll give the man at Marwar 
 Junction my message ?" 
 
 He got out at a little roadside station, and I 
 reflected. I had heard, more than once, of men 
 personating correspondents of newspapers and 
 bleeding small Native States with threats of 
 exposure, but I had never met any of the caste 
 before. They lead a hard life, and generally 
 die with great suddenness. The Native States 
 have a wholesome horror of English newspa- 
 pers, which may throw light on their peculiar
 
 WOULD BE KING 113 
 
 methods of government, and do their best to 
 choke correspondents with champagne, or 
 drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand 
 barouches. They do not understand that no- 
 body cares a straw for the internal administra- 
 tion of Native States so long as oppression and 
 crime are kept within decent limits, and the 
 ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from 
 one end of the year to the other. Native 
 States were created by Providence in order to 
 supply picturesque scenery, tigers, and tall- 
 writing. They are the dark places of the earth, 
 full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Rail- 
 way and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the 
 other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I 
 left the train I did business with divers Kings, 
 and in eight days passed through many 
 changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress- 
 clothes and consorted with Princes and Politi- 
 cals, drinking from crystal and eating from sil- 
 ver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and 
 devoured what I could get, from a plate made 
 of a flapjack, and drank the running water, and 
 slept under the same rug as my servant. It 
 was all in the day's work. 
 
 Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert 
 upon the proper date, as I had promised, and 
 the night Mail set me down at Marwar June-
 
 H4 THE MAN WHO 
 
 tion, where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, na- 
 tive-managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The 
 Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt 
 at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had 
 just time to hurry to her platform and go down 
 the carriages. There was only one Second- 
 class on the train. I slipped the window, and 
 looked down upon a flaming red beard, half 
 covered by a railway rug. That was my man, 
 fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. 
 He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in 
 the light of the lamps. It was a great and 
 shining face. 
 
 "Tickets again?" said he. 
 
 "No," said I. "I am to tell you that he is 
 gone South for the week. He is gone South 
 for the week!" 
 
 The train had begun to move out. The red 
 man rubbed his eyes. "He has gone South for 
 the week," he repeated. "Now that's just like 
 his impidence. Did he say that I was to give 
 you anything? — 'Cause I won't." 
 
 "He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and 
 watched the red lights die out in the dark. It 
 was horribly cold, because the wind was blow- 
 ing off the sands. I climbed into my own train 
 — not an Intermediate Carriage this time — and 
 went to sleep.
 
 WOULD BE KING 115 
 
 If the man with the beard had given me a 
 rupee I should have kepi it as a memento of a 
 rather curious affair. But the consciousness of 
 
 having done my duty was my only reward. 
 
 Later on I reilected that two gentlemen like 
 my friends could not do any good if they fore- 
 gathered and personated correspondents of 
 newspapers, and might, if they "stuck up" one 
 of tlve little rat-trap states of Central India or 
 Southern Rajputana, get themselves into seri- 
 ous difficulties. I therefore took some trouble 
 to describe them as accurately as I could re- 
 member to people who would be interested in 
 deporting - them ; and succeeded, so I was later 
 informed, in having them headed back from 
 Degumber borders. 
 
 Then I became respectable, and returned to 
 an Office where there were no Kings and no 
 incidents except the daily manufacture of a 
 newspaper. A newspaper office seems to at- 
 tract every conceivable sort of person, to the 
 prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies 
 arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly 
 abandon all his duties to describe a Christian 
 prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inac- 
 cessible village ; Colonels who have been over- 
 passed for commands sit down and sketch the 
 outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-
 
 n6 THE MAN WHO 
 
 four leading articles on Seniority versus Se- 
 lection; missionaries wish to know why they 
 have not been permitted to escape from their 
 regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a 
 brother missionary under special patronage of 
 the editorial We ; stranded theatrical companies 
 troop up to explain that they cannot pay for 
 their advertisements, but on their return from 
 New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest ; 
 inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, 
 carriage couplings and unbreakable swords 
 and axle-trees call with specifications in their 
 pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-com- 
 panies enter and elaborate their prospectuses 
 with the office pens ; secretaries of ball-commit- 
 tees clamor to have the glories of their last 
 dance more fully expounded; strange ladies 
 rustle in and say: — "I want a hundred lady's 
 cards printed at once, please," which is mani- 
 festly part of an Editor's duty ; and every dis- 
 solute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand 
 Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for 
 employment as a proof-reader. And, all the 
 time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and 
 Kings are being killed on the Continent, and 
 Empires are saying — "You're another," and 
 Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone 
 upon the British Dominions, and the little
 
 WOULD BE KING 117 
 
 black copy-boys are whining, "kaa-pi chay-ha- 
 ych" (copy wanted) like tired bees, and most 
 of the paper is as blank as Modred's shield. 
 
 But that is the amusing part of the year. 
 There are other six months wherein none ever 
 come to call, and the thermometer walks inch 
 by inch up to the top of the glass, and the office 
 is darkened to just above reading-light, and 
 the press machines are red-hot of touch, and 
 nobody writes anything but accounts of amuse- 
 ments in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. 
 Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, 
 because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men 
 and women that you knew intimately, and the 
 prickly-heat covers you as with a garment, 
 and you sit down and write: — "A slight in- 
 crease of sickness is reported from the Khuda 
 Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely 
 sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the ener- 
 getic efforts of the District authorities, is now 
 almost at an end. It is, however, with deep re- 
 gret we record the death, etc." 
 
 Then the sickness really breaks out, and the 
 less recording and reporting the better for the 
 peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and 
 the Kings continue to divert themselves as self- 
 ishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a 
 daily paper really ought to come out once in
 
 n8 THE MAN WHO 
 
 twenty-four hours, and all the people at the 
 Hill-stations in the middle of their amuse- 
 ments say : — "Good gracious ! Why can't the 
 paper be sparkling? I'm sure there's plenty 
 going on up here." 
 
 That is the dark half of the moon, and, as 
 the advertisements say, "must be experienced 
 to be appreciated." 
 
 It was in that season, and a remarkably evil 
 season, that the paper began running the last 
 issue of the week on Saturday night, which is 
 to say, Sunday morning, after the custom of a 
 London paper. This was a great convenience, 
 for immediately after the paper was put to bed, 
 the dawn would lower the thermometer from 
 96° to almost 84° for half an hour, and in that 
 chill — you have no idea how cold is 84° on the 
 grass until you begin to pray for it — a very 
 tired man could set off to sleep ere the heat 
 roused him. 
 
 One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty 
 to put the paper to bed alone. A King or cour- 
 tier or a courtesan or a community was going 
 to die or get a new Constitution, or do some- 
 thing that was important on the other side of 
 the world, and the paper was to be held open 
 till the latest possible minute in order to catch 
 the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as
 
 WOULD BE KING 119 
 
 stilling as a June night can be, and the loo, the 
 
 red-hot wind from the westward, was booming 
 among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that 
 the rain was on its heels. Now and again a 
 spot of almost boiling water would fall on the 
 dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary 
 world knew that was only pretence. It was a 
 shade cooler in the press-room than the office, 
 so I sat there, while the type clicked and clicked 
 and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and 
 the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat 
 from their foreheads and called for water. 
 The thing that was keeping us back, whatever 
 it was, would not come off, though the loo 
 dropped and the last type was set, and the 
 whole round earth stood still in the choking 
 heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. 
 I drowsed, and wondered whether the tele- 
 graph was a blessing, and whether this dying 
 man, or struggling people, was aware of the 
 inconvenience the delay was causing. There 
 was no special reason beyond the heat and 
 worry to make tension, but, as the clock hands 
 crept up to three o'clock and the machines spun 
 their fly-wheels two and three times to see that 
 all was in order, before I said the word that 
 would set them off, I could have shrieked 
 aloud.
 
 120 THE MAN WHO 
 
 Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shiv- 
 ered the quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, 
 but two men in white clothes stood in front of 
 me. The first one said: — "It's him!" The 
 second said: — "So it is!" And they both 
 laughed almost as loudly as the machinery 
 roared, and mopped their foreheads. "We see 
 there was a light burning across the road and 
 we were sleeping in that ditch there for cool- 
 ness, and I said to my friend here, 'The office is 
 open. Let's come along and speak to him as 
 turned us back from the Degumber State/ " 
 said the smaller of the two. He was the man 
 I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow 
 was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. 
 There was no mistaking the eyebrows of the 
 one or the beard of the other. 
 
 I was not pleased, because I wished to go to 
 sleep, not to squabble with loafers. "What do 
 you want?" I asked. 
 
 "Half an hour's talk with you cool and com- 
 fortable, in the office," said the red-bearded 
 man. "We'd like some drink — the Contrack 
 doesn't begin yet, Peachey, so you needn't look 
 • — but what we really want is advice. We don't 
 want money. We ask you as a favor, because 
 you did us a bad turn about Degumber." 
 
 I led from the press-room to the stifling
 
 WOULD BE KING 121 
 
 office with the maps on the walls, and the red- 
 haired man rubbed his hands. "That's some- 
 thing like," said he. "This was the proper 
 shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce 
 to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, 
 and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is mc, and the 
 less said about our professions the better, for 
 wc have been most things in our time. Soldier, 
 sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, 
 street-preacher, and correspondents of the 
 Backwoodsman when we thought the paper 
 wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. 
 Look at us first and see that's sure. It will 
 save you cutting into my talk. We'll take one 
 of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us 
 light." 
 
 I watched the test. The men were absolutely 
 sober, so I gave them each a tepid peg. 
 
 "Well and good," said Carnehan of the eye- 
 brows, wiping the froth from his moustache. 
 "Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over 
 India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler- 
 fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and 
 all that, and we have decided that India isn't 
 big enough for such as us." 
 
 They certainly were too big for the office. 
 Dravot's beard seemed to fill half the room 
 and Carnehan's shoulders the other half, as
 
 122 THE MAN WHO 
 
 they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued : 
 "The country isn't half worked out because 
 they that governs it won't let you touch it. 
 They spend all their blessed time in governing 
 it, and you can't lift a spade, nor chip a rock, 
 nor look for oil, nor anything like that without 
 all the Government saying — 'Leave it alone 
 and let us govern.' Therefore, such as it is, 
 we will let it alone, and go away to some other 
 place where a man isn't crowded and can come 
 to his own. We are not little men, and there 
 is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, 
 and we have signed a Contrack on that. There- 
 fore, we are going away to be Kings." 
 
 "Kings in our own right," muttered Dravot. 
 
 "Yes, of course," I said. "You've been 
 tramping in the sun, and it's a very warm 
 night, and hadn't you better sleep over the no- 
 tion? Come to-morrow." 
 
 "Neither drunk nor sunstruck," said Dravot. 
 "We have slept over the notion half a year, and 
 require to see Books and Atlases, and we have 
 decided that there is only one place now in the 
 world that two strong men can Sa.r-a.-whack. 
 They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it's 
 the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not 
 more than three hundred miles from Peshawur. 
 They have two and thirty heathen idols there,
 
 WOULD BE KING 123 
 
 and we'll be the thirty-third. It's a mountain- 
 ous country, and the women of those parts are 
 very beautiful." 
 
 "But that is provided against in the Con- 
 track." said Carnehan. "Neither Women nor 
 Liqu-or, I )aniel." 
 
 "And that's all we know, except that no one 
 has gone there, and they fight, and in any place 
 where they fight, a man who knows how to 
 drill men can always be a King. We shall go to 
 those parts and say to any King we find — 'D' 
 you want to vanquish your foes?' and we will 
 show him how to drill men ; for that we know 
 better than anything else. Then we will sub- 
 vert that King and seize his Throne and es- 
 tablish a Dy-nasty." 
 
 "You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty 
 miles across the Border," I said. "You have 
 to travel through Afghanistan to get to that 
 country. It's one mass of mountains and peaks 
 and glaciers, and no Englishman has been 
 through it. The people are utter brutes, and 
 even if you reached them you couldn't do any- 
 thing." 
 
 "That's more like," said Carnehan. "If you 
 could think us a little more mad we would be 
 more pleased. We have come to you to know 
 about this country, to read a book about it, and
 
 124 THE MAN WH0 
 
 to be shown maps. We want you to tell us 
 that we are fools and to show us your books." 
 He turned to the bookcases. 
 
 "Are you at all in earnest?" I said. 
 
 "A little," said Dravot, sweetly. "As big a 
 map as you have got, even if it's all blank 
 where Kafiristan is, and any books you've got. 
 We can read, though we aren't very educated." 
 
 I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the- 
 inch map of India, and two smaller Frontier 
 maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the 
 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the men con- 
 sulted them. 
 
 "See here!" said Dravot, his thumb on the 
 map. "Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know 
 the road. We was there with Roberts's Army. 
 We'll have to turn off to the right at Jagdallak 
 through Laghmann territory. Then we get 
 among the hills — fourteen thousand feet — fif- 
 teen thousand — it will be cold work there, but 
 it don't look very far on the map." 
 
 I handed him Wood on the Sources of the 
 Oxns. Carnehan was deep in the Encyclo- 
 paedia. 
 
 "They're a mixed lot," said Dravot, reflect- 
 ively ; "and it won't help us to know the names 
 of their tribes. The more tribes the more they'll 
 fight, and the better for us. From Jagdallak 
 to Ashang. H'mm!"
 
 WOULD BE KING 125 
 
 "But all the information about the country 
 is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be," I pro- 
 tested. "No one knows anything- about it 
 really. Here's the file of the United Services 
 Institute. Read what Bellew says." 
 
 "Blow Bellew !" said Carnehan. "Dan, 
 they're an all-fired lot of heathens, but this 
 book here says they think they're related to us 
 English." 
 
 I smoked while the men pored over Raverty, 
 Wood, the maps, and the Encyclopaedia. 
 
 "There is no use your waiting," said Dravot, 
 politely. "It's about four o'clock now. We'll 
 go before six o'clock if you want to sleep, and 
 we won't steal any of the papers. Don't you 
 sit up. We're two harmless lunatics and if 
 you come, to-morrow evening, down to the 
 Serai we'll say good-bye to you." 
 
 "You are two fools," I answered. "You'll 
 be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the 
 minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you 
 want any money or a recommendation down- 
 country ? I can help you to the chance of work 
 next week." 
 
 "Next week we shall be hard at work our- 
 selves, thank you," said Dravot. "It isn't so 
 easy being a King as it looks. When we've got 
 our Kingdom in going order we'll let you
 
 126 THE MAN WHO 
 
 know, and you can come up and help us to gov- 
 ern it." 
 
 "Would two lunatics make a Contrack like 
 that?" said Carnehan, with subdued pride, 
 showing me a greasy half-sheet of note-paper 
 on which was written the following. I copied 
 it, then and there, as a curiosity : 
 
 This Contract between me and y'ou persuing 
 witnesseth in the name of God — Amen and so 
 forth. 
 
 {One) That me and you will settle this mat- 
 ter together: i. e., to be Kings of 
 Kafiristan. 
 (Two) That you and me will not, while 
 this matter is being settled, look at 
 any Liquor, nor any Woman, 
 black, white or brozvn, so as to get 
 mixed up with one or the other 
 harmful. 
 {Three) That zvc conduct ourselves with dig- 
 nity and discretion and if one of 
 us gets into trouble the other will 
 stay by him. 
 Signed by you and me this day. 
 Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan. 
 Daniel Dravot. 
 Both Gentlemen at Large.
 
 WOULD BE KING 127 
 
 "There was no need for the last article," 
 said Carnehan, blushing modestly; "but it 
 looks regular. Now you know the sort of men 
 that loafers are — we are loafers, Dan, until we 
 get out of India — and do you think that we 
 would sign a Contrack like that unless we was 
 in earnest ? We have kept away from the two 
 things that make life worth having." 
 
 "You won't enjoy your lives much longer if 
 you are going to try this idiotic adventure. 
 Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go 
 away before nine o'clock." 
 
 I left them still poring over the maps and 
 making notes on the back of the "Contrack." 
 "Be sure to come down to the Serai to-mor- 
 row," were their parting words. 
 
 The Kumharsen Serai is the great four- 
 square sink of humanity where the strings of 
 camels and horses from the North load and 
 unload. All the nationalities of Central Asia 
 may be found there, and most of the folk of 
 India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet 
 Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye- 
 teeth. You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian 
 pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep and 
 musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many 
 strange things for nothing. In the afternoon 
 I went down there to see whether my friends
 
 128 THE MAN WHO 
 
 intended to keep their word or were lying 
 about drunk. 
 
 A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and 
 rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's 
 paper whirligig. Behind was his servant bend- 
 ing under the load of a crate of mud toys. 
 The two were loading up two camels, and the 
 inhabitants of the Serai watched them with 
 shrieks of laughter. 
 
 "The priest is mad," said a horse-dealer to 
 me. "He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to 
 the Amir. He will either be raised to honor or 
 have his head cut off. He came in here this 
 morning and has been behaving madly ever 
 since." 
 
 "The witless are under the protection of 
 God," stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in bro- 
 ken Hindi. "They foretell future events." 
 
 "Would they could have foretold that my 
 caravan would have been cut up by the Shin- 
 waris almost within shadow of the Pass!" 
 grunted the Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana 
 trading-house whose goods had been felon- 
 iously diverted into the hands of other robbers 
 just across the Border, and whose misfortunes 
 were the laughing-stock of the bazar. "Ohe, 
 priest, whence come you and whither do you 
 go?"
 
 WOULD BE KING 129 
 
 "From Roum have \ come," shouted the 
 priest, waving his whirligig; "from Roum, 
 blown by the breath of a hundred devils across 
 the sea! O thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing 
 of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers! 
 Who will take the Protected of God to the 
 North to sell charms that arc never still to the 
 Amir? The camels shall not gall, the suns shall 
 ii« -t fall sick, and the wives shall remain faith- 
 ful while they are away, of the men who give 
 me place in their caravan. Who will assist me 
 to slipper the King of the Roos with a golden 
 slipper with a silver heel? The protection of 
 Pir Khan be upon his labors!" He spread ou1 
 the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted be- 
 tween the lines of tethered horses. 
 
 "There starts a caravan from Peshawur to 
 Kabul in twenty days, Huzrut," said the Eu- 
 sufzai trader. "My camels go therewith. Do 
 thou also go and bring us good-luck." 
 
 "I will go even now !" shouted the priest. 
 "I will depart upon my winged camels, and be 
 at Pashawur in a day ! Ho ! Hazar Mir Khan," 
 he yelled to his servant, "drive out the camels, 
 but let me first mount my own." 
 
 He leaped on the back of his beast as it 
 knelt, and, turning round to me, cried : — 
 "Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road,
 
 130 THE MAN WHO 
 
 and I will sell thee a charm — an amulet that 
 shall make thee King of Kafiristan." 
 
 Then the light broke upon me, and I fol- 
 lowed the two camels out of the Serai till we 
 reached open road and the priest halted. 
 
 "What d' you think o' that?" said he in 
 English. "Carnehan can't talk their patter, so 
 I've made him my servant. He makes a hand- 
 some servant. 'Tisn't for nothing that I've 
 been knocking about the country for fourteen 
 years. Didn't I do that talk neat ? We'll hitch 
 on to a caravan at Peshawur till we get to Jag- 
 dallak, and then we'll see if we can get don- 
 keys for our camels, and strike into Kafiristan. 
 Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor! Put your 
 hand under the camel-bags and tell me what 
 you feel." 
 
 I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and 
 another. 
 
 "Twenty of 'em," said Dravot, placidly. 
 "Twenty of 'em, and ammunition to corre- 
 spond, under the whirligigs and the mud dolls." 
 
 "Heaven help you if you are caught with 
 those things !" I said. "A Martini is worth her 
 weight in silver among the Pathans." 
 
 "Fifteen hundred rupees of capital — every 
 rupee we could beg, borrow, or steal — are in- 
 vested on these two camels," said Dravot. "We
 
 WOULD BE KING 131 
 
 won't get caught. We're going through the 
 Khaiber with a regular caravan. Who'd touch 
 a poor mad priest?" 
 
 "Have you got everything you want?" I 
 asked, overcome with astonishment. 
 
 "Not yet, hut we shall soon. Give us a me- 
 mento of your kindness, Brother. Yon did me 
 a service yesterday, and thai time in Marwar. 
 Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the say- 
 in- is." I slipped a small charm compass from 
 my watch-chain and handed it up to the priest. 
 
 "Good-bye," said Dravot, giving me hand 
 cautiously. "It's the last time we'll shake hands 
 with an Englishman these many days. Shake 
 hands with him, Carnehan," he cried, as the 
 second camel passed me. 
 
 Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. 
 Then the camels passed away along the dusty 
 road, and I was left alone to wonder. My eye 
 could detect no failure in the disguises. The 
 scene in Serai attested that they were complete 
 to the native mind. There was just the chance, 
 therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would he 
 able to wander through Afghanistan without 
 detection. But, beyond, they would find death, 
 certain and awful death. 
 
 Ten days later a native friend of mine, giv- 
 ing me the news of the day from Peshawur,
 
 1 32 THE MAN WHO 
 
 wound up his letter with: — "There has been 
 much laughter here on account of a certain 
 mad priest who is going in his estimation to sell 
 petty gauds and insignificant trinkets which 
 he ascribes as great charms to H. H. the Amir 
 of Bokhara. He passed through Peshawur and 
 associated himself to the Second Summer cara- 
 van that goes to Kabul. The merchants are 
 pleased, because through superstition they im- 
 agine that such mad fellows bring good-for- 
 tune." 
 
 The two, then, were beyond the Border. I 
 would have prayed for them, but, that night, a 
 real King died in Europe, and demanded an 
 obituary notice. 
 
 ^c ^c H« ^ ^ ^ 
 
 The wheel of the world swings through the 
 same phases again and again. Summer passed 
 and winter thereafter, and came and passed 
 again. The daily paper continued and I with 
 it, and upon the third summer there fell a hot 
 night, a night-issue, and a strained waiting for 
 something to be telegraphed from the other 
 side of the world, exactly as had happened be- 
 fore. A few great men had died in the past 
 two years, the machines worked with more 
 clatter, and some of the trees in the Office gar- 
 den were a few feet taller. But that was all 
 the difference.
 
 WOULD BE KING 133 
 
 I passed over to the press-room, and went 
 through just such a scene as I have already de- 
 scribed. The nervous tension was stronger 
 than it had been two years before, and I felt 
 the heat more acutely. At three o'clock I cried, 
 "Print off," and turned to go, when there crept 
 to my chair what was left of a man. He was 
 bent into a circle, his head was sunk between 
 his shoulders, and he moved his feet one over 
 the other like a bear. I could hardly see 
 whether he walked or crawled — this rag- 
 wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by 
 name, crying that he was come back. "Can you 
 give me a drink?" he whimpered. "For the 
 Lord's sake, give me a drink!" 
 
 1 went back to the office, the man following 
 with groans of pain, and I turned up the lamp. 
 
 "Don't you know me?" he gasped, dropping 
 into a chair, and he turned his drawn face, 
 surmounted by a shock of grey hair, to the 
 light. 
 
 I looked at him intently. Once before had I 
 seen eyebrows that met over the nose in an 
 inch-broad black band, but for the life of me 
 I could not tell where. 
 
 "I don't know you," I said, handing him the 
 whiskey. "What can I do for you?" 
 
 He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shiv- 
 ered in spite of the suffocating heat.
 
 i 3 4 THE MAN WHO 
 
 "I've come back," he repeated; "and I was 
 the King of Kafiristan — me and Dravot — 
 crowned Kings we was ! In this office we set- 
 tled it — you setting there and giving us the 
 books. I am Peachey — Peachey Taliaferro 
 Carnehan, and you've been setting here ever 
 since — O Lord!" 
 
 I was more than a little astonished, and ex- 
 pressed my feelings accordingly. 
 
 "It's true," said Carnehan, with a dry 
 cackle, nursing his feet, which were wrapped 
 in rags. "True as gospel. Kings we were, 
 with crowns upon our heads — me and Dravot 
 — poor Dan — oh, poor, poor Dan, that would 
 never take advice, not though I begged of 
 him!" 
 
 "Take the whiskey," I said, "and take your 
 own time. Tell me all you can recollect of 
 everything from beginning to end. You got 
 across the border on your camels, Dravot 
 dressed as a mad priest and you his servant. 
 Do you remember that?" 
 
 "I ain't mad — yet, but I shall be that way 
 soon. Of course I remember. Keep looking 
 at me, or maybe my words will go all to pieces. 
 Keep looking at me in my eyes and don't say 
 anything." 
 
 I leaned forward and looked into his face
 
 WOULD BE KING 135 
 
 as steadily as I could. He dropped one hand 
 upon the table and I grasped it by the wrist. 
 It was twisted like a bird's claw, and upon the 
 back was a ragged, red, diamond-shaped scar. 
 
 "No, don't look there. Look at me" said 
 Carnehan. 
 
 "That comes afterward, but for the Lord's 
 sake don't distrack me. We left with that cara- 
 van, me and Dravot playing all sorts of antics 
 to amuse the people we were with. Dravot 
 used to make us laugh in the evenings when 
 all the people was cooking their dinners — 
 cooking their dinners, and . . . what did they 
 do then? They lit little fires with sparks that 
 went into Dravot's beard, and we all laughed 
 — fit to die. Little red fires they was, going 
 into Dravot's big red beard — so funny." His 
 eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly. 
 
 "You went as far as Jagdallak with that 
 caravan," I said, at a venture, "after you had 
 lit those fires. To Jagdallak, where you turned 
 off to try to get into Kafiristan." 
 
 "No, we didn't neither. What are you talk- 
 ing about ? We turned off before Jagdallak, be- 
 cause we heard the roads was good. But they 
 wasn't good enough for our two camels — 
 mine and Dravot's. When we left the caravan, 
 Dravot took off all his clothes and mine too,
 
 136 THE MAN WHO 
 
 and said we would be heathen, because the 
 Kafirs didn't allow Mohammedans to talk to 
 them. So we dressed betwixt and between, and 
 such a sight as Daniel Dravot I never saw yet 
 nor expect to see again. He burned half his 
 beard, and slung a sheep-skin over his shoul- 
 der, and shaved his head into patterns. He 
 shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrage- 
 ous things to look like a heathen. That was in 
 a most mountaineous country, and our camels 
 couldn't go along any more because of the 
 mountains. They were tall and black, and 
 coming home I saw them fight like wild goats 
 — there are lots of goats in Kafiristan. And 
 these mountains, they never keep still, no more 
 than goats. Always fighting they are, and don't 
 let you sleep at night." 
 
 "Take some more whiskey," I said, very 
 slowly. "What did you and Daniel Dravot do 
 when the camels could go no further because 
 of the rough roads that led into Kafiristan?" 
 
 "What did which do? There was a party 
 called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was 
 with Dravot. Shall I tell you about him? He 
 died out there in the cold. Slap from the 
 bridge fell old Peachey, turning and twisting in 
 the air like a penny whirligig that you can sell 
 to the Amir — No ; they was two for three ha'-
 
 WOULD BE KING 137 
 
 pence, those whirligig's, or I am much mistaken 
 and woful sore. And then these camels were 
 no use, and Peachey said to Dravot — 'For the 
 Lord's sake, let's get out of this before our 
 heads are chopped oil',' and with that they 
 killed the camels all among the mountains, not 
 having anything in particular to eat, hut first 
 they took off the boxes with the guns and the 
 ammunition, till two men came along driving 
 four mules. Dravot up and dances in front of 
 them, singing, — 'Sell me four mules.' Says 
 the first man, — 'If you are rich enough to buy, 
 you are rich enough to rob;' but before ever 
 he could put his hand to his knife, Dravot 
 breaks his neck over his knee, and the other 
 party runs away. So Carnehan loaded the 
 mules with the rifles that was taken off the 
 camels, and together we starts forward into 
 those bitter cold mountaineous parts, and never 
 a road broader than the back of your hand." 
 
 He paused for a moment, while I asked him 
 if he could remember the nature of the country 
 through which he had journeyed. 
 
 "I am telling you as straight as I can, but 
 my head isn't as good as it might be. They 
 drove nails through it to make me hear better 
 how Dravot died. The country was mountaine- 
 ous and the mules were most contrary, and the
 
 138 THE MAN WHO 
 
 inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. They 
 went up and up, and down and down, and that 
 other party, Carnehan, was imploring of Dra- 
 vot not to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of 
 bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But 
 Dravot says that if a King couldn't sing it 
 wasn't worth being King, and whacked the 
 mules over the rump, and never took no heed 
 for ten cold days. We came to a big level val- 
 ley all among the mountains, and the mules 
 were near dead, so we killed them, not having 
 anything in special for them or us to eat. We 
 sat upon the boxes, and played odd and even 
 with the cartridges that was jolted out. 
 
 "Then ten men with bows and arrows ran 
 down that valley, chasing twenty men with 
 bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. 
 They was fair men — fairer than you or me — 
 with yellow hair and remarkable well built. 
 Says Dravot, unpacking the guns — 'This is 
 the beginning of the business. We'll fight for 
 the ten men,' and with that he fires two rifles 
 at the twenty men, and drops one of them at 
 two hundred yards from the rock where we 
 was sitting. The other men began to run, but 
 Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes picking 
 them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. 
 Then we goes up to the ten men that had run
 
 WOULD BE KING 139 
 
 across the snow too, and they fires a footy little 
 arrow at us. Dravot he shoots above their 
 heads and they all falls clown flat. Then he 
 walks over and kicks them, and then he lifts 
 them up and shakes hands all round to make 
 them friendly like. He calls them and gives 
 them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand 
 for all the world as though he was King al- 
 ready. They takes the boxes and him across 
 the valley and up the hill into a pine wood on 
 the top, where there was half a dozen big stone 
 idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest — a fellow 
 they call Imbra — and lays a rifle and a cart- 
 ridge at his feet, rubbing his nose respectful 
 with his own nose, patting him on the head, 
 and saluting in front of it. He turns round to 
 the men and nods his head, and says, — 'That's 
 all right. I'm in the know too, and all these 
 old jim-jams are my friends.' Then he opens 
 his mouth and points down it, and when the 
 first man brings him food, he says — 'No ;' and 
 when the second man brings him food, he says 
 — 'No :' but when one of the old priests and the 
 boss of the village brings him food, he says — 
 'Yes ;' very haughty, and eats it slow. That 
 was how we came to our first village, without 
 any trouble, just as though we had tumbled 
 from the skies. But we tumbled from one of
 
 i 4 o THE MAN WHO 
 
 those damned rope-bridges, you see, and you 
 couldn't expect a man to laugh much after 
 that." 
 
 "Take some more whiskey and go on," I 
 said. "That was the first village you came 
 into. How did you get to be King?" 
 
 "I wasn't King," said Carnehan. "Dravot 
 he was the King, and a handsome man he 
 looked with the gold crown on his head and all. 
 Him and the other party stayed in that village, 
 and every morning Dravot sat by the side of 
 old Imbra, and the people came and wor- 
 shipped. That was Dravot's order. Then a 
 lot of men came into the valley, and Carnehan 
 and Dravot picks them off with the rifles be- 
 fore they knew where they was, and runs down 
 into the valley and up again the other side, and 
 finds another village, same as the first one, and 
 the people all falls down flat on their faces, and 
 Dravot says, — 'Now what is the trouble be- 
 tween you two villages ?' and the people points 
 to a woman, as fair as you or me, that was car- 
 ried off, and Dravot takes her back to the first 
 village and counts up the dead — eight there 
 was. For each dead man Dravot pours a little 
 milk on the ground and waves his arms like a 
 whirligig and 'That's all right,' says he. Then 
 he and Carnehan takes the bigf boss of each vil-
 
 WOULD BERING 141 
 
 lage by the arm and walks them down into the 
 valley, and shows them how to scratch a line 
 with a spear right down the valley, and gives 
 each a sod of turf from both sides o' the line. 
 Then all the people comes down and sin mis like 
 the devil and all, and Dravot says, — 'Go and 
 dig the land, and he fruitful and multiply,' 
 which they did, though they didn't understand. 
 Then we asks the names of things in their 
 lingo — bread and water and fire and idols and 
 such, and Dravot leads the priest of each vil- 
 lage up to the idol, and says he must sit there 
 and judge the people, and if anything goes 
 wrong he is to be shot. 
 
 "Next week they was all turning up the land 
 in the valley as quiet as bees and much prettier, 
 and the priests heard all the complaints and 
 told Dravot in dumb show what it was about. 
 'That's just the beginning.' says Dravot. 'They 
 think we're Gods.' He and Carnehan picks 
 out twenty good men and shows them how to 
 click off a rifle, and form fours, and advance in 
 line, and they was very pleased to do so, and 
 clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out 
 his pipe and his baccy-pouch and leaves one at 
 one village and one at the other, and off we 
 two goes to see what was to be done in the 
 next valley. That was all rock, and there was
 
 142 THE MAN WHO 
 
 a little village there, and Carnehan says, — 
 'Send 'em to the old valley to plant,' and takes 
 'em there and gives 'em some land that wasn't 
 took before. They were a poor lot, and we 
 blooded 'em with a kid before letting 'em into 
 the new Kingdom. That was to impress the 
 people, and then they settled down quiet, and 
 Carnehan went back to Dravot, who had got 
 into another valley, all snow and ice and 
 most mountaineous. There was no people 
 there, and the Army got afraid, so Dravot 
 shoots one of them, and goes on till he finds 
 some people in a village, and the Army explains 
 that unless the people wants to be killed they 
 had better not shoot their little matchlocks; 
 for they had matchlocks. We makes friends 
 with the priest and I stays there alone with two 
 of the Army, teaching the men how to drill, 
 and a thundering big Chief comes across the 
 snow with kettle-drums and horns twanging, 
 because he heard there was a new God kicking 
 about. Carnehan sights for the brown of the 
 men half a mile across the snow and wings one 
 of them. Then he sends a message to the Chief 
 that, unless he wished to be killed, he must 
 come and shake hands with me and leave his 
 arms behind. The Chief comes alone first, and 
 Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls
 
 WOULD BE KING 143 
 
 his arms about, same as Dravot used, and very 
 much surprised that Chief was and strokes my 
 eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes alone to the 
 Chief, and asks him in dumb show if he had an 
 enemy he hated. 'I have,' says the Chief. So 
 Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and 
 sets the two of the Army to show them drill, 
 and at the end of two weeks the men can ma- 
 noeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he 
 marches with the Chief to a great big plain on 
 the top of a mountain, and the Chief's men 
 rushes into a village and takes it; we three 
 Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. 
 So we took that village too, and I gives the 
 Chief a rag from my coat and says, 'Occupy 
 till I come;' which was scriptural. By way of 
 a reminder, when me and the Army was eigh- 
 teen hundred yards away, T drops a bullet near 
 him standing on the snow, and all the people 
 f:i11< flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter 
 (o Dravot. wherever he be by land or by sea." 
 
 At the risk of throwing the creature out of 
 train T interrupted. — "How could you write a 
 letter up yonder?" 
 
 "The letter ?— Oh !— The letter ! Keep look- 
 ing at me between the eves, please. It was a 
 string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of 
 it from a blind beggar in the Punjab."
 
 144 TH E MAN WHO 
 
 I remember that there had once come to the 
 office a blind man with a knotted twig and a 
 piece of string which he wound round the twig 
 according to some cipher of his own. He could, 
 after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sen- 
 tence which he had reeled up. He had reduced 
 the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds; and 
 tried to teach me his method, but failed. 
 
 "I sent that letter to Dravot," said Carnehan ; 
 "and told him to come back because this King- 
 dom was growing too big for me to handle, 
 and then I struck for the first valley, to see how 
 the priests were working. They called the vil- 
 lage we took along with the Chief, Bashkai, 
 and the first village we took. Er-Heb. The 
 priests at Er-Heb was doing all right, but they 
 had a lot of pending cases about land to show 
 me, and some men from another village had 
 been firing arrows at night. I went out and 
 looked for that village and fired four rounds 
 at it from a thousand yards. That used all the 
 cartridges T cared to spend, and I waited for 
 Dravot, who had been away two or three 
 months, and I kept my people quiet. 
 
 "One morning I heard the devil's own noise 
 of drums and horns, and Dan Dravot marches 
 down the hill with his Army and a tail of hun- 
 dreds of men, and, which was the most amaz-
 
 WOULD BE KING 145 
 
 ing — a great gold crown on his head. 'My 
 Gord, Carnehan,' says Daniel, 'this is a tremen- 
 jus business, and we've got the whole country 
 as Ear as it's worth having 1 . 1 am the son oi 
 Alexander by Queen Semiramis, and you're my 
 younger brother and a God too! It's the biggest 
 thing we've ever seen. I've been marching and 
 fighting for six weeks with the Army, and 
 every footy little village for fifty miles has 
 come in rejoiceful ; and more than that, I've 
 got the key of the whole show, as you'll see, 
 and I've got a crown for you ! I told 'em to 
 make two of 'em at a place called Shu, where 
 the gold lies in the rock like suet in mutton. 
 Gold I've seen, and turquoise I've kicked out 
 of the cliffs, and there's garnets in the sands 
 of the river, and here's a chunk of amber that 
 a man brought me. Call up all the priests and, 
 here, take your crown.' 
 
 "One of the men opens a black hair bag and 
 I slips the crown on. It was too small and too 
 heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered 
 gold it was — five pound weight, like a hoop of 
 a barrel. 
 
 ( 'Peachey,' says Dravot, 'we don't want to 
 fight no more. The Craft's the trick, so help 
 me!' and he brings forward that same Chief 
 that I left at Bashkai — Billy Fish we called
 
 146 THE MAN WHO 
 
 him afterward, because he was so like Billy- 
 Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on 
 the Bolan in the old days. 'Shake hands with 
 him/ says Dravot, and I shook hands and 
 nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the 
 Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the 
 Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and 
 I tried the Master's Grip, but that was a slip. 
 'A Fellow Craft he is!' I says to Dan. 'Does 
 he know the word ?' -He does,' says Dan, 'and 
 all the priests know. It's a miracle ! The Chiefs 
 and the priests can work a Fellow Craft 
 Lodge in a way that's very like ours, and 
 they've cut the marks on the rocks, but they 
 don't know the Third Degree, and they've 
 come to find out. It's Gord's Truth. I've known 
 these long years that the Afghans knew up to 
 the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. 
 A God and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, 
 and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, 
 and we'll raise the head priests and the Chiefs 
 of the villages.' 
 
 " Tt's against all the law,' I says, 'holding a 
 Lodge without warrant from any one ; and we 
 never held office in any Lodge.' 
 
 " Tt's a master-stroke of policy,' says Dra- 
 vot. Tt means running the country as easy as 
 a four-wheeled bogy on a down grade. We
 
 WOULD BE KING 147 
 
 can't stop to inquire now, or they'll turn 
 against us. I've forty Chiefs at my heel, and 
 passed and raised according to their merit the) 
 shall be. Billet these men on the villages and 
 set- that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The 
 temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. 
 The women must make aprons as you show 
 them. I'll hold a levee of Chiefs to-night and 
 Lodge to-morrow.' 
 
 "I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn't such 
 a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft busi- 
 ness gave us. I showed the priests' families 
 how to make aprons of the degrees, but for 
 Dravot's apron the blue border and marks was 
 made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not 
 cloth. We took a great square stone in the 
 temple for the Master's chair, and little stones 
 for the officers' chairs, and painted the black 
 pavement with white squares, and did what we 
 could to make things regular. 
 
 "At the levee which was held that night on 
 the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out 
 that him and me were Gods and sons of Alex- 
 ander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, 
 and was come to make Kafiristan a country 
 where every man should eat in peace and drink 
 in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs 
 come round to shake hands, and they was so
 
 148 THE MAN WHO 
 
 hairy and white and fair it was just shaking 
 hands with old friends. We gave them names 
 according as they was like men we had known 
 in India — Billy Fish, Holly Wilworth. Pikky 
 Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at 
 Mhow, and so on and so on. 
 
 "The most amazing miracle was at Lodge 
 next night. One of the old priests was watch- 
 ing us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I 
 knew we'd have to fudge the Ritual, and I 
 didn't know what the men knew. The old priest 
 was a stranger come in from beyond the vil- 
 lage of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on 
 the Master's apron that the girls had made for 
 him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, 
 and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot 
 was sitting on. Tt's all up now,' I says. 'That 
 comes of meddling with the Craft without war- 
 rant!' Dravot never winked an eye, not when 
 ten priests took and tilted over the Grand- 
 Master's chair — which was to say the stone of 
 Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom 
 end of it to clear away the black dirt, and pres- 
 ently he shows all the other priests the Mas- 
 ter's Mark, same as was on Dravot's apron, 
 cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the 
 temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old 
 chap falls flat on his face at Dravot's feet and
 
 WOULD BE KING 149 
 
 kisses 'em. 'Luck again,' says Dravot, across 
 the Lodge to me, 'they say it's the missing 
 Mark that no one could understand the why of. 
 We're more than safe now.' Then he bangs 
 the butt of his gun for a gavel and says : — 'By 
 virtue of the authority vested in me by my own 
 right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare 
 myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in 
 Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o' the 
 country, and King of Kafiristan equally with 
 Peachey!' At that he puts on his crown and 
 I puts on mine — I was doing Senior Warden 
 — and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. 
 It was a amazing miracle! The priests moved 
 in Lodge through the first two degrees almost 
 without telling, as if the memory was coming 
 back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot 
 raised such as was worthy — high priests and 
 Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the 
 first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out 
 of him. It was not in any way according to 
 Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn't raise 
 more than ten of the biggest men, because we 
 didn't want to make the Degree common. And 
 they was clamoring to be raised. 
 
 " 'In another six months,' says Dravot. 'we'll 
 hold another Communication and see how you 
 are working.' Then he asks them about their
 
 ■SO 
 
 THE MAN WHO 
 
 villages, and learns thai they was fighting one 
 against the other and were fair sick and tired 
 of it. Ami when they wasn't doing thai they 
 was fighting with the Mohammedans. 'You 
 can fighl those when they come into our coun- 
 try/ says I )ravot. 'Tell off evei y tenth man ol 
 your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two 
 hundred al a time to tins valley to be drilled. 
 Nobody is going to be shot or speared any 
 more so long as he docs well, and l Know thai 
 you won't cluat me because you're white peo- 
 ple sons i)\ Alexander and nol like com- 
 mon, black Mohammedans. You arc my peo 
 pie and by God,' says he, running off into Eng 
 lisli at the end 'I'll make a damned fine Na- 
 tion of vmi, or I'll die in the making!' 
 
 "I can't tell all we did for the next six 
 
 months because Dravol did a lot I couldn't sec 
 
 the hail!.;' oil", and he leained their lingo in a 
 
 way I never could. Mv work was to help the 
 
 people plough, and now and again go OUl with 
 some of the Army and see what the other vil- 
 lages were doing, and make 'em throw rope- 
 bridges across tin- ravines which CUl tip the 
 
 country horrid. Dravol was very kind to me, 
 
 bul when he walked Up and down in the pine 
 w<>od pulling that bloody vvi\ heard of his with 
 both lists I knew he was thinking plans 1 could
 
 WOULD BE KING 15 1 
 
 not advise him about, and I jturt waited for 
 ord< 1 
 
 "But Dravol howed me disrespect be- 
 
 fore the people. They were afraid of me and 
 rmy, bul they loved I )an. I [< 
 if friends with tl 
 hut any one could con the hill - with a 
 
 complaint and Dravot would hear him out fair, 
 and call four pri< what 
 
 was to be done. He u ed to call in Bill) 
 from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from 
 and an old Chief we called ECafuzelum — it was 
 like enough to his real name— and hold 1 
 ciK with 'em when there was any fighting to 
 in small villages. 'I hat was his Coun- 
 cil of War, and the four priests of Ba 
 Shu, Khawak, and Madora wa Privy 
 
 Council. Between the lol of 'em they sent me, 
 with forty men and twenty rifles, and 
 men carrying turquoises, into the Ghorband 
 country to buy those hand-m; rtini rifles, 
 
 that come out of the Amir's worl I Ka- 
 
 bul, from one of the Amir's Herati regiments 
 that would have sold the very teeth out of 
 mouths for turquoi 
 
 "I stayed in Ghorband a month, and 
 the Governor there the nick of my bs 
 hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the
 
 152 THE MAN WHO 
 
 reeiment some more, and, between the two and 
 the tribes-people, we got more than a hundred 
 hand-made Martinis, a hundrd good Kohat 
 Jezails that'll throw to six hundred yards, and 
 forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for 
 the rifles. I came back with what I had, and 
 distributed 'em among the men that the Chiefs 
 sent to me to drill. Dravot was too busy to at- 
 tend to those things, but the old Army that we 
 first made helped me, and we turned out five 
 hundred men that could drill, and two hundred 
 that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. 
 Even those cork-screwed, hand-made guns was 
 a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about 
 powder-shops and factories, walking up and 
 down in the pine wood when the winter was 
 coming on. 
 
 " 'I won't make a Nation,' says he. 'I'll 
 make an Empire! These men aren't niggers; 
 they're English! Look at their eyes — look at 
 their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. 
 They sit on chairs in their own houses. They're 
 the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and 
 they've grown to be English. I'll take a census 
 in the spring if the priests don't get frightened. 
 There must be a fair two million of 'em in 
 these hills. The villages are full o' little chil- 
 dren. Two million people — two hundred and
 
 WOULD BE KING 133 
 
 fifty thousand fighting men — and all English! 
 They only want the rifles and a little drilling. 
 Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to 
 cut in on Russia's right flank when she tries for 
 India! Peachey, man,' he says, chewing his 
 beard in great hunks, 'we shall be Emperors — 
 Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will 
 be a suckling to us. I'll treat with the Vice- 
 roy on equal terms. I'll ask him to send me 
 twelve picked English — twelve that I know of 
 — to help us govern a bit. There's Mackray, 
 Sergeant-pensioner at Segowli — many's the 
 good dinner he's given me, and his wife a pair 
 of trousers. There's Donkin, the Warder of 
 Tounghoo Jail ; there's hundreds that I could 
 lay my hand on if I was in India. The Vice- 
 roy shall do it for me. I'll send a man through 
 in the spring for those men, and I'll write for 
 a dispensation from the Grand-Lodge for what 
 I've done as Grand-Master. That — and all the 
 Sniders that'll be thrown out when the native 
 troops in India take up the Martini. They'll 
 be worn smooth, but they'll do for fighting in 
 these hills. Twelve English, a hundred thou- 
 sand Sniders run through the Amir's country 
 in driblets — I'd be content with twenty thou- 
 sand in one year — and we'd be an Empire. 
 When everything was shipshape, I'd hand over
 
 154 THE MAN WHO 
 
 the crown — this crown I'm wearing now — to 
 Queen Victoria on my knees, and she'd say: 
 "Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot." Oh, it's big! 
 It's big, I tell you ! But there's so much to be 
 done in every place — Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, 
 and everywhere else.' 
 
 " 'What is it ?' I says. 'There are no more 
 men coming in to be drilled this autumn. Look 
 at those fat, black clouds. They're bringing 
 the snow.' 
 
 ' Tt isn't that,' says Daniel, putting his hand 
 very hard on my shoulder; 'and I don't wish 
 to say anything that's against you, for no other 
 living man would have followed me and made 
 me what I am as you have done. You're a first- 
 class Commander-in-Chief, and the people 
 know you; but — it's a big country, and some- 
 how you can't help me, Peachey, in the way I 
 want to be helped.' 
 
 " 'Go to your blasted priests, then !' I said, 
 and I was sorry when I made that remark, but 
 it did hurt me sore to find Daniel talking so 
 superior when I'd drilled all the men, and done 
 all he told me. 
 
 " 'Don't let's quarrel, Peachey/ says Daniel, 
 without cursing. 'You're a King, too, and the 
 half of this Kingdom is yours; but can't you 
 see, Peachev, we want cleverer men than us
 
 WOULD BE KING 155 
 
 now — three or four of 'em, that we can scatter 
 about for our Deputies. It's a hugeous great 
 State, and I can't always tell the right thing to 
 do, and I haven't time for all I want to do, and 
 here's the winter coming on and all.' He put 
 half his beard into his mouth, and it was as red 
 as the gold of his crown. 
 
 " 'I'm sorry, Daniel,' says I. 'I've done all I 
 could. I've drilled the men and shown the peo- 
 ple how to stack their oats better; and I've 
 brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband 
 — but I know what you're driving at. I take it 
 Kings always feel oppressed that way.' 
 
 " There's another thing too,' says Dravot, 
 walking up and down. 'The winter's coming 
 and these people won't be giving much trouble 
 and if they do we can't move about. I want a 
 wife.' 
 
 " 'For Gord's sake leave the women alone !' 
 I says. 'We've both got all the work we can, 
 though I am a fool. Remember the Contrack, 
 and keep clear o' women.' 
 
 " 'The Contrack only lasted till such time as 
 we was Kings ; and Kings we have been these 
 months past,' says Dravot, weighing his crown 
 in his hand. 'You go get a wife too, Peachey 
 — a nice, strappin', plump girl that'll keep you 
 warm in the winter. They're prettier than
 
 156 THE MAN WHO 
 
 English girls, and we can take the pick of 'em. 
 Boil 'em once or twice in hot water, and they'll 
 come as fair as chicken and ham.' 
 
 " 'Don't tempt me !' I says. 'I will not have 
 any dealings with a woman not till we are a 
 dam' side more settled than we are now. I've 
 been doing the work o' two men, and you've 
 been doing the work o' three. Let's lie off a bit, 
 and see if we can get some better tobacco from 
 Afghan country and run in some good liquor ; 
 but no women.' 
 
 " 'Who's talking o' women V says Dravot. 
 'I said wife — a Queen to breed a King's son for 
 the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, 
 that'll make them your blood-brothers, and 
 that'll lie by your side and tell you all the peo- 
 ple thinks about you and their own affairs. 
 That's what I want.' 
 
 " 'Do you remember that Bengali woman I 
 kept at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer ?' 
 says I. *A fat lot o' good she was to me. She 
 taught me the lingo and one or two other 
 things ; but what happened ? She ran away with 
 the Station-master's servant and half my 
 month's pay. Then she turned up at Dadur 
 Junction in tow of a half-caste, and had the im- 
 pidence to say I was her husband — all among 
 the drivers in the running-shed!'
 
 WOULD BE KING 157 
 
 << <-\ 
 
 'We've done with that,' says Dravot. 
 'These women are whiter than you or me, and 
 a Queen I will have for the winter months.' 
 
 " Tor the last time o' asking, Dan, do not' 
 I says. 'It'll only bring us harm. The Bible 
 says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on 
 women, 'specially when they've got a new raw 
 Kingdom to work over.' 
 
 " 'For the last time of answering, T will,' said 
 Dravot, and he went away through the pine- 
 trees looking like a big red devil. The low sun 
 hit his crown and beard on one side and the two 
 blazed like hot coals. 
 
 "But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan 
 thought. He put it before the Council, and 
 there was no answer till Billy Fish said that 
 he'd better ask the girls. Dravot damned them 
 all round. 'What's wrong with me?' he shouts, 
 standing by the idol Imbra. 'Am I a dog or am 
 I not enough of a man for your wenches? 
 Haven't I put the shadow of my hand over this 
 country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?' 
 It was me really, but Dravot was too angry to 
 remember. 'Who brought your guns? Who 
 repaired the bridges? Who's the Grand-Mas- 
 ter of the sign cut in the stone?' and he 
 thumped his hand on the block that he used to 
 sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened
 
 158 THE MAN WHO 
 
 like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing, 
 and no more did the others. 'Keep your hair 
 on, Dan,' said I; 'and ask the girls. That's 
 how it's done at Home, and these people are 
 quite English.' 
 
 " The marriage of the King is a matter of 
 State,' says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he 
 could feel, I hope, that he was going against his 
 better mind. He walked out of the Council- 
 room, and the others sat still, looking at the 
 ground. 
 
 " 'Billy Fish,' says I to the Chief of Bashkai, 
 'what's the difficulty here? A straight answer 
 to a true friend,' 'You know,' says Billy Fish. 
 'How should a man tell you who know every- 
 thing? How can daughters of men marry 
 Gods or Devils? It's not proper.' 
 
 "I remembered something like that in the 
 Bible; but if, after seeing us as long as they 
 had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn't 
 for me to undeceive them. 
 
 " 'A God can do anything,' says I. 'If the 
 King is fond of a girl he'll not let her die.' 
 'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are all 
 sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains, 
 and now and again a girl marries one of them 
 and isn't seen any more. Besides, you two 
 know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the Gods
 
 WOULD BE KING 159 
 
 know that. We thought you were men till you 
 showed the sign of the Master.' 
 
 "I wished then that we had explained about 
 the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master- 
 Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. 
 All that night there was a blowing of horns in 
 a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and 
 I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the 
 priests told us that she was being prepared to 
 marry the King. 
 
 " 'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says 
 Dan. 'I don't want to interfere with your cus- 
 toms, but I'll take my own wife.' 'The girl's a 
 little bit afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks 
 she's going to die, and they are a-heartening of 
 her up down in the temple.' 
 
 " 'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dra- 
 vot, 'or I'll hearten you with the butt of a gun 
 so that you'll never want to be heartened 
 again.' He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed 
 up walking about more than half the night, 
 thinking of the wife that he was going to get in 
 the morning. I wasn't any means comfortable, 
 for I knew that dealings with a woman in for- 
 eign parts, though you was a crowned King 
 twenty times over, could not but be risky. I 
 got up very early in the morning while Dravot 
 was asleep, and I saw the priests talking to-
 
 160 THE MAN WHO 
 
 gether in whispers, and the Chiefs talking to- 
 gether too, and they looked at me out of the 
 corners of their eyes. 
 
 " 'What is up, Fish ?' I says to the Bashkai 
 man, who was wrapped up in his furs and look- 
 ing splendid to behold. 
 
 "'I can't rightly say,' says he; 'but if you 
 can induce the King to drop all this nonsense 
 about marriage, you'll be doing him and me 
 and yourself a great service.' 
 
 " That I do believe,' says I. 'But sure, you 
 know, Billy, as well as me, having fought 
 against and for us, that the King and me are 
 nothing more than two of the finest men that 
 God Almighty ever made. Nothing more, I 
 do assure you.' 
 
 " 'That may be,' says Billy Fish, 'and yet I 
 should be sorry if it was.' He sinks his head 
 upon his great fur cloak for a minute and 
 thinks. 'King,' says he, 'be you man or God or 
 Devil, I'll stick by you to-day. I have twenty 
 of my men with me, and they will follow me. 
 We'll go to Bashkai until the storm blows 
 over.' 
 
 "A little snow had fallen in the night, and 
 everything was white except the greasy fat 
 clouds that blew down and down from the 
 north. Dravot came out with his crown on
 
 WOULD BE KING 161 
 
 his head, swinging his arms and stamping his 
 feet, and looking more pleased than Punch. 
 
 " 'For the last time, drop it, Dan,' says I, in 
 a whisper. 'Billy Fish here says that there will 
 be a row.' 
 
 "'A row among my people!' says Dravot. 
 'Not much. Peachey, you're a 1'<h>1 not to get 
 a wife too. Where's the girl?' says he. with a 
 voiee as loud as the braying of a jackass. 'Call 
 up all the Chiefs and priests, and let the Em- 
 peror see if his wife suits him.' 
 
 "There was no need to call any one. They 
 were all there leaning on their guns and spears 
 round the clearing in the centre of the pine 
 wood. A deputation of priests went down to 
 the little temple to bring up the girl, and the 
 horns blew up fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish 
 saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as 
 he could, and behind him stood his twenty men 
 with matchlocks. Not a man of them under 
 six feet. I was next to Dravot, and behind me 
 was twenty men of the regular Army. Up 
 comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, 
 covered with silver and turquoises, but white 
 as death, and looking back every minute at the 
 priests. 
 
 " 'She'll do,' said Dan, looking her over. 
 'What's to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss
 
 1 62 THE MAN WHO 
 
 me.' He puts his arm round her. She shuts 
 her eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes 
 her face in the side of Dan's flaming red beard. 
 
 " 'The slut's bitten me !' says he, clapping his 
 hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand 
 was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his 
 matchlock-men catches hold of Dan by the 
 shoulders and drags him into the Bashkai lot, 
 while the priests howl in their lingo, — 'Neither 
 God nor Devil, but a man!' I was all taken 
 aback, for a priest cut at me in front, and the 
 Army behind began firing into the Bashkai 
 men. 
 
 " 'God A-mighty !' says Dan. 'What is the 
 meaning o' this ?' 
 
 " 'Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 
 'Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We'll break 
 for Bashkai if we can.' 
 
 "I tried to give some sort of orders to my 
 men — the men o' the regular Army— but it was 
 no use, so I fired into the brown of 'em with an 
 English Martini and drilled three beggars in a 
 line. The valley was full of shouting, howling 
 creatures, and every soul was shrieking, 'Not a 
 God nor a Devil, but only a man !' The Bash- 
 kai troops stuck to Billy Fish all they were 
 worth, but their matchlocks wasn't half as good 
 as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them
 
 WOULD BE KING 163 
 
 dropped. Dan was bellowing like a bull, for he 
 was very wrathy; and Billy Fish bad a bard 
 job to prevent him running out at the crowd. 
 
 " 'We can't stand,' says Billy Fish. 'Make a 
 run for it down tbe valley! The whole place is 
 against us.' Tbe matchlock-men ran, and we 
 went down the valley in spite of Dravot's pro- 
 testations. He was swearing horribly and cry- 
 ing out that be was a King. Tbe priests rolled 
 great stones on us, and the regular Army bred 
 hard, and there wasn't more than six men, not 
 counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came 
 down to the bottom of the valley alive. 
 
 "Then they stopped firing and the horns in 
 the temple blew again. ' Come away — for 
 Gord's sake come away!' says Billy Fish. 
 'They'll send runners out to all tbe villages be- 
 fore ever we get to Basbkai. I can protect you 
 there, but I can't do anything now.' 
 
 "My own notion is that Dan began to go 
 mad in his head from that hour. He stared up 
 and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for 
 walking back alone and killing the priests with 
 his bare hands ; which he could have done. 'An 
 Emperor am I,' says Daniel, 'and next year I 
 shall be a Knight of the Queen.' 
 
 "'All right, Dan,' says I; 'but come along 
 now while there's time.'
 
 1 64 THE MAN WHO 
 
 " 'It's your fault,' says he, 'for not looking 
 after your Army better. There was mutiny in 
 the midst and you didn't know — you damned 
 engine-driving, plate-laying, missionary's-pass- 
 hunting hound!' He sat upon a rock and 
 called me every foul name he could lay tongue 
 to. I was too heart-sick to care, though it was 
 all his foolishness that brought the smash. 
 
 " T'm sorry, Dan,' says I, 'but there's no ac- 
 counting for natives. This business is our 
 Fifty-Seven. Maybe we'll make something out 
 of it yet, when we've got to Bashkai.' 
 
 " 'Let's get to Bashkai, then,' says Dan, 'and, 
 by God, when I come back here again I'll sweep 
 the valley so there isn't a bug in a blanket left !' 
 
 "We walked all that day, and all that night 
 Dan was stumping up and down on the snow, 
 chewing his beard and muttering to himself. 
 
 " 'There's no hope o' getting clear,' said Billy 
 Fish. 'The priests will have sent runners to the 
 villages to say that you are only men. Why 
 didn't you stick on as Gods till things was more 
 settled? I'm a dead man,' says Billy Fish, and 
 he throws himself down on the snow and be- 
 gins to pray to his Gods. 
 
 "Next morning we was in a cruel bad coun- 
 try — all up and down, no level ground at all, 
 and no food either. The six Bashkai men
 
 WOULD BE KING 165 
 
 looked at Billy Fish hungry-wise as if they 
 wanted to ask something, but they said never 
 a word. At noon we came to the top of a flat 
 mountain all covered with snow, and when we 
 climbed up into it, behold, there was an Army 
 in position waiting in the middle! 
 
 " The runners have been very quick,' says 
 Billy Fish, with a little bit of a laugh. 'They 
 are waiting for us.' 
 
 "Three or four men began to fire from the 
 enemy's side, and a chance shot took Daniel in 
 the calf of the leg. That brought him to his 
 senses. He looks across the snow at the Army, 
 and sees the rifles that we had brought into the 
 country. 
 
 " 'We're done for,' says he. 'They are Eng- 
 lishmen, these people, — and it's my blasted 
 nonsense that has brought you to this. Get 
 back, Billy Fish, and take your men away; 
 you've done what you could, and now cut for 
 it. Carnehan,' says he, 'shake hands with me 
 and go along with Billy. Maybe they won't kill 
 yon. I'll go and meet 'em alone. It's me that 
 did it. Me, the King!' 
 
 "'Go!' says I. 'Go to Hell, Dan. I'm with 
 you here. Billy Fish, you clear out, and we 
 two will meet those folk.' 
 
 " 'I'm a Chief.' says Billy Fish, quite quiet. 
 'I stay with you. My men can go.'
 
 1 66 THE MAN WHO 
 
 "The Bashkai fellows didn't wait for a sec- 
 ond word, but ran off, and Dan and Me and 
 Billy Fish walked across to where the drums 
 were drumming and the horns were horning. 
 It was cold — awful cold. I've got that cold 
 in the back of my head now. There's a lump 
 of it there." 
 
 The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two 
 kerosene lamps were blazing in the office, and 
 the perspiration poured down my face and 
 splashed on the blotter as I leaned forward. 
 Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his 
 mind might go. I wiped my face, took a fresh 
 grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said : 
 "What happened after that?" 
 
 The momentary shift of my eyes had broken 
 the clear current. 
 
 "What was you pleased to say?" whined 
 Carnehan. "They took them without any 
 sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, 
 not though the King knocked down the first 
 man that set hand on him — not though old 
 Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown 
 of 'em. Not a single solitary sound did those 
 swines make. They just closed up tight, and 
 I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man 
 called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and 
 they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a
 
 WOULD BE KING 167 
 
 pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow 
 and says: — 'We've had a dashed fine run for 
 our money. What's coining next?' But 
 Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in 
 confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his 
 head. Sir. No, he didn't neither. The King 
 lost his head, so he did, all along o' one of 
 those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly let me 
 have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. 
 They marched him a mile across that snow to 
 a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at the 
 bottom. You may have seen such. They 
 prodded him behind like an ox. 'Damn your 
 eyes !' says the King. 'D'you suppose I can't 
 die like a gentleman ?' lie turns to Peachey — 
 Peachey that was crying like a child. 'I've 
 brought you to this, Peachey,' says he. 
 'Brought you out of your happy life to be 
 killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Com- 
 mander-in-Chief of the Emperor's forces. Say 
 you forgive me, Peachey.' 'I do,' says Peachey. 
 'Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.' 
 'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm going 
 now.' Out he goes, looking neither right nor 
 left, and when he was plumb in the middle of 
 those dizzy dancing ropes, 'Cut, you beggars,' 
 he shouts ; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turn- 
 ing round and round and round twenty thou-
 
 1 68 THE MAN WHO 
 
 sand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till 
 he struck the water, and I could see his body- 
 caught on a rock with the gold crown close 
 beside. 
 
 "But do you know what they did to Peachey 
 between two pine trees? They crucified him. 
 Sir, as Peachey's hand will show. They used 
 wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and 
 he didn't die. He hung there and screamed, 
 and they took him down next day, and said 
 it was a miracle that he wasn't dead. They 
 took him down — poor old Peachey that hadn't 
 done them any harm — that hadn't done them 
 any . . . " 
 
 He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, 
 wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred 
 hands and moaning like a child for some ten 
 minutes. 
 
 "They was cruel enough to feed him up in 
 the temple, because they said he was more of a 
 God than old Daniel that was a man. Then 
 they turned him out on the snow, and told him 
 to go home, and Peachey came home in about a 
 year, begging along the roads quite safe; for 
 Daniel Dravot he walked before and said: — 
 'Come along, Peachey. It's a big thing we're 
 doing.' The mountains they danced at night, 
 and the mountains they tried to fall on
 
 WOULD BE KING 169 
 
 Peachey's head, but I >an he held up his hand, 
 and Peachey came along bent double. He 
 never let go of Dan's hand, and lit.' never let go 
 of Dan's head. They gave it to him as a pres- 
 ent in the temple, to remind him not to come 
 again, and though the crown was pure gold, 
 and Peachey was starving, never would 
 Peachey sell the same. Yon knew Dravot, Sir! 
 Yon knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! 
 Look at him now!" 
 
 He fumbled in the mass of rags round his 
 bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag 
 embroidered with silver thread; and shook 
 therefrom on to my table — the dried, withered 
 head of Daniel Dravot ! The morning sun that 
 had long been paling the lamps struck the red 
 beard and blind, sunken eyes ; struck, too, a 
 heavy circlet of gold studded with raw tur- 
 quoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the 
 battered temples. 
 
 "You behold now," said Carnehan, "the 
 Emperor in his habit as he lived — the King of 
 Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor 
 old Daniel that was a monarch once!" 
 
 I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements 
 manifold, I recognized the head of the man of 
 Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I 
 attempted to stop him. He was not fit to walk
 
 170 THE MAN WHO 
 
 abroad. "Let me take away the whiskey, and 
 give me a little money," he gasped. "I was a 
 King once. I'll go to the Deputy Commis- 
 sioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse till I 
 get my health. No, thank you, I can't wait 
 till you get a carriage for me. I've urgent pri- 
 vate affairs — in the south — at Marwar." 
 
 He shambled out of the office and departed 
 in the direction of the Deputy Commissioner's 
 house. That day at noon I had occasion to go 
 down the blinding hot Mall, and I saw a 
 crooked man crawling along the white dust of 
 the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering 
 dolorously after the fashion of street-singers 
 at Home. There was not a soul in sight, and 
 he was out of all possible earshot of the houses. 
 And he sang through his nose, turning his 
 head from right to left: 
 
 "The Son of Man goes forth to war, 
 
 A golden crown to gain ; 
 His blood-red banner streams afar — 
 
 Who follows in his train?" 
 
 I waited to hear no more, but put the poor 
 wretch into my carriage and drove him off to 
 the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to 
 the Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice 
 while he was with me, whom he did not in the 
 least recognize, and I left him singing it to the 
 missionary.
 
 WOULD BE KING 171 
 
 Two days later I inquired after his welfare 
 of the Superintendent of the Asylum. 
 
 "He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. 
 He died early yesterday morning," said the 
 Superintendent. "Is it true that he was half 
 an hour bareheaded in the sun at midday?" 
 
 "Yes," said I, "but do yon happen to know if 
 he had anything upon him by any chance when 
 he died?" 
 
 "Not to my knowledge," said the Superin- 
 tendent. 
 
 And there the matter rests.
 
 'THE FINEST STORY IN THE 
 WORLD"
 
 "THE FINEST STORY IN THE 
 WORLD" 
 
 "Or ever the knightly years were gone 
 With the old world to the grave, 
 I was a king in Babylon 
 
 And you were a Christian slave." 
 
 — W. E. Henley. 
 
 HIS name was Charlie Mears; he was the 
 only son of his mother, who was a 
 widow, and he lived in the north of London, 
 coming into the City every day to work in a 
 bank. He was twenty years old and suffered 
 from aspirations. I met him in a public bil- 
 liard-saloon where the marker called him by 
 his given name, and he called the marker 
 "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a little ner- 
 vously, that he had only come to the place to 
 look on, and since looking on at games of skill 
 is not a cheap amusement for the young, I sug- 
 gested that Charlie should go back to his 
 mother. 
 
 That was our first step toward better ac- 
 quaintance. He would call on me sometimes 
 in the evenings instead of running about Lon- 
 
 175
 
 176 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 don with his fellow-clerks ; and before long, 
 speaking of himself as a young man must, he 
 told me of his aspirations, which were all lit- 
 erary. He desired to make himself an undy- 
 ing name, chiefly through verse, though he was 
 not above sending stories of love and death to 
 the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was 
 my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems 
 of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments 
 of plays that would surely shake the world. 
 My reward was his unreserved confidence, and 
 the self-revelations and troubles of a young 
 man are almost as holy as those of a maiden. 
 Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anx- 
 ious to do so on the first opportunity; he be- 
 lieved in all things good and all things honor- 
 able, but, at the same time, was curiously care- 
 ful to let me see that he knew his way about 
 the world as befitted a bank clerk on twenty- 
 five shillings a week. He rhymed "dove" with 
 "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly 
 believed that they had never so been rhymed 
 before. The long, lame gaps in his plays he 
 filled up with hasty words of apology and de- 
 scription and swept on, seeing all that he in- 
 tended to do so clearly that he esteemed it al- 
 ready done, and turned to me for applause. 
 I fancy that his mother did not encourage
 
 IN TDK WOULD" 177 
 
 his aspirations, ami I know that his writing- 
 table at In line was the edge of his washstand. 
 This he told me almost at the outset of our ac- 
 quaintance; when he was ravaging my book- 
 shelves, and a little before I was implored to 
 speak the truth as to his chances of "writing' 
 something really great, you know." Maybe I 
 encouraged him too much, for, one night, he 
 called »>n me, his eyes flaming with excitement, 
 and said breathlessly : 
 
 "Do you mind — can you let me stay here and 
 write all this evening? I won't interrupt you, 
 I won't really. There's no place for me to 
 write in at my mother's." 
 
 "What's the trouble?" I said, knowing well 
 what that trouble was. 
 
 "I've a notion in my head that would make 
 the most splendid story that was ever writ- 
 ten. Do let me write it out here. It's stick a 
 notion !" 
 
 There was no resisting the appeal. I set 
 him a table ; he hardly thanked me, but plunged 
 into the work at once. For half an hour the 
 pen scratched without stopping. Then Charlie 
 sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching 
 grew slower, there were more erasures, and 
 at last ceased. The finest story in the world 
 would not come forth.
 
 178 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "It looks such awful rot now," he said, 
 mournfully. "And yet it seemed so good when 
 I was thinking about it. What's wrong?" 
 
 I could not dishearten him by saying the 
 truth. So I answered : "Perhaps you don't feel 
 in the mood for writing." 
 
 "Yes I do — except when I look at this stuff. 
 Ugh!" 
 
 "Read me what you've done," I said. 
 
 He read, and it was wondrous bad, and 
 he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, 
 expecting a little approval ; for he was proud 
 of those sentences, as I knew he would be. 
 
 "It needs compression," I suggested, cau- 
 tiously. 
 
 "I hate cutting my things down. I don't 
 think you could alter a word here without 
 spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than 
 when I was writing it." 
 
 "Charlie, you're suffering from an alarming 
 disease afflicting a numerous class. Put the 
 thing by, and tackle it again in a week." 
 
 "I want to do it at once. What do you 
 think of it?" 
 
 "How can I judge from a half-written tale? 
 Tell me the story as it lies in your head." 
 
 Charlie told, and in the telling there was 
 everything that his ignorance had so carefully
 
 IN THE WORLD" 179 
 
 prevented from escaping into the written word. 
 I looked at him and wondered whether it 
 were possible that he did nol know the orig- 
 inality, the power of the notion thai had come 
 in his way. It was distinctly a Notion among 
 notions. Men had been puffed up with pride 
 by nutii ms not a tithe as excellent and practi- 
 cable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, in- 
 terrupting the current of pure fancy witli sam- 
 ples of horrible sentences that he proposed to 
 use. I heard him out to the end. It would 
 be folly to allow his idea to remain in his own 
 inept hands, when I could do so much with it. 
 Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so 
 much ! 
 
 "What do you think?" he said, at last. "I 
 fancy I shall call it 'The Story of a Ship.' " 
 
 "I think the idea's pretty good ; but you 
 won't be able to handle it for ever so long. 
 Now I—" 
 
 "Would it be of any use to you? Would 
 you care to take it? I should be proud." said 
 Charlie, promptly. 
 
 There are few things sweeter in this world 
 than the guileless, hot-headed, intemperate, 
 open admiration of a junior. Even a woman 
 in her blindest devotion does not fall into the 
 gait of the man she adores, tilt her bonnet to
 
 180 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 the angle at which he wears his hat, or inter- 
 lard her speech with his pet oaths. And Char- 
 lie did all these things. Still it was necessary 
 to salve my conscience before I possessed my- 
 self of Charlie's thoughts. 
 
 "Let's make a bargain. I'll give you a fiver 
 for the notion," I said. 
 
 Charlie became a bank-clerk at once. 
 
 "Oh, that's impossible. Between two pals, 
 you know, if I may call you so, and speaking 
 as a man of the world, I couldn't. Take the 
 notion if it's any use to you. I've heaps more." 
 
 He had — none knew this better than I — but 
 they were notions of other men. 
 
 "Look at it as a matter of business — be- 
 tween men of the world," I returned. "Five 
 pounds will buy you any number of poetry- 
 books. Business is business, and you may be 
 sure I shouldn't give that price unless" — 
 
 "Oh, if you put it that way," said Charlie, 
 visibly moved by the thought of the books. 
 The bargain was clinched with an agreement 
 that he should at unstated intervals come to 
 me with all the notions that he possessed, 
 should have a table of his own to write at, and 
 unquestioned right to inflict upon me all his 
 poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, 
 "Now tell me how you came by this idea."
 
 IX THE WORLD" 181 
 
 "It came by itself." Charlie's eyes opened 
 a little. 
 
 "Yes, but you told me a great deal about 
 the hero that you must have read before some- 
 where." 
 
 "I haven't any time for reading, except 
 when you let me sit here, and on Sundays I'm 
 on my bicycle or down the river all day. 
 There's nothing wrong about the hero, is 
 there?" 
 
 "Tell me again and I shall understand clear- 
 ly. You say that your hero went pirating. 
 1 low did lie live?" 
 
 "lie was on the lower deck of this ship-thing 
 that I was telling you about." 
 
 "What sort of ship?" 
 
 "It was the kind rowed with oars, and the 
 sea spurts through the oar-holes and the men 
 n »w sitting up to their knees in water. Then 
 there's a bench running between the two lines 
 of oars and an overseer with a whip walks up 
 and down the bench to make the men work." 
 
 "How do you know that?" 
 
 "It's in the tale. There's a rope running 
 overhead, looped to the upper deck, for the 
 overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. 
 When the overseer misses the rope once and 
 falls among the rowers, remember the hero
 
 1 82 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 laughs at him and gets licked for it. He's 
 chained to his oar of course — the hero." 
 
 "How is he chained?" 
 
 "With an iron band round his waist fixed to 
 the bench he sits on, and a sort of handcuff on 
 his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He's on 
 the lower deck where the worst men are sent, 
 and the only light comes from the hatchways 
 and through the oar-holes. Can't you imagine 
 the sunlight just squeezing through between 
 the handle and the hole and wobbling about 
 as the ship moves?" 
 
 "I can, but I can't imagine your imagining 
 it." 
 
 "How could it be any other way? Now 
 you listen to me. The long oars on the upper 
 deck are managed by four men to each bench, 
 the lower ones by three, and the lowest of all 
 by two. Remember it's quite dark on the low- 
 est deck and all the men there go mad. When 
 a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn't 
 thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and 
 stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces." 
 
 "Why?" I demanded, amazed, not so much 
 at the information as the tone of command 
 in which it was flung out. 
 
 "To save trouble and to frighten the others. 
 It needs two overseers to drag a man's body up
 
 IN THE WORLD" 183 
 
 to the top deck; and if the men at the lower 
 deck oars were left alone, of course they'll 
 rowing and try to pull up all the benches by 
 all standing together in their chains." 
 
 "You've a most provident imagination. 
 Where have you been reading about galleys 
 and galley-slaves?" 
 
 "Nowhere that I remember. I row a little 
 when I get the chance. But, perhaps, if you 
 say so, I may have read something." 
 
 He went away shortly afterward to deal 
 with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank 
 clerk aged twenty could put into my hands 
 with a profligate abundance of detail, all given 
 with absolute assurance, the story of extrava- 
 gant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, 
 and death in unnamed seas. 
 
 He had led his hero a desperate dance 
 through revolt against the overseers, to com- 
 mand a ship of his own, and ultimate estab- 
 lishment of a kingdom on an island "some- 
 where in the sea, you know," and, delighted 
 with my paltry five pounds, had gone out to 
 buy the notions of other men, that these might 
 teach him how to write. I had the consolation 
 of knowing that this notion was mine by 
 right of purchase, and I thought that I could 
 make something of it. 
 
 When next he came to me he was drunk-
 
 1 84 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 royally drunk on many poets for the first time 
 revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his 
 words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped 
 himself in quotations. Most of all he was 
 drunk with Longfellow. 
 
 "Isn't it splendid? Isn't it superb?" he 
 cried, after hasty greetings. "Listen to this — 
 
 " 'Wouldst thou,' — so the helmsman answered, 
 'Know the secrets of the sea? 
 Only those who brave its dangers 
 Comprehend its mystery.' 
 
 By gum ! 
 
 " 'Only those who brave its dangers 
 Comprehend its mystery,' " 
 
 he repeated twenty times, walking up and 
 down the room and forgetting me. "But / 
 can understand it too," he said to himself. "I 
 don't know how to thank you for that fiver. 
 And this ; listen — 
 
 " 'I remember the black wharves and the ships 
 And the sea-tides tossing free, 
 And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
 And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 
 And the magic of the sea.' 
 
 I haven't braved any dangers, but I feel as if 
 I knew all about it." 
 
 "You certainly seem to have a grip of the 
 sea. Have you ever seen it?"
 
 IN THE WORLD" 185 
 
 "When I was a little chap I went to Brigh- 
 ton once; we used to live in Coventry, though, 
 before we came to London. I never saw it, 
 
 " 'When descends on the Atlantic 
 The gigantic 
 Storm-wind of the Equinox.' " 
 
 He shook me by the shoulder to make me 
 understand the passion that was shaking him- 
 self. 
 
 "When that storm comes," he continued, "I 
 think that all the oars in the ship that I was 
 talking about get broken, and the rowers have 
 their chests smashed in by the bucking oar- 
 heads. By the way, have you done anything 
 with that notion of mine yet?" 
 
 "No. I was waiting to hear more of it from 
 you. Tell me how in the world you're so cer- 
 tain about the fittings of the ship. You know 
 nothing of ships." 
 
 "I don't know. It's as real as anything to 
 me until I try to write it down. I was think- 
 ing about it only last night in bed. after you 
 had loaned me 'Treasure Island ;' and I made 
 tip a whole lot of new things to go into the 
 story." 
 
 "What sort of things ?" 
 
 "About the food the men ate ; rotten figs and 
 black beans and wine in a skin bag, passed 
 from bench to bench."
 
 1 86 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "Was the ship built so long ago as that?" 
 
 "As what? I don't know whether it was 
 long ago or not. It's only a notion, but some- 
 times it seems just as real as if it was true. 
 Do I bother you with talking about it?" 
 
 "Not in the least. Did you make up any- 
 thing else?" 
 
 "Yes, but it's nonsense." Charlie flushed a 
 little. 
 
 "Never mind; let's hear about it." 
 
 "Well, I was thinking over the story, and 
 after a while I got out of bed and wrote down 
 on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men 
 might be supposed to scratch on their oars 
 with the edges of their handcuffs. It semed to 
 make the thing more lifelike. It is so real to 
 me, y'know." 
 
 "Have you the paper on you?" 
 
 "Ye-es, but what's the use of showing it? 
 It's only a lot of scratches. All the same, we 
 might have 'em reproduced in the book on the 
 front page." 
 
 "I'll attend to those details. Show me what 
 your men wrote." 
 
 He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of note- 
 paper, with a single line of scratches upon it, 
 and I put this carefully away. 
 
 "What is it supposed to mean in English?" 
 I said.
 
 IN THE WOULD" 1R7 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it means 'I'm 
 beastly tired.' It's nonsense," he repealed, 
 "but all those men in the ship seem as real as 
 people to me. Do do something to the notion 
 soon; I should like to see it written and 
 printed." 
 
 "But all you've told me would make a long 
 book.'' 
 
 "Make it then. You've only to sit down and 
 write it out." 
 
 "Give me a little time. Have yon any more 
 notions?" 
 
 "Not just now. I'm reading all the books 
 I've bought. They're splendid." 
 
 When he had left I looked at the sheet of 
 notepaper with the inscription upon it. Then 
 I took my head tenderly between both hands, 
 to make certain that it was not coming off or 
 turning round. Then . . . but there seemed 
 to be no interval between quitting my rooms 
 and finding myself arguing with a policeman 
 outside a door marked Private in a corridor of 
 the British Museum. All I demanded, as po- 
 litely as possible, was "the Greek antiquity 
 man." The policeman knew nothing except 
 the rules of the Museum, and it became neces- 
 sary to forage through all the houses and of- 
 fices inside the gates. An elderly gentleman
 
 1 88 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 called away from his lunch put an end to my 
 search by holding the note-paper between fin- 
 ger and thumb and sniffing at it scornfully. 
 
 "What does this mean? H'mm," said he. 
 "So far as I can ascertain it is an attempt to 
 write extremely corrupt Greek on the part" — 
 here he glared at me with intention — "of an 
 extremely illiterate — ah — person." He read 
 slowly from the paper, "Pollock, Erckmann, 
 Tanchnitz, Henniker" — four names familiar 
 to me. 
 
 "Can you tell me what the corruption is 
 supposed to mean — the gist of the thing?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "I have been — many times — overcome with 
 weariness in this particular employment. That 
 is the meaning." He returned me the paper, 
 and I fled without a word of thanks, explana- 
 tion, or apology. 
 
 I might have been excused for forgetting 
 much. To me of all men had been given the 
 chance to write the most marvelous tale in the 
 world, nothing less than the story of a Greek 
 galley-slave, as told by himself. Small won- 
 der that his dreaming had seemed real to 
 Charlie. The Fates that are so careful to shut 
 the doors of each successive life behind us had, 
 in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was
 
 IN THE WORLD" 189 
 
 looking, though that he did nol know, where 
 never man had been permitted to look with full 
 knowledge since Time began. Above all, he 
 was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold 
 to me for five pounds; and he would retain 
 that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not under- 
 stand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial 
 education does not include Greek. lie would 
 supply me — here I capered among the dumb 
 gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered 
 faces — with material to make my tale sure — 
 so sure that the world would hail it as an im- 
 pudent and vamped fiction. And I — I alone 
 would know that it was absolutely and liter- 
 ally true. I, — I alone held this jewel to my 
 hand for the cutting and polishing. Therefore 
 T danced again among the gods till a police- 
 man saw me and took steps in my direction. 
 
 It remained now only to encourage Charlie 
 to talk, and here there was no difficulty. But 
 I had forgotten those accursed books of poe- 
 try. He came to me time after time, as use- 
 less as a surcharged phonograph — drunk on 
 Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what 
 the boy had been in his past lives, and desper- 
 atclv anxious not to lose one word of his bab- 
 ble, I could not hide from him my respect and 
 interest. He misconstrued both into respect
 
 190 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom 
 life was as new as it was to Adam, and inter- 
 est in his readings ; and stretched my patience 
 to breaking point by reciting poetry — not his 
 own now, but that of others. I wished every 
 English poet blotted out of the memory of 
 mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names 
 of song because they had drawn Charlie from 
 the path of direct narrative, and would, later, 
 spur him to imitate them; but I choked down 
 my impatience until the first flood of enthu- 
 siasm should have spent itself and the boy re- 
 turned to his dreams. 
 
 "What's the use of my telling you what / 
 think, when these chaps wrote things for the 
 angels to read?" he growled, one evening. 
 "Why don't you write something like theirs?" 
 
 "I don't think you are treating me quite 
 fairly," I said, speaking under strong restraint. 
 
 "I've given you the story," he said, shortly, 
 replunging into "Lara." 
 
 "But I want the details." 
 
 "The things I make up about that damned 
 ship that you call a galley? They're quite 
 easy. You can just make 'em up yourself. 
 Turn up the gas a little, I want to go on read- 
 ing." 
 
 I could have broken the gas globe over his
 
 IX THE WOULD" 191 
 
 head for his amazing stupidity. T could in- 
 deed make up things for myself did I only 
 
 know what Charlie did not know that he knew. 
 I'm since the doors were shut behind me I 
 could only wait his youthful pleasure ami 
 strive to keep him in good temper. < >ne min- 
 ute's want of guard might spoil a priceless 
 revelation: now and again he would toss his 
 hooks aside he kept them in my rooms, for 
 his mother would have been shocked at the 
 waste of good money had she seen them — 
 and launched into his sea of dreams. Again 
 I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic 
 mind of the hank-clerk had keen overlaid, col- 
 ored and distorted by that which he had read, 
 and the result as delivered was a confused 
 tangle of other voices most like the muttered 
 song through a City telephone in the busiest 
 part of the day. 
 
 He talked of the galley — his own galley 
 had he but known it — with illustrations bor- 
 rowed from the "Bride of Abydos." He 
 pointed the experiences of his hero with quo- 
 tations from "The Corsair," and threw in 
 deep and desperate moral reflections from 
 "Cain" and "Manfred," expecting me to use 
 them all. Only when the talk turned on Long- 
 fellow were the jarring cross-currents dumb,
 
 192 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 and I knew that Charlie was speaking - the truth 
 as he remembered it. 
 
 "What do you think of this?" I said one 
 evening, as soon as I understood the medium 
 in which his memory worked best, and, before 
 he could expostulate, read him the whole of 
 'The Saga of King Olaf!" 
 
 He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his 
 hands drumming on the back of the sofa 
 where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar 
 Tamberskelver and the verse: 
 
 "Einar then, the arrow taking 
 From the loosened string, 
 Answered : 'That was Norway breaking 
 'Neath thy hand, O King.' " 
 
 He gasped with pure delight of sound. 
 
 "That's better than Byron, a little," I ven- 
 tured. 
 
 "Better? Why it's true! How could he 
 have known?" 
 
 I went back and repeated: 
 
 " 'What was that?' said Olaf, standing 
 
 On the quarter-deck, 
 'Something heard I like the stranding 
 Of a shattered wreck?'" 
 
 "How could he have known how the ships 
 crash and the oars rip out and go s-szp all 
 along the line? Why only the other night.
 
 IN THE WORLD" 193 
 
 . . . But go back please and read 'The 
 Skerry of Shrieks' again." 
 
 "No, I'm tired. Let's talk. What hap- 
 pened the other night?" 
 
 "I had an awful nightmare about that gal- 
 lev of ours. I dreamed I was drowned in a 
 fight. You see we ran alongside another ship 
 in the harhor. The water was dead still ex- 
 cept where our oars whipped it up. You 
 know where I always sit in the galley?" He 
 spoke haltingly at first, under a fine English 
 fear of being laughed at. 
 
 "No. That's news to me," I answered, 
 meekly, my heart beginning to beat. 
 
 "On the fourth oar from the bow on the 
 right side on the upper deck. There were 
 four of us at that oar, all chained. I remem- 
 ber watching the water and trying to get my 
 handcuffs off before the row began. Then we 
 closed up on the other ship, and all their fight- 
 ing men jumped over our bulwarks, and my 
 bench broke and I was pinned down with the 
 three other fellows on top of me, and the big 
 oar jammed across our backs." 
 
 "Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and 
 alight. He was looking at the wall behind my 
 chair. 
 
 "I don't know how we fought. The men
 
 194 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 were trampling all over my back, and I lay- 
 low. Then our rowers on the left side — tied 
 to their oars, yo.u know — began to yell and 
 back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and 
 we spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, 
 lying where I was, that there was a galley 
 coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side. 
 I could just lift up my head and see her sail 
 over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her 
 bow to bow, but it was too late. We could 
 only turn a little bit because the galley on our 
 right had hooked herself on to us and stopped 
 our moving. Then, by gum ! there was a 
 crash! Our left oars began to break as the 
 other galley, the moving one y'know, stuck 
 her nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars 
 shot up through the deck planking, butt first, 
 and one of them jumped clean up into the air 
 and came down again close to my head." 
 
 "How was that managed?" 
 
 "The moving galley's bow was plunking 
 them back through their own oar-holes, and I 
 could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks 
 below. Then her nose caught us nearly in the 
 middle, and we tilted sideways, and the fellows 
 in the right hand galley unhitched their hooks 
 and ropes, and threw things on to our upper 
 deck — arrows, and hot pitch or something that
 
 IN THE WOULD" 195 
 
 stung, and we went up and up and up on the 
 left side, and the right side dipped, and I 
 twisted my head round and saw the water 
 stand still as it topped the right bulwarks, and 
 then it curled over and crashed down on the 
 whole lot of us on the right side, and I fell it 
 hit my back, and I woke." 
 
 "( >ne minute, Charlie. When the sea 
 topped the bulwarks, what did it look like?" 
 1 had my reasons for asking. A man of my 
 acquaintance had once gone down with a leak- 
 ing ship in a still sea, and had seen the water- 
 level pause for an instant ere it fell on the 
 deck. 
 
 "It looked just like a banjo-string drawn 
 tight, and it seemed to stay there for years," 
 said Charlie. 
 
 Exactly! The other man had said: "It 
 looked like a silver wire laid down along the 
 bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to 
 break." He had paid everything except the 
 bare life for this little valueless piece of knowl- 
 edge, and I had traveled ten thousand weary 
 miles to meet him and take his knowledge at 
 second hand. But Charlie, the bank-clerk on 
 twenty-five shillings a week, he who had never 
 been out of sight of a London omnibus, knew 
 it all. It was no consolation to me that once
 
 196 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 in his lives he had been forced to die for his 
 gains. I also must have died scores of times, 
 but behind me, because I could have used my 
 knowledge, the doors were shut. 
 
 "And then?" I said, trying to put away the 
 devil of envy. 
 
 "The funny thing was, though, in all the 
 mess I didn't feel a bit astonished or fright- 
 ened. It seemed as if I'd been in a good many 
 fights, because I told my next man so when 
 the row began. But that cad of an overseer on 
 my deck wouldn't unloose our chains and give 
 us a chance. He always said that we'd all be 
 set free after a battle, but we never were; we 
 never were." Charlie shook his head mourn- 
 fully. 
 
 "What a scoundrel !" 
 
 "I should say he was. He never gave us 
 enough to eat, and sometimes we were so 
 thirsty that we used to drink salt-water. I can 
 taste that salt-water still." 
 
 "Now tell me something about the harbor 
 where the fight was fought." 
 
 "I didn't dream about that. I know it was 
 a harbor, though ; because we were tied up to 
 a ring on a white wall and all the face of the 
 stone under water was covered with wood to 
 prevent our ram getting chipped when the tide 
 made us rock."
 
 IN THE WORLD" 197 
 
 "That's curious. Our hero commanded the 
 galley, didn't he?" 
 
 "Didn'l he just! Tic stood by the bows and 
 shouted like a good 'un. I [e was the man who 
 killed the overseer." 
 
 "But yon were all drowned together, Char- 
 lie, weren't yon?" 
 
 "I can't make that fit quite," he said, with 
 a puzzled look. "The galley must have gone 
 down with all hands, and yet T fancy that the 
 hero went on living afterward. Perhaps he 
 climbed into the attacking ship. T wouldn't 
 see that, of course. T was dead, yon know." 
 
 Tie shivered slightly and protested that he 
 conld remember no more. 
 
 I did not press him further, but to satisfy 
 myself that he lay in ignorance of the work- 
 ings of his own mind, deliberately introduced 
 him to Mortimer Collins's "Transmigration," 
 and gave him a sketch of the plot before he 
 opened the pages. 
 
 "What rot it all is !" he said, frankly, at the 
 end of an hour. "I don't understand his non- 
 sense about the Red Planet Mars and the 
 King, and the rest of it. Chuck me the Long- 
 fellow again." 
 
 I handed him the book and wrote out as 
 much as I could remember of his description
 
 198 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time 
 to time for confirmation of fact or detail. 
 He would answer without raising his eyes 
 from the book, as assuredly as though all his 
 knowledge lay before him on the printed page. 
 I spoke under the normal key of my voice that 
 the current might not be broken, and I know 
 that he was not aware of what he was saying, 
 for his thoughts were out on the sea with 
 Longfellow. 
 
 "Charlie," I asked, "when the rowers on the 
 galleys mutinied how did they kill their over- 
 seers?" 
 
 "Tore up the benches and brained 'em. That 
 happened when a heavy sea was running. An 
 overseer on the lower deck slipped from the 
 centre plank and fell among the rowers. They 
 choked him to death against the side of the 
 ship with their chained hands quite quietly, 
 and it was too dark for the other overseer to 
 see what had happened. When he asked, he 
 was pulled down too and choked, and the 
 lower deck fought their way up deck by deck, 
 with the pieces of the broken benches banging 
 behind 'em. How they howled!" 
 
 "And what happened after that?" 
 
 "I don't know. The hero went away — red 
 hair and red beard and all. That was after he 
 had captured our galley, I think."
 
 IN THE WOULD" 199 
 
 The sound of my voice irritated him, and he 
 motioned slightly with his left hand as a man 
 does when interruption jars. 
 
 "You never told me he was red-headed be- 
 fore, or that he captured your galley," I said, 
 after a discreet interval. 
 
 Charlie did not raise his eyes. 
 
 "He was as red as a red bear," said he, ab- 
 stractedly. "He came from the north ; they 
 said so in the galley when he looked for row- 
 ers — not slaves, but free men. Afterward — 
 years and years afterward — news came from 
 another ship, or else he came back" — 
 
 His lips moved in silence. He was raptur- 
 ously retasting some poem before him. 
 
 "Where had he been, then?" I was almost 
 whispering, that the sentence might come gen- 
 tle to whichever section of Charlie's brain was 
 working on my behalf. 
 
 "To the Beaches — the Long and Wonderful 
 Beaches!" was the reply, after a minute of 
 silence. 
 
 "To Furdurstrandi ?" I asked, tingling from 
 head to foot. 
 
 "Yes, to Furdurstrandi," he pronounced the 
 word in a new fashion. "And I too saw" — 
 The voice failed. 
 
 "Do you know what you have said?" I 
 shouted, incautiously.
 
 aoo "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 He lifted his eyes, fully roused now. "No!" 
 he snapped. "I wish you'd let a chap go on 
 reading-. Hark to this : 
 
 " 'But Othere, the old sea captain, 
 He neither paused nor stirred 
 Till the king listened, and then 
 Once more took up his pen 
 And wrote down every word. 
 
 " 'And to the King of the Saxons 
 In witness of the truth, 
 Raising his noble head, 
 He stretched his brown hand and said, 
 "Behold this walrus tooth." ' 
 
 By Jove, what chaps those must have been, to 
 go sailing all over the shop never knowing 
 where they'd fetch the land! Hah!" 
 
 "Charlie," I pleaded, "if you'll only be sen- 
 sible for a minute or two I'll make our hero in 
 our tale every inch as good as Othere." 
 
 "Umph ! Longfellow wrote that poem. I 
 don't care about writing things any more. I 
 want to read." He was thoroughly out of tune 
 now, and raging over my own ill-luck, I left 
 him. 
 
 Conceive yourself at the door of the world's 
 treasure-house guarded by a child — an idle, 
 irresponsible child playing knuckle-bones — on 
 whose favor depends the gift of the key, and 
 you will imagine one half my torment. Till
 
 IN THE WORLD" 201 
 
 that evening Charlie had spoken nothing that 
 might not lie within the experiences of a 
 Greek galley-slave. Bui now, or there was no 
 virtue in books, lie had talked of some desper- 
 ate adventure of the Vikings, of Thorfin Karl- 
 sefne's sailing to Wineland, which is America, 
 in the ninth or tenth century. The battle in the 
 harbor he had seen; and his own death he had 
 described. But this was a much more start- 
 ling plunge into the past. Was it possible that 
 he had skipped half a dozen lives and was then 
 dimly remembering some episode of a thou- 
 sand years later? It was a maddening jumble, 
 and the worst of it was that Charlie Mears in 
 his normal condition was the last person in 
 the world to clear it up. I could only wait and 
 watch, but I went to bed that night full of the 
 wildest imaginings. There was nothing that 
 was not possible if Charlie's detestable memory 
 only held good. 
 
 I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karl- 
 sefne as it had never been written before, 
 might tell the story of the first discovery of 
 America, myself the discoverer. But I was 
 entirely at Charlie's mercy, and so long as 
 there was a three-and-sixpenny Bohn volume 
 within his reach Charlie would not tell. I 
 dared not curse him openly; I hardly dared
 
 202 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 jog his memory, for I was dealing with the 
 experiences of a thousand years ago, told 
 through the mouth of a boy of to-day; and a 
 boy of to-day is affected by every change of 
 tone and gust of opinion, so that he lies even 
 when he desires to speak the truth. 
 
 I saw no more of him for nearly a week. 
 When next I met him it was in Gracechurch 
 street with a billhook chained to his waist. 
 Business took him over London Bridge and I 
 accompanied him. He was very full of the 
 importance of that book and magnified it. As 
 we passed over the Thames we paused to look 
 at a steamer unloading great slabs of white 
 and brown marble. A barge drifted under the 
 steamer's stern and a lonely cow in that barge 
 bellowed. Charlie's face changed from the 
 face of the bank-clerk to that of an unknown 
 and — though he would not have believed this 
 — a much shrewder man. He flung out his 
 arm across the parapet of the bridge and 
 laughing very loudly, said : 
 
 "When they heard our bulls bellow the 
 Skrcelings ran away!" 
 
 I waited only for an instant, but the barge 
 and the cow had disappeared under the bows 
 of the steamer before I answered. 
 
 "Charlie, what do you suppose are Skrcel- 
 ings ?"
 
 IN THE WORLD" 20;, 
 
 "Never heard of 'era before. They sound 
 like a new kind of seagull. What a chap you 
 are for asking questions !" he replied. "I have 
 
 to go to the cashier of the Omnibus Company 
 
 yonder. Will you wait for me and we can 
 lunch somewhere together? I've a notion for 
 a poem." 
 
 "No, thanks. T'm off. You're sure yon 
 know nothing about Skrcelings?" 
 
 "Not unless he's been entered for the Liver- 
 pool Handicap." He nodded and disappeared 
 in the crowd. 
 
 Now it is written in the Saga of Eric the 
 Red or that of Thorfin Karlsefne, that nine 
 hundred years ago when Karlsefne's galleys 
 came to Leif's booths, which Lief had erected 
 in the unknown land called Markland, which 
 may or may not have been Rhode Island, the 
 Skrcelings — and the Lord He knows who these 
 may or may not have been — came to trade with 
 the Vikings, and ran away because they were 
 frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which 
 Thorfin had brought with him in the ships. 
 But what in the world could a Greek slave 
 know of that affair? I wandered up and d< »wn 
 among the streets trying to unravel the mys- 
 tery, and the more I considered it, the more 
 baffling it grew. One thing only seemed cer-
 
 204 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 tain, and that certainty took away my breath 
 for the moment. If I came to full knowledge 
 of anything at all, it would not be one life of 
 the soul in Charlie Mears's body, but half a 
 dozen — half a dozen several and separate ex- 
 istences spent on blue water in the morning 
 of the world! 
 
 Then I walked round the situation. 
 
 Obviously if I used my knowledge I should 
 stand alone and unapproachable until all men 
 were as wise as myself. That would be some- 
 thing, but manlike I was ungrateful. It 
 seemed bitterly unfair that Charlie's memory 
 should fail me when I needed it most. Great 
 Powers above — I looked up at them through 
 the fog and smoke — did the Lords of Life and 
 Death know what this meant to me? Nothing 
 less than eternal fame of the best kind, that 
 comes from One, and is shared by one alone. 
 I would be content — remembering Clive, I 
 stood astounded at my own moderation, — with 
 the mere right to tell one story, to work out 
 one little contribution to the light literature 
 of the day. If Charlie were permitted full 
 recollection for one hour — for sixty short min- 
 utes — of existences that had extended over a 
 thousand years — I would forego all profit and 
 honor from all that I should make of his
 
 IN THE WOK LI)" 205 
 
 speech. I would take no share in the commo- 
 tion thai would follow throughout the partic- 
 ular corner of the earth that calls itself "the 
 world." The thing should he put forth anon- 
 ymously. Nay, I would make other men be- 
 lieve that they had written it. They would 
 hire hull-hided self-advertising Englishmen to 
 bellow it abroad. Preachers would found a 
 fresh conduct of life upon it. swearing that it 
 was new and that they had lifted the fear of 
 death from all mankind. Every Orientalist in 
 Europe would patronize it discursively with 
 Sanskrit and Pali texts. Terrible women in- 
 vent unclean variants of the men's belief for 
 the elevation of their sisters. Churches and 
 religions would war over it. Between the hail- 
 ing and re-starting of an omnibus I foresaw the 
 scuffles that would arise among half a dozen 
 denominations all professing "the doctrine of 
 the True Metempsychosis as applied to the 
 world and the New Era" ; and saw. too, the re- 
 spectable English newspapers shying, like 
 frightened kine, over the beautiful simplicity 
 of the tale. The mind leaped forward a hun- 
 dred — two hundred — a thousand years. I 
 saw with sorrow that men would mutilate and 
 garble the story; that rival creeds would turn 
 it upside down till, at last, the western world
 
 206 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 which clings to the dread of death more 
 closely than the hope of life, would set it aside 
 as an interesting superstition and stampede 
 after some faith so long forgotten that it 
 seemed altogether new. Upon this I changed 
 the terms of the bargain that I would make 
 with the Lords of Life and Death. Only let 
 me know, let me write, the story with sure 
 knowledge that I wrote the truth, and I would 
 burn the manuscript as a solemn sacrifice. Five 
 minutes after the last line was written I would 
 destroy it all. But I must be allowed to write 
 it with absolute certainty. 
 
 There was no answer. The flaming colors of 
 an Aquarium poster caught my eye and I won- 
 dered whether it would be wise or prudent to 
 lure Charlie into the hands of the professional 
 mesmerist, and whether, if he were under his 
 power, he would speak of his past lives. If he 
 did, and if people believed him . . . but 
 Charlie would be frightened and flustered, or 
 made conceited by the interviews. In either 
 case he would begin to lie, through fear or 
 vanity. He was safest in my own hands. 
 
 "They are very funny fools, your English," 
 said a voice at my elbow, and turning round 
 I recognized a casual acquaintance, a young 
 Bengali law student, called Grish Chunder,
 
 IN THE WOULD" 207 
 
 whose father had sent him to England to be- 
 come civilized. The old man was a retired na- 
 tive official, and on an income of five pounds a 
 month contrived to allow his sun two hundred 
 pounds a year, and the run of his teeth in a 
 city where he could pretend to be the cadet of 
 a royal house, and tell stories of the brutal In- 
 dian bureaucrats who ground the fact's of the 
 poor. 
 
 Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied 
 Bengali dressed with scrupulous care in frock 
 coat, tall hat, light trousers and tan gloves. 
 Rut I had known him in the days when the 
 brutal Indian Government paid for his univer- 
 sity education, and he contributed cheap sedi- 
 tion to Sachi Durpan, and intrigued with the 
 wives of his schoolmates. 
 
 "That is very funny and very foolish," he 
 said, nodding at the poster. "I am going 
 down to the Northbrook Club. Will you come 
 too?" 
 
 I walked with him for some time. "You are 
 not well," he said. "What is there in your 
 mind? You do not talk." 
 
 "Grish Chunder, you've been too well edu- 
 cated to believe in a God, haven't you?" 
 
 "Oah, yes, here! But when I go home I 
 must conciliate popular superstition, and make
 
 208 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 ceremonies of purification, and my women will 
 anoint idols." 
 
 "And hang up tulsi and feast the purohit, 
 and take you back into caste again and make 
 a good khuttri of you again, you advanced so- 
 cial Freethinker. And you'll eat desi food, 
 and like it all, from the smell in the courtyard 
 to the mustard oil over you." 
 
 "I shall very much like it," said Grish Chum 
 der, unguardedly. "Once a Hindu — always a 
 Hindu. But I like to know what the English 
 think they know." 
 
 "I'll tell you something that one Englishman 
 knows. It's an old tale to you." 
 
 I began to tell the story of Charlie in Eng- 
 lish, but Grish Chunder put a question in the 
 vernacular, and the history went forward nat- 
 urally in the tongue best suited for its telling. 
 After all it could never have been told in Eng- 
 lish. Grish Chunder heard me, nodding from 
 time to time, and then came up to my rooms, 
 where I finished the tale. 
 
 "Beshak," he said, philosophically. "Lekin 
 darwaza band hai. (Without doubt, but the 
 door is shut.) I have heard of this remem- 
 bering of previous existences among my peo- 
 ple. It is of course an old tale with us, but, 
 to happen to an Englishman — a cow-fed Mai-
 
 IN THE WORLD" 209 
 
 echh—an outcast. By Jove, that is most pe- 
 culiar!" 
 
 "Outcast yourself, Grish Chunder! You eat 
 cow-beef every day. Let's think the thing 
 over. The boy remembers his incarnations." 
 
 "Does he know that?" said Grish Chunder, 
 quietly, swinging his legs as he sal on my table. 
 1 [e was speaking 1 in English now. 
 
 "He does not know anything. Would I 
 speak to you if he did? Go on!" 
 
 "There is no going on at all. If you tell 
 that to your friends they will say you are mad 
 and put it in the papers. Suppose, now, you 
 prosecute for libel." 
 
 "Let's leave that out of the question entirely. 
 Is there any chance of his being made to 
 speak ?" 
 
 "There is a chance. Oah, yess! But if he 
 spoke it would mean that all this world would 
 end now — instan to — fall down on your head. 
 These things are not allowed, you know. As 
 I said, the door is shut." 
 
 "Not a ghost of a chance?" 
 
 "How can there be? You are a Christi-an, 
 and it is forbidden to eat, in your books, of the 
 Tree of Life, or else you would never die. 
 How shall you all fear death if you all know 
 what your friend does not know that he
 
 210 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 knows? I am afraid to be kicked, but I am not 
 afraid to die, because I know what I know. 
 You are not afraid to be kicked, but you are 
 afraid to die. If you were not, by God! you 
 English would be all over the shop in an hour, 
 upsetting the balances of power, and making 
 commotions. It would not be good. But no 
 fear. He will remember a little and a little 
 less, and he will call it dreams. Then he will 
 forget altogether. When I passed my First 
 Arts Examination in Calcutta that was all in 
 the cram-book on Wordsworth. Trailing 
 clouds of glory, you know." 
 
 "This seems to be an exception to the rule." 
 
 "There are no exceptions to rules. Some are 
 not so hard-looking at others, but they are all 
 the same when you touch. If this friend of 
 yours said so-and-so and so-and-so, indicating 
 that he remembered all his lost lives, or one 
 piece of a lost life, he would not be in the bank 
 another hour. He would be what you called 
 sack because he was mad, and they would send 
 him to an asylum for lunatics. You can see 
 that, my friend." 
 
 "Of course I can, but I wasn't thinking of 
 him. His name need never appear in the 
 story." 
 
 "Ah! I see. That story will never be writ- 
 ten. You can try."
 
 IN THE WORLD" 211 
 
 "I am going to." 
 
 "For your own credit and for the sake of 
 money, of course?" 
 
 "No. For the sake of writing the story. 
 On my honor that will be all." 
 
 "Even then there is no chance. You cannot 
 play with the Gods. It is a very pretty story 
 now. As they say, Let it go on that — I mean 
 at that. Be quick; he will not last long." 
 
 "How do you mean?" 
 
 "What I say. He has never, so far, thought 
 about a woman." 
 
 "Hasn't he, though!" I remembered some 
 of Charlie's confidences. 
 
 "I mean no woman has thought about him. 
 When that conies; bus — hogya — all up! I 
 know. There are millions of women here. 
 Housemaids, for instance." 
 
 I winced at the thought of my story being 
 ruined by a housemaid. And yet nothing was 
 more probable. 
 
 Grish Chunder grinned. 
 
 "Yes — also pretty girls — cousins of his 
 house, and perhaps not of his house. One kiss 
 that he gives back again and remembers will 
 cure all this nonsense, or else" — 
 
 "Or else what? Remember he does not 
 know that he knows."
 
 212 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "I know that. Or else, if nothing happens 
 he will become immersed in the trade and the 
 financial speculations like the rest. It must be 
 so. You can see that it must be so. But the 
 woman will come first, / think." 
 
 There was a rap at the door, and Charlie 
 charged in impetuously. He had been released 
 from office, and by the look in his eyes I could 
 see that he had come over for a long talk; 
 most probably with poems in his pockets. 
 Charlie's poems were very wearying, but some- 
 times they led him to talk about the galley. 
 
 Grish Chunder looked at him keenly for a 
 minute. 
 
 "I beg your pardon," Charlie said, uneasily; 
 "I didn't know you had any one with you." 
 
 "I am going," said Grish Chunder. 
 
 He drew me into the lobby as he departed. 
 
 "That is your man," he said, quickly. "I tell 
 you he will never speak all you wish. That is 
 rot — bosh. But he would be most good to 
 make to see things. Suppose now we pretend 
 that it was only play" — I had never seen Grish 
 Chunder so excited — "and pour the ink-pool 
 into his hand. Eh, what do you think? I tell 
 you that he could see anything that a man 
 could see. Let me get the ink and camphor. 
 He is a seer and he will tell us very many 
 things."
 
 IN THE WORLD" 213 
 
 "He may be all you say. bul I'm not going 
 to trust him to your gods and devils." 
 
 "It will not hurt him. IK- will only feel a 
 little stupid and dull when he wake- up. You 
 have seen boys look into the ink-pool before." 
 
 "That is the reason why 1 am nol g< >ing to 
 see it any more. You'd better go, Grish Chun- 
 der." 
 
 He went, declaring far down the stain 
 that it was throwing away my only chance of 
 looking into the future. 
 
 This left me unmoved, for I was concerned 
 for the past, and no peering of hypnotized 
 boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me 
 to that. But I recognized (Irish Thunder's 
 point of view and sympathized with it. 
 
 "What a big black brute that was !" said 
 Charlie, when I returned to him. "Well, look 
 here, I've just done a poem; did it instead of 
 playing dominoes after lunch. May I read 
 it?" 
 
 "Let me read it to myself." 
 
 "Then you miss the proper expression. Be- 
 sides, you always make my things sound as if 
 the rhymes were all wrong." 
 
 "Read it aloud, then. You're like the rest 
 of 'em." 
 
 Charlie mouthed me his poem, and it was
 
 214 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 not much worse than the average of his verses. 
 He had been reading his books faithfully, but 
 he was not pleased when I told him that I pre- 
 ferred my Longfellow undiluted with Charlie. 
 
 Then we began to go through the MS. line 
 by line; Charlie parrying every objection and 
 correction with : 
 
 "Yes, that may be better, but you don't catch 
 what I'm driving at." 
 
 Charles was, in one way at least, very like 
 one kind of a poet. 
 
 There was a pencil scrawl at the back of the 
 paper and "what's that?" I said. 
 
 "Oh, that's not poetry at all. It's some rot 
 I wrote last night before I went to bed and it 
 was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so 
 I made it a sort of blank verse instead." 
 
 Here is Charlie's "blank verse" : 
 
 "We pulled for you when the wind was against us 
 and the sails were low. 
 
 Will you never let us go? 
 
 We ate bread and onions when you took towns or 
 ran aboard quickly when you were beaten back by the 
 foe, 
 
 The captains walked up and down the deck in fair 
 weather singing songs, but we were below, 
 
 We fainted with our chins on the oars, and you did 
 oot see that we were idle, for we still swung to and fro. 
 Will you never let us go?
 
 IN THE WORLD" 215 
 
 Tin- salt made the oar handles like sharkskin; our 
 knees were cut to the bone with sail cracks; <>tir hair 
 was stuck tn our foreheads; and <>ur lips were cut to 
 our gums, ami you whipped u because we could nol 
 row. 
 
 Will you never let us 90? 
 But in a little time we shall run out of the porth"l<s 
 as the water runs along the oarblade, and though you 
 tell the others to row after us you will never catch 'is 
 till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the wind, in 
 the belly of the sail. Alio! 
 
 Will you never let us go?" 
 
 "H'm. What's oar-thresh, Charlie?" 
 
 "The water washed up by the oars. That's 
 the sort of song they might sing in the galley, 
 y'know. Aren't yon ever going to finish that 
 story and give me some of the profits?" 
 
 "It depends on yourself. If you had only 
 told me more about your hero in the first in- 
 stance it might have been finished by now. 
 You're so hazy in your notions." 
 
 "I only want to give you the general notion 
 of it — the knocking about from place to place 
 and the fighting and all that. Can't you fill 
 in the rest yourself? Make the hero save a 
 girl on a pirate-galley and marry her or do 
 something." 
 
 "You're a really helpful collaborator. T 
 suppose the hero went through some few ad- 
 ventures before he married."
 
 216 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "Well then, make him a very artful card — 
 a low sort of man — a sort of political man 
 who went about making treaties and breaking 
 them — a black-haired chap who hid behind the 
 mast when the fighting began." 
 
 "But you said the other day that he was 
 red-haired." 
 
 "I couldn't have. Make him black-haired 
 of course. You've no imagination." 
 
 Seeing that I had just discovered the entire 
 principles upon which the half-memory falsely 
 called imagination is based, I felt entitled to 
 laugh, but forbore, for the sake of the tale. 
 
 "You're right. You're the man with imagi- 
 nation. A black-haired chap in a decked ship," 
 I said. 
 
 "No, an open ship — like a big boat." 
 
 This was maddening. 
 
 "Your ship has been built and designed, 
 closed and decked in; you said so yourself," 
 I protested. 
 
 "No, no, not that ship. That was open, or 
 half decked because — By Jove, you're right. 
 You made me think of the hero as a red-haired 
 chap. Of course if he were red, the ship 
 would be an open one with painted sails." 
 
 Surely, I thought, he would remember now 
 that he had served in two galleys at least — in
 
 in iiii; woki.D" 217 
 
 a three-decked Greek one under the black- 
 haired "political man." and again in a Vi- 
 king's open sea-serpent under the man "red as 
 a red bear" who went to Markland. The devil 
 
 prompted me to speak. 
 
 "Why 'of course/ Charlie?" said T. 
 
 "I don't know. Are you making fun of 
 me? 
 
 The current was broken for the time being. 
 I took up a notebook and pretended to make 
 many entries in it. 
 
 "It's a pleasure to work with an imaginative 
 chap like yourself," T said, after a pause. "The 
 way that you've brought out the character of 
 the hero is simply wonderful." 
 
 "Do you think so?" he answered, with a 
 pleased flush. "I often tell myself that there's 
 more in me than mo — than people think." 
 
 "There's an enormous amount in you." 
 
 "Then, won't you let me send an essay on 
 The Ways of Bank Clerks to Tit-Bits, and get 
 the guinea prize?" 
 
 "That wasn't exactly what I meant, old fel- 
 low : perhaps it would be better to wait a little 
 and go ahead with the galley-story." 
 
 "Ah, but I sha'n't get the credit of that. 
 Tit-Bits would publish my name and address 
 if I win. What are you grinning at? They 
 would."
 
 2i 8 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "I know it. Suppose you go for a walk. I 
 want to look through my notes about our 
 story." 
 
 Now this reprehensible youth who left me, 
 a little hurt and put back, might for aught he 
 or I knew have been one of the crew of the 
 Argo — had been certainly slave or comrade to 
 Thorfin Karlsefne. Therefore he was deeply 
 interested in guinea competitions. Remem- 
 bering what Grish Chunder had said I laughed 
 aloud. The Lords of Life and Death would 
 never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full 
 knowledge of his pasts, and I must even piece 
 out what he had told me with my own poor in- 
 ventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of 
 bank-clerks. 
 
 I got together and placed on one file all my 
 notes ; and the net result was not cheering. I 
 read them a second time. There was nothing 
 that might not have been compiled at second- 
 hand from other people's books — except, per- 
 haps, the story of the fight in the harbor. The 
 adventures of a Viking had been written many 
 times before; the history of a Greek galley- 
 slave was no new thing, and though I wrote 
 both, who could challenge or confirm the ac- 
 curacy of my details? I might as well tell a 
 tale of two thousand years hence. The Lords
 
 IN THE WORLD" 219 
 
 of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish 
 Chunder had hinted. They would allow noth- 
 ing to escape that mighl trouble or make • 
 
 the minds of men. Though I was convinced 
 of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. 
 
 Exaltation followed reaction, nol once, hut 
 twenty times in the next few weeks. My 
 moods varied with the March sunlight and fly- 
 ing clouds. By night or in the beauty of a 
 spring morning- I perceived that I could write 
 that tale and shift continents thereby. In the 
 wet, windy afternoons, I saw that the talc 
 might indeed be written, hut would he nothing 
 more than a faked, false-varnished, sham- 
 rusted piece of Wardour Street work at the 
 end. Then I blessed Charlie in many ways — 
 though it was no fault of his. He seemed to 
 be busy with prize competitions, and I saw less 
 and less of him as the weeks went by and the 
 earth cracked and grew ripe to spring, and 
 the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not 
 care to read or talk of what he had read, and 
 there was a new ring of self-assertion in his 
 voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the 
 galley when we met; but Charlie alluded to it 
 on every occasion, always as a story from 
 which money was to be made. 
 
 "I think I deserve twenty-five per cent.
 
 220 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 don't I, at least ?" he said, with beautiful frank- 
 ness. "I supplied all the ideas, didn't I?" 
 
 This greediness for silver was a new side in 
 his nature. I assumed that it had been devel- 
 oped in the City, where Charlie was picking 
 up the curious nasal drawl of the underbred 
 City man. 
 
 "When the thing's done we'll talk about it. 
 I can't make anything of it at present. Red- 
 haired or black-haired hero are equally diffi- 
 cult." 
 
 He was sitting by the fire staring at the red 
 coals. "I can't understand what you find so 
 difficult. It's all as clear as mud to me," he 
 replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the 
 bars, took light and whistled softly. "Sup- 
 pose we take the red-haired hero's adventures 
 first, from the time that he came south to my 
 galley and captured it and sailed to the 
 Beaches." 
 
 I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. 
 I was out of reach of pen and paper, and 
 dared not move to get them lest I should break 
 the current. The gas-jet puffed and whinnied, 
 Charlie's voice dropped almost to a whisper, 
 and he told a tale of the sailing of an open 
 galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open 
 sea, seen under the curve of the one sail even-
 
 IN THE WORLD' 1 22] 
 
 ing after evening when the galley's beak was 
 notched into the centre of the sinking disc, 
 and "we sailed by that for we had no other 
 guide," quoth Charlie. Tic spoke of a land- 
 ing on an island and explorations in its woods, 
 where the crew killed three men whom they 
 found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, 
 Charlie said, followed the galley, swimming 
 and choking in the water, and the crew cast 
 lots and threw one of their number overboard 
 as a sacrifice to the strange gods whom they 
 had offended. Then they ate sea-weed when 
 their provisions failed, and their legs swelled, 
 and their leader, the red-haired man, killed 
 two rowers who mutinied, and after a year 
 spent among the woods they set sail for their 
 own country, and a wind that never failed car- 
 ried them back so safely that they all slept at 
 night. This, and much more Charlie told. 
 Sometimes the voice fell so low that I could 
 not catch the words, though every nerve was 
 on the strain. He spoke of their leader, the 
 red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of his God ; 
 for it was he who cheered them and slew them 
 impartially as he thought best for their needs ; 
 and it was he who steered them for three days 
 among floating ice, each floe crowded with 
 strange beasts that "tried to sail with us," said
 
 222 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 Charlie, "and we beat them back with the 
 handles of the oars." 
 
 The gas-jet went out, a burned coal gave 
 way, and the fire settled down with a tiny 
 crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie 
 ceased speaking, and I said no word. 
 
 "By Jove!" he said, at last, shaking his 
 head. "I've been staring at the fire till I'm 
 dizzy. What was I going to say?" 
 
 "Something about the galley." 
 
 "I remember now. It's 25 per cent, of the 
 profits, isn't it?" 
 
 "It's anything you like when I've done the 
 tale." 
 
 "I wanted to be sure of that. I must go 
 now. I've — I've an appointment." And he 
 left me. 
 
 Had my eyes not been held I might have 
 known that that broken muttering over the fire 
 was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I 
 thought it the prelude to fuller revelation. At 
 last and at last I should cheat the Lords of 
 Life and Death! 
 
 When next Charlie came to me I received 
 him with rapture. He was nervous and em- 
 barrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, 
 and his lips a little parted. 
 
 "I've done a poem," he said; and then,
 
 IN THE WOULD" 223 
 
 quickly: "it's the best I've ever done Read 
 it." He thrust it into my hand and retreated 
 
 to the \vin<!' >\v. 
 
 I groaned inwardly. It would be the work 
 of half an hour to criticise — that is to say 
 praise — the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. 
 Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, 
 discarding his favorite centipede metres, had 
 launched into shorter and choppier verse, and 
 verse with a motive back of it. This is what 
 I read: 
 
 "The day is most fair, the cheery wind 
 
 Halloos behind the hill, 
 Where he bends the wood as seemcth good, 
 
 And the sapling to his will ! 
 Riot O wind ; there is that in my blood 
 
 That would not have thee still ! 
 
 "She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky; 
 Grey sea, she is mine alone ! 
 Let the sullen boulders hear my cry, 
 And rejoice tho' they be but stone! 
 
 "Mine ! I have won her, O good brown earth, 
 
 Make merry! 'Tis hard on Spring; 
 Make merry; my love is doubly worth 
 
 All worship your fields can bring! 
 Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth 
 
 At the early harrowing." 
 
 "Yes, it's the early harrowing, past a 
 doubt," I said, with a dread at my heart. 
 Charlie smiled, but did not answer.
 
 224 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad; 
 
 I am victor. Greet me O Sun, 
 Dominant master and absolute lord 
 Over the soul of onel" 
 
 "Well?" said Charlie, looking over my 
 shoulder. 
 
 I thought it far from well, and very evil in- 
 deed, when he silently laid a photograph on 
 the paper — the photograph of a girl with a 
 curly head, and a foolish slack mouth. 
 
 "Isn't it — isn't it wonderful ?" he whispered, 
 pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy 
 mystery of first love. "I didn't know ; I didn't 
 think — it came like a thunderclap." 
 
 "Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are 
 you very happy, Charlie?" 
 
 "My God — she — she loves me!" He sat 
 down repeating the last words to himself. I 
 looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoul- 
 ders already bowed by desk-work, and won- 
 dered when, where, and how he had loved in 
 his past lives. 
 
 "What will your mother say?" I asked, 
 cheerfully. 
 
 "I don't care a damn what she says." 
 
 At twenty the things for which one does not 
 care a damn should, properly, be many, but 
 one must not include mothers in the list. I 
 told him this gently; and he described Her,
 
 f% 
 
 
 If 
 
 
 ndtod fism a yd bsiui nssd lavan bfid ari2 
 j|Dn)*q^iiX W •(<( lunigno islls no8 A wsibnA nriol. ^d 9\uv tTgo\\*\f.
 
 224 "THE FINEST STORY 
 
 "Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad; 
 
 I am victor. Greet me O Sun, 
 Dominant master and absolute lord 
 Over the soul of one!" 
 
 'Well?" said Charlie, looking over my 
 shoulder. 
 
 I thought it far from well, and very evil in- 
 deed, when he silently laid a photograph on 
 the paper — the photograph of a girl with a 
 curly head, and a foolish slack mouth. 
 
 "Isn't it — isn't it wonderful?" he whispered, 
 pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy 
 mystery of first love. "I didn't know ; I didn't 
 think — it came like a thunderclap." 
 
 "Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are 
 you very happy, Charlie?" 
 
 "My God — she — she loves me!" He sat 
 down repeating the last words to himself. I 
 looked at the hairless face the narrow shoul- 
 ders already bowed by desk-work, and won- 
 dered when, where, and how he had loved in 
 his past lives. 
 
 "What will your mother say?" I asked, 
 cheerfully. 
 
 "I don't care a damn what she says." 
 
 At twenty the t! r which one does not 
 
 care a damn shoul :>erly, be many, but 
 
 one must not include mothers in the list. I 
 told him this gently; and he described Her, 
 
 She had never been kissed by a man before 
 Mezzogravure b, John Andrew & Son after original by W. Kirkpatrick
 
 IN THE WORLD" 225 
 
 even as Adam must have described to the 
 newly named beasts the glory and tenderness 
 and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that 
 She was a tobacconist's assistant with a weak- 
 ness for pretty dress, and had told him four 
 or five times already that She had never been 
 kissed by a man before. 
 
 Charlie spoke on and on, and on; while I, 
 separated from him by thousands of years, 
 was considering the beginnings of things. 
 Now I understood why the Lords of Life and 
 Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. 
 It is that we may not remember our first woo- 
 ings. Were it not so, our world would be 
 without inhabitants in a hundred years. 
 
 "Now, about that galley-story," I said, still 
 more cheerfully, in a pause in the rush of the 
 speech. 
 
 Charlie looked up as though he had been 
 hit. "The galley — what galley? Good heav- 
 ens, don't joke, man! This is serious! You 
 don't know how serious it is !" 
 
 Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had 
 tasted the love of woman that kills remem- 
 brance, and the finest story in the world would 
 never be written.
 
 
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