sun I'll
hand him over to the guard and have him washed!"

Having formed that resolution, Brown dismissed all thoughts of the
fakir. His memory went back to home--the clean white cottage on the
Sussex Downs, and the clean white girl who once on a time had waited for
him there. For the next few hours, until the guard was changed, the only
signs or sounds of life were the glowing of Brown's pipe, the steady
footfalls of the sentries and occasional creakings from the hell-hot
guard-room, where sleepless soldiers tossed in prickly discomfort.

II.

Bill Brown, with his twelve, had not been set to watch a lonely
crossroad for the fun of it. One road was a well-made highway, and led
from a walled city, where three thousand men sweated and thought
of England, to another city, where five thousand armed natives drew
England's pay, and wore English uniforms.

The other road was a snake-like trail, nearly as wide but not nearly
so well kept. It twisted here and there amid countless swarming native
villages, and was used almost exclusively by natives, whose rightful
business was neither war nor peace nor the contriving of either of them.
It had been a trade-road when history was being born, and the laden
ox-carts creaked along it still, as they had always done and always will
do until India awakes.

But there are few men in the world who attend to nothing but their
rightful business, and there are even more in India than elsewhere
who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among
others. There are few fighting-men among that host. They are priests
for the most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed and
shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk roads,
where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen marching in
eight-hundred-man battalions. They prefer to dream along the byways, and
set other people dreaming. They lead, when the crash comes, from behind.

Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company
were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine
themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled; and
though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed to
read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command, still,
there were other men who found themselves groping, at least two years
before the Mutiny of '57. They were groping for something intangible and
noiseles