s and threatening which they felt was there in a darkness, but
which one could not see.

Baines was one of them--Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at
Bholat. His troops were in the center of a spider's web of roads that
criss-crossed and drained a province. There were big trunk arteries,
which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass of
winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks. He could feel,
if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising, and he was
placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the right spot,
should the knife be needed.

He was like a surgeon, though, who holds a lancet and can use it, but
who lacks permission. The poison in India's system lay deep, and the
fever was slow in showing itself. And meanwhile the men who had the
ordering of things could see neither necessity nor excuse for so much as
a parade of strength. They refused, point-blank and absolutely, to admit
that there was, or, could be, any symptom of unrest.

He dared not make new posts for officers, for officers would grumble at
enforced exile in the country districts, and the Government would get to
hear of it, and countermand. But there were non-commissioned officers
in plenty, and it was not difficult to choose the best of them--three
men--and send them, with minute detachments, to three different points
of vantage. Non-commissioned officers don't grumble, or if they do no
one gets to hear of it, or minds. And they are just as good as officers
at watching crossroads and reporting what they see and hear.

So where a little cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right
angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles from
Bholat, Bill Brown--swordsman and sergeant and strictest of martinets,
as well as sentimentalist--had been set to watch and listen and report.

There were many cleverer men in the non-commissioned ranks of Baine's
command, many who knew more of the native languages, and who had
more imagination. But there was none who knew better how to win the
unqualified respect and the obedience of British and native alike,
or who could be better counted on to obey an order, when it came,
literally, promptly and in the teeth of anything.

Brown's theories on religion were a thing to marvel at, and walk
singularly wide of, for he was a preacher with a pair of fists when
thoroughly aroused. And his devotion to a girl in England whom no one
in his regiment h