ed the fakir.

"Run, sahib! It is time to run away!"

"Go on, then! Why don't you run?"

"I am afraid, sahib."

"Of what?"

"Of the men who slew the soldiers. Sahib! Remember what the fakir said.
You will be pegged out on an anthill, sahib, when you have been beaten.
Run, while there is yet time!"

"Did you see them kill my men?"

"Nay, sahib!"

"How was that?"

"I ran away and hid, sahib."

"How many were there?"

"Very many. The Punjabi skin-buyer brought them."

"He did, did he? Very well! Did he go off with the fakir?"

"I think he did. I did not see."

"Well, we'll suppose he did, then. And when the day breaks; we'll
suppose that we can find him, and we'll go in search of him, and I
wouldn't like to be that Punjabi when I do find him! Get into the
guard-room, and wait in there until I give you leave to stir."

IV.

An Indian city that has yet to have its mysterie's laid bare and
banished by electric light is a stage deliberately set for massacre. The
bazaars run criss-crosswise; any way at all save parallel, and anyhow
but straight. Between them lies always a maze of passages, and alleys,
deep sided, narrow, overhung by trellised windows and loopholed walls
and guarded stairways.

For every square inch where the sun can shine there are a hundred where
a man could hide unseen. Through century piled on suspicious century, no
designer, no architect, no builder has neglected to provide a means of
secret ingress, and still more secret egress, to each new house. And the
newest house is built on secret passages that hid conspirators against
the kings of men who lived before the oldest house was thought of.

After the Mutiny of '57 came broader roads--so that a cannon might be
trained along them.

But in '57, Jailpore was a nest of winding alley-ways and blind bat
and rat holes, where weird smells and strange unlisted poisons and
prophecies were born. In its midst, tight-packed in a roaring babel-din
of many-colored markets, stood a stone-walled palace, built once by a
Hindu king to commemorate a victory over Moslems, added to by a Moslem
Nizam, to celebrate his conquest of the Hindus and added to once again
by the Honorable East India Company, to make a suitable barracks for its
native troops.

From the rat-infested slums, from the hot shadows and the mazy
back-bazaars, from temples, store-houses, shops, and from the
sin-steeped underworld, there screamed and surged and swept the
many-gr