!"

"Bring that lantern back."

"He will curse you, sahib!"

"Do you hear me?"

The Beluchi came nearer again, trembling with fright. Brown snatched the
lamp away from him, and pushed it forward toward the fakir, moving it
up and down to get a view of the whole of him. There was nothing that
he saw that would reassure or comfort or please a devil even. It was
ultradevilish; both by design and accident--conceived and calculated
ghastliness, peculiar to India. Brown shuddered as he looked, and it
took more than the merely horrible to make him betray emotion.

"What god do you say he worships?"

"Sahib, I know not. I am a Mussulman. These Hindus worship many gods."

The fakir chuckled again, and Brown held the lantern yet nearer to him
to get a better view. The fakir's skin was not oily, and for all the
blanket-heat it did not glisten, so his form was barely outlined against
the blackness that was all but tangible behind him.

Brown spat again, as he drew away a step. He could contrive to express
more disgust and more grim determination in that one rudimentary act
than even a Stamboul Softa can.

"So he's holy, is he?"

"Very, very holy, sahib!"

Again the fakir chuckled, and again Brown held his breath and pushed the
lantern closer to him.

"I believe the brute understands the Queen's English!"

"He understanding all things, sahib! He knowing all things what will
happen! Mind, sahib! He may curse you!"

But Brown appeared indifferent to the danger that he ran. To the fakir's
unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely, going over
him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the toe-nails upward.

"Well," he commented aloud, "if the army's got an opposite, here's it!
I'd give a month's pay for the privilege of washing this brute, just as
a beginning!"

The man's toe-nails--for he really was a man!--were at least two inches
long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back on
themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had ever done
had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed upward, by a
deliberately cultivated cramp.

His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were lean
and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by the swarm
of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting from him. His
emaciated body--powdered and smeared with ashes and dust and worse--was
perched bolt-up-right on a fl