old us that story you said nothing of the golden key."

"Ah!" replied the Babu, "you are thinking of the story told by the second
graven image in King Vikramaditya's throne. I will tell you that
tomorrow."

Chapter 12: In which our hero is offered freedom at the price of honor; and
Mr. Diggle finds that others can quote Latin on occasion.

Next morning, when Desmond left the shed with his fellow prisoners, he
took with him, secreted in a fold of his dhoti, a small piece of clay. It
had been given him overnight by the Babu. An hour or two later, happening
to be for a moment alone in the tool shop, he took out the clay and
examined it carefully. It was a moment for which he had waited and longed
with feverish impatience. The clay was a thin strip, oval in shape, and
slightly curved. In the middle of it was the impression, faint but clear,
of a key. A footstep approaching, he concealed the clay again in his
garment, and, when a workman entered, was busily plying a chisel upon a
deal plank.

Before he left the tool shop, he secreted with the clay a scrap of steel
and a small file. That day, and for several days after, whenever chance
gave him a minute or two apart from his fellow workmen, he employed the
precious moments in diligently filing the steel to the pattern on the
clay. It was slow work: all too tedious for his eager thought. But he
worked at his secret task with unfailing patience, and at the week's end
had filed the steel to the likeness of the wards of a key.

That night, when his "co-mates in exile" were asleep, he gently inserted
the steel in the lock of his ankle band. He tried to turn it. It stuck
fast; the wards did not fit. He was not surprised. Before he made the
experiment he had felt that it would fail; the key was indeed a clumsy,
ill-shapen instrument. But next day he began to work on another piece of
steel, and on this he spent every spare minute he could snatch. This time
he found himself able to work faster. Night and morning he looked
searchingly at the key on the warder's bunch, and afterward tried to cut
the steel to the pattern that was now, as it were, stamped upon his
brain.

He wished he could test his second model in the morning light before the
warder came, and correct it then. But to do so would involve discovery by
his fellow captives; the time to take them into his confidence was not
yet. He had perforce to wait till dead of night before he could tell
whether the change