ime there
were eighteen of us, sitting around a mahogany table at midnight, and
King brought his fist down with a crash that split the table and
offended the dignity of than one man.

"Confound the lot of you!" he thundered. "I've been in the service
twenty-one years and I've repeatedly brought back scores of wilder tales
than this. But this is the first time that I've been disbelieved. I'm
not in the service now. So here's my ultimatum! You take this matter
up--at once--or I take it up on my own account! For one thing, I'll
write a full account in all the papers of your refusal to investigate.
Suit yourselves!"

They did not like it; but they liked his alternative less; and there
were two or three men in the room, besides, who were secretly on King's
side, but hardly cared to betray their opinions in the face of so much
opposition. They did not care to seem too credulous. It was they who
suggested with a half-humorous air of concession that no harm could be
done by sending a committee of investigation to discover whether it were
true that living men were held for experimental purposes beneath that
Tirthanker temple; and one by one the rest yielded, somebody, however,
imposing the ridiculous proviso that the Brahmin priests must be
consulted first.

So, what with one thing and another, and one delay and another, and
considering that the wire had been repaired and no less than thirty
Brahmin priests were in the secret, the outcome was scarcely surprising.

Ten of us, including four policemen, called on the Maharajah Jihanbihar
five full days after King and I had last seen the Mahatma; and after we
had wasted half a morning in pleasantries and jokes about stealing a
ride on his elephant, we rode in the Maharajah's two-horse landaus to
the Tirthanker temple, where a priest, who looked blankly amazed,
consented at once to be our guide through the sacred caverns.

But he said they were no longer sacred. He assured us they had not been
used at all for centuries. And with a final word of caution against
cobras he led the way, swinging a lantern with no more suggestion of
anything unusual than if he had been our servant seeing us home on a
dark night.

He even offered to take us through the cobra tunnel, but an acting
deputy high commissioner turned on a flashlight and showed those
goose-neck heads all bobbing in the dark, and that put an end to all
talk of that venture, although the priest was cross-examined as to his