longings about the scantily-furnished room. He had stood
Violet's photo on the one rickety table and laid out his Master's white
mess uniform on the small iron cot.

Major Hunt, Wargrave learned, lived in a bungalow a few hundred yards
away, but, being unmarried, took his meals in the Mess. The Indian
officers and sepoys of the detachment were quartered in barracks in the
Fort.

Frank dressed and entered the anteroom or officers' sitting-room, from
which a door led into the messroom. Both apartments were poorly
furnished, but the walls were adorned with the skulls and skins of many
beasts of the jungle, presented by Colonel Dermot, as Frank learned.
Shelves filled with books ran across one end of the anteroom.

As the interior of the Mess was rather hot at that time of year--though
to Wargrave it seemed very cool after Rohar--the dinner-table was laid
on the verandah; and while the officers sat at their meal the pleasant
mountain breeze played about them. Frank thought with gratitude of his
escape from the burning heat which at that moment was tormenting the
hundreds of millions in the furnace of the Plains of India stretching
away from the foot of the cool hills.

The meal was not luxurious, for it consisted almost exclusively of
tinned provisions, fresh meat being unprocurable in Ranga Duar--except
fowls of exceeding toughness--and vegetables and bread being rare
dainties.

During dinner Wargrave learned how completely isolated his new station
was. Their only European neighbours were the planters on tea-gardens
scattered about in the great forest below, the nearest thirty miles off.
The few visitors that Ranga Duar saw in the year were the General on his
annual inspection, an occasional official of the Indian Civil Service,
the Public Works or the Forest Department, or some planter friend of the
Dermots.

The reason of the existence of this outpost and its garrison was the
guarding of the _duars_, or passes, through the Himalayas against
raiders from Bhutan, that little-known independent State lying between
Tibet and the Bengal border. Its frontier was only two miles from, and a
few thousand feet above, Ranga Duar.

"You are just in time for our one yearly burst of gaiety, Wargrave,"
said the Commandant, "the visit of the Deb Zimpun."

"What on earth is that, sir?" asked the subaltern.

"Sounds like a new disease, doesn't it?" said Burke laughing. "But it
isn't. The Deb Zimpun is a gintleman av high degree,