Our revenues didn't run to it."

"What is your revenue?" Stalky asked in the vernacular.

"With hut-tax, traders' game and mining licenses, not more than fourteen
thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked months ahead." Adam
sighed.

"Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib's camp. Last year
it exceeded three rupees," Imam Din said quietly.

"Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were rather strict on
fines. I worked up my native clerk--Bulaki Ram--to a ferocious pitch
of enthusiasm. He used to calculate the profits of our cotton-scheme
to three points of decimals, after office. I tell you I envied your
magistrates here hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed
to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about meet, and I
was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds for my cotton. That sort of
thing grows on a chap when he's alone--and talks aloud!"

"Hul-lo! Have you been there already?" the father said, and Adam nodded.

"Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of 'Marmion' to a tree, sir.
Well then my luck turned. One evening an English-speaking nigger came in
towing a corpse by the feet. (You get used to little things like that.)
He said he'd found it, and please would I identify, because if it
was one of Ibn Makarrah's men there might be a reward. It was an old
Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab--a smallboned, bald-headed chap,
and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it
sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted
like--like the dog in 'Tom Sawyer,' when he sat on the what's-its-name
beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could
see it had been sarkied. (That's a sort of gum-poison, pater, which
attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a
monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time,
with my shaving soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.

"I'd seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled off his feet,
and he stopped sneezing, I knew he'd live. He was bad, though; lay like
a log for a week while Imam Din and I massaged the paralysis out of him.
Then he told us he was a Hajji--had been three times to Mecca--come in
from French Africa, and that he'd met the nigger by the wayside--just
like a case of thuggee, in India--and the nigger had poisoned him. That
seemed reasonable enough by what I knew of Coast niggers."

"You b