dark, and surprise came upon
Leh Shin's assistant as it has come upon men and nations since the world
first spun in space.

He looked upon the Burman as a harmless lunatic, and he only
half-believed that he had ever been guilty of the act that had ended in
a term of imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, but in one moment he
realized that it might all be true and that he himself was possibly
singled out as the next victim.

In one silent moment he found himself pinned in his corner, the Burman
squatting in front of him, a long knife which he had never seen before
pointing at his throat with horrible, determined persistency.

He opened his mouth and thought to cry out for help, but the Burman
leaned forward and warned him that if he did so, his last minute had
inevitably come.

"I am thy friend, thy good and honourable friend," he said pleasantly as
he made play with the Afghan dagger. "I do but make mirth for both
myself and thee, and I have no thought to harm thee."

The flesh of the gross body crept and crawled under the Burman's look.
Fate had put the heart of a chicken in the huge frame of Leh Shin's
assistant, and it beat now like pelting hail on a frozen road. He was
close to a raw, naked fear, and it made him shameless as he gibbered and
cowered before it.

"I have no money," he said, bleating out the words. "All that I have is
already paid to thee for thy tale."

He whined and cringed and writhed in his close corner.

"I have heard a strange tale," Coryndon said, bending a little closer to
him. "Old now as stale fish that has lain in the dust of the street. It
has been whispered in my ear that thou knowest how Absalom came to his
end."

"I slew him in the house of a seaman," said the boy, in a quavering
voice. "Now take the point of thy knife from my throat, for it doth
greatly inconvenience pleasant speech between thee and me."

Coryndon's watchful eye detected the lie before it announced itself in
words, or so it seemed to the boy, who resigned himself to the mere
paltry limitations of fact, and confessed that he and Absalom had been
friends and that he had never killed anything except a chicken, and once
a dog that was too young to bite his hand.

The details of the story came out at long intervals, with breaks of
sweating terror between each one. Pieced together, it was simple enough.
In spite of the existing feud between their masters, Leh Shin's
assistant and Absalom had struck up a kind of fr