Terai Jungle. To him it was
Paradise. Before going to Simla he had been stationed with a Double Company
of the Indian Infantry Regiment to which he belonged in a similar outpost
in the mountains not many miles away. This outpost had now been abolished.
But while in it he used to spend all his spare time in the marvellous
jungle that extended to his very door.

The great Terai Forest stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of
the Himalayas, from Assam through Bengal to Garwhal and up into Nepal. It
is a sportsman's heaven; for it shelters in its recesses wild elephants,
rhinoceros, bison, bears, tigers, panthers, and many of the deer tribes.
Dermot loved it. He was a mighty hunter, but a discriminating one. He did
not kill for sheer lust of slaughter, and preferred to study the ways of
the harmless animals rather than shoot them. Only against dangerous beasts
did he wage relentless war.

Dermot knew that he could very well leave the routine work of the little
post to his Second in Command. The fort was practically a block of
fortified stone barracks, easily defensible against attacks of badly armed
hillmen and accommodating a couple of hundred sepoys. It was to hold the
_duar_ or pass of Ranga through the Himalayas against raiders from Bhutan
that the little post had been built.

For centuries past the wild dwellers beyond the mountains were used to
swooping down from the hills on the less warlike plainsmen in search of
loot, women, and slaves. But the war with Bhutan in 1864-5 brought the
borderland under the English flag, and the Pax Britannica settled on it.
Yet even now temptation was sometimes too strong for lawless men.
Occasionally swift-footed parties of fierce swordsmen swept down through
the unguarded passes and raided the tea-gardens that are springing up in
the foothills and the forests below them. For hundreds of coolies work on
these big estates, and large consignments of silver coin come to the
gardens for their payment.

But there was bigger game afoot than these badly-armed raiders. The task
set Dermot showed it; and his soldier's heart warmed at the thought of
helping to stage a fierce little frontier war in which he might come early
on the scene.

Carefully sealing up again and locking away the cipher code and keyword, he
went out on the back verandah and shouted for his orderly. The dwellings of
Europeans upcountry in India are not luxurious--far from it. Away from the
big cities like Bom