ble lineage, a plebeian; and so the body corporate
was of inflammable material--little restraint of breeding.

And for all Nana Sahib's veneer of English class, mental development,
beneath the English shirt he wore the _junwa_, the three-strand sacred
thread, insignia of the twice-born,--the Brahmin.

From Governor General to the British officers who played polo with the
Peshwa's son, they all accepted him as one of themselves; considered it
good diplomacy that he had been sent to Oxford and made over.

There was just one man who had misgivings, the Resident at Poona. He
was a small, tired, worn-out official--an executive, a perpetual wheel
in the works, always close to the red-tape-tied papers, always.
Strange that one not a dreamer, no sixth-sense, should have attained to
an intuition--which it was, his distrust of the cheery, sporty Nana
Sahib. That Hodson's superiors intimated that India was getting to his
liver when he wrote, very cautiously, of this obsession, made no
difference; and clinging to his distrust, he achieved something.

After all it was rather strange that the matter had not been taken out
of his hands, but it wasn't. A sort of departmental formula running;
"Commissioner So-and-So has the matter in hand--refer to him." And so,
when a new danger appeared on the distressed horizon, Amir Khan and a
hundred thousand massed horsemen, Captain Barlow was sent to consult
with the Resident. That was the way; a secretive, trusty, brave man,
for in India the written page is never inviolate.

Captain Barlow was sent--ostensibly as an assistant to the Resident, in
reality to acquire full knowledge of the situation, and then go to the
camp of Amir Khan with the delicate mission of persuading him not to
join his riding spear-men to the Mahratta force, but to form an
alliance with the British.

The Resident had asked for Barlow. He had explained that any show of
interest, two men, or five, or twenty, an envoy, even men of pronounced
position, would defeat their object; in fact, believing Nana Sahib to
be what he was, he conceived the very simple idea of playing the
Oriental's Orientalism against him.

Barlow would be the last man in India to whom one as suspicious as the
Peshwa's son would attribute a subtlety deep enough for a serious
mission. He was a great handsome boy; in his physical excellence he
was beautiful; courage was manifest in the strong content of his deep
brown eyes. Incidentally that w