tirring. But a dirtily clad Hindoo, lounging on a raised, railless
store veranda opposite, leered at her impudently, and she came inside
again--to pass the evening and the sultry, black, breathless night out
of sight, at least, of the brutes who shut her off from even exercise.

CHAPTER XIV

So, I am a dog? Hence I must come
To do thy bidding faster?
Must tell thee--Nay, a dog stays dumb!
A dog obeys one master!

NOT many yards from where the restless elephants stood lined under
big brick arches--in an age-old courtyard, three sides of which were
stone-carved splendor and the fourth a typically Eastern mess of
stables, servants' quarters, litter, stink, and noisy confusion--a
stone door, slab-hewn, gave back the aching glitter of the sun. Its only
opening--a narrow slit quite near the top--was barred. A man--his face
close-pressed against them--peered through the interwoven iron rods from
within.

Jaimihr, in a rose-pink pugree still, but not at all the swaggering
cavalier who pranced, high-booted, through the streets--a down-at-heel
prince, looking slovenly and heavy-eyed from too much opium--sat in
a long chair under the cloister which faced the barred stone door. He
swished with a rhino riding-whip at the stone column beside him, and the
much-swathed individual of the plethoric paunch who stood and spoke with
him kept a very leery eye on it; he seemed to expect the binding swish
of it across his own shins, and the thought seemed tantalizing.

"It is not to be done," said Jaimihr, speaking in a dialect peculiar
to Howrah. "That--of all the idiotic notions I have listened to--is the
least worth while! Thy brains are in thy belly and are lost amid the
fat! If my brother Howrah only had such counsellors as thou--such monkey
folk to make his plans for him--the jackals would have finished with him
long ago."

"Sahib, did I not bring word, and overhear, and trap the man?"

"Truly! Overheard whisperings, and trapped me a hyena I must feed!
Now thou sayest, 'Torture him!' He is a Rangar, and of good stock;
therefore, no amount of torturing will make him speak. He is that pig
Mahommed Gunga's man; therefore, there' is nothing more sure than that
Mahommed Gunga will be here, sooner or later, to look for him--Mahommed
Gunga, with the half of a Hindoo name, the whole of a Moslem's fire, and
the blind friendship of the British to rely on!"

"But if the man be dead when Mahommed G