a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a
specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint
and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or
again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources
and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which
may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart
of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.

This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has
proved at times extremely discomposing.

Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of
Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched
laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to
be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the
narrow-edged coat; his sturdy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_
lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green
jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And
he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part
Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of
dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he
would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the
fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat
hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was
just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing
clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known
him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn
himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions,
beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate,
injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or
doubt.

* * * * *

Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought
process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those
elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing
assurance. It made him cautious.

"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the
business."

"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."

"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."

"It is no