rge. I
am on in this piece; but I'm afraid I'm getting rusty in my talk.'

He rose and went into Biel's bedroom, where his trunk had been put, and
shut the door. An hour later, we heard him say, 'I hadn't the heart to
part with my old make-ups when I married. Will this do?' There was a
loathly _fakir_ salaaming in the doorway.

'Now lend me fifty rupees,' said Strickland, 'and give me your Words of
Honour that you won't tell my wife.'

He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table drank
his health. What he did only he himself knows. A _fakir_ hung about
Bronckhorst's compound for twelve days. Then a sweeper appeared, and
when Biel heard of _him_, he said that Strickland was an angel
full-fledged. Whether the sweeper made love to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst's
_ayah_, is a question which concerns Strickland exclusively.

He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly, 'You spoke the
truth, Biel. The whole business is put up from beginning to end. Jove!
It almost astonishes _me_! That Bronckhorst beast isn't fit to live.'

There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said, 'How are you going to
prove it? You can't say that you've been trespassing on Bronckhorst's
compound in disguise!'

'No,' said Strickland. 'Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to get up
something strong about "inherent improbabilities" and "discrepancies of
evidence". He won't have to speak, but it will make him happy, _I_'m
going to run this business.'

Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would happen.
They trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men. When the case came off
the Court was crowded. Strickland hung about in the veranda of the
Court, till he met the Mohammedan _khitmutgar_. Then he murmured a
_fakir's_ blessing in his ear, and asked him how his second wife did.
The man spun round, and, as he looked into the eyes of 'Estreekin
Sahib', his jaw dropped. You must remember that before Strickland was
married, he was, as I have told you already, a power among natives.
Strickland whispered a rather coarse vernacular proverb to the effect
that he was abreast of all that was going on, and went into the Court
armed with a gut trainer's-whip.

The Mohammedan was the first witness, and Strickland beamed upon him
from the back of the Court. The man moistened his lips with his tongue
and, in his abject fear of 'Estreekin Sahib', the _fakir_ went back on
every detail of his evidence--said he was a poor ma