bluffing of unhappy
natives. He hinted darkly at dark methods of persuasion. He
hammered in the debasing futility of the whole spy system, our
own and the other side's. He ended with schoolboy personalities
about people he had met, some of our host's own agents. His
remarks about them were unworthy of the eloquence that had gone
before. Our host took it all in very kindly part. He was a man of
deeds rather than of words.

'I never thought I'd come so low as I did to-day,' he admitted.
'You heard of the German who got away with his wife and kids in
canoes. I was turning over one of the kids' money-boxes. Just
five rupees or so in it. But I'll try to get it back to the
youngster. I never thought to come quite so low.'

I tackled him about a horrid practice he had admitted having
recourse to. 'Torture, or torture-witchcraft possibly! It seems a
hopeful way of eliciting true intelligence, not to speak of
playing the game in any sort of British sense.' He hung his head
penitently. He pleaded that this expedient had saved an execution
only the other day. There had been none after all. Had there
been, as had looked likely at one time, an innocent man would
have died.

'Oh, why not be without reproach as well as without fear?' I
pleaded.

'How am I to get truth from them? It's a usage of their own.' He
was pleading back.

'Not that way.' I was inflexible in my scorn and horror, for I
knew that I was right.

By this time we had about finished dinner. Soon we were outside
Hunter in a deck-chair, I on a box, my host on a looted camp-stool.
We smoked on under the stars.

We spoke of looting. The naval man scintillated about the conduct
of the army at a raid on a neighboring town. I was with him most
of the way.

'So they cleared away with their swags for fear of enemy
reinforcements. And they had a report printed that the natives
had looted the place. That put the lid on it,' he said. But then
came purgatory for me. The Native Question cropped up. Our host
was away just then, conferring about chits that his spies had
brought in. Hunter fairly coruscated with cynicism, when it came
to the Native Question. He had expressed very different views
upon it the last time that I had met him (the day before at
lunchtime). Now he expressed himself cured of any sneaking wish
to treat natives with kindness rather than kiboko. His boy, to
whom he had granted leave of absence, had not come back to his
day, and the whole fabric of