r, we heard him say:--"I hadn't the heart
to part with my old makeups when I married. Will this do?" There was a
lothely faquir salaaming in the doorway.

"Now lend me fifty rupees," said Strickland, "and give me your Words of
Honor 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 faquir hung about
Bronckhorst's compound for twelve days. Then a mehter appeared, and when
Biel heard of HIM, he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged.
Whether the mehter 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 verandah of the
Court, till he met the Mohammedan khitmatgar. Then he murmured a
faquir'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 "Estreeken 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 "Estreeken Sahib" the faquir, went back on every
detail of his evidence--said he was a poor man and God was his witness
that he had forgotten every thing that Bronckhorst Sahib had told him
to say. Between his terror of Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he
collapsed, weeping.