play fast
and loose with you, and chuck the whole job as soon as he gets quit of
India and his embarrassments there?"

Bhagwan Singh's sensual lips creased in a cruel smile. "My dear Nugent,"
he said, "Mr. Leslie Chermside will not really be quit of his Indian
debts till he has served my purpose. I shall buy them up, and hold them
over him as a bond of good faith. If he shows signs of kicking over the
traces it will be for you to put on the screw--in your own way. Not that
I anticipate anything of the sort from one who has sunk as low as he
has, and I shall further secure his loyalty by the promise of a small
pension contingent on his success."

Travers Nugent hesitated no longer. "Here is my hand on it," he
exclaimed with an admiration that was not wholly feigned. "It would be
flying in the face of Providence to stand out of a campaign planned on
such masterly lines. Your Highness has supplied the strategy; I will
devise the tactics."

CHAPTER II

"A SCREW LOOSE SOMEWHERE"

A smiling expanse of summer sea; hedges ablaze with wild flowers; the
distant moorland one vast carpet of purple heather; and near at hand,
dotted up and down on either side of a gently sloping coombe, some
scores of pretty houses set in gardens of almost tropical luxuriance.
Towards the lower end of the hill the private residences yielded pride
of place to a little main street of more commercial aspect, which
terminated in an unpretentious esplanade backed by a row of
lodging-houses fronting the beach.

Westward from this spot the red cliffs shelved steadily upward till they
culminated a mile and a half away in the Flagstaff Hill, a bold headland
so called from the coastguard signal station thereon. Eastward of the
esplanade, but hidden from it by a slight eminence, lay the marsh,
formerly a broad estuary through which the river, then navigable for
several miles inland, had emptied into the sea. In these later days the
once broad river's mouth has become a mere stream by the action of a
great storm which many years ago hurled a mighty dam of pebbles across
all but a few yards of the outlet.

But the banks of the older watercourse remain, their steep red sides all
verdure-clad and scored with cavities, hardly to be dignified as caves,
concealed in the trailing undergrowth.

Such was the general configuration of the little town of Ottermouth in
South Devon, for no fault of its own not quite a first-class seaside
resort as yet, but