y puffed out his nostrils scornfully. "You're only three thousand
miles out. Look at the atlas."

"Anyhow, he's as rotten full of fever as the rest of you," said the
Infant, at length on the big divan. "And he's bringing a native servant
with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable
room."

"Why? Is he a Yao--like the fellow Wade brought here--when your
housekeeper had fits?" Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some
odd things.

"No. He's one of old Strickland's Punjabi policemen--and quite
European--I believe."

"Hooray! Haven't talked Punjabi for three months--and a Punjabi from
Central Africa ought to be amusin'."

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was
Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man's placid way, to at least eight designing
women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and
when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

"You didn't send rugs enough," she began. "Adam might have taken a
chill."

"It's quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front?"

"Because he wanted to," she replied, with the mother's smile, and we
were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the
shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

"That is all that came home of him," said his father to me. "There
was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie
centuries since."

"And what is this uniform?" Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who
came to attention on the marble floor.

"The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little
Sahib's body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended
by folk dressed altogether as servants."

"And--and you white men wait at table on horseback?" Stalky pointed to
the man's spurs.

"These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England," said Imam
Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember,
and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how
much leave he had, and he said "Six months."

"But he'll take another six on medical certificate," said Agnes
anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

"You don't want to--eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is
doing." Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

"Ah!" said the Infant. "I've only a few thousand pheasants to look
after. Come along