ntry can always be mounted here. No
future Resident would care to live so close to the palace after what
has happened, I should say."

"I suppose you can't do better," agreed Gerrard reluctantly, looking at
the overgrown wilderness which represented his carefully kept garden.
"Yes, make a cemetery of the place by all means, Rawson. It looks as
if it had a curse on it."

"What an uncommon romantic fellow you are!" said Rawson
good-humouredly. "This was my chief reason for choosing the spot.
Look here!"

He took Gerrard by the elbow and turned him round. From where they
stood they looked straight through the breach made by the guns, and
along the rough track formed by levelling the houses from the chasm in
the outer to that in the inner wall.

"See that? Almost a straight line, ain't it? Well, if we bring 'em in
through the double breach, along that road, and bury them here in the
heart of the palace, will it, or will it not, produce a fine moral
effect?"

"Magnificent!" murmured Gerrard, the dramatic force of the idea
gripping him. "Regular time's revenge."

Two or three days later time's revenge was completed. The bodies of
Nisbet and Cowper, removed reverently from their desecrated grave and
wrapped in the costliest Kashmir shawls to be discovered among Sher
Singh's treasures, were borne through the breach in the city wall,
attended by representatives of every unit of the besieging force,
across the devastated town and through the ruined defences of the
palace, to be laid to rest in the secluded garden with every possible
military honour. As the last echoes of the firing over the grave died
away, Gerrard turned to Charteris with quickened breath.

"Bob," he murmured, "they have made a way for a corpse through the
great wall of Agpur."

[1] In modern parlance, "gas."

CHAPTER XXIII.

RUN TO EARTH.

On the evening of the day when the bodies of the two murdered
Englishmen had been laid in the grave with all imaginable honour, four
figures crept stealthily through the shadows at the base of the
ramparts of the palace. After the funeral, in the course of a stroll
round the walls, Gerrard and Charteris had refreshed their memory of
the various localities. Long ago they had satisfied themselves as to
the identity of the tree which masked the exit of the secret passage,
and on looking from the parapet they discovered that it had survived
the siege uninjured. But the hole it concealed was b