HEY kept this out of the papers at the time, there being a fine-meshed censorship. Enough months have elapsed since, and enough events have happened to smoke screen this one as effectually as if Julius Cæsar and the Gauls had played the lead ing parts. The prince went home alive. India resumed worrying about the price of homespun cotton, the next monsoon, and whether rupee-paper was likely to rise or fall. The Pioneer found front-page space for an account of spooks in a planter's bungalow. They even resumed printing the divorce news. All was well again.
“Set it down, why don't you?” King said; and Grim nodded.
I demurred. Either King or Grim could have told the story better. But as they sat on the end of my bed in the little white-washed ward, the one cleaning spurs and the other re-splicing the wire-woven handle of a Persian , it was small use arguing with them.
King's excuse, that he had sore fingers and could not punch a typewriter, was possibly half-valid. It was why he was cleaning spurs, for instance, instead of playing polo to get fit for the next adventure fate might hold in store for him. Grim's argument, that he should not write the account because he had a hand in the affair, was even more ridiculous but just as useful, since it cloaked his incurable delight in doing lots and saying less than nothing. What he does say usually adds to his obscurity.
“Write it, and omit me,” Grim suggested. But you might as well omit Hamlet from the play.
Well: here I am, with a month of convalescence still ahead, sore from head to foot, sick of reading, and more sick of the Peshawar climate, hospital diet, the squeak of a , and the view of Allah's “Slag-heap” from the window. So they've set a table in a corner where the flap of the punkah won't scatter the paper all over the place. My jaw being bandaged, the sweat in all likelihood won't drop down and make the ink run. Lord knows there's paper enough; the genial sawbones who runs this outfit—between bouts of preaching to wounded border-thieves—seems to think I propose to rewrite the Encyclopædia—or one of his sermons. He has lent me his dictionary, and a big jar of tobacco. Here
OAN ANGELA came to India. That's the prelude to anything whatever except commonplace. I believe she is twenty-six. I will bet she has twenty-six hundred admirers, including me, who would like to act Herod and kill off eligibles, to destroy beforehand the inevitable lucky, as yet unknown, blade who will someday persuade here to marry. And I dare say twenty-six million dollars would look rather small beside her fortune since they brought in oil on her land in California. Not that that matters; she would be Joan Angela Leich if she had only twenty-six cents.
She came because the prince's visit was spectacular, and when we're young most of us will go a long way to see a circus. But it soon palled. The home papers got wind of it, too, and drew conclusions, the prince being a bachelor about her age. So she cut the round of visits and started to see India for herself, without so much as a by-your-leave or a hint to the Indian Government, which was a great deal too busy to notice much that wasn't obviously dangerous.
In such times Governments fall back on odds and ends of stray resources. Undesirables get short shrift, with apologies in the proper quarter later on—if called for. Men whose courses up and down the earth will bear investigation find surprizing details forced on them, without much explanation and no insurance. You carry unexpected overloads at your own expense and [meet?] with no more reward than any decent fellow gets, who likes not to grudge the gift of manliness and muscle.
So Athelstan King, James Schuyler Grim and I—an Englishman and two Americans—with Narayan Singh, who is a Sikh and was a once, were under canvas by the left bank of Jhelum River, swatting flies, smoking more than was wholesome, and wishing the prince were in care of Scotland Yard.
There was a brigade of Indian cavalry camped on our left hand, about two miles away; we could hear the horses neighing, as bored as we felt. On our right, two miles away again, was a regiment of Bombay infantry. And there was a rumor to the effect that the cavalry were there as much to watch the infantry as to keep a sharp eye on the border. But rumors are rife, and the fact that a Bombay regiment had been ordered north was no proof that its ranks had been corrupted. The men had their rifles. There was ammunition. The officers looked more or less at ease, with long legs sticking out from under home newspapers beneath the awnings, and all routine as usual.