right; to the very last he never said or did anything offensive; nor, in spite of the unending worry we got from him, did he ever get cross word or crooked answer from us.

There was a tedious gap when absolutely nothing happened, and the clouds, which usually only poured warm water on us, rained ramrods. The whole world went out in a sea of dense mist, where you breathed as much water as air, and the toadstools and mushrooms grew on the boots while you watched them. We played a good deal of bridge, I remember, of the elementary sort played in those days before auction; Macmillan very silent and inscrutable, Grant extreme-ly-pre-cise, and calling everything by its severely correct title; and the old Doomworm raving to Heaven at regular intervals about the shortcomings of a hand which, as he truly said, Job would have hesitated to sit down on. And then for days we'd sit and smoke and do nothing but watch the inside of Niagara as viewed through the doorway. Grant seemed even to have written himself to a standstill.

Presently the season eased up a bit. Macmillan got a brain-wave, and went off to a neighbouring village to fetch the local witchcraft artist. His arrival was as good as a sherry and bitters to Grant; bucked him up no end.

Religion !

The writer had to go off on an extended job just then. He

left the two hard at it, immersed in the hoips and godwots of a monkey mythology.

Returning a fortnight later, he found an ugly state of affairs.

Grant was missing.

With him Ranbir; also the Madrassi.

The three had been absent twenty-four hours, and anxiety growing acute, Crooke had examined the kit and gear left behind. From evidence of what was taken and what left it became clear that the three had pushed off on their own, with an extended absence in view, since considerable foodstuffs had gone with them. Strangely, the main gate sentries knew nothing. Grum Sahib came and went, and nobody said him nay; wasn't he always talking to the villagers ? Ranbir? The Madrassi? They may have come and gone. There was the cookhouse outside. . . . they all gone out together? No; of that there was positive denial.

So there had been a rendezvous outside. Cunning fox, Grant. Damn the fellow! But further consideration modified this a little. Inconsequent, hectic, unbalanced, his subject had become an obsession with him. The long gaps and delays must have maddened him; possibly he had at length realised what screeds of tosh he was writing, on the strength of what little real information. He must have resolved to cut the painter and go and hunt

opinionated egotist set, for a time, in a high place; this utter negation of the peace and privacy of our jungles. Weren't we glad, in the end, to be quit of him? Most emphatically,

we were not. The man was a sahib; he was of our blood; he was one of us; aye-put it fairly and squarely, we'd grown damn fond of the weird and whimsical old juggins, and not one of us but would gladly have cut off his right hand to see him safely back among us, and late once more for dinner.

The days grew to a week, the week to ten days. It neared a fortnight since he had gone, and we could stand it no longer. Sitting apart, we lapsed into the shepherd tongue of the corries, lest eavesdroppers should overhear, and took counsel. But got no nearer solution.

Next morning, rumours trickled in. The old Subadar was the first; tentatively and cautiously, as of one intruding on a family misfortune. 'Was it true that Grum Sahib was away, was lost? Had we by chance heard-hem, hem-no matter." "Wha's that, Subadar Sahib ? ' "Oh, a mere nothing; these junglis . . . tattle ... can't be anything in it. Grum Sahib. . . ." By ten o'clock it grew to an insistent rumour. By mid-day it was fairly and squarely out, and the local gam, now in hand

cuffs in the Quarter Guard, had, under considerable pressure, admitted that he had known it for two days. Grant had been murdered; done in.

The truth, and the whole truth, came to us in bits, then and much later, by a dozen devious and independent ways; and as fast as the bits came to us, SO we passed them on swiftly to Pardon-Howe, who waited, like an electric storm in leash, on the southern horizon. So the whole dismal story might as well be told Poor old Grant.

now.

To begin with, one must know a peculiar fact about the junglis. Illiterate, unwilling to trust one another with verbal messages, they had evolved a kind of message-letter in their communications. A few grains of rice, a fragment of canematting, a toucan feather, and five pebbles, all done up in a

small basket and sent from one gam to another, would be sufficient to bid him to a dinner (rice) inside the sender's house (cane matting) at five hours past noon on the following day, and it would be a big show involving dressiness (toucan's feather). An arrow-head, a piece of the wood from which canoes are made, a bit of bootlace or anything identifiable with the white man, and an indeterminate lump of clay as a question mark, would read, "War on the white men in the stockade near the river bank; what do you think of it? Answer, two arrow heads, "Rather!" Or half an arrowhead, "Bide a wee!" All things red mean blood or bloodshed, or an instant call to arms; all things black, death, or any form of emphasised finality. And so it goes on.

Well, as exactly as we could gather it, what had happened was this. Grant, with Ranbir carrying the kit for both of them, and the Erg-one imagines, carrying nothing at all,met on the main northward path out of view of the stockade. Grant had probably planned it all, and shaped up the supplies and kit. From this point they went due north at a fair speed till they reached the limits of what we called Administered Territory, and thereafter steadily into the northward mountains. Grant probably hoped for all sorts of interesting information by frankly casting loose from our area and diving straight into

the unknown. Possibly he misjudged us enough to think that our chaperonage was a deliberate obstacle put in the way of his researches.

In four days they seem to have covered what was a fair six marches, and reached a large village called Mu Fereang, where Grant walked boldly up to the gam's house, made a leg, and uttered conciliatory noises, and settled in. Jove, the man had a nerve. Not one of us would have cared to do a thing like that. The gam, utterly flabbergasted, seems to have done nothing. The arrival was discussed heatedly in the village parliament, but the situation seemed absolutely without precedent, and nothing came of the talking.

Next day Grant, wise enough not to show himself abroad in the village, started on the gam with his interminable questions. He had picked up a good deal of the jungli speech during his stay at Labêk, and could make himself understood. He seems to have avoided the worst snags of his earlier researches, but there must have been enough in the remainder to drive the gam and his entourage, from day to day, into sullenness, hostility, and finally, a smouldering rage. Who was this confounded white man who plagued them for ever with his pestilent curiosity? What the... Why the . . .? The junglis, as ever, ever, dissembled, and Grant knew less and less of the volcano on which he sat. Word began to go abroad that

against the Upper Tribes; that he was gathering data for an invasion, a numbering of the people, and a poll-tax-the same tax as that enforced in the Lower Territories. Things smouldered; the village parliament, in the young men's hut, was in plenary and permanent session.

About this time Grant began to run short of stores. The cheek of his own outbreaking must have lost its novelty, and the situation normalised by the apparent absence of search or excitement at his departure. Anyhow, quite calmly, he took a sheet of official foolscap (we saw it later) and wrote his amazing request for jam, marmalade, and potted meat. A stickler for the niceties of correspondence, he enclosed it in a long official envelope, gummed it down, and sealed it with a liberal dose of unnecessary seal ing-wax. He gave it to Ranbir, and told him to make a beeline for Labêk and bring back what was wanted.

Ranbir for once lost his way, wandered far, and fetched up at an unknown village. There they took him in and fed him (he had an insinuating way with him, had Ranbir), and gave him liberally of the local barleybrew, he being as near hausted as makes no matter. His tongue was loosened, and cheerily he descanted on the importance of his sahib and the weighty news which he carried a bit of unnecessary bombast which cost him his

ex

slept they searched his kit, found the long official envelope, panicked, and killed him.

Now, in those days-and it was long ago-England was in mourning for a sovereign recently dead; and all official envelopes, in addition to the leaded black type of "On His Majesty's Service," bore a heavy black border. The junglis stared at Grant's innocent letter. There it was; black, black, lots of it. Turn it over. Great red blobs-red for blood, red for a call to arms! Everything they had heard of the strange sahib sitting in Mu Fereang now bore sinister confirmation. There would be troops, and fighting, bloodshed, and thereafter a numbering of the people. And taxes.

Before poor Ranbir's body had even been decently hustled into the jungle, runners were off at top speed. Dawn found Grant, surprised in his sleep, bound hand and foot, and doubly bound in swathe on swathe of tough cane.

The Erg, poor worm, raised a silly outcry; they seem to have swiped him out of existence, as you would a fly.

Things moved quickly. For once there was no chinwag. Bomlaw the gam and Lapok the wizard took Grant in charge. A mob of grimy savages grabbed him and carried him at a run, shoulder high, to the dumbang, the village place of sacrifice, beneath the big Rami tree in the sacred grove near-by, the place where they made their