Page:Following the Equator (Mark Twain).djvu/443

Rh Among the reports of expeditions we find mention of victims of almost every quality and estate:

Also a prince's cook; and even the water-carrier of that sublime lord of lords and king of kings, the Governor-General of India! How broad they were in their tastes! They also murdered actors—poor wandering barn-stormers. There are two instances recorded; the first one by a gang of Thugs under a chief who soils a great name borne by a better man—Kipling's deathless "Gungadin":

Second instance:

But this gang was a particularly bad crew. On that expedition they murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars. And yet Bhowanee protected them; for once when they were strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going by close at hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, Bhowanee made a camel burst out at the same moment with a roar that drowned the scream; and before the man could repeat it the breath was choked out of his body.

The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an awful sacrilege, and even the Thugs recognized this; yet now