Page:Frank Packard - The White Moll.djvu/297

 ought to introduce myself. My name, my real name, you know, is David Holt. My father was in the American Consular service in India when I was about ten. He eventually left it and went into business there through the advice of a very warm friend of his, a certain very rich and very powerful rajah in the State of Chotá Nágpur in the Province of Bengal, where we then lived. I became an equally intimate friend of the rajah's son, and—do I bore you, Danglar?"

Danglar was like a crouched animal, his head drawn into his shoulders, his hands behind him with fingers twisting and gripping at the edge of the washstand.

"What's your proposition?" he snarled. "Curse you, name your price, and have done with it! You're as big a crook as I am!"

"You are impatient!" The Adventurer's shoulders went up again. "In due time the rajah decided that a trip through Europe and back home through America would round out his son's education, and broaden and fit him for his future duties in a way that nothing else would. It was also decided, I need hardly say to my intense delight, that I should accompany him. We come now to our journey through the United States—you see, Danglar, that I am omitting everything but the essential details. In a certain city in the Middle West—I think you will remember it well, Danglar—the young rajah met with an accident. He was out riding in the outskirts of the city. His horse took fright and dashed for the river-bank. He was an excellent horseman, but, pitched from his seat, his foot became tangled in the stirrup, and as he hung there head down, a blow from the horse's hoof rendered him unconscious, and he was being dragged along, when a man by the name of Deemer, at the risk of his own life, saved the rajah's son. The horse plunged over