Page:In Black and White - Kipling (1890).djvu/99

 and byres, and bidden to go to their houses. If they had no houses to go to, so much the worse for their toes.

On returning to Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding trom the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, "Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!" as I stooped over him. I pushed him a few steps up the staircase, threw a pebble at Lalun's City window and hurried home.

Most of the streets were very still, and the cold wind that comes before the dawn whistled down them. In the centre of the Square of the Mosque a man was bending over a corpse. The skull had been smashed in, by butt or bamboo.

"It is expedient that one man should die for the people," said Petitt grimly, raising the shapeless head. "These brutes were beginning to show their teeth too much."

And from afar we could hear the soldiers singing:—"Two Lovely Black Eyes" as they drove the remnant of the rioters within doors.

Of course, you can guess what happened? I was not so clever, When the news went abroad that Khem Singh had escaped from the Fort I did not, since I was then living the story, not writing it, connect myself, or Lalun, or the fat gentleman of the gold pince-nez with his disappearance. Nor did it strike me that Wali Dad was the man who should have steered him across the City, or that Lalun's arms round my neck were put there to hide the money that Nasiban gave to him, and that Lalun had used me and my white face as even a better safeguard than Wali Dad who proved himself so untrustworthy. All that I knew at the time was that, when Fort Amara was taken up with the riots, Kem Singh profited by the confusion to get away, and that his two Sikh guards also escaped.

But later on I received full enlightenment; and so did