Page:Oriental Stories v01 n01 (1930-10).djvu/71

 

Oriental Stories v01n01 (1930-10-11) 0070.png

Carson's power of speech seemed to have left him. He bowed over the wrinkled hand; smiled. And she went on, "I never used to forget the press men—the big ones like you, I mean. It meant a write-up, and if it was favorable" She laughed a low, rippling laugh, youthful and sweet. A man, in passing, looked at her shriveled old face in surprize.

"Come around and see us, won't you?" the captain invited. "We've a bungalow. Been stationed here only a short time. I came down from that hole in the ground they call Judhpore." He laid a visiting-card on the table and penciled an address on it. Then the chair was wheeled away.

Carson sat for some moments in deep thought, after they left his table. Marie Pilotte an old woman—and she not yet twenty-five, if reports were true? And she had spoken of her career in the past tense; had said, "I never used to forget the press men." What could it mean?

a week later Carson went to dine at the captain's bungalow, set in a swirl of trees and shrubs on a road out of Delhi, a road called by the natives "the Road of Siva's Bull."

Marie Pilotte, gowned in white, had the appearance of a woman past sixty. It seemed to Carson that Captain Rawlins was watching his sister furtively during the courses. The native servants came and went almost noiselessly. Instinctively Carson awaited something—he did not know just what. His sixth sense—the queer sense that belongs to the Fourth Estate—was awakened to some new adventure.

It was a sultry, Indian night. The room where the three sat seemed charged with some powerful clement that might at any moment strike them in a terrible, unknown way.

The captain's sister laughed and talked, to be sure, yet to Carson there was an