Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/142

 father's slaves. They know all about thy blade”—touching its hilt where it protruded from Hector's waist shawl—“and, too, about the other blade!”

“The other blade!” thought Hector. “As if this one wasn't enough.”

Then, with a loud voice:

“One thing is sure. I shall have to stop this incipient racial war if we intend to take the train.”

He gave a few rapid, decisive orders to both the railway officials and the servants. The latter triumphantly piled all the baggage, including a screeching, mangy parrot in a rickety bamboo cage which the pipe woman had bought the last moment from a grinning, splay-footed jungly-Bhil, into a first-class compartment, very much to the disgust of its occupant, a majestic Anglo-Indian lady with a Wellingtonian beak who decided to write a letter about it to the Times of India as soon as she reached her husband's hill station. Everybody went aboard, the princess in one compartment with one woman servant and the eunuch who, immediately, pulled down the rattan window shades tight, the rest of the servants in a second compartment, and Hector himself in a third, alone but for the company of one of the princess' people, a red-faced, stony-eyed Tartar who at once squatted on his haunches, at Hector's feet, stuffed his huge mouth full with finely cut pan and promptly fell asleep.

Fifteen minutes earlier, the Eurasian station master had shouted himself hoarse with: