Page:The Phantom 'Rickshaw - Kipling (1890).djvu/46

 rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while, the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and enquired for the means of departure.

"By the way, butler," I said, "what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?"

"There were no doolies," said he.

I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

"Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?" I asked.

"No," said the butler. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard-room."

"A how much?"

"A billiard-room for the Sahibs who built the Railway: I was servant then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with the brandy-wine. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul."

"Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?"