The risk of being seen from the street in case some spy were lurking out there was obvious.  So I walked all the way round the house, and came and stood below him on his left hand where the house cast impenetrable shadow; but though I took my time and moved stealthily he heard me and passed me a letter through the veranda rails, accepting the pistol in exchange without comment.

I could see him distinctly from that angle.  His uniform on one side was torn almost into rags, and his turban was all awry, as if he had lost it in a scuffle and hadn’t spared time to rewind it properly—­a sure sign of desperate haste; for a male tiger in the spring-time is no more careful of his whiskers than a Sikh is of the thirty yards of cloth he winds around his head.

As he didn’t speak or make any more movement than was necessary to pass me the letter and take the pistol, I returned the way I had come, entered by the back door, tossed the letter to Grim, and crept back again to bear a hand in case of need.  Grim said nothing, but Jeremy followed me, and two minutes later the Australian and I were crouching in darkness below the veranda.  This time I don’t think Narayan Singh was aware of friends at hand.

His eyes were fixed on the slightly lighter gap in a dark wall that was the garden gate but looked more like a dim hole leading into a cave.  There being no other entrance that we knew of, Jeremy and I doubled up on the same job, and a rat couldn’t have come through without one of the three of us detecting him.  If we had had our senses with us we might have realized that Narayan Singh was perfectly capable of watching that single narrow space, and have used our own eyes to better advantage.  However, we’re all three alive today, and two of us learned a lesson.

It wasn’t long—­perhaps five minutes—­before a man showed himself outside the gate, like a spectre dodging this and that way in response to unearthly impulse.  Once or twice he started forward, as if on the point of sneaking in, but thought better of it and retreated.  Once his attitude suggested that he might be taking aim with a pistol; but if that was so, he chose not to waste a shot or start an alarm by firing at a mark he couldn’t see.  What he did accomplish was to keep six keen eyes fixed on him.

And that gave three other men their chance to gain an entrance at the rear of the wall in the garden, and creep up unawares.  It was probably sheer accident that led all three of them along the far side of the house, but it was fortunate for Jeremy and me, for otherwise cold steel between our shoulder-blades would likely have been our first intimation of their presence.

We never suspected their existence until they gained the veranda by the end opposite to where we waited; and I think they would have done their murder if the man outside the gate hadn’t lost his head from excitement, or some similar emotion and tried to make a signal to them.  All three had brought up against the end window, where a shade torn in two places provided a good view into the room in which Grim, Mabel and the doctor were still sitting.  Each of them had a pistol, and their intention didn’t admit of doubt.