“Fear not, Sahib, I shall not escape.  I go to Aden Jail,” said Moussa cheerfully—­but he pondered the advisability of attempting escape from the Reformatory should he be sentenced to be hanged.  It had always seemed an impossibility, but it would be better to attempt the impossible than to await the rope.  But doubtless they would say he was too small and light to hang satisfactorily, and would send him to Aden.  Thanks, Master Brahmin, realize as you die that you have greatly obliged your slayer....

* * * * *

“Now you will most certainly be hanged to death by rope and I shall be rid of troublesome fellow,” said the Superintendent to Moussa Isa when that murderous villain was temporarily handed over to him by the police-sepoy to whom he had been committed by Mr. Jones.

“I have avenged my people and myself,” replied Moussa Isa, “even as I said, I go to Aden Jail—­where there are men, and where a Somal is known from a Hubshi”

“You go to hang—­across the road there at Duri Gaol,” replied the babu, and earnestly hoped to find himself a true prophet.  But though the wish was father to the thought, the expression thereof was but the wicked uncle, for it led to the undoing of the wish.  So convinced and convincing did the babu appear to Moussa Isa, that the latter decided to try his luck in the matter of unauthorized departure from the Reformatory precincts.  If they were going to hang him (for defending and purging his private and racial honour), and not send him to Aden after all, he might as well endeavour to go there at his own expense and independently.  If he were caught they could not do more than hang him; if he were not caught he would get out of this dark ignorant land, if he had to walk for a year....

When he came to devote his mind to the matter of escape, Moussa Isa found it surprisingly easy.  A sudden dash from his cell as the door was incautiously opened that evening, a bound and scramble into a tree, a leap to an out-house roof, another scramble, and a drop which would settle the matter.  If something broke he was done, if nothing broke he was within a few yards of six-foot-high crops which extended to the confines of the jungle, wherein were neither police, telegraph offices, railways, roads, nor other apparatus of the enemy.  Nothing broke—­Duri Reformatory saw Moussa Isa no more.  For a week he travelled only by night, and thereafter boldly by day, getting lifts in bylegharies,[45] doing odd jobs, living as the crows and jackals live when jobs were unavailable, receiving many a kindness from other wayfarers, especially those of the poorer sort, but always faring onward to the West, ever onward to the setting sun, always to the sea and Africa, until the wonderful and blessed day when he believed for a moment that he was mad and that his eyes and brain were playing him tricks....  After months and months of weary travel, always toward the setting sun, he had arrived one terrible evening of June at a wide river and a marvellous bridge—­a great bridge hung by mighty chains upon mightier posts which stood up on either distant bank.  It was a pukka road, a Grand Trunk Road suspended in the air across a river well-nigh great as Father Nile himself.