Acha, acha!—­“Good, good!” they all cried.  “Let us play the Nawab’s kismut! let us hang the Nawab!  And Mungloo—­he that is more clever than all of us—­he that is cunning as a Thug—­Mungloo shall be the Nawab!”

So they began with the murder of the Commissioner; and he who personated Kurreim Khan, the assassin, played so naturally, that he sent the Commissioner screaming to his mother, with an arrow sticking in his arm.  Then they arrested Kurreim Khan, and his accomplice, Unnia, a mehwatti, who turned king’s evidence, and betrayed the sowar; and having tried and condemned Kurreim Khan, they would have hung him on the spot; but, being but a little fellow, he became alarmed at the serious turn the sport was taking, although he had himself set so sharp an example; so he took nimbly to his heels, and followed his young friend, the Commissioner.

Then Unnia told how the Nawab had paid Kurreim Khan blood-money, because Shumsh-ud-deen did so hate Fraser Sahib.  Whereupon Metcalfe Sahib, a little naked fellow, just the color of an old mahogany table, sent his sepoys and had the Nawab dragged, in all his ragged breech-cloth glory, to the bar of Sahib justice.  In about three minutes, the Nawab was condemned to die,—­condemned to be hung by an outcast sweeper.  But, in consideration of his exalted rank, they consented that he should wear his slippers, and ride to the place of execution, smoking his hookah; and Mungloo acknowledged the Sahib’s magnanimity by proudly inclining his head, like a true Nawab, with a dignified “Acha!" Then two members of the court-martial, who lived nearest at hand, ran home, and quickly returned, one with his father’s slippers, the other with his mother’s hubble-bubble; and having tied the slippers, that were a world too big, on Mungloo’s little feet, and lighted the hubble-bubble, that he might smoke, they mounted him on a buffalo, captured from the village hurkaru, who happened, just in the nick of time, to come riding by, on his way to Delhi, with the mail.  And they led out the prisoner, smoking his hubble-bubble,—­and looking, as Metcalfe Sahib said of the real Nawab, “as if he had been accustomed to be hanged every day of his life,”—­to the place of execution, an old saul-tree with low limbs.  Then, having taken the rope with which the hurkaru’s mail-bag was lashed to his buffalo, they slipped a noose over the Nawab’s head, made the other end fast to the lower limb of the saul-tree, and led away the buffalo.

Little Mungloo, who was cunning as a Thug, acted with surprising talent; in fact, some of the Sahibs thought he rather overdid his part, for he dropped his hubble-bubble almost awkwardly, and even kicked,—­which the real Nawab had too much self-respect to do,—­so that he sent one of his slippers flying one way, and the other another.  But he choked, and gasped, and showed the whites of his eyes, and turned black in the face, and shivered through all his frame, so