“Yes, why don’t I destroy it?” Ballantyne repeated.  “I ask myself that,” and he took the photograph out of Thresk’s hands and sat in a sort of muse, staring at it.  Then he turned it over and took the edge between his forefinger and his thumb, hesitating whether he would not even at this moment tear it into strips and have done with it.  But in the end he cast it upon the table as he had done many a time before and cried in a voice of violence: 

“No, I can’t.  That’s to own these fellows my masters and I won’t.  By God I won’t!  I may be every kind of brute, but I have been bred up in this service.  For twenty years I have lived in it and by it.  And the service is too strong for me.  No, I can’t destroy that photograph.  There’s the truth.  I should hate myself to my dying day if I did.”

He rose abruptly as if half ashamed of his outburst and crossing to his bureau lighted another cheroot.

“Then what do you want me to do with it?” asked Thresk.

“I want you to take it away.”

Ballantyne was taking a casuistical way of satisfying his conscience, and he was aware of it.  He would not destroy the portrait—­no!  But he wouldn’t keep it either.  “You are going straight back to England,” he said.  “Take it with you.  When you get home you can hand it to one of the big-wigs at the India Office, and he’ll put it in a pigeon-hole, and some day an old charwoman cleaning the office will find it, and she’ll take it home to her grandchildren to play with and one of them’ll drop it on the fire, and there’ll be an end of it.”

“Yes,” replied Thresk slowly.  “But if I do that, it won’t be useful at Calcutta, will it?”

“Oh,” said Ballantyne with a sneer.  “You’ve got a conscience too, eh?  Well, I’ll tell you.  I don’t think that photograph will be needed at Calcutta.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes.  Salak’s friends don’t know it, but I do.”

Thresk sat still in doubt.  Was Ballantyne speaking the truth or did he speak in fear?  He was still standing by the bureau looking down upon Thresk and behind him, so that Thresk had not the expression of his face to help him to decide.  But he did not turn in his chair to look.  For as he sat there it dawned upon him that the photograph was the very thing which he himself needed.  The scheme which had been growing in his mind all through this evening, which had begun to grow from the very moment when he had entered the tent, was now complete in every detail except one.  He wanted an excuse, a good excuse which should explain why he missed his boat, and here it was on the table in front of him.  Almost he had refused it!  Now it seemed to him a Godsend.

“I’ll take it,” he cried, and Baram Singh silently appeared at the outer doorway of the tent.

“Huzoor,” he said.  “Railgharri hai.”

Ballantyne turned to Thresk.

“Your train is signalled,” and as Thresk started up he reassured him.  “There’s no hurry.  I have sent word that it is not to start without you.”  And while Baram Singh still stood waiting for orders in the doorway of the tent Ballantyne walked round the table, took up the portrait very deliberately and handed it to Thresk.