Strickland was about a hundred and eighty miles up the line.  He had not long been married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the telegram a chance of return to the old detective work that his soul lusted after, and next time he came in and heard our story.  He finished his pipe and said oracularly, ’We must get at the evidence.  Oorya bearer, Mussulman khit and sweeper ayah, I suppose, are the pillars of the charge.  I am on in this piece; but I’m afraid I’m getting rusty in my talk.’

He rose and went into Biel’s bedroom, where his trunk had been put, and shut the door.  An hour later, we heard him say, ’I hadn’t the heart to part with my old make-ups when I married.  Will this do?’ There was a loathly fakir salaaming in the doorway.

‘Now lend me fifty rupees,’ said Strickland, ’and give me your Words of Honour that you won’t tell my wife.’

He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table drank his health.  What he did only he himself knows.  A fakir hung about Bronckhorst’s compound for twelve days.  Then a sweeper appeared, and when Biel heard of him, he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged.  Whether the sweeper made love to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst’s ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland exclusively.

He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly, ’You spoke the truth, Biel.  The whole business is put up from beginning to end.  Jove!  It almost astonishes me!  That Bronckhorst beast isn’t fit to live.’

There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said, ’How are you going to prove it?  You can’t say that you’ve been trespassing on Bronckhorst’s compound in disguise!’

‘No,’ said Strickland.  ’Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to get up something strong about “inherent improbabilities” and “discrepancies of evidence”.  He won’t have to speak, but it will make him happy, I’m going to run this business.’

Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would happen.  They trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men.  When the case came off the Court was crowded.  Strickland hung about in the veranda of the Court, till he met the Mohammedan khitmutgar.  Then he murmured a fakir’s blessing in his ear, and asked him how his second wife did.  The man spun round, and, as he looked into the eyes of ’Estreekin Sahib’, his jaw dropped.  You must remember that before Strickland was married, he was, as I have told you already, a power among natives.  Strickland whispered a rather coarse vernacular proverb to the effect that he was abreast of all that was going on, and went into the Court armed with a gut trainer’s-whip.

The Mohammedan was the first witness, and Strickland beamed upon him from the back of the Court.  The man moistened his lips with his tongue and, in his abject fear of ‘Estreekin Sahib’, the fakir went back on every detail of his evidence—­said he was a poor man, and God was his witness that he had forgotten everything that Bronckhorst Sahib had told him to say.  Between his terror of Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed weeping.