There was total darkness everywhere.  The guests were treading literally on each other’s toes and the accidents that happened to the carriages and horses were innumerable.

As good luck would have it another Police Inspector who was also on duty and was on horse-back came up to the only light within a circle of half a mile radius.

To him Hasan Khan said “Go and tell your Commissioner of Police that his subordinates have ill-treated Hasan Khan and tell him that I order him to come here at once.”

Some laughed others scoffed but the Inspector on horse-back went and within ten minutes the Commissioner of the Calcutta Police came along with half a dozen other high officials enquiring what the trouble was about.

To them Hasan Khan told the story of the thrashing he had received and pointed out the assailants.  He then told the Commissioner that if those constables and the Inspector who had ordered him to be handcuffed were dismissed, on the spot, from Government service, the lamps would be lighted without human assistance.  To the utter surprise of everybody present (including the high officials who had come out with the Commissioner of Police) an order dismissing the constables and the Inspector was passed and signed by the Commissioner in the dim light shed by that isolated lamp; and within one second of the order the entire compound of Government House was lighted up again, as if some one had switched on a thousand electric lamps controlled by a single button.

Everybody who was present there enjoyed the whole thing excessively, with the exception of the police officers who had been dismissed from service.

It appeared that the Commissioner of Police knew a lot about Hasan Khan and his black art.  How he had come to know of Hasan Khan’s powers will now be related.

* * * * *

Most of my readers have heard the name of Messrs. Hamilton and Co., Jewellers of Calcutta.  They are the oldest and most respectable firm of Jewellers probably in the whole of India.

One day Hasan Khan walked into their shop and asked to see some rings.

He was shown a number of rings but he particularly approved a cheap ring set with a single ruby.  The price demanded for this ring was too much for poor honest Hasan Khan’s purse, so he proposed that the Jewellers should let him have the ring on loan for a month.

This, of course, the Jewellers refused to do and in a most un-Englishman-like and unbusiness-like manner a young shop assistant asked him to clear out.

He promptly walked out of the shop promising to come again the next day.  Before going out of the shop, however, he told one of the managers that the young shop assistant had been very rude to him and would not let him have the ring for a month.

The next day there was a slight commotion in Hamilton’s shop.  The ring was missing.  Of course, nobody could suspect Hasan Khan because the ring had been seen by everybody in the shop after his departure.  The police were communicated with and were soon on the spot.  They were examining the room and the locks and recording statements when Hasan Khan walked in with the missing ring on his finger.