The Chiefs and the priests can work a Fellow-craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve come to find out.  It’s Gord’s Truth.  I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow-craft Degree, but this is a miracle.  A God and a Grand Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’

“‘It’s against all the law,’ I says, ’holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and you know we never held office in any Lodge.’

“‘It’s a master stroke o’ policy,’ says Dravot.  ’It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogie on a down grade.  We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us.  I’ve forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be.  Billet these men on the villages, and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind.  The temple of Imbra will do for a Lodge-room.  The women must make aprons as you show them.  I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs to-night and Lodge to-morrow.’

“I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn’t such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us.  I showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth.  We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master’s chair, and little stones for the officer’s chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make things regular.

“At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Passed Grand Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us.  Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends.  We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India—­Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan, that was Bazaar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.

“The most amazing miracles was at Lodge next night.  One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the men knew.  The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai.  The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on.  ‘It’s all up now,’ I says.  ’That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand Master’s chair—­which was to say, the stone of Imbra.  The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt,