The punka-coolies had gone to sleep.  Two kerosene lamps were blazing in the office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed on the blotter as I leaned forward.  Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his mind might go.  I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said, “What happened after that?”

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.

“What was you pleased to say?” whined Carnehan.  “They took them without any sound.  Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King knocked down the first man that set hand on him—­not though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown of ’em.  Not a single solitary sound did those swines make.  They just closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk.  There was a man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says, ’We’ve had a dashed fine run for our money.  What’s coming next?’ But Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir.  No, he didn’t, neither.  The King lost his head, so he did, all along o’ one of those cunning rope bridges.  Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir.  It tilted this way.  They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom.  You may have seen such.  They prodded him behind like an ox.  ‘Damn your eyes!’ says the King.  ‘D’ you suppose I can’t die like a gentleman?’ He turns to Peachey—­Peachey that was crying like a child.  ’I’ve brought you to this, Peachey,’ says he.  ’Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor’s forces.  Say you forgive me, Peachey.’  ‘I do,’ says Peachey.  ‘Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.’  ‘Shake hands, Peachey,’ says he.  ‘I’m going now.’  Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes, ’Cut you beggars,’ he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

“But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine-trees?  They crucified him, Sir, as Peachey’s hand will show.  They used wooden pegs for his hands and feet; but he didn’t die.  He hung there and screamed, and they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn’t dead.  They took him down—­poor old Peachey that hadn’t done them any harm—­that hadn’t done them any—­”

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.