“There was no need for the last article,” said Carnehan, blushing modestly; “but it looks regular.  Now you know the sort of men that loafers are,—­we are loafers, Dan, until we get out of India,—­and do you think that we would sign a Contrack like that unless we was in earnest?  We have kept away from the two things that make life worth having.”

“You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure.  Don’t set the office on fire,” I said, “and go away before nine o’clock.”

I left them still poring over the maps and making notes on the back of the “Contrack.”  “Be sure to come down to the Serai to-morrow,” were their parting words.

The Kumharsen Serai is the great foursquare sink of humanity where the strings of camels and horses from the North load and unload.  All the nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk of India proper.  Balkh and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth.  You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep, and musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing.  In the afternoon I went down to see whether my friends intended to keep their word or were lying there drunk.

A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child’s paper whirligig.  Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys.  The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks of laughter.

“The priest is mad,” said a horse-dealer to me.  “He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir.  He will either be raised to honour or have his head cut off.  He came in here this morning and has been behaving madly ever since.”

“The witless are under the protection of God,” stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi.  “They foretell future events.”

“Would they could have foretold that my caravan would have been cut up by the Shinwaris almost within shadow of the Pass!” grunted the Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been diverted into the hands of other robbers just across the Border, and whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the bazaar.  “Ohe, priest, whence come you and whither do you go?”

“From Roum have I come,” shouted the priest, waving his whirligig; “from Roum, blown by the breath of a hundred devils across the sea!  O thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers!  Who will take the Protected of God to the North to sell charms that are never still to the Amir?  The camels shall not gall, the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall remain faithful while they are away, of the men who give me place in their caravan.  Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a golden slipper with a silver heel?  The protection of Pir Khan be upon his labours!” He spread out the skirts of his gabardine and pirouetted between the lines of tethered horses.