Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy.  The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.

Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the regular—­“Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over” grunt of doolie-bearers in the compound.  First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third.  I heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook.  “That’s some one trying to come in,” I said.  But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind.  The shutter of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened.  “That’s some Sub-Deputy Assistant,” I said, “and he has brought his friends with him.  Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.”

But there were no voices and no footsteps.  No one was putting his luggage into the next room.  The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace.  But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone.  I got out of bed and looked into the darkness.  There was never a sign of a doolie.  Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake—­the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break.  No other sound is like it.  A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed.  I was not frightened—­indeed I was not.  I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies.  I jumped into bed for that reason.

Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up.  It is a mistake to say that hair stands up.  The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp.  That is the hair sitting up.

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing—­a billiard ball.  I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs—­all the furniture of the room next to mine—­could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards.  After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more.  I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dak-bungalow.  I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer.  There was whir on whir and click on click.  Sometimes there was a double click and a whir and another click.  Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room.  And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward—­stroke after stroke.  I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.