Week after week until the spring came we listened to their tales by day and talked them over among ourselves at night; and the more they assured us Ranjoor Singh was working with them in Berlin, the more we prayed for opportunity to prove our hearts.  Spring dragged along into summer and there began to be prayers for vengeance on him.  I said less than any.  Understanding had not come to me fully yet, but it seemed to me that if Ranjoor Singh was really playing traitor, then he was going a tedious way about it.  Yet it was equally clear that if I should dare to say one word in his behalf that would be to pass sentence on myself.  I kept silence when I could, and was evasive when they pressed me, cowardice struggling with new conviction in my heart.

There came one night at last, when men’s hearts burned in them too terribly for sleep, that some one proposed a resolution and sent the word whispering from hut to hut, that we should ask for Ranjoor Singh to be brought to us.  Let the excuse be that he was our rightful leader, and that therefore he ought to advise us what we should do.  Let us promise to do faithfully whatever Ranjoor Singh should order.  Then, when he should have been brought to us, should he talk treason we would tear him in pieces with our hands.  That resolution was agreed to.  I also agreed.  It was I who asked the next day that Ranjoor Singh be brought.  The German officer laughed; yet I asked again, and he went away smiling.

We talked of our plan at night.  We repeated it at dawn.  We whispered it above the bread at breakfast.  After breakfast we stood in groups, confirming our decision with great oaths and binding one another to fulfillment—­I no less than all the others.  Like the others I was blinded now by the sense of our high purpose and I forgot to consider what might happen should Ranjoor Singh take any other line than that expected of him.

I think it was eleven in the morning of the fourth day after our decision, when we had all grown weary of threats of vengeance and of argument as to what each individual man should do to our major’s body, that there was some small commotion at the entrance gate and a man walked through alone.  The gate slammed shut again behind him.

He strode forward to the middle of our compound, stood still, and confronted us.  We stared at him.  We gathered round him.  We said nothing.

“Fall in, two deep!” commanded he.  And we fell in, two deep, just as he ordered.

“’Ten-shun!” commanded he.  And we stood to attention.

Sahib, he was Ranjoor Singh!

He stood within easy reach of the nearest man, clothed in a new khaki German uniform.  He wore a German saber at his side.  Yet I swear to you the saber was not the reason why no man struck at him.  Nor were there Germans near enough to have rescued him.  We, whose oath to murder him still trembled on our lips, stood and faced him with trembling knees now that he had come at last.