I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in the Colonel’s mind, it was so full of other considerations.  He thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the arsenal than upon the curves of the temples.  Because, in the Colonel’s opinion, it had come to look very like fighting.  In the opinion of little Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be ‘bagging’ the Maharajah’s artillery by now.  Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling for the fray.  So were the men, most of them.  They wanted a change of diet.  Thomas Jones, sergeant, entirely expressed the sentiments of his company when he said that somebody ort to pay up for this blessed march, they ’adn’t wore the skins off their ’eels fer two ‘undred mile to admire the bloomin’ scenery.  Besides, for Thomas Jones’s part, he was tired of living on this yere bloomin’ tinned rock, he wanted a bit of fresh roast kid and a Lalpore curry.

Colonel Starr had been sent to ‘arrange,’ if possible, and to fight if necessary.  Perhaps we need not inquire into the arrangements the Government had commissioned Colonel Starr to make.  They were arrangements of a kind frequently submitted to the princes of independent States in India when they are troublesome, and their result is that a great many native States are governed by English political residents, while a great many native princes attend parties at Government House in Calcutta.  The Maharajah of Chita had been very troublesome indeed.  Twice in the year his people had raided peaceful villages under British protection, and now he had killed a missionary.  It was quite time to ‘arrange’ the Maharajah of Chita, and Colonel Starr, with two guns and three hundred troops, had been sent to do it.

His Highness, however, seemed indisposed to further his social prospects in Calcutta and the good of his State.  For the twenty-four hours they had been in camp under his walls the Maharajah had taken no more notice of Colonel Starr and his three hundred Midlanders than if they represented so many jungle bushes.  To all Colonel Starr’s messages, diplomatic, argumentative, threatening, there had come the same unsatisfactory response—­the Maharajah of Chita had no word to say to the British Raj.  And still the gates were shut, and still only the pipal-trees looked over the wall, and only the cannon looked through.

By the time evening came Colonel Starr was at the end of his patience.  He was not, unfortunately, simultaneously at the end of his investigations.  He did not yet know the position or the contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive red city on the hill.  The reports of the peasantry had been contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things had failed him, while he very particularly required to