He had tied a noose while he was speaking, and the fakir had watched him with eyes that blazed with hate.  A soldier seized the noose, and slipped it over the fakir’s head.

“Two!”

The tree was an easy one to climb.  “Two” and “three” were the work of not more than a minute.

“Four!” commanded Brown, and the rope drew tight across the bough.  The fakir had to strain his chin upward in order to draw his breath.

“Steady, now!”

The men were lined out in single file, each with his two hands on the rope.  Not half of them were really needed to lift such a wizened load as the fakir, but Brown was doing nothing without thought, and wasting not an effort.  He wanted each man to be occupied, and even amused.  He wanted the audience, whom he could not see, but who he knew were all around him in the shadows, to get a full view of what was happening.  They might not have seen so clearly, had he allowed one-half of the men to be lookers-on.

“Steady!” he repeated.  “Be sure and let him breathe, until I give the word.”  Then he seized the cowering Beluchi by the neck, and dragged him up close beside the fakir.  “Translate, you!” he ordered.  “To the crowd out yonder first.  Shout to ’em, and be careful to make no mistakes.”

“Speak, then, sahib!  What shall I say?”

“Say this.  This most sacred person here is our prisoner.  He will die the moment any one attempts to rescue him.”

The Beluchi translated, and repeated word for word.

“I will now talk with him, and he himself will talk with you, and thus we will come to an arrangement!"’

There was a commotion in the shadows, and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty men appeared, keeping at a safe distance still, but evidently anxious to get nearer.

“Now talk to the fakir, and not so loudly!  Ask him `Are you a sacred person?’ Ask him softly, now!”

“He says `Yes,’ sahib, `I am sacred!"’

“Do you want to die?”

“All men must die!”

The answer made an opening for an interminable discussion, of the kind that fakirs and their kindred love.  But Brown was not bent just then on dissertation.  He changed his tactics.

“Do you want to die, a little slowly, before all those obedient worshipers of yours, and in such a way that they will see and understand that you can not help yourself, and therefore are a fraud?”

The Beluchi repeated the question in the guttural tongue that apparently the fakir best understood.  In the fitful light cast by the burning roofs, it was evident that the fakir had been touched in the one weak spot of his armor.

There can scarcely be more than one reason why a man should torture himself and starve himself and maim and desecrate and horribly defile himself.  At first sight, the reason sounds improbable, but consideration will confirm it.  It is vanity, of an iron-bound kind, that makes the wandering fakir.