His voice had nothing in it but the abrupt military explosion when he gave his orders now—­no argument, no underlying sympathy.  He was no longer herding a flock of frightened children.  He was ordering trained, grown men, and he knew it and they knew it.  The orders ripped out, like the crack of a drover’s whip.

“Fall in, now, properly!  ’Tshun!  Right dress!  To two paces—­open order—­from the center—­extend!  Now, then!  Left and right wings—­ last three at each end forward—­right wheel—­halt.  That’s it.  ’Bout face.  Now each man keep two eyes lifting till the morning.  If anything shows up, or any of you hear a sound, shoot first and challenge afterward!”

They were standing so when the pale sun greeted them, in hollow square, with their backs toward the fakir, who was squatting, staring straight in front of him, on his dais, with his back turned to the tree and his withered arm still pointing up to heaven like a dead man’s calling to the gods for vengeance.

A little later, Brown made each alternate man lie down and get what sleep he could just where he was, with a comrade standing over him.  He himself slept so for a little while.  But one of the men heard something move among the hanging tendrils of the baobab, investigated with his bayonet-point, and managed to transfix a twelve-foot python.  After that there was, not so much desire for sleep.  The fakir either slept with his eyes open or else dispensed with sleep.  No one seemed able to determine which.

When the day grew hotter, and the utterly remorseless Indian sun bore down on them, and on the aching desolation of the plain and the burnt-out guardhouse, the fakir still sat unblinking, gazing straight out in front of him, with eyes that hated but did nothing else.  He seemed to have no time nor thought nor care for anything but hate and the expression of it.

At noon, three little children came to him, and brought him water in a small brass bowl, and cooked-up vegetables wrapped in some kind of leaf.  Brown let him have theirs, and bribed the frightened children to go and bring water for the men and himself.  He gave them the unheard-of wealth of one rupee between them, and they went off with it—­ and did not come back.

Meanwhile the fakir had drunk his water, and had poured out what was left.  He had also eaten what the children had brought him, and suddenly, from vacant, implacable hatred, he woke up and began to be amused.

“Ha-ha!” he laughed at them.  “Ho-ho!” And then he launched out with a string of eloquence that Brown called on the Beluchi to translate.

“Who said there would be thirst, and the sound of water!  Is there a thirst?  Who spoke of an anthill and of hungry ants and raw red openings in the flesh for the little ants to run in and out more easily?”

The Beluchi translated faithfully, and the men all listened.

“Tell him to hold his tongue!” growled Brown at last.