Then off again before sunrise in the cool amid the shouting and confusion of a breaking camp, with truant ponies to be hunted, and everybody yelling for his right of road, and the elephants sauntering urbanely through it all with trunks alert for pickings from the hay-carts.  They were nights and days superbly gorgeous, all-entertaining, affluent of humor.

Then on the third day, nearing Sialpore toward evening they filed past two batteries of Royal Horse Artillery, drawn up on a level place beside the road to let them by—­an act of courtesy not unconnected with its own reward.  It is never a bad plan to let the possibly rebellious take a long look at the engines of enforcement.

“Ah!” laughed Yasmini, up in the howdah now beside Tess on the elephant, “the guns of the gods!  I said the gods were helping us!”

“Look like English guns to me,” Tess answered.

“So think the English, too.  So thinks Samson who sent for them.  So, too, perhaps Gungadhura will think when he knows the guns are coming!  But I know better.  I never promise the gods too much, but let them make me promises, and look on while they perform them.  I tell you, those are the guns of the gods!”

Chapter Twenty

A bad man ruined by the run of luck
May shed the slime—­they’ve done it,
Times and again they’ve done it. 
That turn to aspiration out of muck
Is quick if heart’s begun it,
If heart’s desire’s begun it. 
But ’ware revenge if greater craft it is
That jockeyed him to recognize defeat,
Or greater force that overmastered his—­
Efficiency more potent than deceit
That craved his crown and won it! 
Safer the she-bear with her suckling young,
Kinder the hooked shark from a yardarm hung,
More rational a tiger by the hornets stung
Than perfidy outcozened.  Shun it!

“Millions!  Think of it!  Lakhs and crores!”

The business of getting a maharajah off the throne, even in a country where the overlords are nervous, and there is precedent, is not entirely simple, especially when the commissioner who recommends it has a name for indiscretion and ambition.  The government of conquered countries depends almost as much on keeping clever administrators in their place as on fostering subdivision among the conquered.

So, very much against his will, Samson was obliged to go to see a high commissioner, who is a very important person indeed, and ram home his arguments between four walls by word of mouth.  He did not take Sita Ram with him, so there is a gap in the story at that point, partly bridged by Samson’s own sketchy account of the interview to Colonel Willoughby de Wing, overheard by Carlos de Sousa Braganza the Goanese club butler, and reported to Yasmini at third hand.