’Don’t be an ass.  It’s grievous enough, God knows, and the Government will know later on; but that’s no reason for your sulking.  You must try to run the district, you must stand between him and as much insult as possible; you must show him the ropes; you must pacify the Khusru Kheyl, and just warn Curbar of the Police to look out for trouble by the way.  I’m always at the end of a telegraph-wire, and willing to peril my reputation to hold the district together.  You’ll lose yours, of course, If you keep things straight, and he isn’t actually beaten with a stick when he’s on tour, he’ll get all the credit.  If anything goes wrong, you’ll be told that you didn’t support him loyally.’

‘I know what I’ve got to do,’ said Tallantire wearily, ’and I’m going to do it.  But it’s hard.’

’The work is with us, the event is with Allah,—­as Orde used to say when he was more than usually in hot water.’  And Bullows rode away.

That two gentlemen in Her Majesty’s Bengal Civil Service should thus discuss a third, also in that service, and a cultured and affable man withal, seems strange and saddening.  Yet listen to the artless babble of the Blind Mullah of Jagai, the priest of the Khusru Kheyl, sitting upon a rock overlooking the Border.  Five years before, a chance-hurled shell from a screw-gun battery had dashed earth in the face of the Mullah, then urging a rush of Ghazis against half a dozen British bayonets.  So he became blind, and hated the English none the less for the little accident.  Yardley-Orde knew his failing, and had many times laughed at him therefor.

‘Dogs you are,’ said the Blind Mullah to the listening tribesmen round the fire.  ’Whipped dogs!  Because you listened to Orde Sahib and called him father and behaved as his children, the British Government have proven how they regard you.  Orde Sahib ye know is dead.’

‘Ai! ai! ai!’ said half a dozen voices.

’He was a man.  Comes now in his stead, whom think ye?  A Bengali of Bengal—­an eater of fish from the South.’

‘A lie!’ said Khoda Dad Khan.  ’And but for the small matter of thy priesthood, I’d drive my gun butt-first down thy throat.’

’Oho, art thou there, lickspittle of the English?  Go in to-morrow across the Border to pay service to Orde Sahib’s successor, and thou shalt slip thy shoes at the tent-door of a Bengali, as thou shalt hand thy offering to a Bengali’s black fist.  This I know; and in my youth, when a young man spoke evil to a Mullah holding the doors of Heaven and Hell, the gun-butt was not rammed down the Mullah’s gullet.  No!’

The Blind Mullah hated Khoda Dad Khan with Afghan hatred; both being rivals for the headship of the tribe; but the latter was feared for bodily as the other for spiritual gifts.  Khoda Dad Khan looked at Orde’s ring and grunted, ’I go in to-morrow because I am not an old fool, preaching war against the English.  If the Government, smitten with madness, have done this, then...’