Long and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal), and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service, and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends. Otherwise he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure’s sake.

If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate. He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place was full of schoolboys — sons of Anglo–Indians whom the Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper’s heart.

But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.

Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks are coming for to-night-with their boy.”

“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,” I said. “Is he in the Service?”

“No. Strick got him into the Centro–Euro-Africa Protectorate. He’s Assistant–Commissioner at Dupe — wherever that is. Somaliland, ain’t it, Stalky?” asked the Infant.

Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You’re only three thousand miles out. Look at the atlas.”

“Anyhow, he’s as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,” said the Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he’s bringing a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable room.”

“Why? Is he a Yao — like the fellow Wade brought here — when your housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some odd things.

“No. He’s one of old Strickland’s Punjabi policemen — and quite European — I believe.”

“Hooray! Haven’t talked Punjabi for three months — and a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin’.”

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man’s placid way, to at least eight designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

“You didn’t send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might have taken a chill.”

“It’s quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front?”

“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother’s smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to me. “There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since.”

“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.

“The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib’s body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.”

“And — and you white men wait at table on horseback?” Stalky pointed to the man’s spurs.

“These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England,” said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said “Six months.”

“But he’ll take another six on medical certificate,” said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

“You don’t want to — eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing.” Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

“Ah!” said the Infant. “I’ve only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We’re just ourselves. What flower is your honour’s ladyship commanding for the table?”

“Just ourselves?” she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall. “Then let’s have marigolds the little cemetery ones.”

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam’s servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din — shoeless, out of respect to the floors — brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

“Now what d’you expect to get out of your country?” the Infant asked, when — our India laid aside we talked Adam’s Africa. It roused him at once.

“Rubber — nuts — gums — and so on,” he said. “But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”

“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”

“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.”

“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.

“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.”

“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

“The best man alive — absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him”— Adam jerked out some heathen phrase —“that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.”

“I’m glad of that. Because I’ve heard from other quarters” Stalky’s sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father’s policemen twenty years before, and his mother’s eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man’s first love or loyalty.

A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.

“I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our shirts,” said the voice of Imam Din.

“Does he know as much English as that?” cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.

We all admired the cotton for Adam’s sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.

“It’s — it’s only an experiment,” he said. “We’re such awful paupers we can’t even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that”— he patted the stuff —“by a pure fluke.”

“How much did it cost?” asked Strickland.

“With seed and machinery — about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals.”

“That sounds promising.” Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.

“No, thank you,” said Agnes. “I’ve been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I’ll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday’s hymns.”

She lifted the boy’s hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant’s ancestors’ banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians’ gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.

“There’s an abominable self-playing attachment here!” she called.

“Me!” the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder. “That’s how I play Parsifal.”

“I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.”

We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.

“Now for the direct expression,” said Stalky, and moved on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich fever-thinned blood.

“It’s nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We haven’t been able to prove cannibalism against that tribe in the courts; but when a Sheshaheli offers you four pounds of woman’s breast, tattoo marks and all, skewered up in a plantain leaf before breakfast, you —”

“Naturally burn the villages before lunch,” said Stalky.

Adam shook his head. “No troops,” he sighed. “I told my Chief about it, and he said we must wait till they chopped a white man. He advised me if ever I felt like it not to commit a — a barren felo de se, but to let the Sheshaheli do it. Then he could report, and then we could mop ’em up!”

“Most immoral! That’s how we got —” Stalky quoted the name of a province won by just such a sacrifice.

“Yes, but the beasts dominated one end of my cotton-belt like anything. They chivied me out of it when I went to take soil for analysis — me and Imam Din.”

“Sahib! Is there a need?” The voice came out of the darkness, and the eyes shone over Adam’s shoulder ere it ceased.

“None. The name was taken in talk.” Adam abolished him with a turn of the finger. “I couldn’t make a casus belli of it just then, because my Chief had taken all the troops to hammer a gang of slave kings up north. Did you ever hear of our war against Ibn Makarrah? He precious nearly lost us the Protectorate at one time, though he’s an ally of ours now.”

“Wasn’t he rather a pernicious brute, even as they go?” said Stalky. “Wade told me about him last year.”

“Well, his nickname all through the country was ‘The Merciful,’ and he didn’t get that for nothing. None of our people ever breathed his proper name. They said ‘He’ or ‘That One,’ and they didn’t say it aloud, either. He fought us for eight months.”

“I remember. There was a paragraph about it in one of the papers,” I said.

“We broke him, though. No — the slavers don’t come our way, because our men have the reputation of dying too much, the first month after they’re captured. That knocks down profits, you see.”

“What about your charming friends, the Sheshahelis?” said the Infant.

“There’s no market for Sheshaheli. People would as soon buy crocodiles. I believe, before we annexed the country, Ibn Makarrah dropped down on ’em once — to train his young men — and simply hewed ’em in pieces. The bulk of my people are agriculturists just the right stamp for cotton-growers. What’s Mother playing?—‘Once in royal’?”

The organ that had been crooning as happily as a woman over her babe restored, steadied to a tune.

“Magnificent! Oh, magnificent!” said the Infant loyally. I had never heard him sing but once, and then, though it was early in the tolerant morning, his mess had rolled him into a lotus pond.

“How did you get your cannibals to work for you?” asked Strickland.

“They got converted to civilization after my Chief smashed Ibn Makarrah — just at the time I wanted ’em. You see my Chief had promised me in writing that if I could scrape up a surplus he would not bag it for his roads this time, but I might have it for my cotton game. I only needed two hundred pounds. Our revenues didn’t run to it.”

“What is your revenue?” Stalky asked in the vernacular.

“With hut-tax, traders’ game and mining licenses, not more than fourteen thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked months ahead.” Adam sighed.

“Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib’s camp. Last year it exceeded three rupees,” Imam Din said quietly.

“Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were rather strict on fines. I worked up my native clerk — Bulaki Ram — to a ferocious pitch of enthusiasm. He used to calculate the profits of our cotton-scheme to three points of decimals, after office. I tell you I envied your magistrates here hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about meet, and I was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds for my cotton. That sort of thing grows on a chap when he’s alone — and talks aloud!”

“Hul-lo! Have you been there already?” the father said, and Adam nodded.

“Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of ‘Marmion’ to a tree, sir. Well then my luck turned. One evening an English-speaking nigger came in towing a corpse by the feet. (You get used to little things like that.) He said he’d found it, and please would I identify, because if it was one of Ibn Makarrah’s men there might be a reward. It was an old Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab — a smallboned, bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like — like the dog in ‘Tom Sawyer,’ when he sat on the what’s-its-name beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could see it had been sarkied. (That’s a sort of gum-poison, pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with my shaving soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.

“I’d seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled off his feet, and he stopped sneezing, I knew he’d live. He was bad, though; lay like a log for a week while Imam Din and I massaged the paralysis out of him. Then he told us he was a Hajji — had been three times to Mecca — come in from French Africa, and that he’d met the nigger by the wayside — just like a case of thuggee, in India — and the nigger had poisoned him. That seemed reasonable enough by what I knew of Coast niggers.”

“You believed him?” said his father keenly.

“There was no reason I shouldn’t. The nigger never came back, and the old man stayed with me for two months,” Adam returned. “You know what the best type of a Mohammedan gentleman can be, pater? He was that.”

“None finer, none finer,” was the answer.

“Except a Sikh,” Stalky grunted.

“He’d been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out; he could quote poetry and the Koran all day long. He played chess — you don’t know what that meant to me — like a master. We used to talk about the regeneration of Turkey and the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed in slavery, of course, but he quite saw that it would have to die out. That’s why he agreed with me about developing the resources of the district by cotton-growing, you know.”

“You talked of that too?” said Strickland.

“Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don’t know what it meant to me. A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our Hajji marvellous?”

“Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we found the money for our cotton-play.” Imam Din had moved, I fancy, behind Strickland’s chair.

“Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too. He brought me news when I was down with fever at Dupe that one of Ibn Makarrah’s men was parading through my District with a bunch of slaves — in the Fork!”

“What’s the matter with the Fork, that you can’t abide it?” said Stalky. Adam’s voice had risen at the last word.

“Local etiquette, sir,” he replied, too earnest to notice Stalky’s atrocious pun. “If a slaver runs slaves through British territory he ought to pretend that they’re his servants. Hawkin’ ’em about in the Fork — the forked stick that you put round their necks, you know — is insolence — same as not backing your topsails in the old days. Besides, it unsettles the District.”

“I thought you said slavers didn&rsq............