A drowsy policeman answered Strickland’s call. He was followed by another, and Tietjens sat wondrous still.

‘Take him to the police-station,’ said Strickland. ‘There is a case toward.’

‘Do I hang, then?’ said Bahadur Khan, making no attempt to escape, and keeping his eyes on the ground.

‘If the sun shines or the water runs—yes!’ said Strickland.

Bahadur Khan stepped back one long pace, quivered, and stood still. The two policemen waited further orders.

‘Go!’ said Strickland.

‘Nay; but I go very swiftly,’ said Bahadur Khan. ‘Look! I am even now a dead man.’

He lifted his foot, and to the little toe there clung the head of the half-killed snake, firm fixed in the agony of death.

‘I come of land-holding stock,’ said Bahadur Khan, rocking where he stood. ‘It were a disgrace to me to go to the public scaffold: therefore I take this way. Be it remembered that the Sahib’s shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his washbasin basin. My child was bewitched, and I slew the wizard. Why should you seek to slay me with the rope? My honour is saved, and—and—I die.’

At the end of an hour he died, as they die who are bitten by the little brown karait, and the policemen bore him and the thing under the tablecloth to their appointed places. All were needed to make clear the disappearance of Imray.

‘This,’ said Strickland, very calmly, as he climbed into bed, ‘is called the nineteenth century. Did you hear what that man said?’

‘I heard,’ I answered. ‘Imray made a mistake.’

‘Simply and solely through not knowing the nature of the Oriental, and the coincidence of a little seasonal fever. Bahadur Khan had been with him for four years.’

I shuddered. My own servant had been with me for exactly that length of time. When I went over to my own room I found my man waiting, impassive as the copper head on a penny, to pull off my boots.

‘What has befallen Bahadur Khan?’ said I.

‘He was bitten by a snake and died. The rest the Sahib knows,’ was the answer.

‘And how much of this matter hast thou known?’

‘As much as might be gathered from One coming in in the twilight to seek satisfaction. Gently, Sahib. Let me pull off those boots.’

I had just settled to the sleep of exhaustion when I heard Strickland shouting from his side of the house—

‘Tietjens has come back to her place!’

And so she had. The great deerhound was couched statelily on her own bedstead on her own blanket, while, in the next room, the idle, empty, ceiling-cloth waggled as it trailed on the table.