He lurched over to his writing-table with his long loose stride, pulled a piece of paper towards him, and wrote to the man whom, he trusted above all others. After a cheery and unpatronising form of "Well donc, thou good and faithful servant," he announced his long-deferred intention of going home on leave-" and the Lord knows who they'll send as my locum; there's nobody in the immediate running. I only hope it won't be some silly ass from down-country, full of theories and ideas, who'll upset all your plans. But whoever it is, be patient with him. I'll tell him, when I hand over, not to bother you, and that he'd better let you alone to

ference. So long, old man, and give all your stout lads my love."

the

Five days later it was handed to Pardon-Howe in durbar at a tribal conference, where he sat on a log, the rain dripping off the edges of his hat, and his pipe upside-down to keep it alight. The two Gurkhas who brought it barged unceremoniously through squatting groups of tribesmen, treating the reeking assembly, very properly, as dirt. They came to a halt in front of the Burra Sahib, saluted punctiliously, and handed the message. They stood to attention while he read it; the Gurkha instinct, as of all born soldiers, knew the value of a little ceremonial on occasion.

The Line of stockaded posts ran, like Hadrian's Wall, along the ill-defined and fluid edge of Administered Territory. Here lay groups of Gurkha Military Police, whose nominal job it was to sit in their stockades and efface themselves, but who, in practice, pervaded everywhere in cheery indifference to a jungle population which lacked everything but leadership and a common purpose to make it aggressively hostile. At any moment it might have roared out into an avalanche of yelling fiends, who would have barged, to their ruin, in mobs against the

walls of the stockades. As a matter of fact, the émeute never came off, and the occasional whumping and booming of wargongs calling from village to distant village never portended anything worse than yet another conference of endless talk.

The Gurkha patrols, using path or dense jungle indifferently, went through the land in every direction. They lived, moved, and fought in a way which regulars thought unconventional, and which the tribes found embarrassing. They had untranslatable nicknames for all the principal natives, cocked their beaver at the girls, and

swooshed out of the pathway any jungli whom they met; little swaggering lords of creation. The junglis hated and feared them; and the village maidens adored them, so clean, so saucy and debonair were they, and such a way with them. But discipline held good; and just as no jungli was ever a penn'orth the worse for the Gurk and his ever-ready kukri, so was there never so much as an arm's-length flirtation.

At Labêk stood the headquarter stockade of the Western Section. Here, perched on a cleared hill-top above the big straggling village, Crooke lived as O.C. the Line, and with him his adjutant, Macmillan. The remainder of his white officers had subsidiary groups of their own, east and west, and a cheerful elasticity of command pervaded the whole. There was much moving about, and little reporting. As Crooke said, if he had to be perpetually tagging round after his officers, they wouldn't be there; his show demanded the very best, and carried no passengers. He would happen in on them occasionally when he thought he wanted exercise, or they would drop into the headquarter stockade, and then Crooke's high nasal neigh rose and fell, and the news of the day would be swopped and the guest-chamber in the long hut would be swept and garnished, and the whisky bottle-one, or more, sometimes-would be routed out from a forgotten corner; and they'd go to bed somewhere

getting on for 1 A.M., all the better for a little unbending. Good days.

Macmillan, the little, wiry, red-haired adjutant, the most silent man in Scotland or out of it, had all but a sinecure; the organisation was perfect, and ran on its own wheels. He and Crooke knew the very linings of each other's minds, and lived by what appeared to be a kind of telepathy, economising words. This, perhaps, was just as well. Crooke, for all his efficiency, and the affection he inspired among white man and Gurkha alike, was known as the Doomworm. He had a way of getting fits of deep depression when there was nothing much on; and the despondent monologue, sometimes sometimes blazing out into pæans of lyrical abuse, would have been too much for any one if it had been encouraged. Macmillan was the very antidote for him, and the two opposites lived, month in and month out, in their narrow quarters with never the shadow of irritation between them. When the Doomworm had a fit on, Macmillan, who was one of the best pipers I've yet met, would reach down his pipes from the shelf and stroll out into the verandah. few preliminary shakes on the middle E, and a touch or two to his drones (they never took much tuning-the sodden climate kept the reeds in the pink of mellowness), he would break into quickstep or strathspey, and keep the wind steadily to

With a

the bag by the half-hour together. He'd always finish on a pibroch, the Desperate Battle, or some fantastic composition of his own; and, as the long wild peals and hiccupping gracenotes rose and fell and rose again as the player worked himself up and up, so old Dooms would rumble off into grunts, which died away into a contented silence. There he would sit, while the wild music flooded the very souls of the two of them, his eyes fixed on space, and every wrinkle smoothed out of his worried mind till he purred like a wellstroked cat.

Or sometimes Brodie or Fraser would be there, and there would be an evening of it, all in dead silence while the music lasted; and a flat blanket of quiet would overlie the chattery little Gurks in the barrack huts, the hillman in them responding to Macmillan. Why, the very village dogs forgot to howl and bicker when the thin far-away skirling floated down from the stockade.

Pardon-Howe shared occasionally in these gatherings on his rare tours of the Line. But mainly he kept away and left his officers to run things on the broad and simple lines which he had long ago laid down. His great and virile influence lay over the whole; but so long as things ran normally he refused to interfere in details, and left everything in trust to his chosen

instruments on the spot.

Some weeks after the change of Chief, rumours began to penetrate to the outer edge of things. Correspondence commenced to arrive in PardonHowe's office with a frequency in strong contrast to the occasional notes scrawled, without the intervention of a secretary, by the late Head. Piecing together the interminable screeds with what he heard from infrequent visitors from headquarters, he gathered that His Temporary Excellency Theophilus Barron, the new Chief, was all at sea in a frontier province, and regarded his new acquisition as a refreshing contrast to his previous experiences in densely packed Presidency towns down country; as a new toy, in fact. And the Lord help us all if he's going to treat the nimble jungli as a plaything!" growled Pardon-Howe, as he waded through the wads of typescript. of the turgid rhetoric was pure nonsense; mentally you could see His Excellency dictating the polished phrases and resounding inanities to a stenographer, with due insistence on the mot juste, page on page worked up to some futile phrase voicing a "bedrock principle," which might have been Machiavelli, but which sounded suspiciously like Manchester.

66

Much

The perfectly polite but somewhat laconic replies which came back did nothing to stem the flood, which finally settled down into a steady flow of questioning. Pardon-Howe's looselyknit but supremely efficient