The intruder was an Asiatic with the conventional hawk-nose of the Jew in the shape of his face; a brown man wearing a coloured turban upon his head, an old tweed jacket on his shoulders, and a pair of dirty white linen trousers on his legs, narrowing until they fitted closely round his ankles. He wore neither shoes nor stockings. And he stood very still watching Endicott with alert, bright eyes. Endicott, without moving from the door, reached out and lit the candles upon the table.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded curiously. He had no personal fear, and he was not much troubled by the man's hiding in the room. Elsie, whom the fellow might have frightened, had long since gone to bed, and there was nothing of value, except the Crown Derby, which he could have stolen. On the other hand Endicott was immensely puzzled by the presence of an Asiastic at all in this inland and lonely valley far from railways and towns, at half-past ten of the night.
"I pass the house," the man answered in English which was astonishingly good. "I think you give me one piece opium to go on with."
"Opium!" cried Mr. Endicott, as if he had been stung. How many times had he voted for the suppression of everything to do with opium. "You'll find none of that abominable drug here!"
He surveyed the Asiatic, outraged in every feeling. He lifted the latch. He was on the point of flinging open the door. He had actually begun to open it, when his mood changed. North of the Tropic of Capricorn. The lilt of the words was in his ears. He remembered the talk of the Australian in the railway-carriage about the overcrowding of the East. The coming of this strange brown man seemed to him of a sudden curiously relevant. He closed the door again.
"You passed the house? Where do you come from? Who are you? How do you come here?"
The Asiatic, who had stood gathered like a runner at the starting-point while the door was being opened, now cringed and smiled.
"Protector of the poor, I tell you my story"; and Mr. Endicott found himself listening in that quiet farm-house of the Cumberland dales to a most enlightening Odyssey.
The man's name was Ahmed Ali, and he was a Pathan of the hills. His home was in the middle country between Peshawur and the borders of Afghanistan, and he belonged to a tribe of seven hundred men, every one of whom had left his home and his wife and his children behind him, and had gone down to Bombay to seek his livelihood in the stokeholds of ships. Ahmed had been taken on a steamer of the Peninsula and Oriental Line bound for Australia, where he hoped to make his fortune. But neither at Sydney nor at Melbourne had he been allowed to land.
"But I am a British citizen," he said, having acquired some English.