By this time the hookah had made the round of the circle and once more reached Ram Deen, and as he paused again to "drink tobacco" his listeners made comment:
"Wah! coach-wan ji," said the little carrier, "knives may be blunt and clubs cracked, but fire loveth stubble and thatch. Ho, ho!"
And Ram Deen smiled grimly as he passed the hookah to his neighbor, who said as he took it, "And what of thy man-child, Buldeo?"
Ram Deen tucked the ends of his parted beard under his turban, and spitting bravely into the fire to conceal the tremor in his voice, he said, "As the dawn broke I reached the tree whereon I had fastened my son. When I came near a pack of jackals that had been worrying something under the tree slunk away. The child was not to be seen, but the bark of the tree was scored with the talons of a leopard, and at its foot was a small red cap and a handful of fresh bones."
Ram Deen puffed the hookah in silence when it reached him again.
By and by, in response to the expectation of his listeners, he said, "Bheem Dass rode after me on the mail-cart to Kaladoongie that night. I knew he would come, and therefore I brake the telegraph wire and fastened it across the road a foot above the ground. When the horse stumbled over it and fell the driver was thrown on his head and killed. But Bheem Dass lay groaning on the road with a broken thigh-bone.
"And I held a lamp taken from the cart to my face, so that he should know me, and I spat and stamped on him; and thereafter I mounted the mail-cart and drove it over his skull as he screamed for mercy.
"I took the mail to Kaladoongie, and it was told the sahib-log that the mail-cart had been overturned and the coach-wan and Bheem Dass killed; and they made me driver because the road was unsafe and I had shown them that I was not afraid.
"Ye are poor men and know naught,—knowledge dieth suddenly!"
And the bullock driver said, "Ho, ho! coach-wan sahib, we be poor men and know nothing, and are fain to live."