"Lie not, Jhungi!" interrupted Tiddu calmly, "he is but my apprentice, Huzoor, but I----" he paused, caught up a cloth, gave it one dexterous twirl round him, squatted down, and there he was, to the life, a veiled woman watching the stranger with furtive, modest eye. "But I," came a round feminine voice full of feminine inflections, "am of the thousand-faced people who wander to a thousand places. A new place, a new face. It makes a large world, Huzoor, a strange world." There was a melancholy cadence in his voice, which added interest to the sheer amaze which Jim Douglas was feeling. He had heard the legend of the Many-Faced Tribe, had even seen clever actors claiming to belong to it, and knew how the Stranglers deceived their victims, but anything like this he had never credited, much less seen. He himself, though he knew to the contrary, could scarcely combat the conviction, which seemed to come to him from that one furtive eye, that a woman sat within those folds.
"But how?" he begun in perplexity. "I thought the Baharupas [Lit. many-faced] never went in caravans."
Tiddu resumed the cracked voice and let the smile become visible, and, as if by magic, the illusion disappeared. "The Huzoor is right. We are wanderers. But in my youth a woman tied me to one place, one face; women have the trick, Huzoor, even if they are wanderers themselves. This one was, but I loved her; so after we had burned her and her fellow-wanderer together hand-in-hand, according to the custom, so that they might wander elsewhere but not in the tribe, I lingered on. He was the father of Jhungi, and the boy being left destitute I taught him to play; for it needs two in the play as in life. The man and the woman, or folks care not for it. So I taught Jhungi----"
"And brother Bhungi?" suggested his hearer dryly.
A faint chuckle came from the veil. "And Bhungi. He plays well, and hath beguiled an old rascal with thin legs and a fat face like mine into playing with him. Some, even the Huzoor himself, might be beguiled into mistaking Siddu for Tiddu. But it is a tom-cat to a tiger. So being warned, the Huzoor will give no unearned blows. Yet if he did, are not two kicks bearable from the mulch-cow?" As he spoke he angled out a hand impudently for an alms with the beggars' cry of "Alakh," to point his meaning.
It was echoed by Jhungi, who, envious of Tiddu's holding the boards, as it were, had in sheer devilry and desire not to be outdone, taken up the disguise of a mendicant. It was a most creditable performance, but Tiddu dismissed it with a waive of the hand.
"Bullah!" he said contemptuously, "'tis the refuge of fools. There is not one true beggar in fifty, so the forty-and-nine false ones go free of detention as the potter's donkey. Even the Huzoor could do better--had I the teaching of him."
He leaned forward, dropping his voice slightly, and Jim Douglas narrowed his eyes as men do when some unbidden idea claims admittance to the brain.
"You?" he echoed; "what could you teach me?"
Tiddu rose, let fall the veil to decent dignified drapery, and fixed his eyes full on the questioner. They were luminous eyes, differing from Jhungi's beady ones as the fire-opal differs from the diamond.