III
Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into Sar.
He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads, which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was told by those on which he could lay his hands.
The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success. He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants. Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.
On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered, to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with quite another carpet.
Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.
Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round some of the walls.
The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he had a more pressing use for it.
Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost exhausted.
Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of that: hence his use of it.