He then gets out again, replaces the lid and thrusts the sword through the hole in the lid twisting it in all directions. Were it not for the thickness of the cloth, which is by now close to the body of the boy by reason of the performer having pressed it down by sitting in the basket, the sword would certainly hurt the little chap. Incidentally the sword is none too sharp.
The sword is withdrawn and pushed through the sides, above the body of the boy.
The basket is proved undeniably empty.
If my readers doubt this explanation, let them offer the Jadoo-wallah, at this stage of the game, two thousand rupees to be allowed to fire a No. 8 cartridge from a 12 bore gun from a range of thirty yards at the empty basket. The performer will not accept the offer unless he values the boy at less than two thousand rupees and has a good chance of escaping arrest for murder. I have offered it twice with impunity.
The trick divides into two endings. One can always tell which ending it will have by a glance at the basket. If it has two ropes which pass underneath it, permanently attached, the betting is that the boy will appear from the end of the garden. The reason of this is that after the re-appearance of the boy—a duplicate of the one in the basket—the permanent ropes on the basket allow it to be hitched up on the shoulder pole and carried away, with the disappeared boy still inside it. When the Jadoo-wallah gets round the corner, the little assistant gets out while his impersonator goes a round about way into the next compound ready to re-appear at the end of the next performance of the trick.
If the basket has no ropes attached to it, odds are on the performance ending by the magician apologising profusely to his Gods who restore the boy from the depths of the basket again. The performer in this case has no duplicate, and the trick if well presented is almost as effective as the other, with the more elaborate ending.