“Very much.”
“Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything.”
“That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end.”
“Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not know who did the dacoity?”
Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and I answered it in the same way.
“What foolish people!” he said, and turned his back on us.
He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his father’s workroom and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than if he had been in office in the Plains.
“And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap’s laughing at me. It’s an awful thing to have a son. You see, he’s your own and his own, and between the two you don’t quite know how to handle him,” said Strickland. “I wonder what in the world he thinks about.”
I asked Adam this later on, quietly. He put his head on one side for a moment and replied: “In these days I think about great things. I do not play with Victor and the cow’s child any more. Victor is only a baba.”
At the end of the third week of Strickland’s leave, the result of Strickland’s labours—labours that had made Mrs. Strickland more indignant against the dacoits than any one else—came to hand. The Police at Peshawur reported that half of the Shubkudder gang were held at Peshawur to account for the possession of some blankets and a horse-bucket. Strickland’s assistant had also four men under suspicion in his charge; and Imam Din must have stirred up Strickland’s Inspector to investigations on his own account, for a string of incoherent telegrams came in from the Club Secretary in which he entreated, exhorted, and commanded Strickland to take his “mangy Policemen” off the Club premises. “Your men, in servants’ quarters here, examining cook. Billiard-marker indignant. Steward threatens resignation. Members furious. Grooms stopped on roads. Shut up, or my resignation goes to Committee.”