He slammed the door again and bolted it, and whether or not he really fell asleep, within the minute he was giving us a perfect imitation of a hog snoring. What was more, the crowd began to take its cue from the babu, and a roof-tile broke at our feet as a gentle reminder that we had the town's permission to depart. Without caste-marks, and in those shabby, muddy, torn clothes, we were obviously undesirables.
So we made for the railroad station, where, since we had money, none could refuse to sell us third-class tickets. But, though we tried, we could not send a telegram from there either, although King took the station babu to one side and proved to him beyond argument that he knew the secret service signs. The babu was extremely sorry, but the wire was down. The trains were being run for the present on the old block system, one train waiting in a station until the next arrived, and so on.
So, although King sent a long telegram in code from a junction before we reached Lahore, nothing had been done about it by the time we had changed into Christian clothes at our hotel and called on the head of the Intelligence Department. And by then it was a day and a half since we had seen the Gray Mahatma.
The best part of another day was wasted in consulting and convincing men on whose knees the peace of India rested. They were naturally nervous about invading the sacred privacy of Hindu temples, and still more so of investigating Yasmini's doings in that nest of hers. There were men among them who took no stock in such tales as ours anyhow—hard and fast Scotch pragmatists, who doubted the sanity of any man who spoke seriously of anything that they themselves had not heard, seen, smelt, felt and tasted. Also there was one man who had been jealous of Athelstan King all his years in the service, and he jumped at the chance of obstructing him at last.
After we had told our story at least twenty times, more and more men being brought in to listen to it, who only served to increase incredulity and water down belief, King saw fit to fling his even temper to the winds and try what anger could accomplish. By that time there were eighteen of us, sitting around a mahogany table at midnight, and King brought his fist down with a crash that split the table and offended the dignity of than one man.
"Confound the lot of you!" he thundered. "I've been in the service twenty-one years and I've repeatedly brought back scores of wilder tales than this. But this is the first time that I've been disbelieved. I'm not in the service now. So here's my ultimatum! You take this matter up—at once—or I take it up on my own account! For one thing, I'll write a full account in all the papers of your refusal to investigate. Suit yourselves!"
They did not like it; but they liked his alternative less; and there were two or three men in the room, besides, who were secretly on King's side, but hardly cared to betray their opinions in the face of so much opposition. They did not care to seem too credulous. It was they who suggested with a half-humorous air of concession that no harm could be done by sending a committee of investigation to discover whether it were true that living men were held for experimental purposes beneath that Tirthanker temple; and one by one the rest yielded, somebody, however, imposing the ridiculous proviso that the Brahmin priests must be consulted first.
So, what with one thing and another, and one delay and another, and considering that the wire had been repaired and no less than thirty Brahmin priests were in the secret, the outcome was scarcely surprising.
Ten of us, including four policemen, called on the Maharajah Jihanbihar five full days after King and I had last seen the Mahatma; and after we had wasted half a morning in pleasantries and jokes about stealing a ride on his elephant, we rode in the Maharajah's two-horse landaus to the Tirthanker temple, where a priest, who looked blankly amazed, consented at once to be our guide through the sacred caverns.
But he said they were no longer sacred. He assured us they had not been used at all for centuries. And with a final word of caution against cobras he led the way, swinging a lantern with no more suggestion of anything unusual than if he had been our servant seeing us home on a dark night.