"D'you recollect the man I mentioned at the consulate—the biped Peter Measel, missionary on his own account, who keeps a diary and libels ladies in it? Well, he's foul of a thalukdar* from Rajputana, and of a Prussian contractor, recruiting men for work on the Baghdad railway. I wasn't allowed to murder him. I see why now—finger of justice—I'd have been too quick. Sit down, you idiots! You've no idea what he wrote about Miss Vanderman. Let him scream, I like it!"
———————- * Punjabi Word—landholder. ———————-
"Come along," said Monty. "If he were a bad-house keeper he has had enough!"
But Will had gone before us, headlong down the stairs with the speed off the mark that they taught him on the playing field at Bowdoin. When we caught up he was standing astride a prostrate being who sobbed like a cow with its throat cut, and a Rajput and a German, either of them six feet tall, were considering whether or not to resent the violence of his interference. The German was disposed to yield to numbers. The Rajput not so.
"Why are you beating him?" asked Monty.
"Gott in Hinimel, who would not! He wrote of me in his diary—der
Liminel!—that I shanghai laborers."
"Do you, or don't you?" asked Monty sweetly.
"Kreutz-blitzen! What is that to do with you—or with him? What right had he to write that people in France should pray for me in church?"
The Rajput all this while was standing simmering, as ready as a boar at bay to fight the lot of us, yet I thought with an air about him, too, of half-conscious surprise. Several times he took a half-pace forward to assert his right of chastisement, looked hard at Monty, and checked mid-stride.
"You've done enough," said Monty.