Ranjoor Singh, who understood and tried to live the Sikh religion with all his gentlemanly might, was there to acquire information, not to impart it. He grunted gravely.
"All martial nations expand eventually. They tell me—I have heard—some of you Sikhs have tried Canada?"
Ranjoor Singh did not wince, though his back stiffened when the men around him grinned; it is a sore point with the Sikhs that Canada does not accept their emigrants.
"Sikhs are admitted into all the German colonies," said the man with the gray eyes. "They are welcome."
"Do many go?" asked Ranjoor Singh.
"That is the point. The Sikhs want a place in the sun from which they are barred at present—eh? Now, Germany—"
"Germany? Where is Germany?" asked Yasmini. She understands the last trick in the art of getting a story on its way. "To the west is England. Farther west, Ameliki. To the north lies Russia. To the south the kali pani-ocean. Where is Germany?"
The man with the gray eyes took her literally, since his nation are not slow at seizing opportunity. He launched without a word more of preliminary into a lecture on Germany that lasted hours and held his audience spellbound. It was colorful, complete, and it did not seem to have been memorized. But that was art.
He had no word of blame for England. He even had praise, when praise made German virtue seem by that much greater; and the inference from first to last was of German super-virtue.
Some one in the crowd—who bore a bullet-mark in proof he did not jest—suggested to him that the British army was the biggest and fiercest in the world. So he told them of a German army, millions strong, that marched in league—long columns—an army that guarded by the prosperous hundred thousand factory chimneys that smoked until the central European sky was black.