"Just another move in our deranged friend's plot," Finnerty commented. He turned to the native: "Was the lama of the temple killed?"
"Men who are dead do not come to the market place to complain, and as the priest has not spoken it may be that he is dead."
"Here comes our friend in perpetuity, the Banjara!" Finnerty exclaimed. He rose, and, going into the bungalow, returned to drop a rupee in the native's hand, saying: "Go back to Raj Bahadar and tell the mahout I will be along shortly." He turned to the captain.
"Swinton, all one's servants may know the thing a man is risking his life to discover and he be none the wiser till some one babbles it like a child."
"As in the mutiny," Swinton suggested. "Our officials saw cow dung plastered on the trees—some few heard what they called 'silly whispers,' but all native India knew, and all India remained hushed till the dead silence was shattered by the tornado."
"Exactly. And while we say Ananda is insane, and all these things are child's play, think of the trifling things that were used as factors to breed that holocaust of hate. The Mussulmans told that the British Raj had greased the cartridges they had to bite with pig's fat to defile their religion; that suttee had been abolished to break the Hindu faith by filling the land with widow prostitutes; that water the Hindu sepoys drank had come in contact with leather valves made from the skin of a cow. There were other trivial things lied into mountains of sins. Ananda knows all that; he has the cunning of a serpent and the viciousness of a black leopard."
The Banjara had arrived, and Finnerty counted out five rupees; then, with a touch of Irish humour, he added another, saying, with a smile: "This for your disappointment in not having a dog killed."
"If the monkey man, Mahadua, had been true to his caste, which is to watch and not talk, there would have been profit for both sides—the sahib would have obtained a kill."
When he had tucked away his money, the Banjara said: "My brother is not now keeper at the tiger garden."
"Why? For whose sin does he suffer?"