Finnerty's chair groaned as though it had received a twist from his big frame, but his voice was devoid of protest: "I can't make the girl out. My mind is in a psychological state, and I suppose I'm influenced by the apparent candour in her eyes. They seem to express trouble, too, as if she were searching for a moral finger post, for a way out of darkness." Then the major expressed an apologetic phrase: "I'm afraid I'm a bit awkward at psychology; jungle dwellers are more in my line."
Swinton put his hand on the big man's shoulder. "My dear major, I wish I'd had a brother like you. My family was baked in the crucible of government service for generations; we're executive automatons."
"I understand; you're an Englishman—Damn it! I mean, in youth you never roamed the hills like shaggy-haired colts as we do in Ireland."
"If I had I wouldn't have made a good Raj policeman. But to hark back. The German machine, more soulless than our own, knows the value of Mona Lisa eyes, and Marie was probably picked for this delicate mission for the very quality that has won your sympathy—her appealing womanhood."
"And yet my perhaps sympathy for the girl was birthed by accident, not design on her part."
"What is an attractive girl doing here so close to Prince Ananda? Why is she here with a Prussian who is an enemy of the British Raj? Why is she averse to being approached? What is she searching for in the hills? It's the road to China, and guns have already arrived, according to our Banjara."
"I haven't an answer for any one of your queries, captain, but we must investigate those packets."
Lord Victor arrived now, and as he had not yet seen the skin of Pundit Bagh he was taken to where it was pegged out on the ground and being rubbed with ashes and alum. This kill of a tiger was probably the first incident in his life calculated to raise elation in the hearts of his friends.
"Something to tack to, eh?" he cried joyfully. "Fancy I hear the chaps in fluffy old London saying as I pass, 'That's the man that shot a big man-eater on foot.' No swank to that, major, for I did. You know that dicky little chapel dedicated to the tiger god?"
"Yes; the one down in the plain."