"By gad! And the three sapphires are in Darpore—the one that was stolen from me last night, the one stolen from Baboo Dass, and this one."
"Prince Ananda has yours; I saw Boelke purposely tip over that table. But who stole the one from the baboo I don't know; it couldn't have been a raj agent, for it belonged to the maharajah."
"Where did they come from?" Finnerty queried.
"Yours, of course, was on Burra Moti's neck, and she must have been attached to some temple; Akka probably murdered some lama who had this one about his neck; where Prince Ananda got the third one I don't know."
"By Jove!" Finnerty ejaculated. "It was a hillman that Moti put her foot on. He had been sent to steal that bell, as he couldn't carry the elephant."
"Here's another thing," Captain Swinton said. "In the United States there has been arrested a clique of Hindus who have sold a great quantity of rare old jewels, gold ornaments, and sapphires in the rough. Machine guns and ammunition were bought with the money obtained, and quite a consignment is somewhere on the road now between China and India."
"Great Scott! Up this way—to come in through Nepal?"
"The stuff was shipped from San Francisco to Hongkong, and though the British government had every road leading out of that city watched, they never got track of it. Our men there think it was transshipped in Hongkong harbour and is being brought around to India by water."
"Does the government think the maharajah is mixed up in this?"
"I'm here to find out. He mystified me to-day. Gilfain thinks he's magnificent—as natural as a child. But he's too big for me to judge; I can't docket him like I can Ananda. He was as regally disinterested over the disappearance of that sapphire as the Duke of Buckingham was when his famous string of black pearls broke and scattered over the floor at the Tuileries; but the prince was seething."