"If the identity were destroyed, captain, how do you know an officer owned it?"
"For one thing, he had used an army code, though changed so that I could only make out bits of it; and in two or three places the other has written the word 'captain.' One entry in code that I've partly worked out is significant: 'Darpore, March.' And that entry, I gather from other words surrounding it, was written in England. The second handwriting wasn't Perreira's; I have his on that envelope he addressed to me. The latter entries are in a woman's hand."
Strangely there was no comment from Finnerty. He had pulled the cheroot box toward him and was lighting a fresh smoke.
"What do you really know about the Boelke girl, major?" the captain asked pointedly, his blue-coloured wax disks of eyes fixed in their placid, opaque way on Finnerty, who, throwing away the match he had held interminably to his cheroot, turned to answer: "She popped into Darpore one day, and I don't think even Doctor Boelke, who is supposed to be her uncle, expected her. You know India, captain—nothing that pertains to the sahibs can be kept quiet—and I hadn't heard a word of her coming. Boelke gave out that she had been living in Calcutta while he was up here, but I don't believe that; I think she came straight from Europe. I probably would not have met the girl—Marie is her name—but for an accident. Up on an elephant path that leads to an elephant highway, a great, broad trail, we have elephant traps—pits ten feet deep, covered over with bamboos, leaves, and earth that completely hide their presence. One day I was riding along this trail, inspecting, when I heard, just beyond a sharp turn in the path, a devil of a row, and, driving my mount forward, was just in time to throw myself off, grab that grey stallion by the nostrils, and choke him to a standstill. He had put a hoof through a pit covering and gone to his knees, the sudden lurch throwing the girl over his head; and there she was, her foot caught in a stirrup, being dragged in a circle by the crazed beast, for she was gamely hanging onto the rein."
"She'd have been trampled to death only for you. And to-day you saved her life again."
The major gave a dry laugh. "I think she was in a temper over it, too."
"What's this station gossip about Ananda's intentions?"
"The girl doesn't seem like that; to me she's the greatest mystery in all this fogged thing. She speaks just like an English girl."
"Perhaps she's one of Ananda's London flames, and the relationship with Boelke is only claimed in a chaperoning sense. He couldn't marry her, having a princess now."
"Rajahs arrange their domestic matters to suit themselves. Much can be done with a pinch of datura, or a little cobra venom collected in a piece of raw meat that has been put with a cobra in a pot that sits over a slow fire. But if Ananda tries that game——You saw his brother-in-law, Darna Singh?"