The Hundred Days

"They said you have a tale for me;
and so, by Allah, I am here to listen."
THEY kept this out of the papers at the time, there being a fine-meshed censorship in force. Enough months have elapsed since, and enough events have happened to smoke-screen this one as effectually as if Julius Caesar and the Gauls had played the leading parts. The Prince went home alive. India resumed worrying about the price of homespun cotton, the next monsoon, and whether rupee-paper was likely to rise or fall. The Pioneer found front-page space for an account of spooks in a planter's bungalow. And all was well again.
"Set it down, why don't you?" King said; and Grim nodded. I demurred. Either King or Grim could have told the story better. But as they sat on the end of my bed in the little white-washed ward, the one cleaning spurs and the other resplicing the wire-woven handle of a Persian scimitar, it was small use arguing with them.
King's excuse, that he had sore fingers and could not punch a typewriter, was possibly half-valid. It was why he was cleaning spurs, for instance, instead of playing polo to get fit for the next adventure Fate might hold in store for him. Grim's argument, that he should not write the account because he had a hand in the affair, was more ridiculous, but just as useful, since it cloaked his incurable delight in doing lots and saying nothing, or, rather, less than nothing. What he does say usually adds to his obscurity.
"Write it, and omit me," Grim suggested. But you might as well omit Hamlet from the play.
Well, here I am, with a month of convalescence still ahead of me, sore from head to foot, sick of reading, and still more sick of the Peshawar climate, hospital diet, the squeak of a punkah, and the view of Allah's Slagheap from the window. So they've set a table for me in a corner where the flap of the punkah won't scatter the paper all over the place. My jaw being bandaged, the sweat, in all likelihood, won't drop down and make the ink run. Lord knows there's paper enough; the genial sawbones who runs this outfit (between bouts of preaching to wounded border-thieves) seems to think I propose to rewrite the Encyclopaedia — or one of his sermons. He has lent me his dictionary and a big jar of tobacco. Here begins:
Joan Angela came to India. That's the prelude to anything whatever except common-place. I believe she is twenty-six. I will bet she has twenty-six hundred admirers, including me, who would like to act Herod and kill off eligibles in order to destroy beforehand the inevitable lucky, but as yet unknown, blade who will some day persuade her to marry. And I daresay twenty- six million dollars would look rather small beside her fortune since they brought in oil on her land in California. (Not that that matters; she would be Joan Angela Leich if she had only twenty-six cents.)
She came because the Prince's visit was likely to prove spectacular, and when we're young most of us will go a long way to see a circus. But it soon palled. The home papers got wind of it, too, and drew conclusions, the Prince being still a bachelor and about her age. So she cut short the round of visits and started to see India for herself, without so much as a by-your-leave or a hint to the Indian Government, which was a great deal too busy just then to notice much that wasn't obviously dangerous.
In times like that a Government falls back on odds and ends of stray resources. Undesirables are given short shrift, with apologies in the proper quarter later on, if called for. Men whose courses up and down the earth will bear investigation find surprising details forced on them, without much explanation and no insurance. You carry unexpected overloads at your own expense and risk, with no more prospect of reward than any decent fellow gets who likes to know he did not grudge the gift of manliness and muscle.