right. I’ll sign a warrant. Do you know where he is?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Are you sure we can convict him?”
“Perfectly.”
Without more ado Anthony began to fill out a regulation form.
“Better describe him as ‘a person unknown—colored—believed to be a leper—accused of plotting to loot the military camp.’ There.”
He handed it to Jim. The printed portion was couched in the customary legal verbiage intended to convey the meaning without too formal crudity, that the prisoner should be caught, brought in and delivered alive or dead.
Jim put it in his pocket and went to his tent to sleep until late afternoon. Brigadier-General Jenkins, on the other hand, after restating his opinion of the Zionists for Aaronsohn’s benefit, marched down to the place where they confined civilian prisoners, to see Charkas alone and drill him on his part. A very cautious, forehanded brigadier was Albert Jenkins, although given to expressing triumph rather sooner than was wise.
He had the ill taste to laugh aloud on his way back, as he passed Catesby in his tent, this time with two armed sentries standing on guard in front of it.
CHAPTER XIII
“The chain’s complete.”
It was growing dark when Jim emerged from his tent feeling less at ease than he cared to admit to himself. A note had come from Catesby, who was now to all intents and purposes incommunicado, to the effect that from five until six on the evening of the third he had been inquiring, at Jenkins’ verbal request, into an accident that had taken place several days previously. A civilian had had his leg broken by a gun-wheel, and civilian witnesses had been difficult to find; but he had unearthed one, and was questioning him at the time when Jenkins pretended he had given the order about the TNT. Now he could not find the man again to prove the fact.
Jim had the note in his hand. As Catesby’s next friend he had the right to visit him in any circumstances, just as a lawyer may go to his client in jail.
Things looked pretty bad at the moment. Bull-buffalo Jenkins was caught in a net of lies, certainly; but like many another buffalo before him he was going to be able to blunder out of it by brute force unless the unexpected happened. But it always does.
There seems to be a natural law that when chicanery has reached a certain stage of ripeness, and the elements of decency begin to rebel, all the clues required to link the crimes with the criminal appear on the surface one by one, almost exactly as when two chemicals are mixed and one of them disintegrates. Examination of the career of any criminal or of any public scandal will confirm the phenomenon.
It is easy to talk airily of luck and coincidence. Luck is an element of crime and loose thinking. The fact is that honest persistency sets natural laws to working, with the result, for instance, that an inventor on the trail of one idea discovers an entirely different one that he never dreamed of; a general, wholly bent on a definite, ably worked-out line of strategy discovers an unexpected flaw in the enemy’s design that he would have missed if his own arrangements had been careless. There is no luck about it. It is law.
So, although Jim was surprised and rather annoyed at the moment, he stumbled that minute on a clue. Aaronsohn, the vitriolic journalist in gold- rimmed glasses, was sitting outside the tent on a camp-stool, a hand on either knee in an attitude of suppressed impatience. He got to his feet the instant Jim appeared.
“You are Major Grim, I think. I would like to talk to you.”
“I’m in a hurry,” Jim warned him.
“I am not. Why not do your errand and I will wait here for you? I have waited already two hours. You were asleep and I did not care to disturb you.”
“Something important, eh?”
“To me, yes. To you, perhaps not.”
“All right. Wait in my tent. Help yourself to cigarettes, and I’ll be right back.”
Instead of going to Catesby as he had intended, Jim went straight to the hospital tent, where he found Narayan Singh sitting at the end of the cot in glowering impatience.
“Have you slept?” he asked him.
“Ask the orderly, sahib.”
Jim beckoned the orderly and put the question.
“Hah! Never was such a sleeper! He has snored so for five hours on end that the very tent-poles shook, and I had to wake him twice lest the other patients get out of bed to murder him.”
Jim laughed and went to find the doctor.
“Is Narayan Singh fit to be discharged?” he asked.
“No, but I’ll discharge him like a shot. Most Sikhs enjoy a short spell in hospital, but that man has more excuses for discharging him than a porcupine has bristles. He’s an interesting specimen, and not badly hurt; three days would see him as right as a trivet. I’ve talked with him on and off for about three hours just for the fun of it.”
“Hasn’t he slept at all?”
“Not much. But you know what Sikhs are; they can go without sleep for a tremendous time, and make it up afterwards. The last excuse he tried on me was a story that his father died of hydrophobia because he couldn’t stand hospital environment at night, and he suggested the disease might be hereditary.
“Sure, I’ll let him out—a liar like that deserves anything. Tell him to come back and have his head dressed again after he has seen the lady.”
Outside between the tents Jim gave Narayan Singh his warrant to arrest the iblis.
“Have you any idea where to look for him?” he asked.
“Surely, sahib. That Suliman played a game with other young sprouts of wickedness outside the place where I lay. Afterwards they talked until Suliman grew sleepy and went off with all their money.
“They told the gossip of the lines: how certain men had seen the iblis cross the railway line this morning, but were afraid to interfere with him. He was heading due east. I think, sahib, he will dance again tonight to summon thieves and learn from them how much has happened. If he does—!”
“You’d better take some men with you.”
“Aye, sahib—four men if I may choose them.”
“Will you go in disguise?”
“Not I! We will take rifles with bayonets, wear our uniforms and bring back that iblis in the name of a Sikh, whose head is no proper target for roof-stones. There is honor involved.”
“All right.”
Jim made arrangements for Narayan Singh to have the selection of four volunteers, and got written
