Chapter 15

He who sets a tiger-trap

(Hush! and watch! and wait!)

Can’t afford a little nap

Hidden where the twigs enwrap

Lest—it has occurred—mayhap

A jackal take the bait.

So stay awake, my sportsman bold,

And peel your anxious eye,

There’s more than tigers, so I’m told,

To test your cunning by!

 

"Me for the princess!"

It is not always an entirely simple matter in India to dismiss domestic
servants. To begin with it was Sunday; the ordinary means of cashing
checks were therefore unavailable, and Dick Blaine had overlooked
the fact that he had no money of small denominations in the house.
It was hardly reasonable to expect Chamu and the cook to leave without
their wages.

Then again, Sita Ram had not yet sent new servants to replace the
potential poisoners; and Chamu had put up a piteous bleating, using
every argument, from his being an orphan and the father of a son, down
to the less appealing one that Gungadhura would be angry. In vain
Dick reassured him that he and cook and maharajah might all go to hell
together with his, Dick Blaine’s, express permission. In vain he advised
him to put the son to work, and be supported for a while in idleness.
Chamu lamented noisily. Finally Dick compromised by letting both
servants remain for one more day, reflecting that they could not very
well tamper with boiled eggs; lunch and dinner he would get at the
English club across the river; for breakfast on Monday he would content
himself again with boiled eggs, and biscuits out of an imported tin,
after which he would cash a check and send both the rascals packing.

So the toast that Chamu brought him he broke up and threw into the
garden, where the crows devoured it without apparent ill-effect; he
went without tea, and spent an hour or so after breakfast with a good
cigar and a copy of a month-old Nevada newspaper. That religious
rite performed, he shaved twice over, it being Sunday, and strolled out
to look at the horses and potter about the garden that was beginning
to shrivel up already at the commencement of the hot weather.

"If I knew who would be maharajah of this state from one week to the
next," he told himself, "I’d get a contract from him to pipe water all over
the place from the hills behind."

He was sitting in the shade, chewing an unlit cigar, day-dreaming about
water-pressure and dams and gallons-per-hour, when Gungadhura’s
note came and he ordered the dog-cart at once, rather glad of something
to keep him occupied. As he drove away he did not see Mukhum Dass
lurking near the small gate, as it was not intended that he should.
Mukhum Dass, for his part, did not see Pinga, the one-eyed beggar
with his vertical smile, who watched him from behind a rock, for that
was not intended either. Pinga himself was noticed closely by another man.

The minute Dick was out of sight Mukhum Dass entered the small gate
in the wall, and called out for Chamu brazenly. Chamu received him
at the bottom
of the house-steps, but Mukhum Dass walked up them uninvited.

"The cellar," he said. "I have come to see the cellar. There is a complaint
regarding the foundations. I must see."

"But, sahib, the door is locked."

"Unlock it."

"I have no key."

"Then break the lock!"

"The cellar door is nailed down!"

"Draw the nails!"

"I dare not! I don’t know how! By what right should I do this thing?"

"It is my house. I order it!"

"But, sahib, only yesterday Blaine sahib dismissed me in great anger
because I permitted another one as much as to look into the cellar!"

If the tale Yasmini told him on the morning of her first visit to Tess
had not been enough to determine Mukhum Dass, now, with the lost
title-deed recovered, the conviction that Gungadhura wanted the place
for secret reasons, and Chamu’s objections to confirm the whole wild
story, he became as set on his course and determined to wring the
last anna out of the mystery as only a money-lender can be.

"With what money did you repay to me the loan that your son obtained
by false pretenses?" he demanded.

"I? What? I repaid the loan. I have the receipt. That is enough."

"On the receipt stands written the number of the bank-note. I have kept
the bank-note. It was stolen from the Princess Yasmini. Do you wish
to go to jail? Then open that cellar door!"

"Sahib, I never stole the note!" wept Chamu. "It was thrust into my
cummerbund from behind!"

But Mukhum Dass set his face like a flint, and the wretched Chamu
knew nothing about the law against compounding felonies. Wishing
he had had curiosity enough himself to search the cellar thoroughly
before the door was nailed down, he finally yielded to the money-lender’s
threats and between them, with much sweating and grunting, they pushed
and pulled the safe from off the trap. Then came the much more difficult
task of drawing nails without an instrument designed for it. Dick Blaine
kept all his tools locked up.

"There is an outside door to the cellar, behind the house," said Chamu.

"But that is of iron, idiot! and bolts on the inside with a great bar resting
in the stonework. Are there no tools in the garden?"

Chamu did not know, and the money-lender went himself to see. There
Pinga with the vertical smile saw him choose a small crow-bar and return
into the house with it. Pinga passed the word along to another man,
who told it to a third, who ran with it hot-foot to Gungadhura’s palace.

Once inside the house again Mukhum Dass lost no time, arguing to
himself most likely that with the secret of the treasure of Sialpore in
his possession it would not much matter what damage he had done.
He would be able to settle for it. He broke the hasp of the door, and
levered up the trap, splintering it badly and breaking both hinges in the
process, while Chamu watched him, growing green with fear.

Then he ordered a lamp and went alone into the cellar, while Chamu,
deciding that a desperate situation called for desperate remedies, went
up-stairs on business of his own. It took Mukhum Dass about two minutes
to discover the loose stone—less than two more to raise it—and about
ten seconds to see and pounce on the silver tube. He was too bent
on business to notice the man with the vertical smile peering down at
him through the trap. Pinga escaped from the house after seeing the
money-lender hide the tube inside his clothes, and less than a minute
later a lean man ran like the wind to Gungadhura’s palace to confirm
the first’s report.

With a wry face at the splintered trap-door, and a shrug of his shoulders
of the kind he used when clients begged in tears for extra time in which
to pay, Mukhum Dass looked about for Chamu with a sort of half-notion
of giving him a small bribe. But Chamu was not to be seen. So he
left the house by the way he had come, mounted his mule where he
had left it in a hollow down the road, and rode off smiling.

Ten minutes later Chamu and the cook both left by the same exit.
Chamu had with him, besides his own bundle of belongings, a revolver
belonging to Dick Blaine, two bracelets belonging to Tess, a fountain-pen
that he had long had his heart on, plenty of note-paper on which to have
a writer forge new references, a half-dozen of Dick’s silk handkerchiefs
and a turquoise tie-pin. The revolver alone, in that country in those days,
would sell for enough to take him to Bombay, where new jobs with newly
arrived sahibs are plentiful. The cook, not having enjoyed the run of
the house, had only a few knives and a pound of cocoa. They quarreled
all the way down-hill as to why Chamu should and should not defray
the cook’s traveling expenses.

A little later, in the ghat between Siva’s temple and the building, where
the dead Afghan used to keep his camels, Mukhum Dass, smiling as
he rode, was struck down by a knife-blow from behind and pitched
off his mule head-foremost. The mule ran away. The money-lender’s
body was left lying in a pool of blood, with the clothing torn from it;
and it was considered by those who found the body several hours
afterward and drove away the pariah dogs and kites, that the fact of
his money having been taken deprived the murder of any unusual interest.

Late that evening Dick Blaine, returning from a desultory dinner at the
club across the river, very nearly fell into the trap-door, for the hamal
had run away too, thinking he would surely be accused of all the mischief,
and no lamps were lit.

"Well!" he remarked, striking a match to look about him, "dad-blame
me if that isn’t a regular small town yegg’s trick! You’d think after I gave
Gungadhura the key and all, he’d have the courtesy to use it and draw
the nails! His head can’t ache enough to suit me! Me for the princess!
If I’d any scruples, believe me, bo, they’re vanished—gone—Vamoosed!
That young woman’s going to win against the whole darned outfit, English,
Indian and all! Me for her! Chamu! Where’s Chamu? Why aren’t the
lamps lit?"

He wandered through the house in the dark in search of servants, and
finally lit a lamp himself, locked all the doors and went to bed.