India.

Dermot stared at the letter.

"So that's it!" he thought. "It's a bigger thing than I imagined."

He had known when he consented to being transferred from a staff
appointment in Simla to the command of a small detachment of a Military
Police Battalion garrisoning an unimportant frontier fort on the face of
the Himalayas that he was being sent there for a special purpose. He had
consented gladly; for to him the great attraction of his new post was that
he would find himself once more in the great Terai Jungle. To him it was
Paradise. Before going to Simla he had been stationed with a Double Company
of the Indian Infantry Regiment to which he belonged in a similar outpost
in the mountains not many miles away. This outpost had now been abolished.
But while in it he used to spend all his spare time in the marvellous
jungle that extended to his very door.

The great Terai Forest stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of
the Himalayas, from Assam through Bengal to Garwhal and up into Nepal. It
is a sportsman's heaven; for it shelters in its recesses wild elephants,
rhinoceros, bison, bears, tigers, panthers, and many of the deer tribes.
Dermot loved it. He was a mighty hunter, but a discriminating one. He did
not kill for sheer lust of slaughter, and preferred to study the ways of
the harmless animals rather than shoot them. Only against dangerous beasts
did he wage relentless war.

Dermot knew that he could very well leave the routine work of the little
post to his Second in Command. The fort was practically a block of
fortified stone barracks, easily defensible against attacks of badly armed