of news from their territories into British India. So those
Kings' Prime Ministers were seriously annoyed and took steps,
after the Oriental fashion. They suspected, among many others,
the bullying, red-bearded horsedealer whose caravans ploughed
through their fastnesses belly-deep in snow. At least, his
caravan that season had been ambushed and shot at twice on the
way down, when Mahbub's men accounted for three strange ruffians
who might, or might not, have been hired for the job. Therefore
Mahbub had avoided halting at the insalubrious city of Peshawur,
and had come through without stop to Lahore, where, knowing his
country-people, he anticipated curious developments.

And there was that on Mahbub Ali which he did not wish to keep an
hour longer than was necessary - a wad of closely folded tissue-
paper, wrapped in oilskin - an impersonal, unaddressed statement,
with five microscopic pin-holes in one corner, that most
scandalously betrayed the five confederated Kings, the
sympathetic Northern Power, a Hindu banker in Peshawur, a firm of
gun-makers in Belgium, and an important, semi-independent
Mohammedan ruler to the south. This last was R17's work, which
Mahbub had picked up beyond the Dora Pass and was carrying in for
R17, who, owing to circumstances over which he had no control,
could not leave his post of observation. Dynamite was milky and
innocuous beside that report of C25; and even an Oriental, with
an Oriental's views of the value of time, could see that the
sooner it was in the proper hands the better. Mahbub had no
particular desire to die by violence, because two or three family
blood-feuds across the Border hung unfinished on his hands, and
when these scores were cleared he intended to settle down as a
more or less virtuous citizen. He had never passed the serai gate