improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of
the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a game at
billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."

A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage--it
breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed
dâk-bungalow-haunter:--"There is a corpse in the next room, and there's a
mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel
have just eloped from a place sixty miles away," the hearer would
not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild,
grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person
fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept.
I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the
scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my
heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards
played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My
dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an
absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would
be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror;
and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I
slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred
to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have
dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and
wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.