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Rung Ho! by Talbot Mundy
page 52 of 344 (15%)

"It was enough, bahadur, that he sat on that stone; for that alone he
had been beaten! What he said was but the babbling of priests. All
priests are alike. They have a common jargon--a common disrespect
for what they dare not openly defy. These temple rats of fakirs mimic
them. That is all, sahib. A whipping meets the case."

"But the stone? Why shouldn't he sit on it?"

"Wait one minute, sahib, and then see." He formed his hands into a
trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating
order to somebody behind:

"Oh-h-h--Battee-lao!"

The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man
came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.

Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still
sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him,
until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his
voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at
least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the
light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.

"Look, Cunningham-sahib!"

The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light,
to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side,
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