to India, by hook or crook," mused Alan Hawke, and therefore, he
very delicately played his wary fish, the sybaritic young swell of
the staff. Captain the Honorable Anson Anstruther's reserve soon
melted under the skillful bonhomie of the astute Alan Hawke. An
easy-going patrician of the staff, he was in the magic circle of
the viceroy. The heir to an inevitable fortune, and already vested
with substantially stratified deposits at "Coutts" and Glyn, Carr
and Glyn's, he would have been envied by most luckless mortals the
heavy balances which he always carried at "Grind-lay's," a fortune
for any less fortunate man.

He was already interested in the remarkably fetching looking young
woman at Alan Hawke's left, being a squire of dames par excellence,
while Major Alan Hawke himself wondered how Anstruther had drifted
so far away from the direct line of travel to London.

Thawing visibly under the influence of Hawke's gracefully modulated
camaraderie, the susceptible Anstruther was attentively examining
his fair neighbor in silence, while he tried vaguely to recall some
story which he had once heard, quite detrimental to the cosmopolitan
Major.

He gave it up as a bad job! "Hang it!" he thought. "It may have
been some other chap. Verylikely!" It was the strange story of a
sharp encounter with the hostile Kookies, in which a couple of English
mountain guns, long before abandoned by a British expeditionary
force, had been served with due professional skill and most
desperate dash by a reckless man, easily recognized as an English
refugee artillerist. The wounded escaped British soldier, who had
died after denouncing the deserting adventurer, had left his parting