range where vengeance is believed as real and worthy as love must be
transitory, his very bowels ached for physical retaliation, just as
his skin and bones smarted from the beating the risaldar-major's men
had given him.

He was scoffed at by small boys as he slunk through byways of the
big bazaar. A woman who had smiled at him but a day ago now emptied
unseemly things on him from an upper story when he went to moan
beneath her window. He decided to include that woman in his
vengeance, too, if possible, but not to miss Ranjoor Singh on her
account; there was not room for him and Ranjoor Singh on one rain-
pelted earth, but, if needs must, the woman might wait a while.

As nearly all humans do when their mood is similar to his, he slunk
into dark places, growling like a dog and believing all the world his
enemy. He came very near to the summit of exasperation when, on
making application at a free dispensary, his sores were dressed for
him by a Hindu assistant apothecary who lectured him on brotherly
love with interlarded excerpts from Carlyle done into Hindustani. But
the climax came when a native policeman poked him in the ribs with a
truncheon and ordered him out of sight.

With a snarl that would have done credit to a panther driven off its
prey, he slunk up a byway to shelter himself and think of new
obscenities; and as he stood beneath a cloth awning to await the
passing of a more than usually heavy downpour, the rotten fibers
burst at last and let ten gallons of filthy rain down on him.

From that minute he could see only red; so it was in a red haze that
two of the troopers from Ranjoor Singh's squadron passed the end of