steel-shod boots, and strength, and speed into the effort. A yard
from the door he took off, as a man does at the broad jump in the
inter-regimental sports, landing against the lower panel with his
heels two feet from the bottom.

The door went inward as if struck by a blast of dynamite, and the
Sikh's head struck a flagstone. Long strong arms seized him by the
feet and dragged him inside. Then the door closed again, and this
time a bolt really did shoot home, to be followed by two others and a
bar that fitted vertically into the beam above and the floor beneath.

Outside, thirty feet from the street corner, the crowd came together
as a tide-race meets amid the rocks, roaring, shouting, surging,
swaying back and forth, nine-tenths questioning at the limit of its
lungs, and one-tenth yelling information that was false before they
had it. Those at the back believed already that there were ten men
down. In the next street there was supposed to be a riot. And the
shrill repeated whistle of the nearest policeman summoning help
confirmed the crowd in its belief, besides convincing it of new
atrocities as yet unguessed.

Only one man in the crowd had wit enough to carry the tale to
barracks where it might be expected to produce action. He was a
Bengali babu, bare of leg and fat of paunch, who had enough
imagination to conceive of a regiment in receipt of the news, and the
mental picture so appealed to him that he held his protruding stomach
in both hands while he ran down-street like a landslide, his mouth
agape and his eyes all but popping from his head.

He reached the barrack gate speechless and breathless, just as