would have surprised him.

A short fifty yards separated him from the bend in the way round which
the horse and its rider had vanished. He had no more than gained this
point than he was obliged to pull up sharply to avoid running into the
girl herself.

Although dismounted, she was on her feet, and apparently uninjured. She
stood with one hand against the trunk of a tree, on the edge of a small
clearing wherein the axes of the local lumbermen had but lately been
busy. Her horse had disappeared; the rumble of his hoofs, diminuendo,
told the way he had gone.

So much Amber comprehended in a single glance; with a second he sought
the cause of the accident, and identified it with a figure so _outre_
and bizarre that he momentarily and excusably questioned the testimony
of his senses.

At a little distance from the girl, in the act of addressing her, stood
a man, obese, gross, abnormally distended with luxurious and sluggish
living, as little common to the scene as a statue of Phoebus Apollo had
been: a babu of Bengal, every inch of him, from his dirty red-and-white
turban to his well-worn and cracked patent-leather shoes. His body was
enveloped in a complete suit of emerald silk, much soiled and faded,
and girt with a sash of many colours, crimson predominating. His hands,
fat, brown, and not overclean, alternately fluttered apologetically and
rubbed one another with a suggestion of extreme urbanity; his lips,
thick, sensual, and cruel, mouthed a broken stream of babu-English;
while his eyes, nearly as small and quite as black as shoe-buttons
--eyes furtive, crafty, and cold--suddenly distended and became