“Great shot, sir!  I envy you,” said Kildare.

“Splendid shot.  A hundred yards at least,” said John Westonhaugh meditatively, but in a loud voice.

So we swung away toward the camp, though it was early.  Ghyrkins chuckled, and the man with the broken bones groaned.  But between the different members of the party he would be a rich man before he was well.  I amused myself with my favourite sport of potting peacocks with bullets; it is very good practice.  Isaacs had told me that morning when we started that he would leave us the next day to meet Shere Ali near Keitung.  We reached camp about three o’clock, in the heat of the afternoon.  The injured beater was put in a servant’s tent to be sent off to Pegnugger in a litter in the cool of the night.  There was a doctor there who would take care of him under the collector’s written orders.

The camp was in a shady place, quite unlike the spot where we had first pitched our tents.  There was a little grove of mango-trees, rather stunted, as they are in the north, and away at one corner of the plantation was a well with a small temple where a Brahmin, related to all the best families in the neighbouring village, dwelt and collected the gifts bestowed on him and his simple shrine by the superstitious, devout, or worldly pilgrims who yearly and monthly visited him in search of counsel, spiritual or social.  The men had mowed the grass smooth under the trees, and the shade was not so close as to make it damp.  Some ryots had been called in to dig a ditch and raised a rough chapudra or terrace, some fifteen feet in diameter, opposite the dining-tent, on which elevation we could sit, even late at night, in reasonable security from cobras and other evil beasts.  It was a pleasant place in the afternoon, and pleasanter still at night.  As I turned into our tent after we got back, I thought I would go and sit there when I had bathed, and send for a hookah and a novel, and go to sleep.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XI.

I observed that Isaacs was very quick about his toilet, and when I came out and ascended the terrace, followed by Kiramat Ali with books and tobacco, I glanced lazily over the quiet scene, settling myself in my chair, and fully expecting to see my friend somewhere among the trees, not unaccompanied by some one else.  I was not mistaken.  Turning my eyes towards the corner of the grove where the old Brahmin had his shrine, I saw the two well-known figures of Isaacs and Miss Westonhaugh sauntering towards the well.  Having satisfied the expectations of my curiosity, I turned over the volume of philosophy, well thumbed and hard used as a priest’s breviary, and I inhaled long draughts of tobacco, debating whether I should read, or meditate, or dream.  Deciding in favour of the more mechanical form of intellectuality, I fixed on a page that looked inviting, and followed the lines,