Surprise does not hover; its coming events are shadowless, and its spring is the spring of a tiger out of the dark, and surprise came upon Leh Shin’s assistant as it has come upon men and nations since the world first spun in space.

He looked upon the Burman as a harmless lunatic, and he only half-believed that he had ever been guilty of the act that had ended in a term of imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, but in one moment he realized that it might all be true and that he himself was possibly singled out as the next victim.

In one silent moment he found himself pinned in his corner, the Burman squatting in front of him, a long knife which he had never seen before pointing at his throat with horrible, determined persistency.

He opened his mouth and thought to cry out for help, but the Burman leaned forward and warned him that if he did so, his last minute had inevitably come.

“I am thy friend, thy good and honourable friend,” he said pleasantly as he made play with the Afghan dagger.  “I do but make mirth for both myself and thee, and I have no thought to harm thee.”

The flesh of the gross body crept and crawled under the Burman’s look.  Fate had put the heart of a chicken in the huge frame of Leh Shin’s assistant, and it beat now like pelting hail on a frozen road.  He was close to a raw, naked fear, and it made him shameless as he gibbered and cowered before it.

“I have no money,” he said, bleating out the words.  “All that I have is already paid to thee for thy tale.”

He whined and cringed and writhed in his close corner.

“I have heard a strange tale,” Coryndon said, bending a little closer to him.  “Old now as stale fish that has lain in the dust of the street.  It has been whispered in my ear that thou knowest how Absalom came to his end.”

“I slew him in the house of a seaman,” said the boy, in a quavering voice.  “Now take the point of thy knife from my throat, for it doth greatly inconvenience pleasant speech between thee and me.”

Coryndon’s watchful eye detected the lie before it announced itself in words, or so it seemed to the boy, who resigned himself to the mere paltry limitations of fact, and confessed that he and Absalom had been friends and that he had never killed anything except a chicken, and once a dog that was too young to bite his hand.

The details of the story came out at long intervals, with breaks of sweating terror between each one.  Pieced together, it was simple enough.  In spite of the existing feud between their masters, Leh Shin’s assistant and Absalom had struck up a kind of friendship that was not unlike the friendship of any two boys in any quarter of the globe.  They used special knocks upon the door, and when they passed as strangers in the streets they made masonic signs to one another, and they also gambled with European cards in off hours.