He had known when he consented to being transferred from a staff appointment in Simla to the command of a small detachment of a Military Police Battalion garrisoning an unimportant frontier fort on the face of the Himalayas that he was being sent there for a special purpose.  He had consented gladly; for to him the great attraction of his new post was that he would find himself once more in the great Terai Jungle.  To him it was Paradise.  Before going to Simla he had been stationed with a Double Company of the Indian Infantry Regiment to which he belonged in a similar outpost in the mountains not many miles away.  This outpost had now been abolished.  But while in it he used to spend all his spare time in the marvellous jungle that extended to his very door.

The great Terai Forest stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, from Assam through Bengal to Garwhal and up into Nepal.  It is a sportsman’s heaven; for it shelters in its recesses wild elephants, rhinoceros, bison, bears, tigers, panthers, and many of the deer tribes.  Dermot loved it.  He was a mighty hunter, but a discriminating one.  He did not kill for sheer lust of slaughter, and preferred to study the ways of the harmless animals rather than shoot them.  Only against dangerous beasts did he wage relentless war.

Dermot knew that he could very well leave the routine work of the little post to his Second in Command.  The fort was practically a block of fortified stone barracks, easily defensible against attacks of badly armed hillmen and accommodating a couple of hundred sepoys.  It was to hold the duar or pass of Ranga through the Himalayas against raiders from Bhutan that the little post had been built.

For centuries past the wild dwellers beyond the mountains were used to swooping down from the hills on the less warlike plainsmen in search of loot, women, and slaves.  But the war with Bhutan in 1864-5 brought the borderland under the English flag, and the Pax Britannica settled on it.  Yet even now temptation was sometimes too strong for lawless men.  Occasionally swift-footed parties of fierce swordsmen swept down through the unguarded passes and raided the tea-gardens that are springing up in the foothills and the forests below them.  For hundreds of coolies work on these big estates, and large consignments of silver coin come to the gardens for their payment.

But there was bigger game afoot than these badly-armed raiders.  The task set Dermot showed it; and his soldier’s heart warmed at the thought of helping to stage a fierce little frontier war in which he might come early on the scene.

Carefully sealing up again and locking away the cipher code and keyword, he went out on the back verandah and shouted for his orderly.  The dwellings of Europeans upcountry in India are not luxurious—­far from it.  Away from the big cities like Bombay, Calcutta, or Karachi, the amenities of civilisation are sadly lacking.  The bungalows are lit only by oil-lamps, their floors are generally of pounded earth covered with poor matting harbouring fleas and other insect pests, their roofs are of thatch or tiles, and such luxuries as bells, electric or otherwise, are unknown.  So the servants, who reside outside the bungalows in the compounds, or enclosures, are summoned by the simple expedient of shouting “Boy”.