“Sahib!” he whispered hoarsely.  “Sahib!”

“What is it?” demanded Brown, scarcely waiting for an answer, though.  Something told him what it was that moved, and his own skin felt goose-fleshy from neck to heel.

“The fakir, sahib!”

There was a murmur through the ranks, a sibilant indrawing of the breath.

“Did I hear anybody swear?” asked Brown.

Nobody answered him.  All nine men stood stock-still, leaning on their rifles, their heads craned forward and their eyes strained in the direction of the gloomy baobab.

“Form single rank!” commanded Brown.

There was no response.  They stood there fixed like a row of chickens staring at a snake!

“Form single rank!”

He leaped at them, and broke the first rule of the service—­as a man may when he is man enough, and the alternative would be black shame.

His fist was a hard one and heavy, and they felt the weight of it.

“Form single rank!  Take one pace open order!  Extend!  Now, forward—­ by the right!  Right dress, there!”

He marched in front of them, and they followed him for very shame, now that he had broken their paralysis.

“Halt!  Port-arms!  Charge bayonets!”

He was peering at something in the dark, something that chuckled and smelled horrible, and sat unusually still for anything that lived.

“Numbers One, Two, Three—­left wheel—­forward!  Halt!  Numbers Seven, Eight, Nine—­right wheel—­forward!  Halt!”

They were standing now on three sides of a square.  The fourth side was the trunk of the baobab.  Between them and the trunk, the streaming tendrils swayed and swung, bats flitted and something still invisible sat still and chuckled.

“One pace forward—­march!”

They could see now.  The fakir sat and stared at them and grinned.  Brown raised the lamp and let its rays fall on him.  The light glinted off his eyes, and off the only other part of him that shone—­the long, curved, ghastly fingernails that had grown through the palm of his upstretched hand.

“How did you get here?” demanded Brown, not afraid to speak, for fear that fright would take possession of himself as well as of his men, but quite well aware that the fakir would not answer him.  Then he remembered the Beluchi.

“Ask him, you!  Ask him how he came here.”

The Beluchi found his tongue, and stammered out a question.  The fakir chuckled, and following his chuckle let a guttural remark escape him.

“He says, sahib, that he flew!”

“Ask him, could he fly with nine fixed bayonets in him!”

There was a little laughter from the men at that sally.  It takes very little in the way of humor to dispel a sense of the uncanny or mysterious.

“He answers, sahib, that you have seen what comes of striking him.  He asks how many dead there be.”