"He has gone South for the week," he repeated. "Now that's just
like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything?
'Cause I won't."

"He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights
die out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was
blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train--not an
Intermediate carriage this time--and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept
it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of
having done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not
do any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of
newspapers, and might, if they blackmailed one of the little rat-trap
States of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves
into serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe
them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be
interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later
informed, in having them headed back from the Degumber
borders.

Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there
were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a
newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable
sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission
ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his
duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a
perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed