Told in the East | Page 3

ran. To the fakir's unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely, going over him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the toe-nails upward.
"Well," he commented aloud, "if the army's got an opposite, here's it! I'd give a month's pay for the privilege of washing this brute, just as a beginning!"
The man's toe-nails--for he really was a man!--were at least two inches long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back on themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had ever done had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed upward, by a deliberately cultivated cramp.
His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were lean and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by the swarm of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting from him. His emaciated body--powdered and smeared with ashes and dust and worse--was perched bolt-up-right on a flat earth dais that had once on a time been the throne of a crossroads idol. One arm, his right one, hung by his side in an almost normal attitude, and his right fingers moved incessantly like a man's who is kneading clay. But his other arm was rigid--straight up in the air above his head; set, fixed, cramped, paralyzed in that position, with the fist clenched. And through the back of the closed fist the fakir's nails were growing.
But, worse than the horror of the arm was the creature's face, with the evidence of torture on it, and fiendish delight in torture for the torture's sake. His eyes were his only organs that really lived still, and they expressed the steely hate and cruelty, the mad fanaticism, the greedy self-love--self-immolating for the sake of self--that is the thoroughgoing fakir's stock in trade. And his lips were like the graven lips of a Hindu temple god, self-satisfied, self-worshiping, contemptuous and cruel. He chuckled again, as Brown finished his inspection.
"So that crittur's holy, is he? Well, tell him that I'm set here to watch these crossroads. Tell him I'm supposed to question every one who comes, and find out what his business is, and arrest him if he can't give a proper account of himself. Say he's been here three days now, and that that's long enough for any one to find his tongue in. Tell him if I don't get an answer from him here and now I'll put him in the clink!"
"But, sahib--"
"You tell him what I say, d'you hear?"
The Beluchi made haste to translate, trembling as he spoke, and wilting visibly when the baleful eyes of the fakir rested on him for a second. The fakir answered something in a guttural undertone.
"What does he say?"
"That he will curse you, sahib!"
"Sentry!" shouted Brown.
"Sir!" came the ready answer, and the sling-swivels of a rifle clicked as the man on guard at the crossroads shouldered it. There are some men who are called "sir" without any title to it, just as there are some sergeants who receive a colonel's share of deference when out on a non-commissioned officer's command. Bill Brown was one of them.
"Come here, will you!"
There came the sound of heavy footfalls, and a thud as a rifle-butt descended to the earth again. Brown moved the lamp, and its beams fell on a rifleman who stood close beside him at attention--like a jinnee formed suddenly from empty blackness.
"Arrest this fakir. Cram him in the clink."
"Very good, sir!"
The sentry took one step forward, with his fixed bayonet at the "charge," and the fakir sat still and eyed him.
"Oh, have a care, sahib!" wailed the Beluchi. "This is very holy man!"
"Silence!" ordered Brown. "Here. Hold the lamp."
The bayonet-point pressed against the fakir's ribs, and he drew back an inch or two to get away from it. He was evidently able to feel pain when it was inflicted by any other than himself.
"Come on," growled the sentry. "Forward. Quick march. If you don't want two inches in you!"
"Don't use the point!" commanded Brown. "You might do him an injury. Treat him to a sample of the butt!"
The sentry swung his rifle round with an under-handed motion that all riflemen used to practise in the short-range-rifle days. The fakir winced, and gabbled something in a hurry to the man who held the lamp.
"He says that he will speak, sahib!"
"Halt, then," commanded Brown. "Order arms. Tell him to hurry up!"
The Beluchi translated, and the fakir answered him, in a voice that sounded hard and distant and emotionless.
"He says that he, too, is here to watch the crossroads, sahib! He says that he will curse you if you touch him!"
"Tell him to curse away!"
"He says not unless you touch him, sahib."
"Prog him off his perch!" commanded Brown.
The rifle leaped up at the word, and its butt