VENGEANCE OF JHAPOO THE GOND 275 



Another Indian day came and passed, and the late after- 

 noon found us descending the shady side of the hill once 

 more. In front of me a coolie from the nearest village, 

 balancing his burden on his head, stepped warily down 

 from stone to stone of the ruinous boulder-paved path. 

 Had he but caught a whisper as to the nature of the load 

 which I had imposed on him, I should have had to shoulder 

 the chest and bear it myself to the jungle below, for the 

 story would have spread like wild-fire. It was easy to see 

 that every man of my own retainers now possessed the 

 secret of the dreadful box ; and the only bar to its rapid 

 dissemination lay in their own keen anxiety to avoid 

 any kind of contact with the object of their horror. I 

 therefore found some amusement in a contemplation of 

 the coolie's apathetic indifference to his task, the while 

 mentally piercing the chest's sides and obtaining an 

 imaginary view of its grisly occupant ; a comparison 

 rendered still more piquant by the silent terror with which 

 my servants had watched him tackle his job, in their eyes 

 thereby dooming himself irrevocably to some ghastly fate. 

 Behind me, dragging a bleating goat, tramped my orderly, 

 a fine upstanding young Rajput, a fighting-man, and one 

 who would willingly share any position of danger into 

 which his sahib might chance to find his way. His 

 sturdy broad frame was, I thought, a trifle unnecessarily 

 braced up, and his eye perhaps wider than usual ; and 

 from such signs I gathered his state of mind ; for they said 

 plainly: "The creatures of the jungle what are they? 

 Where the sahib stands, my place is by his side, and I 

 budge not, no, not when the tiger himself doth charge, and 

 I hand the second gun. But as for this matter of bhoots 

 and goblins, this jddoo of a box and what not, it is quite 

 another business, and a word of most ineffable badness ! 

 Arre bap ! (Oh ! my father !) 



"Yet the sahibs, they say, have strong and efficacious 

 magic of their own. Albeit, then, that I close my eyes, or 



