Part 7

"Now," said the Electrical Engineer (who, having passed in electricity, is supposed to know something about everything else under the sun), "everyone will please take jugs and go and pour your water each into your own cans in the room allotted to you. Then come back here for the vitriol, each carrying your mask."

By the chemist's advice we had made ourselves thick masks of felt, covering the nose and mouth, with slits for the eyes.

These, as soon as the water had been poured into the cans--Jaikeran standing looking on at these preparations with a countenance of terror--we each tied over our faces with tapes. Then we all started to feel our way back into the dining-room, where our vitriol was to be doled out to us.

"My eye isn't big enough," groaned Veronica. "I can't see where I am going. Someone please cut the slits larger for me." And Veronica sat down, and then each of us in turn, while the others stood and applied scissors to the slits, at the imminent risk of cutting out our eyes.

No one could breathe, and the panting in the room was awful.

"Come here," said the Electrical Engineer to Jaikeran, "and have your mask on, you Jaikeran."

Jaikeran, trembling like a leaf, fell on his two knees to the Electrical Engineer and held up his hands in prayer.

"Sahib have mercy on Jaikeran!" he quavered. "Sahib no kill poor Jaikeran this time! Sahib spare my life, and sahib have tit-for-tat." When the Electrical Engineer said, "Don't be a fool!" and tried to fix his mask on for him, he made for the open door, and the exasperated Electrical Engineer started to chase him round and round the cottage.

We would have let him go back to his home--a patch of mealies, two cows, a hut, and a skinny brother--shining clearly about three miles away on the broad table of green, but we had to have Jaikeran to help; so the Electrical Engineer caught him, assured him that (if we could manage it) no one would die that day, and, leading him back by the scruff of his neck, it seemed as if now, at last, all was once more ready.

"I am of o--pinion," said Six-and-eightpence, when we once more stood ready round the table in the dining-room, "that we should each be armed with a wet blanket in case of necessity."

"Jaikeran," said I, "go to the tents and fetch the blankets. Juldee!"

"Now," said the Electrical Engineer, "go, Jaikeran, to the well and fetch a bucket of water, and keep your mask on, Jaikeran; it's too much trouble to fix again. You can see your way through the eyelet holes."

So Jaikeran departed in his mask across the veldt for the water, and returned with a string of affrighted Dutch villagers behind him.

"For certain they are dynamiters," said one old back-veldt Boer.

"Or coiners," said another.

"No," whispered a third. "It is as I told you. The English are all mad. The Indian servant-man says it is to be a mosquito hunt! And each one engaged in it risks his life! Who but lunatics would act so?"

The Dutch contingent now made a kind of cordon round the house and watched proceedings closely, in case it should be necessary to send a runner for the police from the nearest town.

Meanwhile we in the garden proceeded to soak our blankets, wrapped our heads in them, and, re-entering the house, assembled again round the dining-room table and announced we really were ready at last.

"The heat is too cruel!" suddenly said Veronica. "Couldn't we have something to drink before we begin? If not, I shall faint."

It was by this time getting on for 11 a.m., and a cloudless day, such as you expect in the Rand midsummer, and what with the felt masks and the blankets and the fright we were all in, we were in an awful state, and so it was imperative that whisky should be served out to the men and lemonade and sal volatile to the ladies.

"And how are we to drink it?" said someone from under his mask.

"Sit down all of you," said the Electrical Engineer, "and I'll come round and pour it into your mouths while each of you lifts your mask slightly up. We can't undo them now." So we sat in a row, and the villagers crowding towards the house beheld the operation. One of them said this sort of thing could not be permitted to go on, and so he rushed after a cart going up the hill towards the town and told the driver to make for the police-station and tell the mounted police they were wanted at once.

"Are you all ready?" said the Electrical Engineer. "Then come to the table and I'll dole out the vitriol first."

We each stood with a tin pannikin and received the stuff, though it was difficult from under our masks and blankets to see whether it was going into the pannikins or over our hands or feet, which a single drop would, of course, burn to the bone.

"Go quickly," shouted the Electrical Engineer when it was done, "and pour it into the water in the tins. I _quite_ forgot, when I decided on tin pans, that the corrosive fluid will burn through the tin in two minutes. _Run!_"

"How can we run," howled Mr. H----, holding his at arm's length and jerking himself towards the room he had to do, "with this thrice-infernal stuff under our noses?"

"If you don't you'll have no nose left," shouted the Electrical Engineer, making for his own room.

We all got rid of our vitriol without mishap to ourselves, flinging the cans when finished to the floor, where they instantly burnt large holes in the carpets, which had been left standing to get fumigated too.

"Bang goes six pound seven and eight three-farthings!" the MacPhairson was heard to mutter, as a frizzling noise heralded the cremation of his Axminster--bought second-hand for Simplicity Hall. "It's no' me as will beleeve anny more in the Simple Life!"

We next collected to receive our bags of cyanide. We all stood round while the Electrical Engineer uncorked the big sealed bottles and started removing the prussic acid, which was in powder and lumps, each lump being large enough to polish off a town full of people. We drew our masks very close over our mouths during this part of the proceedings. The back doors, and, indeed, all the doors, had to be left wide open through which to effect our escape the instant the chemicals mixed, and we all knew that if one speck of the poison floated down anyone's throat, that person was done for. A joyous breeze blew through the cottage, and the prussic-acid powder flew about and no one dared breathe, much less speak.

The Electrical Engineer poured the lumps and powder into our paper bags, Jaikeran standing by, his mask on, a blanket round his head, and his knees simply knocking together.

"Now," said the Electrical Engineer, "the moment has arrived! Keep your heads! Each take your bag, please" (out went all our hands), "and walk quietly into your allotted rooms. Carry the bag by its string, held well away from you. Walk up to the tins, where the water and the vitriol will be already mingled. Slight fumes will be already rising, so _don't_ go too near. Drop your bags into the vitriol and water, and instantly, without one second's delay, rush from the house, shutting and locking doors behind you. Jaikeran! Clear out, unless you want to die!"

Before we each reached our allotted room, Jaikeran was making for the horizon and his skinny brother, and we haven't seen him since....

There was a deathly silence as we each entered the different rooms. It is impossible to say what we looked like--for a moving lump of dripping blanket was all that could be seen of anyone.

"What the dickens!" shouted Mr. H----, colliding with Six-and-eightpence in his room. "Who and what are you? Get out of my way!"

"My dear fellow, whoever you are," said the muffled voice of Six-and-eightpence, "this is _my_ room. I can't see a thing. Where the dickens are the tins of vitriol?"

"Is that you, Six-and-eightpence?" said Mr. H----.

"Yes. Is it you?" responded the other. "This isn't your room, old chap; it's mine. Yours is next door. For Heaven's sake, get out. The others have thrown in their stuff. They're off. We shall be overpowered, I tell you."

"Well, I can't find my room," said Mr. H----, desperately. "Here, throw the stuff down anywhere. I'm off; come on."

As it turned out later, Six-and-eightpence's prussic acid did go into the tins, or at any rate most of it. But Mr. H---- lost his head, thinking he could smell through his blanket the deadly fumes already pouring from the other rooms, and, hearing everyone else making a dash for the open air, he upset his with a crash.

He rushed for what he thought was the door, but it was the window, all pasted up. His blanketed head went crash at the glass, luckily not breaking it, and then, realizing that he had made a mistake, he groped round for the door. But--it was shut and locked! Muffled in his blanket, Six-and-eightpence, thinking Mr. H---- had gone out before him, had run out, slamming and locking the door behind him! His prussic acid was already mingling with the vitriol. Mr. H---- could smell it!

When we all got outside we threw off our masks and blankets, and someone said, "Where is H----?"

"He's not here!"

"Then he must be in the house!"

"Good heavens! Not here?" said Six-and-eightpence, looking round him in a dazed way and rubbing his eyes. "Why, yes; I must have done--yes! I've locked him into my room! This comes of our being muffled in these blankets!"

"Good heavens, man!" yelled the Electrical Engineer, "he'll be dead by now!"

We all made a run for the house, clean forgetting our blankets, and burst open the hall door again.

It was strange; but there were not half the fumes we expected. What did it mean?... However, we did not stop to inquire....

Six-and-eightpence dragged open his bedroom door, and there, prone on the floor, lay Mr. H----, rolled in his blanket and kicking faintly. "Who's there?" he demanded. "I'm almost done for, you fellows!"

"Wonder you're not done for entirely," said they, hauling him out by his blanket and the hair of his head combined. "Didn't we say old Six-and-eightpence would do just this? Out you come!"

And in a few seconds the rescued one lay on the veldt, and kneeling beside him we all cried, "Saved!" and tried very hard to shed tears of joy....

* * * * *

The day passed somehow, all sitting on the veldt, and Mr. H---- (in the only arm-chair, propped up affectionately with pillows) described to us in moving terms what it had felt like to be face to face with death.

"Did you see the whole of your past life laid before you in a flash--like they say drowning people always do?" we asked.

"Yes," said Mr. H----, in tones of gloomy triumph; "I did, and I can tell you it wasn't pleasant."

Privately, I wasn't surprised to hear it, though I didn't say so.

"What was it like--the going off under the fumes?" asked someone else.

"It was like being rocked to sleep," said Mr. H----, in a sentimental tone. "And I heard church bells ringing, and I said to myself, 'They are ringing for my funeral. My poor, poor mother! And the guv'nor, too! This will bring their grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.'"

"Please don't talk of it!" cried Veronica, wiping her eyes. "I feel (I don't know if you do, E----?) that this should be a lesson to us all to be more charitable to each other. I didn't believe, Mr. H----, and I must freely confess it, that you had it in you to feel and speak like this! It shows how we may be mistaken."

"I don't wear my heart on my sleeve," replied the hero, languidly, leaning back in his chair. "I knew you all misunderstood me, but I made up my mind to bear it, certain that the truth must out, even though I _didn't_ give a potato-masher to the establishment."

"And," said I, "truth is stranger than fiction any day."

The hero glanced sharply at me, for I was sitting gazing up at our roof-tree, and now and then I sniffed.

After a pause I said, sniffing again:--

"Does anyone smell a very strong smell of some gas--hydrocyanic gas, I suppose? Where is it coming from? We pasted up all the windows and doors," I added, rising from my chair.

Everybody now sniffed in turn, and all declared that the smell grew stronger and stronger.

Suddenly both I and Veronica gave a shout together.

"Veronica! Everybody!" I cried. "We pasted up the windows and doors and forgot to shut the ventilators of the chimneys. Every bit of gas has escaped! All our trouble has been for nothing. And as for your death throes, Mr. H----, well, I don't want to be rude, but it has all been----"

"_Bunkum!_" finished Willy-Nilly. "Church bells and all, old chap!"

* * * * *

At eve we re-entered the cottage--cautiously at first, then more boldly.

Nothing had happened--nothing at all!

Flies buzzed in hundreds around us as if they had enjoyed the nice aromatic bath they had had. Every scrap of gas had gaily escaped up the wide chimneys. It was two in the morning before we had got the cottage shipshape again, and the breakages and general damage would be hard to calculate.

"I've done with the Simple Life," said Mr. H----, the erstwhile hero of this memorable day. "If you don't mind, I think I'll leave. There's not enough repose about the life, don't you know."

"And I, too," said the MacPhairson. "It's too expensive! Me Axminster's ruined, me bagpipes have gone to glory, and me tent's in smithereens."

So these two have left.

As for those of us who still remain at Simplicity Hall, we have decided to leave the "moss--quitoes" and "etceteras" alone, hoping that, as we mean to sleep in the tents till the Rand winter comes on, we may in the end starve them out.

+The End.+

+By Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Mackenzie.+

For many years the author was Chief of Police in one of the native States of the Malay Peninsula, and here relates three queer little adventures which befell him in his official capacity.

"Do you mean to say you can't get any evidence whatever to go on?"

"No, Tuan."

"Then you and your detectives must be a lot of fools! In England a burglar or a murderer might be clever enough to hide all traces of his crime, but out here they are all coolies, and must leave no end of evidence which any officer who knows his work could easily follow up. If you can't do the simplest detective work, you and your men had better return to duty and leave your work to me. The next crime I will investigate myself. You can go."

I was Chief of Police of the native State of Sungei Ujong,[4] in the Malay Peninsula, and Detective-Sergeant Cassim stood rigidly at attention before me in my office. As I finished he saluted and left.

[4] Now combined with Jelebu and Negri Sembilan.

I was a fool--doubly a fool, for I had not only made a statement which I knew was wrong, but I had lost my temper. The Malay is dignified, if he is nothing else, and to lose one's temper with him is to lower one's own dignity, and that means lowering his respect.

When a man is worried, however, he is apt to forget the little niceties. Two gang robberies and a murder within ten days, and not a particle of evidence to go on, would fret most policemen's tempers, to say nothing of receiving one's reports back from the Resident minuted, "The police appear to be doing their duty in a somewhat perfunctory manner." I had to trust to my detectives, and they had failed to help me.

The following morning Barton, the Collector of Land Revenue, came to my office.

"Morning, old chap," he said. "You might send a detective to my house to see if he can find out anything. A burglary was committed last night, but the beggar must have been disturbed, for he only took away a Bee clock."

"I'll go myself," I said. I would show Sergeant Cassim how easily a crime could be detected, I told myself.

Like most of the houses in the place, Barton's was a bungalow. The upper halves of all the outer doors were venetianed, the doors themselves being merely fastened by bolts top and bottom. We did not go in for locks.

The burglary seemed quite simple of explanation. The "boy" must have forgotten to bolt one of the doors, and a midnight thief had simply walked in. Of course, the "boy" denied having failed in his duty--a Chinaman naturally would do so. But why the thief was contented with a clock, value two dollars, when he could have taken twenty times that amount beat me entirely.

As we left the compound to return to the office the doctor met us on his pony.

"You are the very man I was looking for," he said to me. "I had a thief in my house last night. One of the veranda doors was found open, but the queer part of the business is that he only took a clock. Thank goodness, he did not walk off with the Sultan's Cup."

"That's funny!" I replied. "Exactly the same thing happened to Barton last night, even to the article stolen. Let's go and have a look."

Examination convinced me that the robbery had been carried out in identically the same manner, and I grew puzzled.

"What does your 'boy' say?" I asked. "He probably forgot to bolt the door. I am almost sure that is what happened at Barton's."

"I can answer for that," replied the doctor. "I am a pretty late bird, as you fellows know; I did not turn in till about two last night, and I fastened the two doors myself."

If ever I searched a house thoroughly I did that one, but not a scrap of any sort of evidence could I find, in spite of my boast. I next sent the sergeant-major to scour the pawnshops, but without success; no one had tried to pawn a clock that day.

The climax was reached the following morning when, as I was returning from early parade, one of the Resident's "boys" met me with a note:--

"You might come up to the Residency and investigate a burglary which took place here last night. A clock was stolen."

I trust neither the boy nor my Sikh orderly fully understood my remarks on the subject. The doctor and Barton might pass their little robberies off as a joke, but a burglary at the Residency was a very different matter.

Exactly the same thing had occurred. A door had been found open and a clock gone. Nothing else had been touched. The Resident's remarks on the efficiency of my force as guardians of the peace were not complimentary, but distinctly to the point. Very sore, and very much mystified, I put my pride in my pocket and sent for Sergeant Cassim.

When he arrived I took him on one side and discussed these three bewildering robberies with him.

"Perhaps you can make something out of them," I said. "I believe it is the servants in each case."

He walked round the Resident's drawing-room, examined the floor of the veranda and the steps, and then said:--

"I shall be able to tell the Tuan to-morrow morning who committed the robberies."

"If you are so certain, why not now?"

"The Tuan must give me time to think and act."

That afternoon I received a letter through the post addressed to me in Malay. It contained a slip of paper bearing the following words, also in Malay:--

"If the Tuan will pretend he is going away to-night, and will return about eleven and hide near the veranda of his house, he will catch the burglar."

I have received a fair number of anonymous letters in my time, which usually meant nothing, but this was the oddest of them all. Why on earth should I pretend to leave for the night? Why could I not have been told merely to hide?

Suddenly the reason flashed across my mind--the guard! When I was living at head-quarters a guard, consisting of a lance-corporal and three men, was posted at my house from sunset till sunrise; in that district it was extremely useful to have four fully-armed men ready to accompany me anywhere at a moment's notice. When, however, I was absent on a tour of inspection the guard was dispensed with. It was apparently essential for the detecting of the burglar that the guard should be absent.

Of course, it might be only an excuse to get the house unguarded till the hour named in order that the burglar could enter before my return, and so doubly fool me; but I determined to risk it.

Accordingly I sent for the sergeant-major and told him I was going to investigate the last gang robbery myself on the spot, and that I should not be back till the following morning. He need not therefore post my guard.

A little before sunset I drove to a police-station about six miles away, and sent my dogcart back with instructions to return for me at six the following morning. I then told the sergeant in charge of the station that I was going to investigate the matter of the gang robbery, and that I should probably stay the night at the Towkay's (Chinese headman).

I visited the place, and, after spending an hour or so making inquiries--incidentally having to split a bottle of the vilest apology for champagne with the hospitable Towkay--I walked back to my house.

I suppose I must have been hiding at the side of the veranda for nearly an hour when a figure appeared at one of the dining-room doors. Being barefooted, I had not heard him approach the house, and I must confess that his sudden appearance was somewhat startling. He fumbled with the venetians for a couple of minutes; then the door opened silently and he entered the house. No sooner had he done so than the light of a bull's-eye lantern began to flash about the room; the man was evidently no ordinary thief.

Creeping on tip-toe to the door he had entered by, I waited with what patience I could muster, intending to commence operations by knocking the thief down as soon as he appeared. Presently the light went out, and I had drawn my arm back to let him have my fist on the side of his head, when a voice said:--

"Tuan, here is the burglar."

It was Sergeant Cassim himself!

"What on earth does this mean?" I demanded. "Where is the man?"

"I am he. Did not the Tuan see me enter the house?"

"Of course I did; but what is the meaning of it?"

"The Tuan told me I was a fool, and that no man committed a crime in this country without leaving some trace of it; also that the Tuan would prove this to me by investigating the next case himself. I am a Malay, Tuan, and do not like to be called names when I have not deserved them. I knew that crimes were often committed and no trace left, so I thought I would prove this to the Tuan. Did I leave any traces?"

"No, you certainly did not."

"But if the Tuan had only thought, he must have known these were not real burglaries; they were all exactly alike, even to the article stolen. Has the Tuan ever known such a thing happen before? Even the letter did not help him. Surely no thief gives himself away--in this country, at least! I was quite prepared for the Tuan to tell me he saw the whole thing when he got the letter. He must have forgotten how he spoke to me."

Cassim was evidently a reader of character and knew how I would take his rebuke, which I had undoubtedly fully deserved.

"You are right and I was wrong, Cassim," I said; "I am sorry I spoke as I did. But you were doing a very risky thing. Suppose Tuan Barton, or the Tuan Doctor, or the Tuan Besar (the Resident) had caught you in their houses?"

"Who would have suspected or said anything to me? I am the detective-sergeant, and if I find a house open at night it is my duty to investigate the matter. I _was_ seen, but the Tuan never thought of asking even that. If he had asked the Sikh sentry at the Residency, he would have said he had seen me walk round the building, for he challenged me. Why did the Tuan forget such a simple inquiry?"

"Of course, no one knows anything of this?" I said, evading his last question.

"Surely the Tuan can trust me?" he replied.