"
"What did he do to his father's widow, then?"
"Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from a
beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man that would dare going into
the State to get hush-money for it. They'll try to poison me, same as they did
in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you'll give the man at Marwar
Junction my message?"
He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more
than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small
Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste
before. They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The
Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw
light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke
correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-
hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the
internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are
kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased
from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth,
full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one
side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid.
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