Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in
dumb-show if he had an enemy he hated. 'I have,' says the chief. So Carnehan
weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them
drill, and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as
Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a
mountain, and the Chief's men rushes into a village and takes it, we three
Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. So we took that village too, and
I gives the Chief a rag from my coat, and says, 'Occupy till I come;' which
was scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen
hundred yards away, I drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all
the people falls flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever
he be by land or by sea."
At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted: "How could
you write a letter up yonder?"
"The letter?--oh!--the letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes, please. It
was a string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of it from a blind beggar
in the Punjab."
I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with a knotted
twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some
cipher of his own.
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