The Marriage of Meldrum Strange. Talbot Mundy

something about it. Sooner than bleat to anybody else I told her, and she was tickled—lent me the price and some over.

      I paid her out of the first check. Strange had me sworn not to say a word about his movements to any one, so I didn’t drop a hint, although I saw Zelmira pretty often. But she understood; she isn’t like a Greek at all—downy, I dare bet, and up to her eyes in ambition, but on the level. She found out when he was going, and where; maybe she asked him; I don’t know.”

      “But what did Strange come to India for?” asked Ommony.

      “Open an office, I guess—Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Simla—he aims to be a sort of clearing-house for information so’s to trip crooks before they get started—card indexes to beat the encyclopædia—every thing in ’em from a man’s past to what he might do if the game looked good. Poker out of books, I’d call it, but that’s his affair. The funny part is this: he’d come away to give the papers and the public time to calm down and forget him, Zelmira Poulakis included. I know about her, because on the steamer coming out he asked me point-blank whether I’d let on to her about his movements. Well: we hadn’t been in Bombay three days before she puts up at the same hotel!”

      “Tagged him, eh?”

      “No. We came by way of San Francisco and Hongkong. She took the English boat by way of New York and Port Said. But Strange wasn’t having any. He swore a blue streak and took the train that night—Delhi like a darned fool; she could go to Delhi. Who’s to stop her? She showed up at our hotel in Delhi—never made a move to interfere with Strange, but treated Grim and Jeff Ramsden like old friends. Strange caught me talking to her, so he shipped me off all over the place making dates for him, and I was in a place called Ahmednugger when I got a telegram a yard long telling me to see you and fix up tiger-shooting for him. He wants to hide and have a good time until Zelmira picks on some one else.”

      “He heard of me, of course, from Athelstan King?”

      “Oh, yes, and I’m to say King sends his compliments, and do you mind?”

      “Strange will have to rough it here,” said Ommony. “I’m no millionaire.”

      Charley looked about him.

      “Seems you’ve got tigers,” he said. “I reckon Strange is killing mad!”

      “How old is he?”

      “ ’Bout fifty—fifty-five—somewhere there. Too much stomach, but totes it himself. Doesn’t need a nurse yet. Say—you’ll like him, for a while at any rate. He’s real good company; there’s nothing wrong with him except his point of view,” said Charley, almost pleadingly. “King said——”

      “I’d have him here for your sake,” Ommony interrupted, laughing. “You stay, of course?”

      “That’s up to him. No orders about that yet. I’ve got my camera. Say: the gang told me you know animals from A to Izzard.’

      “And——?”

      “I’ve got special English plates, the best lens out of Jena, and scads o’ more plates in Bombay. All that’s needed is a dark room——”

      “I can fix that up.”

      “—and the animals.”

      “Make yourself at home,” said Ommony. “When will Strange be here? Better wire him, hadn’t I?”

      Charley’s eyes, sky-bright with a glint of steel in them, met Ommony’s again and dwelt there half a second.

      “If it’s all the same to you I’d sooner wire and you write,” he answered. “That’ll give us four days extra before he comes.”

      Ommony laughed again.

      “All right. I’ve only one bathroom, so you mayn’t have that; but there’s running water, cool enough too, in a shed outside, and I’ll lend you two men to cover the shed with tar-paper; there’s lots of it in the shed.”

      “They told me you were white!” said Charley, grinning.

      1 ↑ See “A Secret Society.” Aug. 10, 1922 issue.

      2. "I'm thinking."

      CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

       “I’m thinking.”

      ART is individual, and knows no limits. Fools are they who sneer at new tools, and processes of giving form to idea. Ommony, an artist in his own way, paid suitable homage to Charley’s camera, because the thing of brass and glass and wood was the tool of a true enthusiast.

      That forest and its outskirts are a thousand square miles. There are temples in it, not wholly ruinous but older than written history, and in places trees have forced themselves up from between the stones of forgotten cities. Men live there, known now as junglis, naked and afraid, whose ancestors were kings in lost Lemuria if the very ancient books are true. And the animals live where human pride one time adored itself.

      Above all, there are spots of sunlight filtered through gaps in the foliage; fire-lanes—Ommony’s first charge—along which light flows like a river; clearings where creatures, whose every habit is an open book to Ommony, lie basking, playing with their young; and a look-out rock from which, if the bears aren’t there before you, you may view the leagues of jungle spread like a sun-lit sea.

      Charley was in his element, and Ommony no less.

      “My ——, you know,” said Charley, “you can do this stuff early and late, when the raw’s left out and the real thing’s looking at you! They say you can’t, but you can! I know you can!”

      “Let’s try,” said Ommony.

      So they slept at noon, and stalked the mysteries of twilight, when two-thirds of the earth is waking and a third shades into the unknown.

      “Any fool can shoot a tiger on the hop!” swore Charley. “Can you shoot him so he’ll show on the negative how light ripples off his pelt? I’ll bet you!”

      “All bets off,” said Ommony. “I think you can.”

      But they needed the junglis to show exactly where the tiger lay, and Ommony’s low whistle to make the beast look up in such way that his proper aspect faced the lens, while Diana the staghound lay growling in rumbled undertones. And once it was Ommony’s rifle that changed death’s course, when a leopard rushed the click of the ambushed camera and Charley hugged his one tool, turning his back to protect it better.

      “So that’s all right,” said Ommony, measuring the two strides and a half that death had lacked.

      “Hope so, at any rate,” Charley answered. “I think I got him before he moved. Half a second, while I slip in another plate. Did you notice the brown of that shadow, and how his ’hind-end seemed afloat in it? If that shows on the negative it’s worth the trip to India.”

      “How much will you get for it?”

      “No more than for a punk one. You can’t make money at this game.”

      “Nor at mine. But it’s good, isn’t it?”

      “You betcha!”

      THEY seemed to have been friends a year when Jeff turned up, walking from the station because he loved the feel of brown earth underfoot—Jeff with a beard like Ommony’s, and a boy’s grin, but bigger and heavier than Ommony and Charley both together. The veranda chair creaked under him, but not even the terrier was afraid, and Diana’s long