Unlike most other officers, Commissioners draw a fixed monthly travelling allowance. It is therefore a point of honour with them to spend a good deal of time away from headquarters. In the Northern Division the cost of travelling was high, and the monthly allowance was never a source of profit. An early tour brought me to Bhamo, after being nearly swamped by a sudden squall. Signs of violence were still common. The Captain of the steamer assured me that quite lately he had seen corpses floating down the river “dreadfully emancipated.” At Bhamo I was shocked to find that the day before my arrival Bo Ti, one of the rebel leaders of Mogaung, had escaped from the primitive wooden jail. He was never recaptured. With him went a young Indian who was under trial for attempting to murder the Colonel of a native regiment. The Colonel I found convalescent. He was a hard man, and sepoys had often threatened to shoot him. As he was shaving one morning he felt a shock, and knew that he was wounded. Thinking that the threat had been carried out, the stout old man said to himself, “They shan’t know they have hit me,” and went on shaving. It was really his own servant, who from behind had slashed him with a sword. Owing to the Colonel’s grim determination not to let the sepoy know that he had scored, his assailant got in another blow. This is the story as I heard it. The Colonel, a bulky, muscular man, recovered from wounds which would probably have killed one of slighter build. It was doubtless by the agency of this young Indian that the guard of the jail was corrupted and the prisoner’s escape facilitated. He, too, made his way to the Kachin country, and was never caught. Vague rumours of his presence in the frontier fights of the next few years were current. I hope he did not have a very good time in the hills. A story of Bhamo of later years may be told here. A military police sepoy ran “amuck,” as they say. Armed with a rifle and well supplied with ammunition, he took possession of a masonry house, and from a casement amused himself by shooting at anyone who came in sight. The house was duly surrounded by police, and the Deputy Commissioner and District Superintendent came down. It did not occur to them to summon infantry and guns from the neighbouring fort, or to fire volleys at the brick walls. The Superintendent, Mr. H. F. Hertz,[203] obtained a rough description of the interior of the house, and entered it from next door. Groping in the semi-darkness characteristic of native houses, he made his way to the room next to that held by the sepoy. Hearing a sound, the sepoy half-opened the door and thrust out his rifle. Pushing the rifle aside with one hand, Mr. Hertz shot the man dead with his revolver, receiving a slight wound in the encounter. This is the way these things are managed in Burma.