A shadow fell between them. Then a hollow voice: "And if you tell Maraj? What if you should tell Maraj?" * * * * * Bamjee almost fainted. Maraj had climbed over the wall and approached from behind them. His maniac eyes looked burned by lack of sleep, and his movement was almost simian, but an intelligence, mocking and masterful, glowed beneath the surface. However dry his eyes might seem, they looked indomitable. He lifted Bamjee by the neck with one hand and dumped him beside Quorn. Then he sat and faced them both. Quorn noticed that Asoka was beginning to grow nervous. "Snap Maraj in a trap! That is funny!" "Hell!" said Quorn. "Of course they couldn't catch you in a trap." "But I will catch them!" "Sure you will. O' course you will. That's a part o' the bargain you made with me." Genius has nothing whatever to do with education. It is a gift for recognizing the essence of things and what to do about it. Quorn knew nothing about maniacs, just as he had known nothing about elephants until he came to Narada. He could not have explained his method; it would certainly not have occurred to him to say there was something simple about a man whose manhood had been lost in a maze of egotism and murderous cunning. He did not think about it. He acted, simply. "Would you break our bargain?" But Maraj was suspicious. "There is new horse-dung on the track. Whose horses?" "Mine. Bamjee's." "Many horses. Whose?" "Rana Raj Singh and his men. Rana Raj Singh quarreled with the Ranee--pulled his freight. Off in a huff. Nobody knows where he's going, and nobody cares." Something in the maniac's eyes altered. Cunning beneath cunning readjusted purpose beneath purpose. Quorn noticed a sudden blaze of anger that was instantly suppressed and hidden under too much suavity; but he had no means of knowing that Maraj had listened through Blake's window to the whole of the Ranee's conversation. "He is after Maraj," said the maniac. He was being so subtle now that subtlety oozed from his lips in a conceited smile, defeating its own end. Simultaneously Quorn and Bamjee recognized that his conceit could be his own undoing. "What do you care?" Quorn asked. "Ain't you a match for him?" "Yes, and for the Brahmins also." He fixed his eyes on Bamjee's. "You did not know, did you, that I was listening behind the wall? I heard you say the Brahmins mean to snap me in the same trap with the Ranee. So they shall. I will be the bait. I will draw the Brahmins, too, into their own trap. Rana Raj Singh shall find them in it, and destroy them. But, first, they shall destroy the Ranee, so that he shall have the impulse to destroy them. Ho, but we will feed death! And though they close me in a trap without an outlet, can they keep me in it?" He grinned, glaring again into Quorn's eyes. "Afterward, you and I will keep that tryst--when you have no elephant to think about--nothing to think about except me, your master."