Narada knew that there were tantrums in the wind. It was the time of year when corn-fed elephants go _musth_ and men are inflamed by all the tom-tom of the marriage drums until imagination, like a strange gas, maddens the whole mob. It was normal in the month of carnival for slumbering resentment of a thousand years of wrongs to blaze into sudden flame and make a smoke-black ruin of--perhaps a street of money-lenders' houses, or a mean mosque, raised by poor Mahommedans whose chaste and inexpensive minaret had too long pointed to a scorching sky. No agitator needed to harangue hot crowds and tongue-lash lethargy into a spate of violence. It only needed mummurs--of the right sort, from the right source. And it is a strange fact that the more men mock the methods, and the servants, and the outer symbols of religion, that much easier it is for whisperers to stir them to the state where they will stab each other. Nowhere more than in Narada are the Brahmins hated. Nowhere is it easier for Brahmins of a certain sort to stir with almost noiseless tongue the terrible volcano that resides in ignorant minds. And so it happened that the Ranee's troops could not march on the day when Quorn brought back Asoka to the city, polished him until he shone, harnessed him with the lightest hunting _howdah_, and rode him, stately as a page of legend, through the crowded streets toward the palace. The troops were needed to the last man--fifty of them--to parade with gleaming bayonets and make rioting look like too risky a gamble. There were two tales circulating. One was that the Ranee had defied the Brahmins, which nobody minded much, although they shuddered at the sacrilege while they secretly and even openly enjoyed the scandal. It was the other tale that made men glower when they heard it. It was not enough that the Ranee kept and protected and used an elephant that had slain a very holy fakir. She had employed Maraj to cause the elephant to do it. The Brahmins said so. And to show how fair and strictly truthful the Brahmins could be on occasion, had the Brahmins not admitted publicly, and now privately, that Quorn truly was the reincarnated Gunga _sahib_? The Brahmins had explained it perfectly: it was just another case of ingratitude to the gods who had provided the Ranee with agents for the accomplishment of holy purposes, in the form of Quorn and his elephant; agents which she had promptly used for unholy purposes. There could only be one possible end to it. Quorn, of course, would have to suffer for letting himself be so misused. The elephant--the Ranee--well, whoever should kill all three of them might have to be a martyr for it, but inevitably he would turn out to be the agent of the angry gods who would mete out due reward in the hereafter.