To say one thing to-day, the precise opposite to-morrow, and to explain with easy grace that it was a mistake, or that the evidence had been wrongly taken down, seemed to every man whom Blunt interrogated the correct and natural procedure for a person who was being pressed for information which it was inconvenient to produce. Some men remembered everything; others professed the most absolute obliviousness; each contradicted all the rest, except when Government interests were concerned, and then all swore together like a band of conspirators. To make confusion worse confounded, the accounts were kept on a system which none of the Salt Board people understood and which no one else could be induced to explain. Then, by some fatality, the white ants had always eaten the precise documents of which Blunt stood in need, and the trembling officials produced a tattered mass of dirt and rags and assured him that this was the record which he called for, or rather all that could be found of its remains. Blunt became, day by day, more profoundly convinced that all men--all the Rumble Chunder men, at any rate--were liars, and let his conviction appear in short speeches and abrupt procedure. The old Zámindars, outraged by discourtesy in the presence of their retainers, came away from his presence quivering with rage and ripe for the first chance of mischief which offered. Blunt found the nettle stinging him sorely, and, like a rough, resolute man, grasped it with all the more unflinching hand. When at last he succeeded in making out a case he dealt out the sternest justice, not, perhaps, without a gratified vindictiveness against the people who had so long baffled and annoyed him. One Uzuf Ali, a large grantee, had been called upon to verify his claims; and this he proceeded to do with the utmost alacrity. He and his forefathers, he protested, had been in possession for centuries--look at the Revenue records, the files of the Courts, the orders of Government. Here, too, was a Sunnud from the Emperor Akbar confirming them in their rights. Twenty witnesses, all disinterested, honourable, unimpeachable, the entire village indeed, would attest the fact of continuous, open, rightful enjoyment from a period as far as memory could go. So the twenty witnesses did; but then appeared a gentleman, one Hosain Khan, on the other side, and blew the pretty story into the air. Uzuf Ali was an audacious impostor, everybody in the country knew that his father had come from Delhi not thirty years ago; he had no more right to an ounce of salt than the 'Commissioner Sahib' himself; the ground over which he claimed his rights was notoriously in the possession of another man: as for the Sunnud of Akbar, it was an obvious forgery, as the Commissioner Sahib might see for himself by merely looking.