He rode to the house of the District Superintendent of Police. As a favor, for Grier was a popular man, Captain Melville gathered a few mounted constables, and they all cantered off to the Hutchinsons’ garden. In the compound they found a stranger fraternizing with the servants, and in his possession was a quantity of sweetmeats, which subsequent examination proved to be rank with _dhatura_, an Indian drug which can induce sleep or death. A raid on the wood secured a dozen rascals armed to the teeth, and the nine ponies, exactly as Karl had described them. There was a small fight, in which a sepoy’s head was cut open, but the surprise was too effectual for any serious resistance to be offered. “Conspiracy” was the root word of the legal indictment which sent the gang to the Andamans convict settlement. The affair was known as the “Hutchinson Raid.” Such things happen in India. But Karl’s share in the adventure was kept quiet by the authorities. It would have discredited the otherwise conclusive evidence, they thought. CHAPTER II THE SAVING OF CONSTANTINE Though others might calmly dismiss the child’s vision as an extraordinarily accurate delusion--“an unusually elaborate series of coincidences,” the policeman termed it--not so his parents. A man from Inverness, a woman from the Schwartz Wald, may be dour and stolid to outward seeming, but they are highly imaginative by nature. An ancestor of Grier’s, a warrior bard, took service with the Elector-Palatine, and this remote link led to the Indian tea-planter marrying a stout and pretty Gretchen from the borders of the Black Forest. Karl, named after his German grandfather, not altogether without an eye to the main chance, I regret to say, was their only child, and were he the ugliest duckling ever hatched he would yet have been their greatest treasure. But he was a very good-looking, merry-eyed, manly little fellow, with a face like one of Murillo’s angels, and eyes with the blue of the Red Sea in them. If you are in doubt as to the true blend of sapphire and ultramarine meant by that tint, ask any sailor-man of your acquaintance, and he will tell you that the blue of the Red Sea is a deep, unvarying, steadfast color, while the blue of the Mediterranean is, often as not, a steely mistral gray. In a word, Mr. and Mrs. Grier secretly worshiped their bonny chick, and it was a great shock to them to discover that his developing brains held compartments not within common ken. Therefore, although Karl ate his meals heartily, and throve apace, they kept a close eye on him, and compared notes whenever any curious action or utterance caught their attention. And what eagle-like intensity there is in that wistful parental glance! How it detects and interprets signs and portents! What degenerates must be the father and mother whose first warning of danger to their young comes from a nurse!