Something had happened in India. It was retching for outlet at Calcutta, seething through Indian provinces. London and St. Petersburg were jerking with its startling galvanism. The correspondents afield in Bhurpal began to sense this mysterious friction, but could get no word nor line on the truth. Rumors were thick as _confetti_ in Mardi Gras. Rumors ran through all shades of dreaming and shapes of reason. One story was that China had wiped out the foreign concessions from Hong Kong to Vladivostok and had challenged the world to war; another that Russian armies were swarming over the Himalayas, and that all India stood ready to back the Russian Bear against the British Lion; that England would call upon Japan and the United States, and Russia demand the alliance of the French and Germans; in short, that there would be a merry manifestation of hell around the world. Routledge tarried but one day with the civilian outfit. He had been gone but forty-eight hours, with Bulwer-Shinn’s cavalry, when the rousing mystery which he had intimated to Jerry Cardinegh in their brief night walk, began to be felt by the army and its followers. That which was known in the secret councils of Calcutta and London never reached the field, but the results did. The campaign came to an abrupt close. The hand behind history beckoned; and arteries of horse, guns, and infantry, running like lines of red ink over the map of Bhurpal, were bottled up into garrisons to _wait_. The petty insurrection in the hills, which had called the soldiers and scribes to action after a bleak stretch of peace, was as remotely forgotten as the vagaries of a fever past. One after another the correspondents were recalled--uneasy, irritable, their work half-done and wholly lustreless. All their cables of the last days (messages that hinted some grave international lesion; the strained, dwarfed results of minds that searched the stars and the soil for truth) were either stopped in the sending or answered by a crisp word that nothing more of the sort was wanted. This was heart-breaking. Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, and Talliaferro had fore-gathered on the veranda of the Bengal Hotel in Calcutta. They were awaiting ship for Madras, Bombay, and Home. It was ten days after the big social night in Bhurpal, and early in January, 1902. Trollope had promulgated a theory. It was a full-rigged, painstakingly-ballasted theory, involving hours of heavy work in a smutty, sweltering coach on the way down from Madirabad, and Trollope was a heavy man who drew heat--“the Blue Boar,” a few intimates dared to call him. The theory contained a discriminating opinion, weighed to a dram, on the cause of the sudden scatter of troops from field to garrison, and undertook to interpret the pregnant undertone of disorder which whispered across the empire. A cablegram from his paper, the _Examiner_, had just been delivered, and was spread out upon the table before the others. Trollope was breathing hard.