* * * * * There was but one thing left in Rydamphur for Routledge to do. It concerned the servant of the Rest House, whom he had found good, and the little son of Madan Das. “This is to be your child,” he said to the man. “The mother is dead, and the others of the family lie dead in the country. I am leaving Rydamphur now, but by chance I shall come back. You shall attend the mother’s body--and take the child for your own. It is the wish of the very holy man who tarried here a few days. It was his _chela_ who carried the woman in from the country during the night. It is also my wish, and I leave you money. More money will be forthcoming in due time. First of all, I want you to buy a little brass bowl, which shall be the child’s own. Remember the name. He is the son of Madan Das. And now give me your name.” It was done in order. An hour after, when all the village was attracted to the threshing-floor, and the bullock-carts were creaking in, and the sweating, harried Englishmen were pushing back the natives, lest they fall under the wheels, Mr. Jasper perceived the man who had so fascinated him set out, alone and without conveyance, along the sandy western road toward the railroad. * * * * * It was a night late in October when Routledge reached Calcutta, where he was forced to sink deeply into the native life to avoid recognition. With two months’ files of the _Pioneer_, he sat down to study the premonitive mutterings of the Russo-Japanese war. They were wide in aim, but deep with meaning for the man who had mastered the old game of war. The point which interested him most in regard to this inevitable fracture of the world’s peace was not brought out in the _Pioneer_. Just how much did the awful activity of one Tyrone patriot, Jerry Cardinegh, have to do with the ever bristling negotiations between Tokyo and St. Petersburg?... In the light of the present developments, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was one of the cleverest figments of diplomacy in the history of national craft. Japan was a fine tool, with a keen and tempered edge. It would take all the brute flesh that Russia could mass in Manchuria to blunt it. Decidedly, Russia would have none left to crumple the borders of British India. Meanwhile, England had nothing more serious to do than to collect her regular Indian tributes, attend her regular Indian famines, and to vent from time to time a world-wide whoop of encouragement for her little brown brothers, facing the Bear. “That reminds me,” Routledge reflected with a start, “that all this is _my_ work. I took it from Jerry Cardinegh.”