“Do you know what that maniac had done? Tertius and I shook it out of him by instalments. There was an underground granary cellar-room below the watch-tower, and in blasting the road Stalky had blown a hole into one side of it. Being no one else _but_ Stalky, he’d kept the hole open for his own ends; and laid poor Everett’s body slap over the well of the stairs that led down to it from the watch-tower. He’d had to move and replace the corpse every time he used the passage. The Sikhs wouldn’t go near the place, of course. Well, he’d got out of this hole, and dropped on to the road. Then, in the night _and_ a howling snow-storm, he’d dropped over the edge of the khud, made his way down to the bottom of the gorge, forded the nullah, which was half frozen, climbed up on the other side along a track he’d discovered, and come out on the right flank of the Khye-Kheens. He had then--listen to this!--crossed over a ridge that paralleled their rear, walked half a mile behind that, and come out on the left of their line where the gorge gets shallow and where there was a regular track between the Malôt and the Khye-Kheen camps. That was about two in the morning, and, as it turned out, a man spotted him--a Khye-Kheen. So Stalky abolished him quietly, and left him--_with_ the Malôt mark on his chest, same as Everett had. “‘I was just as economical as I could be,’ Stalky said to us. ‘If he’d shouted I should have been slain. I’d never had to do that kind of thing but once before, and that was the first time I tried that path. It’s perfectly practicable for infantry, you know.’ “‘What about your first man?’ I said. “‘Oh, that was the night after they killed Everett, and I went out lookin’ for a line of retreat for my men. A man found me. I abolished him--_privatim_--scragged him. But on thinkin’ it over it occurred to me that if I could find the body (I’d hove it down some rocks) I might decorate it with the Malôt mark and leave it to the Khye-Kheens to draw inferences. So I went out again the next night and did. The Khye-Kheens are shocked at the Malôts perpetratin’ these two dastardly outrages after they’d sworn to sink all bleed feuds. I lay up behind their sungars early this morning and watched ’em. They all went to confer about it at the head of the gorge. Awf’ly annoyed they are. Don’t wonder.’ You know the way Stalky drops out his words, one by one.” “My God!” said the Infant, explosively, as the full depth of the strategy dawned on him. “Dear-r man!” said McTurk, purring rapturously. “Stalky stalked,” said Tertius. “That’s all there is to it.” “No, he didn’t,” said Dick Four. “Don’t you remember how he insisted that he had only applied his luck? Don’t you remember how Rutton Singh grabbed his boots and grovelled in the snow, and how our men shouted?”