“We had better be there, don’t you think, when the doings begin?” Dicky inquired. “Doings?” “When the performance is pulled off.” “Ah, _tamasha_!” “I think so,” said Dicky. They heard the slamming of boarded shop windows in all the native streets. The word for suspension of trade had gone abroad. The two pressed through gathering groups all making their way in one direction. They had passed through a stretch of bazaars and before them now was a carriage bridge over the railroad right of way. On the bridge, they were packed tightly in the throng by the railings on either side. In a moment, the crowd in front halted and surged back. Lala Relu Ram gripped his arm queerly. Now they heard voices far ahead--angry voices in English--demanding the people to disperse. The van of the crowd had been confronted by a police and military piquet, but the pressing forward did not cease. “My people are refusing to be stopped. They claim the right to make their plea,” the student whispered. Dicky was sinking himself into the purpose of the populace. As ever from his training, he sought to clear his mind of preconception and self-interest--so that the events might write upon a clean surface. Just now a shot was heard; a bullet sang overhead--then a volley. It was not until that moment that he remembered the dusty twisted ascetic in the mango grove at Cawnpore. But that was only two days ago, and where was the wall? * * * * * He found himself in the very quick of the Indian people--under the cuticle of India herself. India the timid, the terrible; India talking of Soul-force; India running with its _faryad_ to the ranking English representative of Amritsar; explaining her griefs and her hurts to herself and to the English, seeing neither the humor of her plight on one side, nor its grimness on the other; India led about on a string which she might have broken with the flick of a finger. That was what India had always seemed most like to Dicky Cobden--_hathis_, the elephant, gentlest and strongest of creatures. For many generations she had been banged about by the shouts and blows of the white _mahout_, who was not in the cult of elephant lore, never a native of her habitat. He had made her stand around according to his own ideas--India, the great female elephant, full of tremors and flutterings; of vast strange delicacies and uncomputable powers.... Now she was leaving her white _mahout_ to follow about a little black man with an invisible string. “_Mahatma Gandhiki jai! Gandhi Maharajiki rai!_” Dicky heard the voice raised now in the lull that followed the first volley.... A little black man with an invisible string, called Soul-force.