The weird procession crawled and crept and sidled back to where it had started from not so long before--jumping at every sound, and at every shadow that showed deeper than the coal-black night around them. It took them fifteen minutes to recross a hundred yards. But when they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown's command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the rifles in his charge. They were scarcely visible to him or one another in the blackness, but he sensed the change in them, and changed his own tune to fit the changed condition. His voice had nothing in it but the abrupt military explosion when he gave his orders now--no argument, no underlying sympathy. He was no longer herding a flock of frightened children. He was ordering trained, grown men, and he knew it and they knew it. The orders ripped out, like the crack of a drover's whip. “Fall in, now, properly! 'Tshun! Right dress! To two paces--open order--from the center--extend! Now, then! Left and right wings--last three at each end forward--right wheel--halt. That's it. 'Bout face. Now each man keep two eyes lifting till the morning. If anything shows up, or any of you hear a sound, shoot first and challenge afterward!” They were standing so when the pale sun greeted them, in hollow square, with their backs toward the fakir, who was squatting, staring straight in front of him, on his dais, with his back turned to the tree and his withered arm still pointing up to heaven like a dead man's calling to the gods for vengeance. A little later, Brown made each alternate man lie down and get what sleep he could just where he was, with a comrade standing over him. He himself slept so for a little while. But one of the men heard something move among the hanging tendrils of the baobab, investigated with his bayonet-point, and managed to transfix a twelve-foot python. After that there was, not so much desire for sleep. The fakir either slept with his eyes open or else dispensed with sleep. No one seemed able to determine which. When the day grew hotter, and the utterly remorseless Indian sun bore down on them, and on the aching desolation of the plain and the burnt-out guardhouse, the fakir still sat unblinking, gazing straight out in front of him, with eyes that hated but did nothing else. He seemed to have no time nor thought nor care for anything but hate and the expression of it. At noon, three little children came to him, and brought him water in a small brass bowl, and cooked-up vegetables wrapped in some kind of leaf. Brown let him have theirs, and bribed the frightened children to go and bring water for the men and himself. He gave them the unheard-of wealth of one rupee between them, and they went off with it--and did not come back.