In India, the rains are due the middle of June. It was now the first of May, and under the brazen sky the broad leaves of the teakwood trees hung limp and gray. It grew hot and hot, and sometimes the south wind failed, and the evil soul of the smell of the native village was abroad. In the middle of the dry season life in the up country is at best a foretaste of purgatory, and for a month an intangible horror had hung over Her Majesty's garrison at Madoopoor, until the most phlegmatic of troopers was a mere bundle of frayed and tattered nerves. Through the long, hot days, and the longer, hotter nights, we abjured the punkah-wallahs to greater efforts, and drank iced peg and made vain conjecture as to the nature of the terror that was in our midst.

       It began with Dicky Brown, the little subaltern lately up from Calcutta. Dicky, with his banjo, his music hall ditties, and his unfailing good humor, had infused a new interest in life throughout the station, and we one and all blessed the advent of his freckled face among us. He brought up from Calcutta a magnificent mastiff that soon became the pride and pet of the garrison, and that followed his footsteps like a shadow, sleeping by the door of his room at night. She was absolutely fearless. One day when a man-eater followed a shrieking syce from the edge of the jungle into the colonel's compound, Gyp faced the beast undaunted, and would undoubtedly have been killed, had not the colonel with his smooth-bore express put an end to the tiger's career.

       Upon a certain evening, Dicky took it into his curly head to stroll down the weed-grown road from the cantonment with Gyp at his heels, leaving a group of us sitting in the colonel's quarters, drinking iced peg and grilling in the breeze from the swaying punkahs that felt like a blast from a smelting furnace.

       A half hour afterwards, something burst through the open door like a whirlwind and crouched in a cowering heap in the lamplight, with gurgling, half-human moans of abject, whimpering terror, that brought us all to our feet.

       It was Gyp.

       We looked at each other for a moment in silence. I believe the first thought that came to us was of the day that she had faced the man-eater without fear, and the inference was plain that something very extraordinary was afoot.

       The colonel was the first to get his scattered wits together. Stepping across to the gun rack, he took down a rifle and started for the door. Upon that, each of us grabbed a gun and followed him. I turned at the door and called to Gyp, but she only huddled closer to the floor, trembling in an agony of terror and whining piteously.

       A frightened bearer came running toward us with an incoherent tale of a fiery-eyed monster that had fallen upon him and knocked him in the dust, and torn his clothes. Evidently he had been in Gyp's path.

       Throughout the length of the night, that seemed an age, we searched for Dicky. It was just as the cool dawn came, driving the mists away to the hills, that the colonel and I, a little separated from the rest of the searchers, found under an areca palm in the edge of the jungle — something, that had been him.

       I have seen some rather unpleasant things in my time, and my nerves, I believe, are as steady as the next man's, but even now I recall that sight with something of a shudder. The colonel, a man of iron, went white, as he turned his face away and staggered against a tree. For myself, I believe I was near to fainting, when I felt his hand on my shoulder, shaking me. When we had done what we could in the way of decently interring poor Dicky, the colonel read the burial service of the Church of England over his grave, and I have never held it necessary to crave absolution for the laborious tissue of lies that the colonel and I together embroidered in the letter that went to the white-haired mother in far off England. We wrote her that Dicky had died of the jungle fever with her name on his lips, and how we had made him as comfortable as possible to the last. It wrenched our hearts, though, to think how she would kiss and cherish the lock of hair that the bugler sacrificed, because it most nearly matched Dicky's own.

       That was in the beginning. Next, the colonel's best bearer went down the dry bed of a nullah one afternoon to look at a snare he had set, and never returned.

       A few days later, the bugler, strolling across the maidan one morning, passed around the corner of the armorer's shed and disappeared. At time for tiffin his absence was discovered, and the colonel, quietly passing the word to half a dozen of the oldest troopers, began a search. The bugler's footprints were plainly to be seen in the gray dust for about five paces beyond where he had turned the corner of the armorer's shed. His cap lay near where he had fallen forward upon his face and dug his fingers in the dry earth. That was all, and the bugler had vanished as though the earth had swallowed him up.

       Five hundred yards away, in the edge of the jungle, we found — something.

       Then the colonel, grown ten years older in a week, had wired to Melton at Lucknow, and at sunset next day he swung down from the saddle of an exhausted pony at the colonel's quarters, and remained closeted with him for an hour.

       Melton, be it known, had lived among the Gauri villagers as one of them, and knew more of the mysteries of that land of mysteries than any other white man I have ever seen. He could read the subtle shadings of the native moods and superstitions as the beater reads the sign in the bent leaf of grass or the broken twig in the pathless jungle. The colonel had appealed to the one man in all India who might be expected to solve the mystery.

       Of the time that followed — looking back on it through the ten years that have intervened — I have a memory of what seemed a horrid nightmare. I believe Melton was the only sane one among us. Day after day he went about like an uneasy spirit — watching, listening, quiet and alert. Night after night he sat in his room in the colonel's bungalow, smoking for hours upon end, writing in a journal which he kept under lock and key, and sitting for hours in silence with his brow furrowed by deep thought. His presence, I believe, was the one thing that kept us all from going stark, raving mad.

       As I sat on the verandah at my quarters one afternoon, idly watching a couple of pariah dogs fighting over a bone in the dust, a trooper came out of the armorer's shed, carrying a mus- ket, and started across the maidan. I turned to pick up the week-old Calcutta paper beside my chair, and when I looked up he had disappeared. Probably thirty seconds had passed, and he was gone. What had been his musket lay in the dust. The barrel was twisted like a bit of tangled wire. Of the stock only a handful of splinters remained. The strength of a dozen men would scarcely suffice to have reduced the weapon to such a wreck.

       The next morning, when I entered Melton's room, what was left of the trooper's musket lay on the table. When I went in, Melton looked up in a preoccupied way and motioned me to a seat. He was smoking, and by the appearance of his deep-set, sombre eyes, his disheveled hair, and the half-empty tobacco jar at his elbow, I gathered that he had kept night-long vigil with the mystery that was engrossing him.

       "Ananda Bheem," said he, "a high caste Brahmin to whom I once did what he was pleased to consider a great service, told me that Siva, the God of Terror, once in every century came upon the earth in the form of an invisible demon, searching for souls to be his slaves in the abode of evil spirits, and that when he had wrested a sufficient number of them from their human habitations, he would depart, and trouble the earth no more for another hundred years."

       I shuddered involuntarily. "Can it be possible that you see in that fable an explanation of what has been happening here?" I asked.

       He shrugged his shoulders. "In the light of a few things that I have learned," he replied, "I am inclined to take his word for it."

       Knowing Melton as I did, I made no further comment, and we fell to discussing a certain plan which he had conceived for the solution of the mystery. He left to me the task of arranging the details, and before I had closed the door behind me, he had thrown himself upon a charpoy, fully dressed, and was sound asleep.

       Across the corner of the maidan from the armorer's shed stood the colonel's stable, a matter of twenty paces away. That afternoon, two hours before sunset, everything was ready for Melton's desperate experiment. Within the armorer's shed stood the colonel and a couple of stalwart troopers. Inside the stable I took up my position with two more troopers. Each of us had a coil of strong rope.

       In the center of the open space between, Melton paced slowly back and forth, calmly smoking, and apparently unconscious of any danger. Ten paces to the north of where we waited with loudly beating hearts — then ten paces to the south, and back again.

       I have stalked lions in the desert, on foot and alone, without a thought of fear, and have stood in the path of a musth elephant and waited without a tremor for the proper instant to fire the shot which would bring him down, but this thing which we were now about was not at all to my liking. I would not have walked in Melton's footsteps for all the gold in India. He, outwardly cool and calm, had deliberately set himself as the bait of a trap for some terrible thing, the nature of which we did not know.

       We had not long to wait, though it seemed to our strained nerves that years were dragging their slow length along. Never for a second did we take our eyes from the silent figure pacing slowly back and forth.

       Of a sudden, when Melton was nearly opposite our ambush, he staggered slightly, then, turning swiftly, cried "Now!" and threw out his arms as though grappling with an unseen presence.

       We were beside him in an instant, half mad with unreasoning terror, but throwing coil after coil of rope around something that we could not see, but which had gripped Melton like an octopus, and was crushing the life out of him, perfect athlete that he was.

       At last we had him free, and the thing, meshed in a network of rope, lay in the dust, while Melton tenderly felt of a strained wrist.

       Of course it is altogether unbelieveable — and I can remember pinching my arm sharply to see whether I was awake or dreaming — but something, invisible to our sight, tightly bound with ropes that stretched and strained as it struggled to escape, lay before us.

       We gazed at each other in horror. Only on Melton's face was an expression of quiet triumph. I bent over and laid my hand on the thing, and shuddered as I did so. I could feel what seemed to be short, silky hair between my fingers, and the play of powerful muscles beneath my touch, but the sensation was that of placing your hand on the body of a dead animal in the dark.

       With one accord we looked at Melton for an explanation. He smiled grimly. "I think "Ananda Bheem knew whereof he spoke," said he.