My dominant fear was that the players might want a
marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the
dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my
terror; and it was real.
After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept
because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept
awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and
peered into the dark of the next room.
When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and
inquired for the means of departure.
"By the way, _khansamah_," I said, "what were those three doolies doing in
my compound in the night?"
"There were no doolies," said the _khansamah_.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door.
I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with
the owner of the big Black Pool down below.
"Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?" I asked.
"No," said the _khansamah_. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how
long, it was a billiard room."
"A how much?"
"A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was _khansamah_
then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to
come across with brandy-_shrab_. These three rooms were all one, and they
held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening.
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