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Updated: May 31, 2025
There, before Amber and Doggott could alight to change for Benares, their compartment was invaded by an unmistakable loafer, very drunk.
"You don't 'ear anything, sir?" "Not a sound." "It's cruel cold, Mr. Amber. 'Adn't you better come inside, sir?" "I suppose so." He abandoned hope disconsolately and returned to the hut, his teeth inclined to chatter and his stomach assailed by qualms premonitions of exhaustion in a body insufficiently nourished. Doggott, himself similarly affected, perhaps, was quick to recognise the symptoms.
The Poonah slipped in to her dock under cover of darkness. Amber, disembarking with Doggott, climbed into an open ghari on the landing stage and was driven swiftly to his hotel.
From the hour in which he had obtained it he had never but this once let it out of his personal possession. The envelope he had caused to be constructed for its safe-keeping during his enforced inaction in London. He had never once looked at it save in strict privacy, secure even from the eyes of Doggott; and the latter did not know what the leather case contained.
Should he have died or left me, however, the disposition of my effects is a matter about which I am wholly careless." The signature was unmistakably genuine the formal "H.D. Rutton" with which Amber was familiar. It was unwitnessed. The Virginian put aside the paper and offered Doggott the blank cheque on Rothschilds'. "This," he said, "makes you pretty nearly independently rich, Doggott."
And the train continued on its appointed way, bearing both Amber and the injured Doggott. Thus they had come to the heart of Rajputana. In the chill of dawn they were deposited at Badshah Junction. A scanty length of rude platform received them and their two small travelling bags.
"You're talking of the day you met Doggott at Nokomis station?" interposed his employer from the stand he had taken at one side of the fireplace, his back to the broad hearth whereon blazed a grateful driftwood fire. Amber looked up inquiringly, nodding an unspoken affirmative. "It was my fault that he er prevaricated, I'm afraid; as he says, it was by my order."
Amber broke the seal and read the enclosures once to himself and a second time aloud to Doggott. The date was barely a year old. "For reasons personal to myself and sufficient," Rutton had written, "I choose not to make a formal will. I shall die, probably in the near future, by my own hand, of poison.
Rutton's expression was masked by the shadows; Amber could make nothing of his curious reticence, and remained silent, waiting a further explanation. It came, presently, with an effect of embarrassment. "I had have peculiar reasons for not wishing my refuge here to be discovered. I told Doggott to be careful, should he meet any one we knew. Although, of course, neither of us anticipated...."
Fascinated, Amber felt his consciousness slip from him as a mantle might slip from his shoulders; awake, staring wide-eyed into the emerald eye, he forgot self, forgot the world, and dreamed, dreamed curiously.... The crash of the door closing behind him brought him to the right-about in a panic flutter. He glared stupidly for a time before comprehending that Rutton and Doggott had returned.
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