He
ordered them as a penance to visit all the Bhuttia villages on each side
of the border and tell everyone how terrible was the punishment for such
a crime. They were first to seek out their companions in the raid and
lay the same task on them. He found afterwards that these latter had
hardly waited to be told, for they had already spread broadcast the
tale, which grew as it travelled. Before long every mountain and jungle
village had heard how the Demon-Man had overtaken the raiders on his
marvellous winged elephant, slain some by breathing fire on them and
called up from the Lower Hell a troop of devils, half dragons, half
elephants, who had torn the other criminals limb from limb or eaten them
alive. So, not the fear of the Government, as Dermot intended, but the
terror of him and his attendant devil Badshah, lay heavy on the
border-side.
Chunerbutty, kept at the soldier's request in utter ignorance of more
than the fact that Noreen had been rescued by him from the raiders, had
concluded at first that the crime was what it appeared on the surface--a
descent of trans-frontier Bhuttias to carry off a white woman for ransom.
But when these stories reached the tea-garden villages and eventually came
to his ears he was very puzzled. For he knew that, in spite of their
extravagance, there was probably a grain of truth somewhere in them.
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