with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress.
'They should have mauled us,' he said, 'instead of mewing at us. I wonder what they meant. I don't like it one little bit.'
I said that the Managing Committee of the temple would in all probability bring a criminal action against us for insulting their religion. There was a section of the Indian Penal Code which exactly met Fleete's offence. Strickland said he only hoped and prayed that they would do this. Before I left I looked into Fleete's room, and saw him lying on his right side, scratching his left breast. Then I went to bed cold, depressed, and unhappy, at seven o'clock in the morning.
At one o'clock I rode over to Strickland's house to inquire after Fleete's head. I imagined that it would be a sore one. Fleete was breakfasting and seemed unwell. His temper was gone, for he was abusing the cook for not supplying him with an underdone chop. A man who can eat raw meat after a wet night is a curiosity. I told Fleete this and he laughed.
'You breed queer mosquitoes in these parts,' he said. 'I've been bitten to pieces, but only in one place.'
'Let's have a look at the bite,' said Strickland. 'It may have gone down since this morning.'
While the chops were being cooked, Fleete opened his shirt and showed us, just over his left breast, a mark, the perfect double of the black rosettes—the five or six irregular blotches arranged in a circle—on a leopard's hide. Strickland looked and said, 'It was only pink this morning. It's grown black now.'
Fleete ran to a glass.
'By Jove!' he said, 'this is nasty. What is it?'
