the Adjutant repeated. “It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock. Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will fall as the men did. The old Mugger will then be ready.”

The Jackal looked at the Adjutant and the Adjutant looked at the Jackal. If there was one thing they were more certain of than another, it was that the engine was everything in the wide world except a bullock. The Jackal had watched it time and again from the aloe hedges by the side of the line, and the Adjutant had seen engines since the first locomotive ran in India.

But the Mugger had only looked up at the thing from below, where the brass dome seemed rather like a bullock’s hump.

“M — yes, a new kind of bullock,” the Mugger repeated ponderously, to make himself quite sure in his own mind; and