He felt himself clutching at a red knife, breathing red air
through distended nostrils. He forgot his sores; forgot to feel them.
As he hunted the two troopers through the maze of streets, he
recognized them for two of the men who had thrashed him; so he drew
closer, for fear they might escape him in the crowd. Now that he no
longer wandered objectless, but looked ahead and walked with a will
and a purpose, street-corner "constabeels" ceased to trouble him;
there were too many people in those thronged, kaleidoscopic streets
for any but the loafers to be noticed. He drew nearer and nearer to
the troopers, all unsuspected.
But the pace was fast, and they approached their barracks, where his
chance of ramming a knife into them and getting away unseen would be
increasingly more remote; and he had no desire to die until he had
killed the other four men, Ranjoor Singh himself, and the woman who
had spurned his love. He must kill these two, he decided, while yet
safe from barrack hue and cry.
He crept yet closer, and--now that his plan was forming in his mind-
began to see less red. In a minute more he recognized a house at a
street corner, whose lower story once had been a shop, but that now
was boarded up and showed from outside little sign of occupation. But
he saw that the door at the end of an alley by the building was ajar,
and through a chink between the shutters of an upper story his keen
northern eyes detected lamp-light.
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