She keeps the key to that steel door, and it has, besides, a
combination lock that only she understands.
Once a very clever hillman, who had been south for an education and
had learned skepticism in addition to the rule of three, undertook to
discover wires leading over roof-tops to that room; but he searched
for a week and did not find them. When his search was over, and all
had done laughing at him, he was found one night with a knife-wound
between his shoulder-blades, and, later still, Yasmini sang a song
about him. None searched for wires after that, and the consensus of
opinion still is that she makes magic in the room below-stairs.
She sought that room the minute Ranjoor Singh was safely locked in
with his trooper, although her maids reported more than one Northern
gentleman waiting impatiently in the larger of her two reception-
rooms for official information of the war. Government bulletins are
regarded as pure fiction always, unless confirmed by Yasmini.
And, within five minutes of Ranjoor Singh's release of his trooper
from the sheet, no less a personage than a general officer had thrown
aside other business and had drawn on a cloak of secrecy that not
even his own secretary could penetrate.
"Closed carriage!" he ordered; and, as though the fire brigade were
doing double duty, a carriage came, and the horses, rump-down, halted
from the gallop outside his door.
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