Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECOND CHAPTER THE BAFFLING INDIAN MYSTERY IS DISCUSSED BY FOUR MEN WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRST TO SOLVE IT The Powers are held together with links not welded by hands. The strain upon the weaker links sets to quivering the entire cable of civilization. Certain sections of the system grind constantly against each other, and inevitably there comes a period when snapping is imminent. At such a time the two material forces draw apart for defense. Frequently peace is preserved by silent affronts of power; frequently by an easing of tension on either hand, a more comfortable adjustment of boundaries, and thick applications of the lubricant, diplomacy. The time is critical, however, and in either background the engines of war are assembled against the crisis. … Something had happened in India. It was retching for outlet at Calcutta, seething through Indian provinces. London and St. Petersburg were jerking with its startling galvanism. The correspondents afield in Bhurpal began to sense this mysterious friction, but could get no word nor line on the truth. Rumors were thick as confetti in Mardi Gras. Rumors ran through all shades of dreaming and shapes of reason. One story was that China had wiped out the foreign concessions from Hong Kong to Vladivostok and had challenged the world to war; another that Russian armies were swarming overthe Himalayas, and that all India stood ready to back the Russian Bear against the British Lion; that England would call upon Japan and the United States, and Russia demand the alliance of the French and Germans; in short, that there would be a merry manifestation of hell around the world. Routledge tarried but one day with the civilian outfit. He had been gone but forty-eight hours, with Bulwer- Shinn’s cavalry, when the rousing mystery…