known individual who had dislodged it, and calculated that it would reach the level torrent bed in which he was standing just opposite to him and about fifty yards away. The last few yards of the slope were bare, and he watched the mass tumble down out of the thickets on to the open pine-needlecovered foot. In a sudden flash he realised that the boulder owned a large pair of tusks, which gleamed fiercely in a shaft of the sinking sun. He hastily slid the bolt home, took a quick snap-shot whilst the beast still had its head lower than its hind-quarters, and then a very fierce and angry grunt, almost a bellow, told of a hit. The big tusker, and he was a very big one, checked his headlong rush not a jot as he got on to the level of the stream-bed, but went straight for S. His thoughts suddenly turned on the results of encounters with wounded tusker boar. There was not much space for cogitation. The next shot evidently smashed the beast's near fore-shoulder, as it turned him in full career. The turn caused his attack to take the fresh direction of the "ober-förster when only about ten yards from S. The latter shouted to warn him, and fired a shot which proved decisive, though with scarcely a yard to spare. The great grey boar owned a fine pair of tusks. He turned the scale at over two hundred kilogrammes, or a trifle under five hundred pounds, and now rejoices in the name of “Murgatroyd," which seems to fit him very well. A FRONTIER INCIDENT. BY LOUIS MAGRATH KING. Man must pay for his flights into the empyrean. What sort of world would it be if you could be heroic with impunity, if Semele were not consumed with fire or Belgium devastated? But happily life and our conception of what is fit and proper do not always tally, and so it is quite likely that it was merely post hoc after all. THIS is the story of how a and not the prosaic other. high Tibetan official, the Kalon Lama, met an unexpected crisis in his and his country's affairs. It was one of those cases where a decision one way or the other had to be made, where inaction were as positive as action, and a wait-and-see policy out of the question. Nor was there time to refer the matter to superior authority. The responsibility for whatever was done or not done was his and his alone. He was called upon, in fact, to make an immediate decision in a matter of high policy. He did so, throwing in his lot, as was his wont, with the angels, and he perished utterly. Or perhaps that is rather begging the question. In life, or anyway in high politics, things are hardly as simple as that. However, we can say that he did what he thought was right regardless of consequences, which is as near as any of us can get to right in the abstract. And he passed on, but whether propter hoc or merely post hoc will probably never be established to the complete satisfaction of the people. Public opinion in that particular part of the world has it that it was the former; and, indeed, it is more in consonance with artistic values, with our sense of the fitness of things, that it should be this He was one of the four members of the Council of State or Cabinet, and was concurrently Governor-General of the great frontier province of Kham and Commander-in-Chief of the army upon which Tibet relied to maintain her historic sovereignty, recently reasserted with effect throughout the length and breadth of the land with the exception of a fringe of frontier territory still in the hands of her great neighbour, China, who, moreover, continued to claim an ultimate suzerainty over the whole country. He was, in fact, in the most responsible post a subject could occupy ; and he held the confidence-indeed, was the right hand-of his august master, the Bodhisat Avalokitesvara embodied in His Holiness the Dalai Lama, divine ruler of Tibet. Impregnably entrenched in the regard of deity incarnate and in high office, he appeared to be a man beyond the reach of the shafts of chance and circumstance. But Fate knew otherwise. Working out her inexorable purposes, she set him a nice problem delicately attuned to the man he was. To a man of a different type, one of narrower vision or less scrupulous a sense of responsibility, it would have been no problem at all. If the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, so also are there loose rocks about to keep the mountain goat intrigued; in other words, we are all of us happily proIvided from time to time with the particular difficulties and assuagements we require for our due development. There was no particular reason why the clouds should have gathered just then, unless it was that Fate had decided to drench him. The Tibetan question was for the moment dormant, and neither side desired or was in a position to press its claims and contentions by force of arms. The Armistice, which had brought to an end the hostilities of 1917-18, had been scrupulously observed on both sides, and responsible opinion on the one side as on the other seemed to agree that the general question between the two countries was not susceptible of a military solution. The political horizon was clear, peace reigned, and nothing of particular importance was coming through the oracles, which seem almost to be the form the shadow of coming events takes in that part of the world. Then fate took a hand, or it may have been Terang-gungchi, the sprite of mischief whom the Tibetans believe to play quite an important rôle in human affairs. However that may be, the chaos which is China of a sudden stretched forth, octopus-like, a tentacle and he was in the coils. It was like this. In the aforesaid hostilities, which were happily brought to an end through the mediation of my predecessor on the frontier, the Tibetan armies had recovered a large slice of their lost territories, ousting the alien claimant from the Lama States of Riwoche, Chamdo, and Draya, the kingdoms of Derge, Hlato, and Lintsung, the provinces of Markham and Gonjo, and the Thirty-nine Banners of Jyade. As a result, they found themselves in possession of a new north-eastern frontier in the form of a salient which lay athwart the lines of communication between the Chinese frontier outposts of Jyekundo in the north and Tachienlu in the extreme east. That in itself was not of much consequence. Commercial intercourse was in no way interrupted; and of political and military co-operation, to which, of course, the wedge could not but be an obstacle, there was normally little or none between the places concerned, each being under a virtually independent satrap who took no particular interest in his distant fellow. Soon afterwards, however, the Central Government of China decided to send by this route a consignment of arms and ammunition and funds to the Tachienlu satrap, or to give him his proper title-the Occupation Commissioner (that is, Civil and Military Governor) of the frontier area, who, unlike most of the military leaders in the province in which his satrapy lay, was sympathetic to the party then in power at Peking. It was a small consignment, but still large enough, it was thought, to prevent his political extinction, a matter of definite moment to Peking. Large enough also, however but that couldn't be helped,to constitute too tempting a morsel to the various satraps through whose domains it would have had to pass if it had been sent by the ordinary route. Indeed, the latter had actually been tried, and the consignment had been swallowed almost before it had got under way, gobbled up, in fact, by the first commander who saw it-like some worm spotted by a lucky chicken. Hence the tremendously circuitous route chosen for the second attempt, a route which had, however, the advantage of lying entirely within regions controlled by men who still took orders from Peking, apart, that is, from the last stage which lay through Tibetan territory, the wedge aforesaid. Its passage through that was unavoidably left for the Commissioner himself to arrange as best he could and if he could. He proceeded to do so. He detailed a battalion of troops to proceed to Jyekundo to take delivery of the said supplies, wrote to the Kalon Lama requesting him to allow it right of way across the salient, and at the same time sent up two deputies with full powers to arrange the necessary details of procedure, transport, and so on. He took it for granted that the Kalon Lama would accede to his request. His proposition was, in his own eyes, eminently reasonable; all he wanted was his supplies; his convoy would merely cross the salient like any merchant caravan, pick up the consignment and bring it back, a matter of a month or two at the most, and then everybody would be as they were before. He had no military or territorial designs, no ulterior motives, no anything save a fixed determination to get those supplies of his, upon which his political survival depended. His enemies-not Tibetans, but his own fellow countrymen and military rivals-were beating at his gates, he was short of arms and ammunition and money, and his only hope of maintaining his position lay in getting in these supplies. There was, of course, nothing illicit in the matter; they were his, consigned to him by the Government of his country. He was entitled to them, and he must have them or go under. The whole thing was a domestic matter, of no concern whatsoever of the Tibetans; it was merely a geographical accident that the route of approach stage when I returned to the passed through their territory, and all they had to do was to let his convoy through. He was not even raising the major question-namely, whether the Tibetans were in rightful occupation of the salient at all. In his eyes they were not a brief year ago it had been part of his own domain, but it was not his purpose to complicate a simple issue by digging up that aspect of it. As far as his present proposition was concerned, that particular question could remain in the abeyance to which it had already got accustomed, lulled to sleep, like some fierce dog, by the measured periods of diplomacy. It was all very good and considerate of him, and no doubt he felt that such an attitude of sweet reasonableness could hardly but bring its own reward. Moreover, he conceived himself as giving the Tibetan authorities an opportunity of conceding on their own volition what he could, if he liked, exact by force of arms. But could he? It can be said that he was convinced he could. Nor was he, in his own view, asking anything impossible of the Tibetans. What possible objection could they raise Immediate compliance was their proper rôle. Like all of us, any one who has happily provided himself with a fixed idea, he could see no flaw whatsoever in his case. As far as this matter was concerned, he was in a pulpit, made, like all pulpits, for one. Things had reached this side of the frontier-an impasse, I reserved my opinion, and set forth. About a fortnight's trek brought me to the farthest Chinese garrison post, on the very edge of the salient, where I found the two delegates kicking their heels. It appeared that the Tibetan authorities were not prepared either to discuss the Commissioner's proposition or to receive his delegates on their, the Tibetan, |