KING--OF THE KHYBER RIFLES

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

     Suckled were we in a school unkind
     On suddenly snatched deduction
     And ever ahead of you (never behind!)
     Over the border our tracks you'll find,
     Wherever some idiot feels inclined
     To scatter the seeds of ruction.

     For eyes we be, of Empire, we!
     Skinned and Puckered and quick to see
     And nobody guesses how wise we be.
     Unwilling to advertise we be.
     But, hot on the trail of ties, we be
     The pullers of roots of ruction!

     --Son of the Indian Secret Service

The men who govern India--more power to them and her!--are few. Those who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of words are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is the home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones.

The men who know--and Athelstan King might claim to know a little--answer that she is the original home of chivalry and the modern mistress of as many decent, gallant, native gentlemen as ever graced a page of history.

The charge has seen the light in print that India--well-spring of plague and sudden death and money-lenders--has sold her soul to twenty succeeding conquerors in turn.

Athelstan King and a hundred like him whom India has picked from British stock and taught, can answer truly that she has won it back again from each by very purity of purpose.

So when the world war broke the world was destined to be surprised on India's account. The Red Sea, full of racing transports crowded with dark-skinned gentlemen, whose one prayer was that the war might not be over before they should have struck a blow for Britain, was the Indian army's answer to the press.

The rest of India paid its taxes and contributed and muzzled itself and set to work to make supplies. For they understand in India, almost as nowhere else, the meaning of such old-fashioned words as gratitude and honor; and of such platitudes as, “Give and it shall be given unto you.”

More than one nation was deeply shocked by India's answer to “practises” that had extended over years. But there were men in India who learned to love India long ago with that love that casts out fear, who knew exactly what was going to happen and could therefore afford to wait for orders instead of running round in rings.

Athelstan King, for instance, nothing yet but a captain unattached, sat in meagerly furnished quarters with his heels on a table. He is not a doctor, yet he read a book on surgery, and when he went over to the club he carried the book under his arm and continued to read it there. He is considered a rotten conversationalist, and he did nothing at the club to improve his reputation.

“Man alive--get a move on!” gasped a wondering senior, accepting a cigar. Nobody knows where he gets those long, strong, black cheroots, and nobody ever refuses one.

“Thanks--got a book to read,” said King.

“You ass! Wake up and grab the best thing in sight, as a stepping stone to something better! Wake up and worry!”

King grinned. You have to when you don't agree with a senior officer, for the army is like a school in many more ways than one.

“Help yourself, sir! I'll take the job that's left when the scramble's over. Something good's sure to be overlooked.”

“White feather? Laziness? Dark Horse?” the major wondered. Then he hurried away to write telegrams, because a belief thrives in the early days of any war that influence can make or break a man's chances. In the other room where the telegraph blanks were littered in confusion all about the floor, he ran into a crony whose chief sore point was Athelstan King, loathing him as some men loathe pickles or sardines, for no real reason whatever, except that they are what they are.

“Saw you talking to King,” he said.

“Yes. Can't make him out. Rum fellow!”

“Rum? Huh! Trouble is he's seventh of his family in succession to serve in India. She has seeped into him and pickled his heritage. He's a believer in Kismet crossed on to Opportunity. Not sure he doesn't pray to Allah on the sly! Hopeless case.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite!”

So they all sent telegrams and forgot King who sat and smoked and read about surgery; and before he had nearly finished one box of cheroots a general at Peshawur wiped a bald red skull and sent him an urgent telegram.

“Come at once!” it said simply.

King was at Lahore, but miles don't matter when the dogs of war are loosed. The right man goes to the right place at the exact right time then, and the fool goes to the wall. In that one respect war is better than some kinds of peace.

In the train on the way to Peshawur he did not talk any more volubly, and a fellow traveler, studying him from the opposite corner of the stifling compartment, catalogued him as “quite an ordinary man.” But he was of the Public Works Department, which is sorrowfully underpaid and wears emotions on its sleeve for policy's sake, believing of course that all the rest of the world should do the same.

“Don't you think we're bound in honor to go to Belgium's aid?” he asked. “Can you see any way out of it?”

“Haven't looked for one,” said King.

“But don't you think--”

“No,” said King. “I hardly ever think. I'm in the army, don't you know, and don't have to. What's the use of doing somebody else's work?”

“Rotter!” thought the P.W.D. man, almost aloud; but King was not troubled by any further forced conversation. Consequently he reached Peshawur comfortable, in spite of the heat. And his genial manner of saluting the full-general who met him with a dog-cart at Peshawur station was something scandalous.

“Is he a lunatic or a relative of royalty?” the P.W.D. man wondered.

Full-generals, particularly in the early days of war, do not drive to the station to meet captains very often; yet King climbed into the dog-cart unexcitedly, after keeping the general waiting while he checked a trunk!

The general cracked his whip without any other comment than a smile. A blood mare tore sparks out of the macadam, and a dusty military road began to ribbon out between the wheels. Sentries in unexpected places announced themselves with a ring of shaken steel as their rifles came to the “present,” which courtesies the general noticed with a raised whip. Then a fox-terrier resumed his chase of squirrels between the planted shade-trees, and Peshawur became normal, shimmering in light and heat reflected from the “Hills.”

(The P.W.D. man, who would have giggled if a general mentioned him by name, walked because no conveyance could be hired. Judgment was in the wind.)

On the dog-cart's high front seat, staring straight ahead of him between the horse's ears, King listened. The general did nearly all the talking.

“The North's the danger.”

King grunted with the lids half-lowered over full dark eyes. He did not look especially handsome in that attitude. Some men swear he looks like a Roman, and others liken him to a gargoyle, all of them choosing to ignore the smile that can transform his whole face instantly.

“We're denuding India of troops--not keeping back more than a mere handful to hold the tribes in check.”

King nodded. There has never been peace along the northwest border. It did not need vision to foresee trouble from that quarter. In fact it must have been partly on the strength of some of King's reports that the general was planning now.

“That was a very small handful of Sikhs you named as likely to give trouble. Did you do that job thoroughly?”

King grunted.

“Well--Delhi's chock-full of spies, all listening to stories made in Germany for them to take back to the 'Hills' with 'em. The tribes'll know presently how many men we're sending oversea. There've been rumors about Khinjan by the hundred lately. They're cooking something. Can you imagine 'em keeping quiet now?”

“That depends, sir. Yes, I can imagine it.”

The general laughed. “That's why I sent for you. I need a man with imagination! There's a woman you've got to work with on this occasion who can imagine a shade or two too much. What's worse, she's ambitious. So I chose you to work with her.”

King's lips stiffened under his mustache, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled into crow's-feet to correspond. Eyes are never coal-black, of course, but his looked it at that minute.

“You know we've sent men to Khinjan who are said to have entered the Caves. Not one of 'em has ever returned.”

King frowned.

“She claims she can enter the Caves and come out again at pleasure. She has offered to do it, and I have accepted.”

It would not have been polite to look incredulous, so King's expression changed to one of intense interest a little overdone, as the general did not fail to notice.

“If she hadn't given proof of devotion and ability, I'd have turned her down. But she has. Only the other day she uncovered a plot in Delhi--about a million dynamite bombs in a ruined temple in charge of a German agent for use by mutineers supposed to be ready to rise against us. Fact! Can you guess who she is?”

“Not Yasmini?” King hazarded, and the general nodded and flicked his whip. The horse mistook it for a signal, and it was two minutes before the speed was reduced to mere recklessness.

The helmet-strap mark, printed indelibly on King's jaw and cheek by the Indian sun, tightened and grew whiter--as the general noted out of the corner of his eye.

“Know her?”

“Know of her, of course, sir. Everybody does. Never met her to my knowledge.”

“Um-m-m! Whose fault was that? Somebody ought to have seen to that. Go to Delhi now and meet her. I'll send her a wire to say you're coming. She knows I've chosen you. She tried to insist on full discretion, but I overruled her. Between us two, she'll have discretion once she gets beyond Jamrud. The 'Hills' are full of our spies, of course, but none of 'em dare try Khinjan Caves any more and you'll be the only check we shall have on her.”

King's tongue licked his lips, and his eyes wrinkled. The general's voice became the least shade more authoritative.

“When you see her, get a pass from her that'll take you into Khinjan Caves! Ask her for it! For the sake of appearances I'll gazette you Seconded to the Khyber Rifles. For the sake of success, get a pass from her!”

“Very well, sir.”

“You've a brother in the Khyber Rifles, haven't you? Was it you or your brother who visited Khinjan once and sent in a report?”

“I did, sir.”

He spoke without pride. Even the brigade of British-Indian cavalry that went to Khinjan on the strength of his report and leveled its defenses with the ground, had not been able to find the famous Caves. Yet the Caves themselves are a by-word.

“There's talk of a jihad (holy war). There's worse than that! When you went to Khinjan, what was your chief object?”

“To find the source of the everlasting rumors about the so-called 'Heart of the Hills,' sir.”

“Yes, yes. I remember. I read your report. You didn't find anything, did you? Well. The story is now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has come to life. So the spies say.”

King whistled softly.

“There's no guessing what it means,” said the general. “Go and find out. Go and work with Yasmini. I shall have enough men here to attack instantly and smash any small force as soon as it begins to gather anywhere near the border. But Khinjan is another story. We can't prove anything, but the spies keep bringing in rumors of ten thousand men in Khinjan Caves, and of another large lashkar not far away from Khinjan. There must be no jihad, King! India is all but defenseless! We can tackle sporadic raids. We can even handle an ordinary raid in force. But this story about a 'Heart of the Hills' coming to life may presage unity of action and a holy war such as the world has not seen. Go up there and stop it if you can. At least, let me know the facts.”

King grunted. To stop a holy war single-handed would be rather like stopping the wind--possibly easy enough, if one knew the way. Yet he knew no general would throw away a man like himself on a useless venture. He began to look happy.

The general clucked to the mare and the big beast sank an inch between the shafts. The sais behind set his feet against the drop-board and clung with both hands to the seat. One wheel ceased to touch the gravel as they whirled along a semicircular drive. Suddenly the mare drew up on her haunches, under the porch of a pretentious residence. Sentries saluted. The sais swung down. In less than sixty seconds King was following the general through a wide entrance into a crowded hall. The instant the general's fat figure darkened the doorway twenty men of higher rank than King, native and English, rose from lined-up chairs and pressed forward.

“Sorry--have to keep you all waiting--busy!” He waved them aside with a little apologetic gesture. “Come in here, King.”

King followed him through a door that slammed tight behind them on rubber jambs.

“Sit down!”

The general unlocked a steel drawer and began to rummage among the papers in it. In a minute he produced a package, bound in rubber bands, with a faded photograph face-upward on the top.

“That's the woman! How d'you like the look of her?”

King took the package and for a minute stared hard at the likeness of a woman whose fame has traveled up and down India, until her witchery has become a proverb. She was dressed as a dancing woman, yet very few dancing women could afford to be dressed as she was.

King's service uses whom it may, and he had met and talked with many dancing women in the course of duty; but as he stared at Yasmini's likeness he did not think he had ever met one who so measured up to rumor. The nautch he knew for a delusion. Yet--!

The general watched his face with eyes that missed nothing.

“Remember--I said work with her!”

King looked up and nodded.

“They say she's three parts Russian,” said the general. “To my own knowledge she speaks Russian like a native, and about twenty other tongues as well, including English. She speaks English as well as you or I. She was the girl-widow of a rascally Hill-rajah. There's a story I've heard, to the effect that Russia arranged her marriage in the day when India was Russia's objective--and that's how long ago?--seems like weeks, not years! I've heard she loved her rajah. And I've heard she didn't! There's another story that she poisoned him. I know she got away with his money--and that's proof enough of brains! Some say she's a she-devil. I think that's an exaggeration, but bear in mind she's dangerous!”

King grinned. A man who trusts Eastern women over readily does not rise far in the Secret Service.

“If you've got nous enough to keep on her soft side and use her--not let her use you--you can keep the 'Hills' quiet and the Khyber safe! If you can contrive that--now--in this pinch--there's no limit for you! Commander-in-chief shall be your job before you're sixty!”

King pocketed the photograph and papers. “I'm well enough content, sir, as things are,” he said quietly.

“Well, remember she's ambitious, even if you're not! I'm not preaching ambition, mind--I'm warning you! Ambition's bad! Study those papers on your way down to Delhi and see that I get them back.”

The general paced once across the room and once back again, with hands behind him. Then he stopped in front of King.

“No man in India has a stiffer task than you have now! It may encourage you to know that I realize that! She's the key to the puzzle, and she happens to be in Delhi. Go to Delhi, then. A jihad launched from the 'Hills' would mean anarchy in the plains. That would entail sending back from France an army that can't be spared. There must be no jihad, King!--There must--not--be--one! Keep that in your head!”

“What arrangements have been made with her, sir?”

“Practically none! She's watching the spies in Delhi, but they're likely to break for the 'Hills' any minute. Then they'll be arrested. When that happens the fate of India may be in your hands and hers! Get out of my way now, until tiffin-time!”

In a way that some men never learn, King proceeded to efface himself entirely among the crowd in the hall, contriving to say nothing of any account to anybody until the great gong boomed and the general led them all in to his long dining table. Yet he did not look furtive or secretive. Nobody noticed him, and he noticed everybody. There is nothing whatever secretive about that.

The fare was plain, and the meal a perfunctory affair. The general and his guests were there for other reason than to eat food, and only the man who happened to seat himself next to King--a major by the name of Hyde--spoke to him at all.

“Why aren't you with your regiment?” he asked.

“Because the general asked me to lunch, sir!”

“I suppose you've been pestering him for an appointment!”

King, with his mouth full of curry did not answer, but his eyes smiled.

“It's astonishing to me,” said the major, “that a captain should leave his company when war has begun! When I was captain I'd have been driven out of the service if I'd asked for leave of absence at such a time!”

King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.

“Are you bound for the front, sir?” he asked presently. But Hyde did not answer. They finished the meal in silence.

After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes. Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station; and it did not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of the carriage was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at lunch. In fact, he smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated. Neither of them spoke. At the station Hyde lost his temper openly, and King left him abusing an unhappy native servant.

The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and writhed and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in the midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth and all four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British sergeant to force him into a loose-box. At the back of the same platform the little dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched their flanks in line, jingling chains and stamping when the flies bit home.

Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and timid ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already crowded to the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down for the places supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating servants hurried after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage, swearing at the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general himself had telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.

There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India in essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India as she is more often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being of the Khyber Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.

Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--must have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water, to reach the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.

He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been equally useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed, and it was in no mind to try. Without the least apparent effort he arrived--and there is no other word that quite describes it--he arrived, through the densest part of the sweating throng of humans, at the door of the luggage office.

There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially that he melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk. But not at once. Even the sun needs seconds to melt ice.

“Am I God?” the babu wailed. “Can I do all the-e things in all the-e world at once if not sooner?”

King's smile began to get its work in. The man ceased gesticulating to wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress. He actually smiled back. Who was he, that he should suspect new outrage or guess he was about to be used in a game he did not understand? He would have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the merest suggestion of such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and lapsed into his own tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle King. A Northerner who did not seem to understand Punjabi almost cost King his balance as he thrust broad shoulders between him and the bunnia.

The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape; but King, the person most entitled to be angry, actually apologized! That being a miracle, the babu forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's one trunk was checked through to Delhi.

“Delhi is right, sahib?” he asked, to make doubly sure; for in India where the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market-place, men will pay over-measure for a smile.

“Yes. Delhi is right. Thank you, babuji.”

He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's impatience; but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making an unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end. He who had forced his way to the front with so much violence and haste now burst back again toward the train like a football forward tearing through the thick of his opponents. He scattered a swath a yard wide, for he had shoulders like a bull. King saw him leap into third-class carriage. He saw, too, that he was not wanted in the carriage. There was a storm of protest from tight-packed native passengers, but the fellow had his way.

The swath through the crowd closed up like water in a ship's wake, but it opened again for King. He smiled so humorously that the angry jostled ones smiled too and were appeased, forgetting haste and bruises and indignity merely because understanding looked at them through merry eyes. All crowds are that way, but an Indian crowd more so than all.

Taking his time, and falling foul of nobody, King marked down a native constable--hot and unhappy, leaning with his back against the train. He touched him on the shoulder and the fellow jumped.

“Nay, sahib! I am only constabeel--I know nothing--I can do nothing! The teerain goes when it goes, and then perhaps we will beat these people from the platform and make room again! But there is no authority--no law any more--they are all gone mad!”

King wrote on a pad, tore off a sheet, folded it and gave it to him.

“That is for the Superintendent of Police at the office. Carriage number 1181, eleven doors from here--the one with the shut door and a big Hillman inside sitting three places from the door facing the engine. Get the Hillman! No, there is only one Hillman in the carriage. No, the others are not his friends; they will not help him. He will fight, but he has no friends in that carriage.”

The “constabeel” obeyed, not very cheerfully. King stood to watch him with a foot on the step of a first-class coach. Another constable passed him, elbowing a snail's progress between the train and the crowd. He seized the man's arm.

“Go and help that man!” he ordered. “Hurry!”

Then he climbed into the carriage and leaned from the window. He grinned as he saw both constables pounce on a third-class carriage door and, with the yell of good huntsmen who have viewed, seize the protesting Northerner by the leg and begin to drag him forth. There was a fight, that lasted three minutes, in the course of which a long knife flashed. But there were plenty to help take the knife away, and the Hillman stood handcuffed and sullen at last, while one of his captors bound a cut forearm. Then they dragged him away; but not before he had seen King at the window, and had lipped a silent threat.

“I believe you, my son!” King chuckled, half aloud. “I surely believe you! I'll watch! Ham dekta hai!”

“Why was that man arrested?” asked an acid voice behind him; and without troubling to turn his head, he knew that Major Hyde was to be his carriage mate again. To be vindictive, on duty or off it, is foolishness; but to let opportunity slip by one is a crime. He looked glad, not sorry, as he faced about--pleased, not disappointed--like a man on a desert island who has found a tool.

“Why was that man arrested?” the major asked again.

“I ordered it,” said King.

“So I imagined. I asked you why.”

King stared at him and then turned to watch the prisoner being dragged away; he was fighting again, striking at his captors' heads with handcuffed wrists.

“Does he look innocent?” asked King.

“Is that your answer?” asked the major. Balked ambition is an ugly horse to ride. He had tried for a command but had been shelved.

“I have sufficient authority,” said King, unruffled. He spoke as if he were thinking of something entirely different. His eyes were as if they saw the major from a very long way off and rather approved of him on the whole.

“Show me your authority, please!”

King dived into an inner pocket and produced a card that had about ten words written on its face, above a general's signature. Hyde read it and passed it back.

“So you're one of those, are you!” he said in a tone of voice that would start a fight in some parts of the world and in some services. But King nodded cheerfully, and that annoyed the major more than ever; he snorted, closed his mouth with a snap and turned to rearrange the sheet and pillow on his berth.

Then the train pulled out, amid a din of voices from the left-behind that nearly drowned the panting of overloaded engine. There was a roar of joy from the two coaches full of soldiers in the rear--a shriek from a woman who had missed the train--a babel of farewells tossed back and forth between the platform and the third-class carriages--and Peshawur fell away behind.

King settled down on his side of the compartment, after a struggle with the thermantidote that refused to work. There was heat enough below the roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere became as turgid as the mental after a little while.

Hyde all but stripped himself and drew on striped pajamas. King was content to lie in shirt-sleeves on the other berth, with knees raised, so that Hyde could not overlook the general's papers. At his ease he studied them one by one, memorizing a string of names, with details as to their owners' antecedents and probable present whereabouts. There were several photographs in the packet, and he studied them very carefully indeed.

But much most carefully of all he examined Yasmini's portrait, returning to it again and again. He reached the conclusion in the end that when it was taken she had been cunningly disguised.

“This was intended for purpose of identification at a given time and place,” he told himself.

“Were you muttering at me?” asked Hyde.

“No, sir.”

“It looked extremely like it!”

“My mistake, sir. Nothing of the sort intended.”

“H-rrrrr-ummmmmph!”

Hyde turned an indignant back on him, and King studied the back as if he found it interesting. On the whole he looked sympathetic, so it was as well that Hyde did not look around. Balked ambition as a rule loathes sympathy.

After many prickly-hot, interminable, jolting hours the train drew up at Rawal-Pindi station. Instantly King was on his feet with his tunic on, and he was out on the blazing hot platform before the train's motion had quite ceased.

He began to walk up and down, not elbowing but percolating through the crowd, missing nothing worth noticing in all the hot kaleidoscope and seeming to find new amusement at every turn. It was not in the least astonishing that a well-dressed native should address him presently, for he looked genial enough to be asked to hold a baby. King himself did not seem surprised at all. Far from it; he looked pleased.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the man in glib babu English. “I am seeking Captain King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant. Can you kindlee tell me, sir, where I could find Captain King sahib?”

“Certainly,” King answered him. He looked glad to be of help. “Are you traveling on this train?”

The question sounded like politeness welling from the lips of unsuspicion.

“Yes, sir. I am traveling from this place where I have spent a few days, to Bombay, where my business is.

“How did you know King sahib is on the train?” King asked him, smiling so genially that even the police could not have charged him with more than curiosity.

“By telegram, sir. My brother had the misfortune to miss Captain King sahib at Peshawur and therefore sent a telegram to me asking me to do what I can at an interview.”

“I see,” said King. “I see.” And judging by the sparkle in his eyes as he looked away he could see a lot. But the native could not see his eyes at that instant, although he tried to.

He looked back at the train, giving the man a good chance to study his face in profile.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” said the native oilily. “You are most kind! I am your humble servant, sir!”

King nodded good-by to him, his dark eyes in the shadow of the khaki helmet seeming scarcely interested any longer.

“Couldn't you find another berth?” Hyde asked him angrily when he stepped back into the compartment.

“What were you out there looking for?”

King smiled back at him blandly.

“I think there are railway thieves on the train,” he announced without any effort at relevance. He might not have heard the question.

“What makes you think so?”

“Observation, sir.”

“Oh! Then if you've seen thieves, why didn't you have 'em arrested? You were precious free with that authority of yours on Peshawur platform!”

“Perhaps you'd care to take the responsibility, sir? Let me point out one of them.”

Full of grudging curiosity Hyde came to stand by him, and King stepped back just as the train began to move.

“That man, sir--over there--no, beyond him--there!”

Hyde thrust head and shoulders through the window, and a well-dressed native with one foot on the running-board at the back end of the train took a long steady stare at him before jumping in and slamming the door of a third-class carriage.

“Which one?” demanded Hyde impatiently.

“I don't see him now, sir!”

Hyde snorted and returned to his seat in the silence of unspeakable scorn. But presently he opened a suitcase and drew out a repeating pistol which he cocked carefully and stowed beneath his pillow; not at all a contemptible move, because the Indian railway thief is the most resourceful specialist in the world. But King took no overt precautions of any kind.

After more interminable hours night shut down on them, red-hot, black-dark, mesmerically subdivided into seconds by the thump of carriage wheels and lit at intervals by showers of sparks from the gasping engine. The din of Babel rode behind the first-class carriages, for all the natives in the packed third-class talked all together. (In India, when one has spent a fortune on a third-class ticket, one proceeds to enjoy the ride.) The train was a Beast out of Revelation, wallowing in noise.

But after other, hotter hours the talking ceased. Then King, strangely without kicking off his shoes, drew a sheet up over his shoulders. On the opposite berth Hyde covered his head, to keep dust out of his hair, and presently King heard him begin to snore gently. Then, very carefully he adjusted his own position so that his profile lay outlined in the dim light from the gas lamp in the roof. He might almost have been waiting to be shaved.

The stuffiness increased to a degree that is sometimes preached in Christian churches as belonging to a sulphurous sphere beyond the grave. Yet he did not move a muscle. It was long after midnight when his vigil was rewarded by a slight sound at the door. From that instant his eyes were on the watch, under dark of closed lashes; but his even breathing was that of the seventh stage of sleep that knows no dreams.

A click of the door-latch heralded the appearance of a hand. With skill, of the sort that only special training can develop, a man in native dress insinuated himself into the carriage without making another sound of any kind. King's ears are part of the equipment for his exacting business, but he could not hear the door click shut again.

For about five minutes, while the train swayed head-long into Indian darkness, the man stood listening and watching King's face. He stood so near that King recognized him for the one who had accosted him on Rawal-Pindi platform. And he could see the outline of the knife-hilt that the man's fingers clutched underneath his shirt.

“He'll either strike first, so as to kill us both and do the looting afterward--and in that case I think it will be easier to break his neck than his arm--yes, decidedly his neck; it's long and thin;--or--”

His eyes feigned sleep so successfully that the native turned away at last.

“Thought so!” He dared open his eyes a mite wider. “He's pukka--true to type! Rob first and then kill! Rule number one with his sort, run when you've stabbed! Not a bad rule either, from their point of view!”

As he watched, the thief drew the sheet back from Hyde's face, with trained fingers that could have taken spectacles from the victims' nose without his knowledge. Then as fish glide in and out among the reeds without touching them, swift and soft and unseen, his fingers searched Hyde's body. They found nothing. So they dived under the pillow and brought out the pistol and a gold watch.

After that he began to search the clothes that hung on a hook beside Hyde's berth. He brought forth papers and a pocketbook--then money. Money went into one bag--papers and pocketbook into another. And that was evidence enough as well as risk enough. The knife would be due in a minute.

King moved in his sleep, rather noisily, and the movement knocked a book to the floor from the foot of his berth. The noise of that awoke Hyde, and King pretended to begin to wake, yawning and rolling on his back (that being much the safest position an unarmed man can take and much the most awkward for his enemy).

“Thieves!” Hyde yelled at the top of his lungs, groping wildly for his pistol and not finding it.

King sat up and rubbed his eyes. The native drew the knife, and--believing himself in command of the situation--hesitated for one priceless second. He saw his error and darted for the door too late. With a movement unbelievably swift King was there ahead of him; and with another movement not so swift, but much more disconcerting, he threw his sheet as the retiarius used to throw a net in ancient Rome. It wrapped round the native's head and arms, and the two went together to the floor in a twisted stranglehold.

In another half-minute the native was groaning, for King had his knife-wrist in two hands and was bending it backward while he pressed the man's stomach with his knees.

“Get his loot!” he panted between efforts.

The knife fell to the floor, and the thief made a gallant effort to recover it, but King was too strong for him. He seized the knife himself, slipped it in his own bosom and resumed his hold before the native guessed what he was after. Then he kept a tight grip while Hyde knelt to grope for his missing property. The major found both the thief's bags, and held them up.

“I expect that's all,” said King, loosening his grip very gradually. The native noticed--as Hyde did not--that King had begun to seem almost absent-minded; the thief lay quite still, looking up, trying to divine his next intention. Suddenly the brakes went on, but King's grip did not tighten. The train began to scream itself to a standstill at a wayside station, and King (the absent-minded)--very nearly grinned.

“If I weren't in such an infernal hurry to reach Bombay--” Hyde grumbled; and King nearly laughed aloud then, for the thief knew English, and was listening with all his ears, “--may I be damned if I wouldn't get off at this station and wait to see that scoundrel brought to justice!”

The train jerked itself to a standstill, and a man with a lantern began to chant the station's name.

“Damn it!--I'm going to Bombay to act censor. I can't wait--they want me there.”

The instant the train's motion altogether ceased the heat shut in on them as if the lid of Tophet had been slammed. The prickly heat burst out all over Hyde's skin and King's too.

“Almighty God!” gasped Hyde, beginning to fan himself.

There was plenty of excuse for relaxing hold still further, and King made full use of it. A second later he gave a very good pretense of pain in his finger-ends as the thief burst free. The native made a dive at his bosom for the knife, but he frustrated that. Then he made a prodigious effort, just too late, to clutch the man again, and he did succeed in tearing loose a piece of shirt; but the fleeing robber must have wondered, as he bolted into the blacker shadows of the station building, why such an iron-fingered, wide-awake sahib should have made such a truly feeble showing at the end.

“Damn it!--couldn't you hold him? Were you afraid of him, or what?” demanded Hyde, beginning to dress himself. Instead of answering, King leaned out into the lamp-lit gloom, and in a minute he caught sight of a sergeant of native infantry passing down the train. He made a sign that brought the man to him on the run.

“Did you see that runaway?” he asked.

“Ha, sahib. I saw one running. Shall I follow?”

“No. This piece of his shirt will identify him. Take it. Hide it! When a man with a torn shirt, into which that piece fits, makes for the telegraph office after this train has gone on, see that he is allowed to send any telegrams he wants to! Only, have copies of every one of them wired to Captain King, care of the station-master, Delhi. Have you understood?”

“Ha, sahib.”

“Grab him, and lock him up tight afterward--but not until he has sent his telegrams!'

“Atcha, sahib.”

“Make yourself scarce, then!”

Major Hyde was dressed, having performed that military evolution in something less than record time.

“Who was that you were talking to?” he demanded. But King continued to look out the door.

Hyde came and tapped on his shoulder impatiently, but King did not seem to understand until the native sergeant had quite vanished into the shadows.

“Let me pass, will you!” Hyde demanded. “I'll have that thief caught if the train has to wait a week while they do it!”

He pushed past, but he was scarcely on the step when the station-master blew his whistle, and his colored minion waved a lantern back and forth. The engine shrieked forthwith of death and torment; carriage doors slammed shut in staccato series; the heat relaxed as the engine moved--loosened--let go--lifted at last, and a trainload of hot passengers sighed thanks to an unresponsive sky as the train gained speed and wind crept in through the thermantidotes.

Only through the broken thermantidote in King's compartment no wet air came. Hyde knelt on King's berth and wrestled with it like a caged animal, but with no result except that the sweat poured out all over him and he was more uncomfortable than before.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded at last, sitting on King's berth. His head swam. He had to wait a few seconds before he could step across to his own side.

“Only a knife,” said King. He was standing under the dim gas lamp that helped make the darkness more unbearable.

“Not that robber's knife? Did he drop it?”

“It's my knife,” said King.

“Strange time to stand staring at it, if it's yours! Didn't you ever see it before?”

King stowed the knife away in his bosom, and the major crossed to his own side.

“I'm thinking I'll know it again, at all events!” King answered, sitting down. “Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

Within ten minutes Hyde was asleep, snoring prodigiously. Then King pulled out the knife again and studied it for half an hour. The blade was of bronze, with an edge hammered to the keenness of a razor. The hilt was of nearly pure gold, in the form of a woman dancing.

The whole thing was so exquisitely wrought that age had only softened the lines, without in the least impairing them. It looked like one of those Grecian toys with which Roman women of Nero's day stabbed their lovers. But that was not why he began to whistle very softly to himself.

Presently he drew out the general's package of papers, with the photograph on the top. He stood up, to hold both knife and papers close to the light in the roof.

It needed no great stretch of imagination to suggest a likeness between the woman of the photograph and the other, of the golden knife-hilt. And nobody, looking at him then, would have dared suggest he lacked imagination.

If the knife had not been so ancient they might have been portraits of the same woman, in the same disguise, taken at the same time.

“She knew I had been chosen to work with her. The general sent her word that I am coming,” he muttered to himself. “Man number one had a try for me, but I had him pinched too soon. There must have been a spy watching at Peshawur, who wired to Rawal-Pindi for this man to jump the train and go on with the job. She must have had him planted at Rawal-Pindi in case of accidents. She seems thorough! Why should she give the man a knife with her own portrait on it? Is she queen of a secret society? Well--we shall see!”

He sat down on his berth again and sighed, not discontentedly. Then he lit one of his great black cigars and blew rings for five or six minutes. Then he lay back with his head on the pillow, and before five minutes more had gone he was asleep, with the cold cigar still clutched between his fingers.

He looked as interesting in his sleep as when awake. His mobile face in repose looked Roman, for the sun had tanned his skin and his nose was aquiline. In museums, where sculptured heads of Roman generals and emperors stand around the wall on pedestals, it would not be difficult to pick several that bore more than a faint resemblance to him. He had breadth and depth of forehead and a jowl that lent itself to smiles as well as sternness, and a throat that expressed manly determination in every molded line.

He slept like a boy until dawn; and he and Hyde had scarcely exchanged another dozen words when the train screamed next day into Delhi station. Then he saluted stiffly and was gone.

“Young jackanapes!” Hyde muttered after him. “Lazy young devil! He ought to be with his regiment, marching and setting a good example to his men! We'll have our work cut out to win this war, if there are many of his stamp! And I'm afraid there are--I'm afraid so--far too many of 'em! Pity! Such a pity! If the right men were at the top the youngsters at the foot of the ladder would mind their P's and Q's. As it is, I'm afraid we shall get beaten in this show. Dear, oh, dear!”

Being what he was, and consistent before all things, Major Hyde drew out his writing materials there and then and wrote a report against Athelstan King, which he signed, addressed to headquarters and mailed at the first opportunity. There some future historian may find it and draw from it unkind deductions on the morale of the British army.

     The only things which can not be explained are facts.  So,
     use 'em. A riddle is proof there is a key to it.  Nor is it
     a riddle when you've got the key. Life is as simple as all
     that.--Cocker

Delhi boasts a round half-dozen railway stations, all of them designed with regard to war, so that to King there was nothing unexpected in the fact that the train had brought him to an unexpected station. He plunged into its crowd much as a man in the mood might plunge into a whirlpool,--laughing as he plunged, for it was the most intoxicating splurge of color, din and smell that even India, the many-peopled--even Delhi, mother of dynasties--ever had evolved.

The station echoed--reverberated--hummed. A roar went up of human voices, babbling in twenty tongues, and above that rose in differing degrees the ear-splitting shriek of locomotives, the blare of bugles, the neigh of led horses, the bray of mules, the jingle of gun-chains and the thundering cadence of drilled feet.

At one minute the whole building shook to the thunder of a grinning regiment; an instant later it clattered to the wrought-steel hammer of a thousand hoofs, as led troop-horses danced into formation to invade the waiting trucks. Loaded trucks banged into one another and thunderclapped their way into the sidings. And soldiers of nearly every Indian military caste stood about everywhere, in what was picturesque confusion to the uninitiated, yet like the letters of an index to a man who knew. And King knew. Down the back of each platform Tommy Atkins stood in long straight lines, talking or munching great sandwiches or smoking.

The heat smelt and felt of another world. The din was from the same sphere. Yet everywhere was hope and geniality and by-your-leave as if weddings were in the wind and not the overture to death.

Threading his way in and out among the motley swarm with a great black cheroot between his teeth and sweat running into his eyes from his helmet-band, Athelstan King strode at ease--at home--intent--amused--awake--and almost awfully happy. He was not in the least less happy because perfectly aware that a native was following him at a distance, although he did wonder how the native had contrived to pass within the lines.

The general at Peshawur had compressed about a ton of miscellaneous information into fifteen hurried minutes, but mostly he had given him leave and orders to inform himself; so the fun was under way of winning exact knowledge in spite of officers, not one of whom would not have grown instantly suspicions at the first asked question. At the end of fifteen minutes there was not a glib staff-officer there who could have deceived him as to the numbers and destination of the force entraining.

“Kerachi!” he told himself, chewing the butt of his cigar and keeping well ahead of the shadowing native. Always keep a “shadow” moving until you're ready to deal with him is one of Cocker's very soundest rules.

“Turkey hasn't taken a hand yet--the general said so. No holy war yet. These'll be held in readiness to cross to Basra in case the Turks begin. While they wait for that at Kerachi the tribes won't dare begin anything. One or two spies are sure to break North and tell them what this force is for--but the tribes won't believe. They'll wait until the force has moved to Basra before they take chances. Good! That means no especial hurry for me!”

He did not have to return salutes, because he did not look for them. Very few people noticed him at all, although he was recognized once or twice by former messmates, and one officer stopped him with an out-stretched hand.

“Shake hands, you old tramp! Where are you bound for next? Tibet by any chance--or is it Samarkand this time?”

“Oh, hullo, Carmichel!” he answered, beaming instant good-fellowship. “Where are you bound for?” And the other did not notice that his own question had not been answered.

“Bombay! Bombay--Marseilles--Brussels--Berlin!”

“Wish you luck!” laughed King, passing on. Every living man there, with the exception of a few staff-officers, believed himself en route for Europe; their faces said as much. Yet King took another look at the piles of stores and at the kits the men carried.

“Who'd take all that stuff to Europe, where they make it?” he reflected. “And what 'u'd they use camel harness for in France?”

At his leisure--in his own way, that was devious and like a string of miracles--he filtered toward the telegraph office. The native who had followed him all this time drew closer, but he did not let himself be troubled by that.

He whispered proof of his identity to the telegraph clerk, who was a Royal Engineer, new to that job that morning, and a sealed telegram was handed to him at once. The “shadow” came very close indeed, presumably to try and read over his shoulder from behind, but he side-stepped into a corner and read the telegram with his back to the wall.

It was in English, no doubt to escape suspicion; and because it was war-time, and the censorship had closed on India like a throttling string, it was not in code. So the wording, all things considered, had to be ingenious, for the Mirza Ali, of the Fort, Bombay, to whom it was addressed, could scarcely be expected to read more than between the lines. The lines had to be there to read between.

“Cattle intended for slaughter,” it ran, “despatched Bombay on Fourteen down. Meet train. Will be inspected en route, but should be dealt with carefully, on arrival. Cattle inclined to stampede owing to bad scare received to North of Delhi. Take all precautions and notify Abdul.” It was signed “Suliman.”

“Good!” he chuckled. “Let's hope we get Abdul too. I wonder who he is!”

Still uninterested in the man who shadowed him, he walked back to the office window and wrote two telegrams; one to Bombay, ordering the arrest of Ali Mirza of the Fort, with an urgent admonition to discover who his man Abdul might be, and to seize him as soon as found; the other to the station in the north, insisting on close confinement for Suliman.

“Don't let him out on any terms at all!” he wired.

That being all the urgent business, he turned leisurely to face his shadow, and the native met his eyes with the engaging frankness of an old friend, coming forward with outstretched hand. They did not shake hands, for King knew better than to fall into the first trap offered him. But the man made a signal with his fingers that is known to not more than a dozen men in all the world, and that changed the situation altogether.

“Walk with me,” said King, and the man fell into stride beside him.

He was a Rangar,--which is to say a Rajput who, or whose ancestors had turned Muhammadan. Like many Rajputs he was not a big man, but he looked fit and wiry; his head scarcely came above the level of King's chin, although his turban distracted attention from the fact. The turban was of silk and unusually large.

The whitest of well-kept teeth, gleaming regularly under a little black waxed mustache betrayed no trace of betel-nut or other nastiness, and neither his fine features nor his eyes suggested vice of the sort that often undermines the character of Rajput youth.

On second thoughts, and at the next opportunity to see them, King was not so sure that the eyes were brown, and he changed his opinion about their color a dozen times within the hour. Once he would even have sworn they were green.

The man was well-to-do, for his turban was of costly silk, and he was clad in expensive jodpur riding breeches and spurred black riding boots, all perfectly immaculate. The breeches, baggy above and tight, below, suggested the clean lines of cat-like agility and strength.

The upper part of his costume was semi-European. He was a regular Rangar dandy, of the type that can be seen playing polo almost any day at Mount Abu--that gets into mischief with a grace due to practise and heredity--but that does not manage its estates too well, as a rule, nor pay its debts in a hurry.

“My name is Rewa Gunga,” he said in a low voice, looking up sidewise at King a shade too guilelessly. Between Cape Comorin and the Northern Ice guile is normal, and its absence makes the wise suspicious.

“I am Captain King.”

“I have a message for you.”

“From whom?”

“From her!” said the Rangar, and without exactly knowing why, or being pleased with himself, King felt excited.

They were walking toward the station exit. King had a trunk check in his hand, but returned it to pocket, not proposing just yet to let this Rangar over-hear instructions regarding the trunk's destination; he was too good-looking and too overbrimming with personal charm to be trusted thus early in the game. Besides, there was that captured knife, that hinted at lies and treachery. Secret signs as well as loot have been stolen before now.

“I'd like to walk through the streets and see the crowd.”

He smiled as he said that, knowing well that the average young Rajput of good birth would rather fight a tiger with cold steel than walk a mile or two. He drew fire at once.

“Why walk, King sahib? Are we animals? There is a carriage waiting--her carriage--and a coachman whose ears were born dead. We might be overheard in the street. Are you and I children, tossing stones into a pool to watch the rings widen!”

“Lead on, then,” answered King.

Outside the station was a luxuriously modern victoria, with C springs and rubber tires, with horses that would have done credit to a viceroy. The Rangar motioned King to get in first, and the moment they were both seated the Rajput coachman set the horses to going like the wind. Rewa Gunga opened a jeweled cigarette case.

“Will you have one?” he asked with the air of royalty entertaining a blood-equal.

King accepted a cigarette for politeness' sake and took occasion to admire the man's slender wrist, that was doubtless hard and strong as woven steel, but was not much more than half the thickness of his own.

The Rajputs as a race are proud of their wrists and hands. Their swords are made with a hilt so small that none save a Rajput of the blood could possibly use one; yet there is no race in all warring India, nor any in the world, that bears a finer record for hard fighting and sheer derring-do. One of the questions that occurred to King that minute was why this well-bred youngster whose age he guessed at twenty-two or so had not turned his attention to the army.

“My height!”

The man had read his thoughts!

“Not quite tall enough. Besides--you are a soldier, are you not? And do you fight?”

He nodded toward a dozen water-buffaloes, that slouched along the street with wet goatskin mussuks slung on their blue flanks.

“They can fight,” he said smiling. “So can any other fool!” Then, after a minute of rather strained silence: “My message is from her.”

“From Yasmini?”

“Who else?”

King accepted the rebuke with a little inclination of the head. He spoke as little as possible, because he was puzzled. He had become conscious of a puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes--of a subtle wonderment that might be intentional flattery (for Art and the East are one). Whenever the East is doubtful, and recognizes doubt, it is as dangerous as a hillside in the rains, and it only added to his problem if the Rangar found in him something inexplicable. The West can only get the better of the East when the East is too cock-sure.

“She has jolly well gone North!” said the Rangar suddenly, and King shut his teeth with a snap. He sat bolt upright, and the Rangar allowed himself to look amused.

“When? Why?”

“She was too jolly well excited to wait, sahib! She is of the North, you know. She loves the North, and the men of the 'Hills'; and she knows them because she loves them. There came a tar (telegram) from Peshawur, from a general, to say King sahib comes to Delhi; but already she had completed all arrangements here. She was in a great stew, I can assure you. Finally she said, 'Why should I wait?' Nobody could answer her.”

He spoke English well enough. Few educated foreign gentlemen could have spoken it better, although there was the tendency to use slang that well-bred natives insist on picking up from British officers; and as he went on, here and there the native idiom crept through, translated. King said nothing, but listened and watched, puzzled more than he would have cared to admit by the look in the Rangar's eyes. It was not suspicion--nor respect. Yet there was a suggestion of both.

“At last she said, 'It is well; I will not wait! I know of this sahib. He is a man whose feet stand under him and he will not tread my growing flowers into garbage! He will be clever enough to pick up the end of the thread that I shall leave behind and follow it and me! He is a true hound, with a nose that reads the wind, or the general sahib never would have sent him!' So she left me behind, sahib, to--to present to you the end of the thread of which she spoke.”

King tossed away the stump of the cigarette and rolled his tongue round the butt of a fresh cheroot. The word “hound” is not necessarily a compliment in any of a thousand Eastern tongues and gains little by translation. It might have been a slip, but the East takes advantage of its own slips as well as of other peoples' unless watched.

The carriage swayed at high speed round three sharp corners in succession before the Rangar spoke again.

“She has often heard of you,” he said then. That was not unlikely, but not necessarily true either. If it were true, it did not help to account for the puzzled look in the Rangar's eyes, that increased rather than diminished.

“I've heard of her,” said King.

“Of course! Who has not? She has desired to meet you, sahib, ever since she was told you are the best man in your service.”

King grunted, thinking of the knife beneath his shirt.

“She is very glad that you and she are on the same errand.” He leaned forward for the sake of emphasis and laid a finger on King's hand. It was a delicate, dainty finger with an almond nail. “She is very glad. She is far more glad than you imagine, or than you would believe. King sahib, she is all bucked up about it! Listen--her web is wide! Her agents are here--there--everywhere, and she is obeyed as few kings have ever been! Those agents shall all be held answerable for your life, sahib,--for she has said so! They are one and all your bodyguard, from now forward!”

King inclined his head politely, but the weight of the knife inside his shirt did not encourage credulity. True, it might not be Yasmini's knife, and the Rangar's emphatic assurance might not be an unintentional admission that the man who had tried to use it was Yasmini's man. But when a man has formed the habit of deduction, he deduces as he goes along, and is prone to believe what his instinct tells him.

Again, it was as if the Rangar read a part of his thoughts, if not all of them. It is not difficult to counter that trick, but to do it a man must be on his guard, or the East will know what he has thought and what he is going to think, as many have discovered when it was too late.

“Her men are able to protect anybody's life from any God's number of assassins, whatever may lead you to think the contrary. From now forward your life is in her men's keeping!”

“Very good of her; I'm sure,” King murmured. He was thinking of the general's express order to apply for a “passport” that would take him into Khinjan Caves--mentally cursing the necessity for asking any kind of favor,--and wondering whether to ask this man for it or wait until he should meet Yasmini. He had about made up his mind that to wait would be quite within a strict interpretation of his orders, as well as infinitely more agreeable to himself, when the Rangar answered his thoughts again as if he had spoken them aloud.

“She left this with me, saying I am to give it to you! I am to say that wherever you wear it, between here and Afghanistan, your life shall be safe and you may come and go!”

King stared. The Rangar drew a bracelet from an inner pocket and held it out. It was a wonderful, barbaric thing of pure gold, big enough for a grown man's wrist, and old enough to have been hammered out in the very womb of time. It looked almost like ancient Greek, and it fastened with a hinge and clasp that looked as if they did not belong to it, and might have been made by a not very skillful modern jeweler.

“Won't you wear it?” asked Rewa Gunga, watching him. “It will prove a true talisman! What was the name of the Johnny who had a lamp to rub? Aladdin? It will be better than what he had! He could only command a lot of bogies. This will give you authority over flesh and blood! Take it, sahib!”

So King put it on, letting it slip up his sleeve, out of sight,--with a sensation as the snap closed of putting handcuffs on himself. But the Rangar looked relieved.

“That is your passport, sahib! Show it to a Hill-man whenever you suppose yourself in danger. The Raj might go to pieces, but while Yasmini lives--”

“Her friends will boast about her, I suppose!”

King finished the sentence for him because it is not considered good form for natives to hint at possible dissolution of the Anglo-Indian Government. Everybody knows that the British will not govern India forever, but the British--who know it best of all, and work to that end most fervently--are the only ones encouraged to talk about it.

For a few minutes after that Rewa Gunga held his peace, while the carriage swayed at breakneck speed through the swarming streets. They had to drive slower in the Chandni Chowk, for the ancient Street of the Silversmiths that is now the mart of Delhi was ablaze with crude colors, and was thronged with more people than ever since '57. There were a thousand signs worth studying by a man who could read them.

King, watching and saying nothing, reached the conclusion that Delhi was in hand--excited undoubtedly, more than a bit bewildered, watchful, but in hand. Without exactly knowing how he did it, he grew aware of a certain confidence that underlay the surface fuss. After that the sea of changing patterns and raised voices ceased to have any particular interest for him and he lay back against the cushions to pay stricter attention to his own immediate affairs.

He did not believe for a second the lame explanation Yasmini had left behind. She must have some good reason for wishing to be first up the Khyber, and he was very sorry indeed she had slipped away. It might be only jealousy, yet why should she be jealous? It might be fear--yet why should she be afraid?

It was the next remark of the Rangar's that set him entirely on his guard, and thenceforward whoever could have read his thoughts would have been more than human. Perhaps it is the most dominant characteristic of the British race that it will not defend itself until it must. He had known of that thought-reading trick ever since his ayah (native nurse) taught him to lisp Hindustanee; just as surely he knew that its impudent, repeated use was intended to sap his belief in himself. There is not much to choose between the native impudence that dares intrude on a man's thoughts, and the insolence that understands it, and is rather too proud to care.

“I'll bet you a hundred dibs,” said the Rangar, “that she jolly well didn't fancy your being on the scene ahead of her! I'll bet you she decided to be there first and get control of the situation! Take me? You'd lose if you did! She's slippery, and quick, and like all Women, she's jealous!”

The Rangar's eyes were on his, but King was not to be caught again. It is quite easy to think behind a fence, so to speak, if one gives attention to it.

“She will be busy presently fooling those Afridis,” he continued, waving his cigarette. “She has fooled them always, to the limit of their bally bent. They all believe she is their best friend in the world--oh, dear Yes, you bet they do! And so she is--so she is--but not in the way they think! They believe she plots with them against the Raj! Poor silly devils! Yet Yasmini loves them! They want war--blood--loot! It is all they think about! They are seldom satisfied unless their wrists and elbows are bally well red with other peoples' gore! And while they are picturing the loot, and the slaughter of unbelievers--(as if they believed anything but foolishness themselves!)--Yasmini plays her own game, for amusement and power--a good game--a deep game! You have seen already how India has to ask her aid in the 'Hills'! She loves power, power, power--not for its name, for names are nothing, but to use it. She loves the feel of it! Fighting is not power! Blood-letting is foolishness. If there is any blood spilt it is none of her doing--unless--”

“Unless what?” asked King.

“Oh--sometimes there were fools who interfered. You can not blame her for that.”

“You seem to be a champion of hers! How long have you known her?”'

The Rangar eyed him sharply.

“A long time. She and I played together when we were children. I know her whole history--and that is something nobody else in the world knows but she herself. You see, I am favored. It is because she knows me very well that she chose me to travel North with you, when you start to find her in the 'Hills'!”

King cleared his throat, and the Rangar nodded, looking into his eyes with the engaging confidence of a child who never has been refused anything, in or out of reason. King made no effort to look pleased, so the Rangar drew on his resources.

“I have a letter from her,” he stated blandly.

From a pocket in the carriage cushions he brought out a silver tube, richly carved in the Kashmiri style and closed at either end with a tightly fitting silver cap. King accepted it and drew the cap from one end. A roll of scented paper fell on his lap, and a puff of hot wind combined with a lurch of the carriage springs came near to lose it for him; he snatched it just in time and unrolled it to find a letter written to himself in Urdu, in a beautiful flowing hand.

Urdu is perhaps the politest of written tongues and lends itself most readily to indirectness; but since he did not expect to read a catalogue of exact facts, he was not disappointed.

Translated, the letter ran:

        “To Athelstan King sahib, by the hand of Rewa Gunga.
        Greeting.  The bearer is my well-trusted servant, whom
        I have chosen to be the sahib's guide until Heaven
        shall be propitious and we meet.  He is instructed
        in all that he need know concerning what is now in hand,
        and he will tell by word of mouth such things as ought
        not to be written.  By all means let Rewa Gunga travel
        with you, for he is of royal blood, of the House of
        Ketchwaha and will not fail you.  His honor and mine
        are one.  Praying that the many gods of India may heap
        honors on your honor's head, providing each his proper
        attribute toward entire ability to succeed in all things,
        but especially in the present undertaking,

        “I am Your Excellency's humble servant,
        --Yasmini.”
 

He had barely finished reading it when the coachman took a last corner at a gallop and drew the horses up on their haunches at a door in a high white wall. Rewa Gunga sprang out of the carriage before the horses were quite at a standstill.

“Here we are!” he said, and King, gathering up the letter and the silver tube, noticed that the street curved here so that no other door and no window overlooked this one.

He followed the Rangar, and he was no sooner into the shadow of the door than the coachman lashed the horses and the carriage swung out of view.

“This way,” said the Rangar over his shoulder. “Come!”

     Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
     Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
     Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
     But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
     --Eastern Proverb

It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely possible after the hot glare outside. Dimly King made out Rewa Gunga mounting stairs to the left and followed him. The stairs wound backward and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely any lighter as they ascended, until, when he guessed himself two stories at least above road level, there was a sudden blaze of reflected light and he blinked at more mirrors than he could count. They had been swung on hinges suddenly to throw the light full in his face.

There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing lamps, so cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess which were real and which were not. Rewa Gunga offered no explanation, but stood watching with quiet amusement. He seemed to expect King to take a chance and go forward, but if he did he reckoned without his guest. King stood still.

Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and surprised a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the middle pair of curtains and said “Salaam!” smiling with teeth that were as white as porcelain. All the other curtains parted too, so that the whereabouts of the door might still have been in doubt had she not spoken and so distinguished herself from her reflections. King looked scarcely interested and not at all disturbed.

Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting the little maid aside, and led the way. King followed him into a long room, whose walls were hung with richer silks than any he remembered to have seen. In a great wide window to one side some twenty women began at once to make flute music.

Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud of sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious, scented mist. Through the open window came the splash of a fountain and the chattering of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree drooped near by. It seemed that the long white wall below was that of Yasmini's garden.

“Be welcome!” laughed Rewa Gunga; “I am to do the honors, since she is not here. Be seated, sahib.”

King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains that led into rooms beyond. He turned his back toward the reason for his choice. On a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten feet away lay a knife, that was almost the exact duplicate of the one inside his shirt. Bronze knives of ancient date, with golden handles carved to represent a woman dancing, are rare. The ability to seem not to notice incriminating evidence is rarer still--rarest of all when under the eyes of a native of India, for cats and hawks are dullards by comparison to them. But King saw the knife, yet did not seem to see it.

There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease. In spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and ordinary air to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy on every side--could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him--and began to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he deliberately set himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief weapon.

Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned couch with a grace that the West has not learned yet; but King did not make the mistake of trusting him any better for his easy manners, and his eyes sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned thing on which to rest, that he might save himself by a sort of mental leverage.

Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for the first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back against the silken hangings with arms folded.

“Who is that man?” he asked.

“He? Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage,” said Rewa Gunga, looking vaguely annoyed.

“Why is he here?”

He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue. He knew that Rewa Gunga wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about her, and that if he succumbed to that temptation all his self-control would be cunningly sapped away from him until his secrets, and his very senses, belonged to some one else.

“What is he doing here?” he insisted.

“He? Oh, he does nothing. He waits,” purred the Rangar. “He is to be your body-servant on your journey to the North. He is nothing--nobody at all!--except that he is to be trusted utterly because he loves Yasmini. He is Obedience! A big obedient fool! Let him be!”

“No,” said King. “If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!”

He felt himself winning. Already the spell of the room was lifting, and he no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil across his brain.

“Won't you tell him to come here to me?”

Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings and clasping both hands about his knee. It was as a man might laugh who has been touched in a bout with foils.

“Oh!--Ismail!” he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King stare.

The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered, rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight. He combed his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and caught Rewa Gunga's eye. Then he sprang to his feet.

“Come!” ordered Rewa Gunga.

The man obeyed.

“Did you see?” Rewa Gunga chuckled. “He rose from his place like a buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder! Such men are safe! Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey! Such men think too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!”

The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands knotted into clubs.

“What is thy name?” King asked him.

“Ismail!” he boomed.

“Thou art to be my servant?”

“Aye! So said she. I am her man. I obey!”

“When did she say so?” King asked him blandly, asking unexpected questions being half the art of Secret Service, although the other half is harder to achieve.

The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question. One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in his mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was not so stupid as he chose to seem. His eyes were too hawk-bright to be a stupid man's.

“Before she went away,” he answered at last.

“When did she go away?”

He thought again, then “Yesterday,” he said.

“Why did you wait before you answered?”

The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid there. Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously, King was aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were not interested. The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it indifferently, seeing which King allowed himself to smile.

“Never mind,” he told Ismail. “It is no matter. It is ever well to think twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn. Only the monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so? Thou art a man of many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man! If the heart within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms are strong I shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!”

“Aye!” said the Afridi. “But what are words? She has said I am thy servant, and to hear her is to obey!”

“Then from now thou art my servant?”

“Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!”

“Good!” said King.

“Aye, good for thee! May Allah do more to me if I fail!”

“Then, take me a telegram!” said King.

He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore from a letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures at the top and transposing into cypher as he went along.

“Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I should not follow her at once?”

He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at Peshawur, taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those sleepy, half-closed eyes of his. Then he tore the cypher from the top, struck a match and burned the strip of paper and handed the code telegram to Ismail, directing him carefully to a government office where the cypher signature would be recognized and the telegram given precedence.

Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from Sinai--hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing beard--dignity and all, and King settled down to guard himself against the next attempt on his sovereign self-command.

Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had not seen it before. He got up and reached for it and brought it back, turning it over and over in his hand.

“A strange knife,” he said.

“Yes,--from Khinjan,” said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one wolf eyes another.

“What makes you say it is from Khinjan?”

“She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself! There is another knife that matches it, but that is not here. That bracelet you now wear, sahib, is from Khinjan Caves too! She has the secret of the Caves!”

“I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there,” King answered. “Is the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?”

Rewa Gunga laughed.

“Ask her, sahib! Perhaps she will tell you! Perhaps she will let you see! Who knows? She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--Let her women dance for you a while.”

King nodded. Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little table. A minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa Gunga a woman left the great window place and spirited the knife away.

“May I have a sheet of paper?” he asked, for he knew that another fight for his self-command was due.

Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on a silver tray. He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.

In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across the full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen slipped round and round between his fingers. Yet he contrived to write, and since his one object was to give his brain employment, he wrote down a list of the names he had memorized in the train on the journey from Peshawur, not thinking of a use for the list until he had finished. Then, though, a real use occurred to him.

While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras answer the charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood poised beneath the punkah.

There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke they wafted into rings.

King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts into another channel altogether. He reverted to Delhi railway station.

“The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are going to Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his eye-teeth B.C. several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care not to misbehave UNTIL he's ready. And I suppose our government, being ours and we being us, will let him do it! All of which will take time.--And that again means no trouble in the Hills--probably--until the Turks really do feel ready to begin. They'll preach a holy war just ahead of the date. The tribes will keep quiet because an army at Kerachi might be meant for their benefit. Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi in readiness to move on Basra.

“Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--and Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course. Not a doubt of it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all on the platform in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish interpreters! Not a doubt left!”

“What have you written?” asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again and saved his will for him unbound.

“Read it, won't you?” he laughed. “If you know, take this pen and mark the names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi.”

Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty of the names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.

“Where are the others?” he asked him, after a glance at it.

“In jail, or else over the border.”

“Already?”

The Rangar nodded. “Trust Yasmini! She saw to that jolly well before she left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything more to do!”

King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to look too long into the Rangar's eyes. It was not wise just then to look too long at anything, or to think too long on any one subject.

“Ismail is slow about returning,” said the Rangar.

“I wrote at the foot of the tar,” said King, “that they are to detain him there until the answer comes.”

The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as King did not fail to observe). He knew as well as the Rangar that not many men would have kept their will so unfettered in that room as to be able to give independent orders. He recognized resignation, temporary at least, in the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again to watch from under lowered eyelids. It was like being watched by a cat.

All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music, until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her knees. She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a delirium. Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above the basket lid, and the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was there any string, but as it rose it swayed with sickening monotony.

It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the cobra's hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.

They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out of their range, swift and as supple as they. Instantly then she joined in the dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her. Left and right she swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than a matador avoids the bull and courting a deadlier peril than he--poisonous, two to his one. As she danced she whirled both arms above her head and cried as the were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.

Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room, throwing the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.

Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings. The room grew cooler by unguessed means. Every sense was treacherously wooed. And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the languorous dancers, the snakes pursued the woman!

“Do you do this often?” wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga, turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any very great effort.

Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased. The woman spirited her snakes away. The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all was normal again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except that the seductive smell remained, that was like the early-morning breath of all the different flowers of India.

“If she were here,” said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace of disappointment in his tone--“you would not snatch your eyes away like that! You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend! These--she--that woman--they are but clumsy amateurs! If she were here, to dance with her snakes for you, you would have been jolly well dancing with her, if she had wished it! Perhaps you shall see her dance some day! Ah,--here is Ismail,” he added in an altered tone of voice. He seemed relieved at sight of the Afridi.

Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great savage strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail gave it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than wonder. A mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But in a second he had sweated his excitement down.

“Read that, will you?” he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga. It was not in cypher, but in plain everyday English.

“She has not gone North,” it ran. “She is still in Delhi. Suit your own movements to your plans.”

“Can you explain?” asked King in a level voice. He was watching the Rangar narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom of emotion.

“Explain?” said the Rangar. “Who can explain foolishness? It means that another fat general has made another fat mistake!”

“What makes you so certain she went North?” King asked.

Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped back out of hearing. The giant came and loomed over them like the Spirit of the Lamp of the Arabian Nights.

“Whither went she?” asked the Rangar.

“To the North!” he boomed.

“How knowest thou?”

“I saw her go!”

“When went she?”

“Yesterday, when a telegram came.”

The word “came” was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language he used “yesterday” and “to-morrow” are the same word; such is the East's estimate of time.

“By what route did she go?” asked Rewa Gunga.

“By the terrain from the station.”

“How knowest thou that?”

“I was there, bearing her box of jewels.”

“Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?”

“Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me.”

“For what destination was the tikkut?”

“Peshawur!” said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he loved it.

“Yet”--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at him--“a burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is in Delhi still! Who told thee to answer those questions with those words?”

“She!” the big man answered.

“Yasmini?”

“Aye! May Allah cover her with blessings!”

“Ah!” said King. “You have my leave to depart out of earshot.”

Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.

“Whatever the truth of all this,” he said quietly, “I suppose it means she has done what there was to do in Delhi?”

“Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are, and where no game goes to drink? She follows the sambur!”

“You are positive she has started for the North?”

“Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe! She told me she will go. Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!”

“Are you certain you can find her?”

“Aye, sahib,--in the dark!”

“There's a train leaves for the North to-night,” said King.

The Rangar nodded.

“You'll want a pass up the line. How many servants? Three--four--how many?”

“One,” said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the modesty of that allowance; however he wrote out a pass for Rewa Gunga and one servant and gave it to him.

“Be there on time and see about your own reservation,” he said. “I'll attend to Ismail's pass myself.”

He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote something on the back. Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga had one brought to him. He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed it and beckoned Ismail again.

“Take this to Saunders sahib!” he ordered. “Go first to the telegraph office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where Saunders sahib may be found. Having found him, deliver the letter to him. Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help me to bathe and change my clothes.”

“To hear is to obey!” boomed Ismail, bowing; but his last glance was for Rewa Gunga, and he did not turn to go until he had met the Rangar's eyes.

When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare for the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an aura exuding from him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging frankness of his that disarms so many people.

“Then you'll be on the train to-night?” he asked.

“To hear is to obey! With pleasure, sahib!”

“Then good-by until this evening.”

King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because his head ached. Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could have guessed what an ordeal he had passed through or how near he had been to losing self-command.

But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now, he knew he had all his senses with him, for he “spotted” and admired the lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary, or even the overwary. Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps in one.

“Almost like a pool table,” he reflected. “Pocket 'em at both ends and the middle!”

In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel. And before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he made a few strange purchases. In the hotel lobby he invested in a leather bag with a good lock, in which to put them. Later on Ismail came and proved himself an efficient body-servant.

That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place on the train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains running North were nearly empty, although the platforms were all crowded. As he stood at the carriage door with Ismail near him, a man named Saunders slipped through the crowd and sought him out.

“Arrested 'em all!” he grinned.

“Good.”

“Seen anything of her? I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope. It's peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!”

“No. I'm told she went North yesterday.”

“Not by train, she didn't! It's my business to know that!”

King did not answer; nor did he look surprised. He was watching Rewa Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment at the front end of the train. The Rangar waved to him and he waved back.

“I'd know her in a million!” vowed Saunders. “I can take oath she hasn't gone anywhere by train! Unless she has walked, or taken a carriage, she's in Delhi!”

The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged King's elbow in impatient warning. There was no more sign of Rewa Gunga, who had evidently settled down in his compartment for the night.

“Get my bag out again!” King ordered, and Ismail stared.

“Get out my bag, I said!”

“To hear is to obey!” Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm through the window.

The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began to move.

“You've missed it!” said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic disappointment. The giant was tugging at his beard. “How about your trunk? Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you.”

“No,” said King; “it's still in the baggage room at the other station. I didn't intend to go by this train. Came down here to see another fellow off, that's all! Have a cigar and then let's go together and look those prisoners over!”

   Men boast in the Hills, when they ought to pray;
   For the wind blows lusty, and the blood runs red,
   And Law lies belly upwards for a man to wreak his fancy on it.
   Down in the plains, in the dust of the plains
   Where law is master and a good man ought to boast,
   They all lie belly downwards praying for their Hills again!

The rear lights of the train he had not taken swayed out of Delhi station and King grinned as he wiped the sweat from his face with a dripping handkerchief. Behind him towered the hook-nosed Ismail, resentful of the unexpected. In front of him Saunders eyed the proffered black cheroots suspiciously, accepted one with an air of curiosity and passed the case back. Around them the clatter of the station crowd began to die, and Parsimony in a shabby uniform went round to lower lights.

“Are you sure--”

King's merry eyes looked into Saunders' as if there were no world war really and they two were puppets in a comedy.

“--are you absolutely certain Yasmini is in Delhi?”

“No,” said Saunders. “What I swear to is that she has not left by train. It's my business to know who leaves by train.”

“What can you suggest?” asked King, twisting at his scrubby little mustache. But if he wished to convey the impression of a man at his wits' end, he failed signally.

“I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My information's negative. I know she has not gone by--”

King struck a match and held it out, so the sentence was unfinished; the first few puffs of the astonishing cigar wiped out all memory of the missing word. And then King changed the subject.

“Those men I asked you to arrest--?”

“Nabbed”--puff--“every one of 'em!”--puff--puff--“all under”--puff--puff--“lock and key,--best smoke I ever tasted--where d'you get 'em?”

“Had they been in communication with her?”

Puff--puff--“You bet they had! Where d'you get these things?”

“Not her special men by any chance?”

Puff--“Gad, what smoke!--couldn't say, of course, but”--puff--puff--“shouldn't think so.”

“Well--I'll go along with you if you like, and look them over.”

Both tone and manner gave Saunders credit for the suggestion, and Saunders seemed to like it. There is nothing like following up, in football, war or courtship.

“I see you're a judge of a cigar,” said King, and Saunders purred, all men being fools to some extent, and the only trouble being to demonstrate the fact.

They had started for the station entrance when a nasal voice began intoning, “Cap-teen King sahib--Cap-teen King sahib!” and a telegraph messenger passed them with his book under his arm. King whistled him. A moment later he was tearing open an official urgent telegram and writing a string of figures in pencil across the top. Then he decoded swiftly,

        “Advices are Yasmini was in Delhi as recently as six
        this evening.  Fail to understand your inability to
        get in touch.  Have you tried at her house?  Matters
        in Khyber district much less satisfactory.  Word from
        O-C Khyber Rifles to effect that lashkar is collecting.
        Better sweep up in Delhi and proceed northward as quickly
        as compatible with caution.   L. M. L.”
 

The three letters at the end were the general's coded signature. The wording of the telegram was such that as he read King saw a mental picture of the general's bald red skull and could almost hear him say the “fail to understand.” The three words “much less satisfactory” were a bookful of information. So, as he folded up the telegram, tore the penciled strip of figures from the top and burned it with a match, he was at pains to look pleased.

“Good news?” asked Saunders, blowing smoke through his nose.

“Excellent. Where's my man? Here--you--Ismail!”

The giant came and towered above him.

“You swore she went North!”

“Ha, sahib! To Peshawur she went!”

“Did she start from this station?”

“From where else, sahib?”

But this was too much for Saunders, who stepped forward and thrust in an oar. King on the other hand stepped back a pace so as to watch both faces.

“Then, when did she go?”

“I saw her go!” said Ismail, affronted.

“When? When, confound you! When?”

“Yesterday.”

“I expect he means to-morrow,” said King. With the advantage of looker-on and a very deep experience of Northerners, he had noted that Ismail was lying and that Saunders was growing doubtful, although both men concealed the truth with what was very close to being art.

“I have a telegram here,” he said, “that says she is in Delhi!”

He patted his coat, where the inner pocket bulged.

“Nay, then the tar lies, for I saw her go with these two eyes of mine!”

“It is not wise to lie to me, my friend,” King assured him, so pleasantly that none could doubt he was telling truth.

“If I lie may I eat dirt!” Ismail answered him.

Inches lent the Afridi dignity, but dignity has often been used as a stalking horse for untruth. King nodded, and it was not possible to judge by his expression whether he believed or not.

“Let's make a move,” he said, turning to Saunders. “She seems at any rate to wish it believed she has gone North. I can't stay here indefinitely. If she's here she's on the watch here, and there's no need of me. If she has gone North, then that is where the kites are wheeling! I'll take the early morning train. Where are the prisoners?”

“In the old Mir Khan Palace. We were short of jail room and had to improvise. The horse-stalls there have come in handy more than once before. Shall we take this gharry?”

With Ismail up beside the driver nursing King's bag and looking like a great grim vulture about to eat the horse, they drove back through swarming streets in the direction of the river. King seemed to have lost all interest in crowds. He scarcely even troubled to watch when they were held up at a cross-roads by a marching regiment that tramped as if it were herald of the Last Trump, with bayonets glistening in the street lights. He sat staring ahead in silence, although Saunders made more than one effort to engage him in conversation.

“No!” he said at last suddenly--so that Saunders jumped.

“No what?”

“No need to stay here. I've got what I came for!”

“What was that?” asked Saunders, but King was silent again. Conscious of the unaccustomed weight on his left wrist, he moved his arm so that the sleeve drew and he could see the edge of the great gold bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him in Yasmini's name.

“Know anything of Rewa Gunga?” he asked suddenly again.

“The Rangar?”

“Yes, the Rangar. Yasmini's man.”

“Not much. I've seen him. I've spoken with him, and I've had to stand impudence from him--twice. I've been tipped off more than once to let him alone because he's her man. He does ticklish errands for her, or so they say. He's what you might call 'known to the police' all right.”

They began to approach an age-old palace near the river, and Saunders whispered a pass-word when an armed guard halted them. They were halted again at a gloomy gateway where an officer came out to look them over; by his leave they left the gharry and followed him under the arch until their heels rang on stone paving in a big ill-lighted courtyard surrounded by high walls.

There, after a little talk, they left Ismail squatting beside King's bag, and Saunders led the way through a modern iron door, into what had once been a royal prince's stables.

In gloom that was only thrown into contrast by a wide-spaced row of electric lights, a long line of barred and locked converted horse-stalls ran down one side of a lean-to building. The upper half of each locked door was a grating of steel rods, so that there was some ventilation for the prisoners; but very little light filtered between the bars, and all that King could see of the men within was the whites of their eyes. And they did not look friendly.

He had to pass between them and the light, and they could see more of him than he could of them. At the first cell he raised his left hand and made the gold bracelet on his wrist clink against the steel bars.

A moment later be cursed himself, and felt the bracelet with his fingernail. He had made a deep nick in the soft gold. A second later yet he smiled.

“May God be with thee!” boomed a prisoner's voice in Pashtu.

“Didn't know that fellow was handcuffed,” said Saunders. “Did you hear the ring? They should have been taken off. Leaving his irons on has made him polite, though.”

He passed on, and King followed him, saying nothing. But at the next cell he repeated what he had done at the first, taking better care of the gold but letting his wrist stay longer in the light.

“May God be with thee!” said a voice within.

“Gettin' a shade less arrogant, what?” said Saunders.

“May God be with thee!” said a man in the third stall as King passed.

“They seem to be anxious for your morals!” laughed Saunders, keeping a pace or two ahead to do the honors of the place.

“May God be with thee!” said a fourth man, and King desisted for the present, because Saunders looked as if he were growing inquisitive.

“Where did you arrest them?” he asked when Saunders came to a stand under a light.

“All in one place. At Ali's.”

“Who and what is Ali?”

“Pimp--crimp--procurer--Prussian spy and any other evil thing that takes his fancy! Runs a combination gambling hell and boarding house. Lets 'em run into debt and blackmails 'em. Ali's in the kaiser's pay--that's known! 'Musing thing about it is he keeps a photo of Wilhelm in his pocket and tries to make himself believe the kaiser knows him by name. Suffers from swelled head, which is part of their plan, of course. We'll get him when we want him, but at present he's useful 'as is' for a decoy. Ali was very much upset at the arrest--asked in the name of Heaven--seems to be familiar with God, too, and all the angels!--how he shall collect all the money these men owe him!”

“You wouldn't call these men prosperous, then?”

“Not exactly! Ali is the only spy out of the North who prospers much at present, and even he gets most of his money out of his private business. Why, man, the real Germans we have pounced on are all as poor as church mice. That's another part of the plan, of course, which is sweet in all its workings. They're paid less than driven by threats of exposure to us--comes cheaper, and serves to ginger up the spies! The Germans pay Ali a little, and he traps the Hillmen when they come South--lets 'em gamble--gets 'em into debt--plays on their fear of jail and their ignorance of the Indian Penal Code, which altereth every afternoon--and spends a lot of time telling 'em stories to take back with 'em to the Hills when they can get away. They can get away when they've paid him what they owe. He makes that clear, and of course that's the fly in the amber. Yasmini sends and pays their board and gambling debts, and she's our man, so to speak. When they get back to the 'Hills'--”

“Thanks,” said King, “I know what happens in the 'Hills. Tell me about the Delhi end of it.”

“Well, when the wander-fever grabs 'em again they come down once more from their 'Hills' to drink and gamble,--and first they go to Yasmini's. But she won't let 'em drink at her place. Have to give her credit for that, y'know; her place has never been a stews. Sooner or later they grow tired of virtue, 'specially with so much intrigue goin' on under their noses, and back they all drift to Ali's and tell him tales to tell the Germans--and the round begins again. Yasmini coaxes all their stories out of 'em and primes 'em with a few extra good ones into the bargain. Everybody's fooled--'specially the Germans--and exceptin', of course, Yasmini and the Raj. Nobody ever fooled that woman, nor ever will if my belief goes for anything!”

“Sounds simple!” said King.

“Simple and sordid!” agreed Saunders.

King looked up and down the line of locked doors and then straight into Saunders' eyes in a friendly, yet rather disconcerting way. One could not judge whether he were laughing or just thinking.

“D'you suppose it's as simple as all that?”

“How d'you mean?”

“D'you suppose the Germans aren't in direct touch with the tribes?”

“Why should they be? The simpler the better, I expect, from their point of view; and the cheaper the better, too!”

“Um-m-m!” King rubbed his chin. “On what charge did you get these men?”

“Defense of the Realm--suspicious characters--charge to be entered later.”

“Good! That's simple at all events! Know anything of my man Ismail?”

“Sure! He's one of Yasmini's pets. She bailed him out of Ali's three years ago and he worships her. It was he who broke the leg and ribs of a pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much dog in her reception room! He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis! He's dog, desperado, stalking horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets!”

“Then why d'you suppose she passed him along to me?” asked King.

“Dunno! This is your little mystery, not mine!”

“Glad you appreciate that! Do me a favor, will you?”

“Anything in reason.”

“Get the keys to all these cells--send 'em in here to me by Ismail--and leave me in here alone!”

Saunders whistled and wiped sweat from his glistening face, for in spite of windows open to the courtyard it was hotter than a furnace room.

“Mayn't I have you thrown into a den of tigers?” he asked. “Or a nest of cobras? Or get the fiery furnace ready? You'll find 'em sore--and dangerous! That man at the end with handcuffs on has probably been violent! That 'God be with thee' stuff is habit--they say it with unction before they knife a man!”

“I'll be careful, then,” King chuckled; and it is a fact that few men can argue with him when he laughs quietly in that way. “Send me in the keys, like a good chap.”

So Saunders went, glad enough to get into the outer air. He slammed the great iron door behind him as if he were glad, too, to disassociate himself from King and all foolishness. Like many another first-class man, King sheds friends as a cat sheds fur going under a gate. They grow again and quit again and don't seem to make much difference.

The instant the door slammed King continued down the line with his left wrist held high so that the occupant of each cell in turn could see the bracelet.

“May God be with thee!” came the instant greeting from each cell until down toward the farther end. The occupants of the last six cells were silent.

Numbers had been chalked roughly on the doors. With wetted fingers he rubbed out the chalk marks on the last six doors, and he had scarcely finished doing that when Ismail strode in, slamming the great iron door behind him, jangling a bunch of keys and looking more than ever like somebody out of the Old Testament.

“Open every door except those whose numbers I have rubbed out!” King ordered him.

Ismail proceeded to obey as if that were the least improbable order in all the world. It took him two minutes to select the pass-key and determine how it worked, then the doors flew open one after another in quick succession.

“Come out!” he growled. “Come out!--Come out!” although King had not ordered that.

King went and stood under the center light with his left arm bared. The prisoners, emerging like dead men out of tombs, blinked at the bright light--saw him--then the bracelet--and saluted.

“May God be with thee!” growled each of them.

They stood still then, awaiting fresh developments. It did not seem to occur to any one of them as strange that a British officer in khaki uniform should be sporting Yasmini's talisman; the thing was apparently sufficient explanation in itself.

“Ye all know this?” he asked, holding up his wrist. “Whose is this?”

“Hers!”

The answer was monosyllabic and instant from all thirty throats. “May Allah guard her, sleeping and awake!” added one or two of them.

King lit a cheroot and made mental note of the wisdom of referring to her by pronoun, not by name.

“And I? Who am I?” he asked, since it saves worlds of trouble to have the other side state the case. The Secret Service was not designed for giving information, but discovering it.

“Her messenger! Who else? Thou art he who shall take us to the 'Hills'! She promised!”

“How did she know ye were in this jail?” he asked them, and one of the Hillmen laughed like a jackal, showing yellow eye-teeth. The others cackled in chorus after him.

“Answer that riddle thyself--or else ask her! Who are we? Bats, that can see in the night? Spirits, who can hear through walls? Nay, we be plain men of the mountains!”

“But where were ye when she promised?”

“At Ali's. All of us at Ali's--held for debt. We sent and begged of her. She sent word back by a woman that one of the sirkar's men shall free us and send us home. So we waited, eating shame and little else, at Ali's. At last came a sahib in a great rage, who ordered irons put on our wrists and us marched hither. Only when each was pushed into a separate cell were the irons taken off again. Yet we were patient, for we knew this is part of her cunning, to get us away from Ali without paying him. 'May Ali die of want,' said we, with one voice all together in these cells! And now we be ready! They fed us before we had been in here an hour. Our bellies be full, but we be hungry for the 'Hills'!”

King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his shirt. He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose it was and what it meant. But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle. He thought of Ismail--“Ursus, of Quo Vadis--dog, desperado, stalking-horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets.” It was not time yet to run risks with Ismail. The knife stayed where it was.

“I shall start for the Hills at dawn,” he said slowly, and he watched their eyes gleam at the news. No caged tiger is as wretched as a prisoned Hillman. No freed bird wings more wildly for the open. No moth comes more foolishly back to the flame again. It was easy to take pity on them--probably not one of whom knew pity's meaning.

“Is there any among you who would care to come--?”

“Ah-h-h-h!”

“--at the price of strict obedience?”

“Eh-h-h-h-h!”

It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their willingness.

“We be very, very weary for our Hills!” explained the nearest man.

“Aye!” King answered. “And ye all owe Ali!”

“Uh-h-h-h-h!”

But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then, for the men of the North are easier led than driven--up to a certain point. Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals to begin with.

“Will ye obey me, and him?” he asked, laying his hand on Ismail's shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any other reason.

“Aye! If we fail, Allah do more to us!”

King laughed. “Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here ye have no friends. Here ye must obey. But what when ye come to your 'Hills' at last? Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then? In the 'Hills' will ye still obey me?”

They answered him in chorus. Every man of the thirty, and Ismail into the bargain, threw his right hand in the air.

“Allah witness that we will obey!”

“Ah-h-h!” said King. “I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a time! Many a time!”

The answer to that was unexpected. Ismail knelt--seized his hand--and pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!

In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed the bracelet!

“Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?” asked Ismail. “They will obey thee! Have no fear!”

“Kutch dar nahin hai!” King answered. “There is no such thing as fear!” and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling as Aladdin must have done.

“I have heard you swear,” said King; “be ye true men!”

“Ah-h-h!”

“Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?” he asked, and Ismail laughed.

“No more than the dead have! A shroud apiece! Ali gave them bitterness to eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings! They stand in what they own!”

“Then, come!” ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty savages whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive in front of him, after first seeing them handcuffed. But when he is not pressed for time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are included in King's method.

“Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks,” says the Eastern proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and Saunders is still in Delhi.

Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.

“I want blankets for them--two good ones apiece--and food for a week's journey!” he told the astonished Saunders; and he spoke so decidedly that the other man's questions and argument died stillborn. “While you attend to that for me, I'll be seeing his dibs and making explanations. You look full of news. What do you know?”

“I've telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini has not left Delhi by train!”

King smiled at him.

“If I leave by train d'you suppose she'll hear of it?”

“You bet! Bet your boots! Man alive--if she's interested in you by so much,”--he measured off a fraction of his little finger end--“she knows your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past half-dozen! I crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a disadvantage. She laughed at me. On my honor, my spine tingles yet at the mere thought of it! You've never met her? Never heard her laugh? Never seen her eyes? You've a treat in store for you--and a mauvais quat' d'heure! What'll you bet me she doesn't laugh you out of countenance the very first time you meet? Come now--what'll you bet?”

“Not in the habit,” King answered, glancing at his watch. “Will you see about their rations, please, and the blankets? Thanks!”

They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison guard, who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies. One enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and licked it at intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest of the Hillmen, who memorized every detail that by any stretch of imagination might be expected to improve their own shooting when they should get home again.

King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace where he was admitted through one door after another by sentries who saluted when he had whispered to them. He ended by sitting on the end of the bed of a gray-headed man who owns three titles and whose word is law between the borders of a province. To him he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger one, because the gray-haired man had understanding, and hence sympathy.

“I don't envy you!” said he under the sheet. “There was an American here not long ago--most amusing man I ever talked to. He had the right expression. 'I do not desiderate that pie!' was his way of putting it. Good, don't you think?”

All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he held propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper tight to keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.

“There's the release for your prisoners. Take it--and take them! Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?”

“Orders, sir.”

“Whose?”

“His. He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to work with, not against her. This was obvious.”

“How obvious? It seems bewildering!”

“Well, sir,--first place, she doesn't want to seem to be connected with me. Otherwise she'd have been more in evidence. Second place, she has left Delhi--his telegram and Saunders' men on oath notwithstanding--and she did not mean to leave those men. I imagine her best way to manage Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say she promised them. Third place, if those thirty men had been anything but her particular pet gang they'd either have been over the border or else in jail before now,--just like all the others. For some reason that I don't pretend to understand, she promised 'em more than she has been able to perform. So I provide performance. She gets the credit for it. I get a pretty good personal following at least as far as up the Khyber! Q.E.D., sir!”

The man in bed nodded. “Not bad,” he said.

“Didn't she make some effort to get those men away from Ali's?” King asked him. “I mean, didn't she try to get them dry-nursed by the sirkar in some way?”

“Yes. She did. But it was difficult. In the first place, there didn't seem to be any particular hurry. They were eating Ali's substance. The scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them there, and we wanted that. We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali, because he has too urgent need of money just now. He is being pressed on account of debts of his own, and the pressure is making him take risks. He has been begging for money from the German agents. We know who they are, and we expect to make a big haul within a few hours now.”

“Hope I didn't spoil things by butting in, sir.”

“No. This is different. She wanted them arrested and locked up at a moment when the jails were all crowded. And then she wanted us to put 'em into trucks and railroad 'em up North out of harm's way as she put it, and we happened to be too busy. The railway staff was overworked. Now things are getting straightened out. I felt it keenly not being able to oblige her, but she asked too much at the wrong moment! I would have done it if I could out of gratitude; it was she who tipped off for us most of the really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them escaped. But we've all been working both tides under, King. Take me; this is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No--nothing personal--glad to see you, but please understand. And I'm a leisured dilettante compared to most of the others. She must have known our fix. She shouldn't have asked.”

King smiled. “Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!” he said cheerfully.

“So you seem to think. But look out for that woman, King--she's dangerous. She's got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy! I think she's on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!”

“Ham dekta hai!” King grinned. But the older man continued to look as if he pitied him.

“If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward. Now, mind you do! I'm awfully interested, but as for envying you--”

“Envy!” King almost squealed. He made the bed-springs rattle as he jumped. “I wouldn't swap jobs with General French, sir!”

“Nor with me, I suppose!”

“Nor with you, sir.

“Good-by, then. Good-by, King, my boy. Good-by, Athelstan. Your brother's up the Khyber, isn't he? Give him my regards. Good-by!”

Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a little herd on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded by King, who smoked a cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on an unmarked chest of medicines. He seemed absorbed in a book on surgery that he had borrowed from a chance-met acquaintance in the go-down where he drew the medical supplies. Ismail sat on the one trunk that had been fetched from the other station and nursed the new hand-bag on his knees, picking everlastingly at the lock and wondering audibly what the bag contained to an accompaniment of low-growled sympathy.

“I am his servant--for she said so--and he said so. As the custom is he gave me the key of the great bag--on which I sit--as he said himself, for safe-keeping. Then why--why in Allah's name--am I not to have the key of this bag too? Of this little bag that holds so little and is so light?”

“It might be money in it?” hazarded one of the herd.

“Nay, for that it is too light.”

“Paper money!” suggested another man. “Hundies, with printing on the face that sahibs accept instead of gold.”

“Nay, I know where his money is,” said Ismail. “He has but little with him.”

“A razor would slit the leather easily,” suggested another man. “Then with a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not to widen it more than needful, a man could soon discover the contents. And later, the bag might be dropped or pushed violently against some sharp thing, to explain the cut.”

Ismail shook his head.

“Why? What could he do to thee?”

“It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do nothing!” answered Ismail. “He is not at all like other sahibs I have had dealings with. This man does unexpected things. This man is not mad, he has a devil. I have it in my heart to love this man. But such talk is foolishness. We are all her men!”

“Aye! We are her men!” came the chorus, so that King looked up and watched them over the open book.

At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely locked in third-class compartments. King lay lazily on the cushions of a first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the principles of antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do with Prussians and the Khyber Pass; and Ismail attended to the careful packing of soda water bottles in the ice-box on the floor.

“Shall I open the little bag, sahib?” he asked.

King shook his head.

Ismail shook the bag.

“The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered,” he said sagely. “It might be well to rearrange.”

“Put it over there!” King ordered. “Set it down!”

Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his black cheroots. The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its charm over him. He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and lay back in sweet contentment. Headed for the “Hills,” who would not be contented, who had been born in their very shadow?--in their shadow, of a line of Britons who have all been buried there!

“The day after to-morrow I'll see snow!” he promised himself. And Ismail, grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward beard, understood and sympathized.

Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves and crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing scenery. There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke of the “Hills” and home!

Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all Europe. But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite the promise of the “Hills” was, and the thunder of the train that hurried--the bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas--Himahlyas!--the air that blew in on them unscented--the reawakened memory--the heart's desire for the cold and the snow and the cruelty--the dark nights and the shrieking storms and the savagery of the Land of the Knife ahead!

The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because they were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station because the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no less than a jubilee progress!

Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King's prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it. Many an officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.

“Meet you in Berlin!” was a favorite greeting. And after that they would shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.

Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing less than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains, came and paced up and down a platform side by side with King. From them he received opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.

“Got to stay in India? Hard lines!” Then the conversation would be bluntly changed, for in the height of one's enthusiasm it is not decent to hurt another fellow's feelings. Simple, simple as a little child is the clean-clipped British officer. “Look at that babu, now. Don't you think he's a marvel? Don't you think the Indian babu's a marvel? Sixty a month is more than the beggar gets, and there he goes, doing two jobs and straightening out tangled trains into the bargain! Isn't he a wonder, King?”

“India's a wonderful country,” King would answer, that being one of his stock remarks. And to his credit be it written that he never laughed at one of them. He let them think they were more fortunate than he, with manlier, bloodier work to do.

Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in the comfortless light of Northern dawn. But the prisoners crowed and crooned it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when King refused to unlock their compartment doors. Having waited thus long, they could endure a few more hours in patience, now that they could see and smell their “Hills” at last.

And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the station less than two minutes after the train arrived. He was out of the car, for all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand. He took one steady look at King and then at the prisoners before he returned King's salute.

“Good!” he said. And then, as if that were not enough: “Excellent! Don't let 'em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform. Keep 'em in!”

“They're locked in, sir.”

“Excellent! Come and walk up and down with me.”

     Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!
     --Native Proverb

“Seen her?” asked the general, with his hands behind him.

“No,” said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride for stride. His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered the gold bracelet on his other wrist.

The general looked equally sharply sidewise.

“Nor've I,” he said. “She called me up over the phone yesterday to ask for facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here later. He's waiting for you at the foot of the Pass--camped near the fort at Jamrud with your bandobast all ready. She's on ahead--wouldn't wait.”

King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through the barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of him, for it is common knowledge in the “Hills” that when a burra sahib speaks to a chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, “Yes, sir, oh, yes!” at very short intervals. Therefore King could not be a chota sahib after all. So much the better. The “Hills” ever loved to deal with men in authority, just as they ever despised underlings.

“What made you go back for the prisoners?” the general asked. “Who gave you that cue?”

“It's a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and Rewa Gunga expected me to travel by his train.”

“Was that your only reason?”

“No, sir. I had general reasons. None of 'em specific. Where natives have a finger in the pie there's always something left undone at the last minute.”

“But what made you investigate those prisoners?”

“Couldn't imagine why thirty men should be singled out for special treatment. Rewa Gunga told me they were still at large in Delhi. Couldn't guess why. Had 'em arrested so's to be able to question 'em. That's all, sir.”

“Not nearly all!” said the general. “You realize by now, I suppose, that they're her special men--special personal following?”

“Guessed something of that sort.”

“Well--she's clever. It occurred to her that the safest way to get 'em up North was to have 'em arrested and deported. That would avoid interference and delay and would give her a chance to act deliverer at this end, and so make 'em grateful to her--you see? Rewa Gunga told me all this, you understand. He seems to think she's semi-divine. He was full of her cleverness in having thought of letting 'em all get into debt at a house of ill repute, so as to have 'em at hand when she wanted 'em.”

“She must have learned that trick from our merchant marine,” said King.

“Maybe. She's clever. She asked me over the phone whether her thirty men had started North. I sent a telegram in cypher to find out. The answer was that you had found 'em and rounded 'em up and were bringing 'em with you. When she called me up on the phone the second time I told her so, and I heard her chuckle with delight. So I emphasized the point of your having discovered 'em and saved 'em every wit whole and all that kind of thing. I asked her to come and see me, but she wouldn't,--said she was disguised and particularly did not want to be recognized, which was reasonable enough. She sent Rewa Gunga instead. Now, this seems important:

“Before I sent you down to Delhi--before I sent for you at all--I told her what I meant to do, and I never in my life knew a woman raise such terrific objections to working with a man. As it happened her objections only confirmed my determination to send for you, and before she went down to Delhi to clean up I told her flatly she would either have to work with you or else stay in India for the duration of the war.”

The general did not notice that King was licking his lips. Nor, if he had noticed King's hand that now was in front of him pressing on something under his shirt, could he have guessed that the something was a gold-hilted knife with a bronze blade. King grunted in token of attention, and the general continued.

“She gave in finally, but I felt nervous about it. Now, without your getting sight of her--you say you haven't seen her?--her whole attitude has changed! What have you done? Bringing up her thirty men seems a little enough thing. Yet, she swears by you! Used to swear at you, and now says you're the only officer in the British army with enough brains to fill a helmet! Says she wouldn't go up the Khyber without you! Says you're indispensable! Sent Rewa Gunga round to me with orders to make sure I don't change my mind about you! What have you done to her--bewitched her?”

“Done nothing,” said King.

“Well, keep on doing nothing in the same style and the world shall render you its best jobs, one after the other, in sequence! You've made a good beginning!”

“Know anything of Rewa Gunga, sir?”

“Nothing, except that he's her man. She trusts him, so we've got to, and you've got to take him up the Khyber with you. What she orders, he'll do, or you may take it from me she would never have left him behind. As long as she is on our side you will be pretty safe in trusting Rewa Gunga. And she has got to be on our side. Got to be! She's the only key we've got to Khinjan, and hell is brewing there this minute! She dare unlock the gates and ride the devil down the Khyber if she thought it worth her while! You're to go up the Khyber after her to convince her that there are better mounts than the devil and better fun than playing with hell-fire! The Rangar told me he had given you her passport--that right?”

As they turned at the end of the platform King bared his wrist and showed the gold bracelet.

“Good!” said the general, but King thought his face clouded. “That thing is worth more than a hundred men. Jack Allison wore that same bracelet, unless I'm much mistaken, on his way down in disguise from Bukhara. So did another man we both knew; but he died. Be sure not to forget to give it back to her when the show's over, King.”

King nodded and grunted. “What's the news from Khinjan, sir?”

“Nothing specific, except that the place is filling up. You remember what I told you about the 'Heart of the Hills' being in Khinjan? Well, they say now that the 'Heart of the Hills' has been awake for a long time, and that when the heart stirs the body does not lie quiet long. No use trying to guess what they mean; go and find out. And remember--the whole armed force at my disposal in this Province isn't more than enough to tempt the tribes to conclusions! It's a case for diplomacy. It's a case where diplomacy must not fail.”

King said nothing, but the chin-strap mark on his cheek and chin grew slightly whiter, as it always does under the stress of emotion. He can not control it, and he has dyed it more than once on the eve of happenings, there being no more wisdom in wearing feelings on one's face than on a sleeve.

“Here comes your engine,” said the general. “Well--there are two battalions of Khyber Rifles up the Pass and they're about at full strength. They've got word already that you are gazetted to them. They'll expect you. By the way, you've a brother in the K.R., haven't you?”

“At Ali Masjid, sir.”

“Give him my regards when you see him, will you?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“There's your engine whistling. You'd better hurry, Good-by, my boy. Get word to me whenever possible. Good luck to you! Regards to your brother! Good-by!”

King saluted and stood watching while the general hurried to the waiting motor-car. When the car whirled away in a din of dust he returned leisurely to the train that had been shortened to three coaches. Then he gave the signal to start up the spur-track, that leads to Jamrud, where a fort cowers in the very throat of the dreadfulest gorge in Asia--the Khyber Pass.

It was not a long journey, nor a very slow one, for there was nothing to block the way except occasional men with flags, who guarded culverts and little bridges. The Germans would know better than to waste time or effort on blowing up that track, but there might be Northern gentlemen at large, out to do damage for the sport of it, and the sepoys all along the line were posted in twos, and awake.

It was low-tide under the Himalayas. The flood that was draining India of her armed men had left Jamrud high and dry with a little nondescript force stranded there, as it were, under a British major and some native officers. There were no more pomp and circumstance; no more of the reassuring thunder of gathering regiments, nor for that matter any more of that unarmed native helplessness that so stiffens the backs of the official English.

Frowning over Jamrud were the lean “Hills,” peopled by the fiercest fighting men on earth, and the clouds that hung over the Khyber's course were an accent to the savagery.

But King smiled merrily as he jumped out of the train, and Rewa Gunga, who was there to meet him, advanced with outstretched hand and a smile that would have melted snow on the distant peaks if he had only looked the other way.

“Welcome, King sahib!” he laughed, with the air of a skilled fencer who admires another, better one. “I shall know better another time and let you keep in front of me! No more getting first into a train and settling down for the night! It may not be easy to follow you, and I suspect it isn't, but at least it jolly well can't be such a job as leading you! I trust you had a comfortable journey?”

“Thanks,” said King, shaking hands with him, and then turning away to unlock the carriage doors that held his prisoners in. They were baying now like wolves to be free, and they surged out, like wolves from a cage, to clamor round the Rangar, pawing him and struggling to be first to ask him questions.

“Nay, ye mountain people; nay!” he laughed. “I, too, am from the plains! What do I know of your families or of your feuds? Am I to be torn to pieces to make a meal?”

At that Ismail interfered, with the aid of an ash pick-handle, chance-found beside the track.

“Hill-bastards!” he howled at them, beating at them as if they were sheaves and his cudgel were a flail. “Sons of nameless mothers! Forgotten of God! Shameless! Brood of the evil one! Hands off!”

King had to stop him, not that he feared trouble, for they did not seem to resent either abuse or cudgeling in the least--and that in itself was food for thought; but broken shoulders are no use for carrying loads.

Laughing as if the whole thing was the greatest joke imaginable, Rewa Gunga fell into stride beside King and led him away in the direction of some tents.

“She is up the Pass ahead of us,” he announced. “She was in the deuce of a hurry, I can assure you. She wanted to wait and meet you, but matters were too jolly well urgent, and we shall have our bally work cut out to catch her, you can bet! But I have everything ready--tents and beds and stores--everything!”

King looked over his shoulder to make sure that Ismail was bringing the little leather bag along.

“So have I,” he said quietly.

“I have horses,” said Rewa Gunga, “and mules and--”

“How did she travel up the Khyber?” King asked him, and the Rangar spared him a curious sidewise glance.

“On a horse. You should have seen the horse!”

“What escort had she?”

“She?”

Rewa Gunga chuckled and then suddenly grew serious.

“The 'Hills' are her escort, King sahib. She is mistress in the 'Hills.' There isn't a murdering ruffian who would not lie down and let her walk on him! She rode away alone on a thoroughbred mare and she jolly well left me the mare's double on which to follow her. Come and look.”

Not far from where the tents had been pitched in a cluster a string of horses winnied at a picket rope. King saw the two good horses ready for himself, and ten mules beside them that would have done credit to any outfit. But at the end of the line, pawing at the trampled grass, was a black mare that made his eyes open wide. Once in a hundred years or so a viceroy's cup, or a Derby is won by an animal that can stand and look and move as that mare did.

“Just watch!” the Rangar boasted; hooking up the bit and throwing off the blanket. And as he mounted into the native-made rough-hide saddle a shout went up from the fort and native officers and half the soldiery came out to watch the poetry of motion.

The mare was not the only one worth watching; her rider shared the praise. There was something unexpected, although not in the least ungainly, about the Rangar's seat in the saddle that was not the ordinary, graceful native balance and yet was full of grace. King ascribed the difference to the fact that the Rangar had seen no military service, and before the inadequacy of that explanation had asserted itself he had already forgotten to criticize in sheer admiration.

There was none of the spurring and back-reining that some native bloods of India mistake for horse-manship. The Rangar rode with sympathy and most consummate skill, and the result was that the mare behaved as if she were part of him, responding to his thoughts, putting a foot where he wished her to put it and showing her wildest turn of speed along a level stretch in instant response to his mood.

“Never saw anything better,” King admitted ungrudgingly, as the mare came back at a walk to her picket rope.

“There is only one mare like this one,” laughed the Rangar. “She has her.”

“What'll you take for this one?” King asked him. “Name your price!”

“The mare is hers. You must ask her. Who knows? She is generous. There is nobody on earth more generous than she when she cares to be. See what you wear on your wrist!”

“That is a loan,” said King, uncovering the bracelet. “I shall give it back to her when we meet.”

“See what she says when you meet!” laughed the Rangar, taking a cigarette from his jeweled case with an air and smiling as he lighted it. “There is your tent, sahib.”

He motioned with the cigarette toward a tent pitched quite a hundred yards away from the others and from the Rangar's own; with the Rangar's and the cluster of tents for the men it made an equilateral triangle, so that both he and the Rangar had privacy.

With a nod of dismissal, King walked over to inspect the bandobast, and finding it much more extravagant than he would have dreamed of providing for himself, he lit one of his black cheroots, and with hands clasped behind him strolled over to the fort to interview Courtenay, the officer commanding.

It so happened that Courtenay had gone up the Pass that morning with his shotgun after quail. He came back into view, followed by his little ten-man escort just as King neared the fort, and King timed his approach so as to meet him. The men of the escort were heavily burdened; he could see that from a distance.

“Hello!” he said by the fort gate, cheerily, after he had saluted and the salute had been returned.

“Oh, hello, King! Glad to see you. Heard you were coming, of course. Anything I can do?”

“Tell me anything you know,” said King, offering him a cheroot which the other accepted. As he bit off the end they stood facing each other, so that King could see the oncoming escort and what it carried. Courtenay read his eyes.

“Two of my men!” he said. “Found 'em up the Pass. Gazi work I think. They were cut all to pieces. There's a big lashkar gathering somewhere in the 'Hills,' and it might have been done by their skirmishers, but I don't think so.”

“A lashkar besides the crowd at Khinjan?”

“Yes.”

“Who's supposed to be leading it?”

“Can't find out,” said Courtenay. Then he stepped aside to give orders to the escort. They carried the dead bodies into the fort.

“Know anything of Yasmini?” King asked, when the major stood in front of him again.

“By reputation, of course, yes. Famous person--sings like a bulbul--dances like the devil--lived in Delhi--mean her?”

King nodded. “When did she start up the Pass?” he asked.

“How d'ye mean?” Courtenay demanded sharply.

“To-day or yesterday?”

“She didn't start! I know who goes up and who comes down. Would you care to glance over the list?”

“Know anything of Rewa Gunga?” King asked him.

“Not much. Tried to buy his mare. Seen the animal? Gad! I'd give a year's pay for that beast! He wouldn't sell and I don't blame him.”

“He goes up the Khyber with me,” said King. “He's what the Turks would call my youldash.”

“And the Persians a hamrah, eh? There was an American here lately--merry fellow--and I was learning his language. Side partner's the word in the States. I can imagine a worse side partner than that same man Rewa Gunga--much worse.”

“He told me just now,” said King, “that Yasmini went up the Pass unescorted, mounted on a mare the very dead spit of the black one you say you wanted to buy.”

Courtenay whistled.

“I'm sorry, King. I'm sorry to say he lied.”

“Will you come and listen while I have it out with him?”

“Certainly.”

King threw away his less-than-half-consumed cheroot and they started to walk together toward King's camp. After a few minutes they arrived at a point from which they could see the prisoners lined up in a row facing Rewa Gunga. A less experienced eye than King's or Courtenay's could have recognized their attitude of reverent obedience.

“He'll make a good adjutant for you, that man,” said Courtenay; but King only grunted.

At sight of them Ismail left the line and came hurrying toward them with long mountainman's strides.

“Tell Rewa Gunga sahib that I wish to speak to him!” King called, and Ismail hurried back again.

Within two minutes the Rangar stood facing them, looking more at ease than they.

“I was cautioning those savages!” he explained. “They're an escort, but they need a reminder of the fact, else they might jolly well imagine themselves mountain goats and scatter among the 'Hills'!”

He drew out his wonderful cigarette case and offered it open to Courtenay, who hesitated, and then helped himself. King refused.

“Major Courtenay has just told me,” said King, “that nobody resembling Yasmini has gone up the Pass recently. Can you explain?”

“You see, I've been watching the Pass,” explained Courtenay.

The Rangar shook his head, blew smoke through his nose and laughed.

“And you did not see her go?” he said, as if he were very much amused.

“No,” said Courtenay. “She didn't go.”

“Can you explain?” asked King rather stiffly.

“Do you mean, can I explain why the major failed to see her? 'Pon my soul, King sahib, d'you want me to insult the man? Yasmini is too jolly clever for me, or for any other man I ever met; and the major's a man, isn't he? He may pack the Khyber so full of men that there's only standing room and still she'll go up without his leave if she chooses! There is nobody like Yasmini in all the world!”

The Rangar was looking past them, facing the great gorge that lets the North of Asia trickle down into India and back again when weather and the tribes permit. His eyes had become interested in the distance. King wondered why--and looked--and saw. Courtenay saw, too.

“Hail that man and bring him here!” he ordered.

Ismail, keeping his distance with ears and eyes peeled, heard instantly and hurried off. He went like the wind and all three watched in silence for ten minutes while he headed off a man near the mouth of the Pass, stopped him, spoke to him and brought him along. Fifteen minutes later an Afridi stood scowling in front of them with a little letter in a cleft stick in his hand. He held it out and Courtenay took it and sniffed.

“Well--I'll be blessed! A note”--sniff--sniff--“on scented paper!” Sniff--sniff! “Carried down the Khyber in a split stick! Take it, King--it's addressed to you.”

King obeyed and sniffed too. It smelt of something far more subtle than musk. He recognized the same strange scent that had been wafted from behind Yasmini's silken hangings in her room in Delhi. As he unfolded the note--it was not sealed--he found time for a swift glance at Rewa Gunga's face. The Rangar seemed interested and amused.

        “Dear Captain King,” the note ran, in English.  “Kindly
        be quick to follow me, because there is much talk of a
        lashkar getting ready for a raid.  I shall wait for
        you in Khinjan, whither my messenger shall show the way.
        Please let him keep his rifle.  Trust him, and Rewa
        Gunga and my thirty whom you brought with you.  The
        messenger's name is Darya Khan.

                “Your servant,

                        “Ysamini.”
 

He passed the note to Courtenay, who read it and passed it back.

“Are you the messenger who is to show this sahib the road to Khinjan?” he asked.

“Aye!”

“But you are one of three who left here and went up the Pass at dawn! I recognize you.”

“Aye!” said the man. “She met me and gave me this letter and sent me back.”

“How great is the lashkar that is forming?” asked Courtenay.

“Some say three thousand men. They speak truth. They who say five thousand are liars. There is a lashkar.”

“And she went up alone?” King murmured aloud in Pashtu.

“Is the moon alone in the sky?” the fellow asked, and King smiled at him.

“Let us hurry after her, sahib!” urged Rewa Gunga, and King looked straight into his eyes, that were like pools of fire, just as they had been that night in the room in Delhi. He nodded and the Rangar grinned.

“Better wait until dawn,” advised Courtenay. “The Pass is supposed to be closed at dusk.”

“I shall have to ask for special permission, sir.”

“Granted, of course.”

“Then, we'll start at eight to-night!” said King, glancing at his watch and snapping the gold case shut.

“Dine with me,” said Courtenay.

“Yes, please. Got to pack first. Daren't trust anybody else.”

“Very well. We'll dine in my tent at six-thirty,” said Courtenay. “So long!”

“So long, sir,” said King, and each went about his own business, King with the Rangar, and Ismail and all thirty prisoners at his heels, and Courtenay alone, but that much more determined.

“I'll find out,” the major muttered, “how she got up the Pass without my knowing it. Somebody's tail shall be twisted for this!”

But he did not find out until King told him, and that was many days later, when a terrible cloud no longer threatened India from the North.

     Oh, a broken blade,
     And an empty bag,
     And a sodden kit,
     And a foundered nag,
     And a whimpering wind
     Are more or less
     Ground for a gentleman's distress.
     Yet the blade will cut,
     (He should swing with a will!)
     And the emptiest bag
     He may readiest fill;
     And the nag will trot
     If the man has a mind,
     So the kit he may dry
     In the whimpering wind.
     Shades of a gallant past--confess!
     How many fights were won with less?

“I think I envy you!” said Courtenay.

They were seated in Courtenay's tent, face to face across the low table, with guttering lights between and Ismail outside the tent handing plates and things to Courtenay's servant inside.

“You're about the first who has admitted it,” said King.

Not far from them a herd of pack-camels grunted and bubbled after the evening meal. The evening breeze brought the smoke of dung fires down to them, and an Afghan--one of the little crowd of traders who had come down with the camels three hours ago--sang a wailing song about his lady-love. Overhead the sky was like black velvet, pierced with silver holes.

“You see, you can't call our end of this business war--it's sport,” said Courtenay. “Two battalions of Khyber Rifles, hired to hold the Pass against their own relations. Against them a couple of hundred thousand tribesmen, very hungry for loot, armed with up-to-date rifles, thanks to Russia yesterday and Germany to-day, and all perfectly well aware that a world war is in progress. That's sport, you know--not the 'image and likeness of war' that Jorrocks called it, but the real red root. And you've got a mystery thrown in to give it piquancy. I haven't found out yet how Yasmini got up the Pass without my knowledge. I thought it was a trick. Didn't believe she'd gone. Yet all my men swear they know she has gone, and not one of them will own to having seen her go! What d'you think of that?”

“Tell you later,” said King, “when I've been in the 'Hills' a while.”

“What d'you suppose I'm going to say, eh? Shall I enter in my diary that a chit came down the Pass from a woman who never went up it? Or shall I say she went up while I was looking the other way?”

“Help yourself!” laughed King.

“Laugh on! I envy you! If the worst comes to the worst, you'll have had the best end of it. If you fail up there in the 'Hills' you'll get scoughed and be done with you. You'll at least have had a show. All we shall know of your failure will be the arrival of the flood! We'll be swamped ingloriously--shot, skinned alive and crucified without a chance of doing anything but wait for it! You're in luck--you can move about and keep off the fidgets!”

For a while, as he ate Courtenay's broiled quail, King did not answer. But the merry smile had left his eyes and he seemed for once to be letting his mind dwell on conditions as they concerned himself.

“How many men have you at the fort?” he asked at last.

“Two hundred. Why?”

“All natives?”

“To a man.”

“Like 'em?”

“What's the use of talking?” answered Courtenay. “You know what it means when men of an alien race stand up to you and grin when they salute. They're my own.”

King nodded. “Die with you, eh?”

“To the last man,” said Courtenay quietly with that conviction that can only be arrived at in one way, and that not the easiest.

“I'd die alone,” said King. “It'll be lonely in the 'Hills.' Got any more quail?”

And that was all he ever did say on that subject, then or at any other time.

“Here's to her!” laughed Courtenay at last, rising and holding up his glass. “We can't explain her, so let's drink to her! No heel-taps! Here's to Rewa Gunga's mistress, Yasmini!”

“May she show good hunting!” answered King, draining his glass; and it was his first that day. “If it weren't for that note of hers that came down the Pass, and for one or two other things, I'd almost believe her a myth--one of those supposititious people who are supposed to express some ideal or other. Not an hallucination, you understand--nor exactly an embodied spirit, either. Perhaps the spirit of a problem. Let y be the Khyber district, z the tribes, and x the spirit of the rumpus. Find x. Get me?”

“Not exactly. Got quinine in your kit, by the way?”

“Plenty, thanks.”

“What shall you do first after you get up the Pass? Call on your brother at Ali Masjid? He's likely to know a lot by the time you get there.”

“Not sure,” said King. “May and may not. I'd like to see him. Haven't seen the old chap in a donkey's age. How is he?”

“Well two days ago,” said Courtenay. “What's your general plan?”

“Hunt!” said King. “Hunt for x and report. Hunt for the spirit of the coming ruction and try to scrag it! Live in the open when I can, sleep with the lice when it rains or snows, eat dead goat and bad bread, I expect; scratch myself when I'm not looking, and take a tub at the first opportunity. When you see me on my way back, have a bath made ready for me, will you--and keep to windward!”

“Certainly!” said Courtenay. “What's the Rangar going to do with that mare of his? Suppose he'll leave her at Ali Masjid? He'll have to leave her somewhere on the way. She'll get stolen. Gad! That's the brightest notion yet! I'll make a point of buying her from the first horse-thief who comes traipsing down the Pass!”

“Here's wishing you luck!” said King. “It's time to go, sir.”

He rose, and Courtenay walked with him to where his party waited in the dark, chilled by the cold wind whistling down the Khyber. Rewa Gunga sat, mounted, at their head, and close to him his personal servant rode another horse. Behind them were the mules, and then in a cluster, each with a load of some sort on his head, were the thirty prisoners, and Ismail took charge of them officiously. Darya Khan, the man who had brought the letter down the Pass, kept close to Ismail.

“Are you armed?” King asked, as soon as he could see the whites of the Rangar's eyes through the gloom.

“You jolly well bet I am!” the Rangar laughed.

King mounted, and Courtenay shook hands; then he went to Rewa Gunga's side and shook hands with him, too.

“Good-by!” called King.

“Good-by and good luck!”

“Forward! March!” King ordered, and the little procession started.

“Oh, men of the 'Hills,' ye look like ghosts--like graveyard ghosts!” jeered Courtenay, as they all filed past him. “Ye look like dead men, going to be judged!”

Nobody answered. They strode behind the horses, with the swift silent strides of men who are going home to the “Hills”; but even they, born in the “Hills”' and knowing them as a wolf-pack knows its hunting-ground, were awed by the gloom of Khyber-mouth ahead. King's voice was the first to break the silence, and he did not speak until Courtenay was out of ear-shot. Then:

“Men of the 'Hills'!” he called. “Kuch dar nahin hai!”

“Nahin hai! Hah!” shouted Ismail. “So speaks a man! Hear that, ye mountain folk! He says, 'There is no such thing as fear!'”

In his place in the lead, King whistled softly to himself; but he drew an automatic pistol from its place beneath his armpit and transferred it to a readier position.

Fear or no fear, Khyber-mouth is haunted after dark by the men whose blood-feuds are too reeking raw to let them dare go home and for whom the British hangman very likely waits a mile or two farther south. It is one of the few places in the world where a pistol is better than a thick stick.

Boulder, crag and loose rock faded into gloom behind; in front on both hands ragged hillsides were beginning to close in; and the wind, whose home is in Allah's refuse heap, whistled as it searched busily among the black ravines. Then presently the shadow of the thousand-foot-high Khyber walls began to cover them, and King drew rein to count them all and let them close up. To have let them straggle after that point would be tantamount to murder probably.

“Ride last!” he ordered Rewa Gunga. “You've got the only other pistol, haven't you?”

Darya Khan, who had brought the letter, had a rifle; so King gave him a roving commission on the right flank.

They moved on again after five minutes, in the same deep silence, looking like ghosts in search of somebody to ferry them across the Styx. Only the glow of King's cheroot, and the lesser, quicker fire of Rewa Gunga's cigarette, betrayed humanity, except that once or twice King's horse would put a foot wrong and be spoken to.

“Hold up!”

But from five or ten yards away that might have been a new note in the gaining wind or even nothing.

After a while King's cheroot went out, and he threw it away. A little later Rewa Gunga threw away his cigarette. After that, the veriest five-year-old among the Zakka Khels, watching sleepless over the rim of some stone watch-tower, could have taken oath that the Khyber's unburied dead were prowling in search of empty graves. Probably their uncanny silence was their best protection; but Rewa Gunga chose to break it after a time.

“King sahib!” he called softly, repeating it louder and more loudly until King heard him. “Slowly! Not so fast!”

“Why?”

King did not check speed by a fraction, but the Rangar legged his mare into a canter and forced him to pull out to the left of the track and make room.

“Because, sahib, there are men among those boulders, and to go too fast is to make them think you are afraid! To seem afraid is to invite attack! Can we defend ourselves, with three firearms between us? Look! What was that?”

They were at the point where the road begins to lead up-hill, westward, leaving the bed of a ravine and ascending to join the highway built by British engineers. Below, to left and right, was pit-mouth gloom, shadows amid shadows, full of eerie whisperings, and King felt the short hair on his neck begin to rise.

So he urged his horse forward, because what Rewa Gunga said is true. There is only one surer key to trouble in the Khyber than to seem afraid--and that is to be afraid. And to have sat his horse there listening to the Rangar's whisperings and trying to see through shadows would have been to invite fear, of the sort that grows into panic.

The Rangar followed him, close up, and both horse and mare sensed excitement. The mare's steel shoes sent up a shower of sparks, and King turned to rebuke the Rangar. Yet he did not speak. Never, in all the years he had known India and the borderland beyond, had he seen eyes so suggestive of a tiger's in the dark! Yet they were not the same color as a tiger's, nor the same size, nor the same shape!

“Look, sahib!”

“Look at what?”

“Look!”

After a second or two he caught a glimpse of bluish flame that flashed suddenly and died again, somewhere below to the right. Then all at once the flame burned brighter and steadier and began to move and to grow.

“Halt!” King thundered; and his voice was as sharp and unexpected as a pistol-crack. This was something tangible, that a man could tackle--a perfect antidote for nerves.

The blue light continued on a zigzag course, as if a man were running among boulders with an unusual sort of torch; and as there was no answer King drew his pistol, took about thirty seconds' aim and fired. He fired straight at the blue light.

It vanished instantly, into measureless black silence.

“Now you've jolly well done it, haven't you!”' the Rangar laughed in his ear. “That was her blue light--Yasmini's!”

It was a minute before King answered, for both animals were all but frantic with their sense of their riders' state of mind; it needed horsemanship to get them back under control.

“How do you know whose light it was?” King demanded, when the horse and mare were head to head again.

“It was prearranged. She promised me a signal at the point where I am to leave the track!”

“Where's that guide?” demanded King; and Darya Khan came forward out of the night, with his rifle cocked and ready.

“Did she not say Khinjan is the destination?”'

“Aye!” the fellow answered.

“I know the way to Khinjan. That is not it. Get down there and find out what that light was. Shout back what you find!”

The man obeyed instantly and sprang down into darkness. But King had hardly given the order when shame told him he had sent a native on an errand he had no liking for himself.

“Come back!” he shouted. “I'll go.”

But the man had gone, slipping noiselessly in the dark from rock to rock.

So King drove both spurs home, and set his unwilling horse to scrambling downward at an angle he could not guess, into blackness he could feel, trusting the animal to find a footing where his own eyes could make out nothing.

To his disgust he heard the Rangar follow immediately. To his even greater disgust the black mare overtook him. And even then, with his own mount stumbling and nearly pitching him headforemost at each lurch, he was forced to admire the mare's goatlike agility, for she descended into the gorge in running leaps, never setting a wrong foot. When he and his horse reached the bottom at last he found the Rangar waiting for him.

“This way, sahib!”

The next he knew sparks from the black mare's heels were kicking up in front of him, and a wild ride had begun such as he had never yet dreamed of. There was no catching up, for the black mare could gallop two to his horse's one; but he set his teeth and followed into solid night, trusting ear, eye, guesswork and the God of Secret Service men who loves the reckless.

Once in a minute or so he would see a spark, or a shower of them, where the mare took a turn in a hurry. Once in every two or three minutes he caught sight for a second of the same blue siren light that had started the race. He suspected that there were many torches placed at intervals. It could not be one man running. More than once it occurred to him to draw and shoot, but that thought died into the darkness whence it came. Never once while he rode did he forget to admire the Rangar's courage or the black mare's speed.

His own horse developed a speed and stamina he had not suspected, and probably the Rangar did not dare extend the mare to her limit in the dark; at all events, for ten, perhaps fifteen, minutes of breathless galloping he almost made a race of it, keeping the Rangar, either within sight or sound.

But then the mare swerved suddenly behind a boulder and was gone. He spurred round the same great rock a minute later, and was faced by a blank wall of shale that brought his horse up all standing. It led steep up for a thousand feet to the sky-line. There was not so much as a goat-track to show in which direction the mare had gone, nor a sound of any kind to guide him.

He dismounted and stumbled about on foot for about ten minutes with his eyes two feet from the earth, trying to find some trace of hoof. Then he listened, with his ear to the ground. There was no result.

He knew better than to shout, for that would sound like a cry of distress, and there is no mercy whatever in the “Hills” for lost wanderers, or for men who seem lost. He had not a doubt there were men with long jezails lurking not far away, to say nothing of those responsible for the blue torchlight.

After some thought be mounted and began to hunt the way back, remembering turns and twists with a gift for direction that natives might well have envied him. He found his way back to the foot of the road at a trot, where ninety-nine men out of almost any hundred would have been lost hopelessly; and close to the road he overtook Darya Khan, hugging his rifle and staring about like a scorpion at bay.

“Did you expect that blue light, and this galloping away?” he asked.

“Nay, sahib; I knew nothing of it! I was told to lead the way to Khinjan.”

“Come on, then!”

He set his horse at the boulder-strewn slope and had to dismount to lead him at the end of half a minute. At the end of a minute both he and the messenger were hauling at the reins and the horse had grown frantic from fear of falling backward. He shouted for help, and Ismail and another man came leaping down, looking like the devils of the rocks, to lend their strength. Ismail tightened his long girdle and stung the other two with whiplash words, so that Darya Khan overcame prejudice to the point of stowing his rifle between some rocks and lending a hand. Then it took all four of them fifteen minutes to heave and haul the struggling animal to the level road above.

There, with eyes long grown used to the dark, King stared about him, recovering his breath and feeling in his pockets for a fresh cheroot and matches. He struck a match and watched it to be sure his hand did not shake before he spoke, because one of Cocker's rules is that a man must command himself before trying it on others.

“Where are the others?” he asked, when he was certain of himself.

“Gone!” boomed Ismail, still panting, for he had heaved and dragged more stoutly than had all the rest together.

King took a dozen pulls at the cheroot and stared about again. In the middle of the road stood his second horse, and three mules with his baggage, including the unmarked medicine chest. Close to them were three men, making the party now only six all told, including Darya Khan, himself and Ismail.

“Gone whither?” he asked.

“Whither?”

Ismail's voice was eloquent of shocked surprise.

“They followed! Was it then thy baggage on the other mules? Were they thy men? They led the mules and went!”

“Who ordered them?”

“Allah! Need the night be ordered to follow the Day?”

“Who told them whither to go?”

“Who told the moon where the night was?” Ismail answered.

“And thou?”

“I am thy man! She bade me be thy man!”

“And these?”

“Try them!”

King bethought him of his wrist, that was heavy with the weight of gold on it. He drew back his sleeve and held it up.

“May God be with thee!” boomed all five men at once, and the Khyber night gave back their voices, like the echoing of a well.

King took his reins and mounted.

“What now?” asked Ismail, picking up the leather bag that he regarded as his own particular charge.

“Forward!” said King. “Come along!”

He began to set a fairly fast pace, Ismail leading the spare horse and the others towing the mules along. Except for King, who was modern and out of the picture, they looked like Old Testament patriarchs, hurrying out of Egypt, as depicted in the illustrated Bibles of a generation ago--all leaning forward--each man carrying a staff--and none looking to the right or left.

After a time the moon rose and looked at them from over a distant ridge that was thousands of feet higher than the ragged fringe of Khyber wall. The little mangy jackals threw up their heads to howl at it; and after that there was pale light diffused along the track, and they could see so well that King set a faster pace, and they breathed hard in the effort to keep up. He did not draw rein until it was nearly time for the Pass to begin narrowing and humping upward to the narrow gut at Ali Masjid. But then he halted suddenly. The jackals had ceased howling, and the very spirit of the Khyber seemed to hold its breath and listen.

In that shuddersome ravine unusual sounds will rattle along sometimes from wall to wall and gully to gully, multiplying as they go, until night grows full of thunder. So it was now that they heard a staccato cannonade--not very loud yet, but so quick, so pulsating, so filling to the ears that he could judge nothing about the sound at all, except that whatever caused it must be round a corner out of sight.

At first, for a few minutes King suspected it was Rewa Gunga's mare, galloping over hard rock away ahead of him. Then he knew it was a horse approaching. After that he became nearly sure he was mistaken altogether and that the drums were being beaten at a village--until he remembered there was no village near enough and no drums in any case.

It was the behavior of the horse he rode, and of the led one and the mules, that announced at last beyond all question that a horse was coming down the Khyber in a hurry. One of the mules brayed until the whole gorge echoed with the insult, and a man hit him hard on the nose to silence him.

King legged his horse into the shadow of a great rock. And after shepherding the men and mules into another shadow, Ismail came and held his stirrup, with the leather bag in the other hand. The bag fascinated him, because he did not know what was in it, and it was plain that he meant to cling to it until death or King should put an end to curiosity.

King drew his pistol. Ismail drew in his breath with a hissing sound, as if he and not King were the marksman. King notched the foresight against the corner of a crag, at a height that ought to be an inch or two above an oncoming horse's ears, and Ismail nodded sagely. Whoever now should gallop round that rock would be obliged to cross the line of fire. Such are the vagaries of the Khyber's night echoes that it was a long five minutes yet before a man appeared at last, riding like the night wind, on a horse that seemed to be very nearly on his last legs. The beast was going wildly, sobbing, with straggled ears.

Instead of speaking, King spurred out of the shadow and blocked the oncoming horseman's way, making his own horse meet the other shoulder to breast, knocking most of the remaining wind out of him. At risk of his own life, Ismail seized the man's reins. The sparks flew, and there was a growled oath; but the long and the short of it was that the rider squinted uncomfortably down the barrel of King's repeating pistol.

“Give an account of yourself!” commanded King.

The man did not answer. He was a jezailchi of the Khyber Rifles--hook-nosed as an osprey--black-bearded--with white teeth glistening out of a gap in the darkness of his lower face. And he was armed with a British government rifle, although that is no criterion in that borderland of professional thieves where many a man has offered himself for enlistment with a stolen government rifle in his grasp.

The waler he rode was an officer's charger. The poor brute sobbed and heaved and sweated in his tracks as his rightful owner surely had never made him do.

“Whither?” King demanded.

“Jamrud!”

The jezailchi growled the one-word answer with one eye on King, but the other eye still squinted down the pistol barrel warily.

“Have you a letter?”

The man did not answer.

“You may speak to me. I am of your regiment. I am Captain King.”

“That is a lie, and a poor one!” the fellow answered. “But a very little while ago I spoke with King sahib in Ali Masjid Fort, and he is no cappitin, he is leftnant. Therefore thou art a liar twice over--nay, three times! Thou art no officer of Khyber Rifles! I am a jezailchi, and I know them all!”

“None the less,” said King, “I am an officer of the Khyber Rifles, newly appointed. I asked you, have you a letter?”

“Aye!”

“Let me see it.”

“Nay!”

“I order you!”

“Nay! I am a true man! I will eat the letter rather!”

“Tell me who wrote it, then.”

But the fellow shook his head, still eying the pistol as if it were a snake about to strike.

“I have eaten the salt!” he said. “May dogs eat me if I break faith! Who art thou, to ask me to break faith? An arrficer? That must be a lie! The letter is from him who wrote it, to whom I bear it--and that is my answer if I die this minute!”

King let his reins fall and raised his left wrist until the moonlight glinted on the gold of his bracelet under the jezailchi's very eyes.

“May God be with thee!” said the man at once.

“From whom is your letter, and to whom?” asked King, wondering what the men in the clubs at home would say if they knew that a woman's bracelet could outweigh authority on British sod; for the Khyber Pass is as much British as the air is an eagle's or Korea Japanese, or Panama United States American, and the Khyber jezailchis are paid to help keep it so.

“From the karnal sahib (colonel) at Landi Kotal, whose horse I ride,” said the jezailchi slowly, “to the arrficer at Jamrud. To King sahib, the arrficer at Ali Masjid I bore a letter also, and left it as I passed.”

“Had they no spare horse at Ali Masjid? That beast is foundered.”

“There are two horses there, and both lame. The man who thou sayest is thy brother is heavy on horses.”

King nodded. “What is in the letter?” he asked.

“Nay! Have I eyes that can see through paper?”

“Thou hast ears that can listen!” answered King.

“In the letter that I left at Ali Masjid there is news of the lashkar that is gathering in the 'Hills,' above Ali Masjid and beyond Khinjan. King sahib is ordered to be awake and wary.”

“And to lame no more horses jumping them over rocks!”

“Nay, the karnal sahib said he is to ride after no more jackals with a spear!”

“Same old game!” said King to himself. “What knowest thou of the lashkar that is gathering?”

“I? Oh, a little. An uncle of mine, and three half-brothers, and a brother are of its number! One came at night to tempt me to join--but I have eaten the salt. It was I who first warned our karnal sahib. Now, let me by!”

“Nay, wait!” ordered King. But he lowered his pistol point.

To hold up a despatch rider was about as irregular as any proceeding could be; but it was within his province to find out how far the Khyber jezailchis could be trusted and within his power more than to make up the lost time. So that the irregularity did not trouble him much.

“Does this other letter tell of the lashkar, too?”

“Am I God, that I should know? But of what else should the karnal sahib write?”

“What is the object of the rising?” King asked him next; and the man threw his head back to laugh like a wolf. Laughter, at night in the Khyber, is an insult. Ismail chattered into his beard; but King sat still.

“Object? What but to force the Khyber and burst through into India and loot? What but to plunder, now that English backs are turned the other way?”

“Who said their backs are turned?” demanded King.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho! Hear him!”

The Khyber echoed the mockery away and away into the distance.

“Their backs are this way and their faces that! The kites know it! The vultures know it! The little jackals know it! The little butchas in the valley villages all know it! Ask the rocks, and the grass--the very water running from the 'Hills'! They all know that the English fight for life!”

“And the Khyber jezailchis? What of them?” King asked.

“They know it better than any!”

“And?”

“They make ready, even as I.”

“For what?”

“For what Allah shall decide! We ate the salt, we jezailchis. We chose, and we ate of our own free will. We have been paid the price we named, in silver and rifles and clothing. The arrficers the sirkar sent us are men of faith who have made no trouble with our women. What, then, should the Khyber jezailchis do? For a little while there will be fighting--or, if we be very brave and our arrficers skillful, and Allah would fain see sport, then for a longer while. Then we shall be overridden. Then the Khyber will be a roaring river of men pouring into India, as my father's father told me it has often been! India shall bleed in these days--but there will be fighting in the Khyber first!”

“And what of her? Of Yasmini?” King asked.

“Thou wearest that--and askest what of her? Nay--tell!”

“Should she order the jezailchis to be false to the salt--?”

“Such a question!”

The man clucked into his beard and began to fidget in the saddle. King gave him another view of the bracelet, and again he found a civil answer.

“We of the Rifles have her leave to be loyal to the salt, for, said she, otherwise how could we be true men; and she loves no liars. From the first, when she first won our hearts in the 'Hills,' she gave us of the Rifles leave to be true men first and her servants afterward! We may love her--as we do!--and yet fight against her, if so Allah wills--and she will yet love us!”

“Where is she?” King asked him suddenly, and the man began to laugh again.

“Let me by!” he shouted truculently. “Who am I to sit a horse and gossip in the Khyber? Let me by, I say!”

“I will let you by when you have told me where she is!”

“Then I die here, and very likely thou, too!” the man answered, bringing his rifle to the port in front of him so quickly that he almost had King at a disadvantage. As it was, King was quick enough to balance matters by covering him with the pistol again. The horses sensed excitement and began to stir. With a laugh the jezailchi let the rifle fall across his lap, and at that King put the pistol out of sight.

“Fool!” hissed Ismail in his ear; but King knows the “Hills” better in some ways than the savages who live in them; they, for instance, never seem able to judge whether there will be a fight presently or not.

“Why won't you tell me where she is?” he asked in his friendliest voice, and that would wheedle secrets from the Sphynx.

“Her secrets are her own, and may Allah help her guard them! I will tear my tongue out first!”

“Enviable woman!” murmured King. “Pass, friend!” he ordered, reining aside. “Take my spare horse and leave me that weary one, so you will recover the lost time and more into the bargain.”

The man changed horses gladly, saying nothing. When he had shifted the saddle and mounted, he began to ride off with a great air, not so much as deigning to scowl at Ismail. But he had not ridden a dozen paces when he sat round in the saddle and drew rein.

“Sahib!” he called. “Sahib!”

King waited. He had waited for this very thing and could afford to wait a minute longer.

“Hast thou--is there--does the sahib--I have not tasted--”

He made a sign with his hand that men recognize in pretty nearly every land under the sun.

“So-ho!” laughed King, patting his hip pocket, from which the cap of a silver-topped flask had been protruding ever since he put the pistol out of sight. “So our copper's hot, eh?”

“May Allah do more to me if my throat is not lined with the fires of Eblis!”

“But the Kalamullah!” King objected. “What saith the Prophet?”

“The Prophet forbade the faithful to drink wine,” said the jezailchi. “He said nothing about whiskey, that I ever heard!”

“Mine is brandy,” said King.

“May Allah bless the sahib's sons and grandsons to the seventh generation! May Allah--”

“Tell me about Yasmini first! Where is she?”

“Nay!”

King tapped the flask in his pocket.

“Nay! My throat is dry, but it shalt parch! I know not! As to where she is, I know not!”

“Remember, and I will give you the whole of it!”

He drew the flask out of his pocket and rode a little way toward the man.

“None can overhear. Tell me now.”

“Nay, sahib! I am silent!”

“Have you passed her on your way?”

The man shook his head--shook it until the whites of his eyes were a streak in the middle of his dark face; and when a Hillman is as vehement as that he is surely lying.

King set the flask to his own lips and drank a few drops.

“Salaam, sahib!” said the jezaitchi, wheeling his horse to ride away.

King let him ride twenty paces before calling to him to halt.

“Come back!” he ordered, and rode part of the way to meet him.

“I but tried thee, friend!” he said, holding out the flask.

“Allah then preserve me from a second test!”

The jezailchi seized the flask, clapped it to his lips and drained it to the last drop while King sat still in the moonlight and smiled at him.

“God grant the giver peace!” he prayed, handing the flask back. The kindly East possesses no word for “Thank you.” Then he wheeled the horse in a sudden eddy, as polo ponies turn on the Indian plains, and rode away down the wind as if the Pass were full of devils in pursuit of him.

King watched him out of sight and then listened until the hoof-beats died away and the Pass grew still again.

“The jezailchis'll stand!” he said, lighting a new cheroot. “Good men and good luck to 'em!”

Then he rode back to his own men.

“Where starts the trail to Khinjan?” he asked; not that he had forgotten it, but to learn who knew.

“This side of Ali Masjid!” they answered all together.

“Two miles this side. More than a mile from here,” said Ismail. “What next? Shall we camp here? Here is fuel and a little water. Give the word--”

“Nay-forward!” ordered King.

“Forward?” growled Ismail. “With this man it is ever 'forward!' Is there neither rest nor fear? Has she bewitched him? Hai! Ye lazy ones! Ho! Sons of sloth! Urge the mules faster! Beat the led horse!”

So in weird wan moonlight, King led them forward, straight up the narrowing gorge, between cliffs that seemed to fray the very bosom of the sky. He smoked a cigar and stared at the view, as if he were off to the mountains for a month's sport with dependable shikarris whom he knew. Nobody could have looked at him and guessed he was not enjoying himself.

“That man,” mumbled Ismail behind him, “is not as other sahibs I have known. He is a man, this one! He will do unexpected things!”

“Forward!” King called to them, thinking they were grumbling. “Forward, men of the 'Hills'!”

     The owl he has eyes that are big for his size,
     And the night like a book he deciphers;
     “Too-woop!” he asserts, and “Hoo-woo-ip!” he cries,
     And he means to remark he is awfully wise;
     But he lags behind us, who are “on” to the lies
     Of the hairy Himalayan knifers!

     For eyes we be, of Empire, we,
     Skinned and puckered and quick to see,
     And nobody guesses how wise we be,
     Nor hidden in what disguise we be,
     A-cooking a sudden surprise we be
     For hairy Himahlyan knifers!

After a time King urged his horse to a jog-trot, and the five Hillmen pattered in his wake, huddled so close together that the horse could easily have kicked more than one of them. The night was cold enough to make flesh creep; but it was imagination that herded them until they touched the horse's rump and kept the whites of their eyes ever showing as they glanced to left and right. The Khyber, fouled by memory, looks like the very birthplace of the ghosts when the moon is fitful and a mist begins to flow.

“Cheloh!” King called merrily enough; but his horse shied at nothing, because horses have an uncanny way of knowing how their riders really feel. They led mules and the spare horse, instead of dragging at their bridles, pressed forward to have their heads among the men, and every once and again there would sound the dull thump of a fist on a beast's nose--such being the attitude of men toward the lesser beasts.

They trotted forward until the bed of the Khyber began to grow very narrow, and Ali Masjid Fort could not be much more than a mile away, at the widest guess. Then King drew rein and dismounted, for he would have been challenged had he ridden much farther. A challenge in the Khyber after dark consists invariably of a volley at short range, with the mere words afterward, and the wise man takes precaution.

“Off with the mules' packs!” he ordered, and the men stood round and stared. Darya Khan, leaning on the only rifle in the party, grinned like a post-office letter box.

“Truly,” growled Ismail, forgetting past expression of a different opinion, “this man is as mad as all the other Englishmen.”

“Were you ever bitten by one?” wondered King aloud.

“God forbid!”

“Then, off with the packs--and hurry!”

Ismail began to obey.

“Thou! Lord of the Rivers! (For that is what Darya Khan means.) What is thy calling?”

“Badragga” (guide), he answered. “Did she not send me back down the Pass to be a guide?”

“And before that what wast thou?”

“Is that thy business?” he snarled, shifting his rifle-barrel to the other hand. “I am what she says I am! She used to call me 'Chikki'--the Lifter!--and I was! There are those who were made to know it! If she says now I am badragga, shall any say she lies?”

“I say thou art unpacker of mules' burdens!” answered King. “Begin!”

For answer the fellow grinned from ear to ear and thrust the rifle-barrel forward insolently. King, with the movement of determination that a man makes when about to force conclusions, drew up his sleeves above the wrist. At that instant the moon shone through the mist and the gold bracelet glittered in the moonlight.

“May God be with thee!” said “Lord of the Rivers” at once. And without another word he laid down his rifle and went to help off-load the mules.

King stepped aside and cursed softly. To a man who knows how to enforce his own authority, it is worse than galling to be obeyed because he wears a woman's favor. But for a vein of wisdom that underlay his pride he would have pocketed the bracelet there and then and have refused to wear it again. But as he sweated his pride he overheard Ismail growl:

“Good for thee! He had taught thee obedience in another bat of the eye!”

“I obey her!” muttered Darya Khan.

“I, too,” said Ishmail. “So shall he before the week dies! But now it is good to obey him. He is an ugly man to disobey!”

“I obey him until she sets me free, then,” grumbled Darya Khan.

“Better for thee!” said Ismail.

The packs were laid on the ground, and the mules shook themselves, while the jackals that haunt the Khyber came closer, to sit in a ring and watch. King dug a flashlight out of one of the packs, gave it to Ismail to hold, sat on the other pack and began to write on a memorandum pad. It was a minute before he could persuade Ismail that the flashlight was harmless, and another minute before he could get him to hold it still. Then, however, he wrote swiftly.

        “In the Khyber, a mile below you.

        “Dear Old Man--I would like to run in and see you, but
        circumstances don't permit.  Several people sent you
        their regards by me.  Herewith go two mules and their
        packs.  Make any use of the mules you like, but store
        the loads where I can draw on them in case of need.
        I would like to have a talk with you before taking the
        rather desperate step I intend, but I don't want to be
        seen entering or leaving Ali Masjid.  Can you come
        down the Pass without making your intention known?
        It is growing misty now.  It ought to be easy.  My men
        will tell you where I am and show you the way.  Why
        not destroy this letter?

        “Athelstan.”
 

He folded the note and stuck a postage stamp on it in lieu of seal. Then he examined the packs with the aid of the flashlight, sorted them and ordered two of the mules reloaded.

“You three!” he ordered then. “Take the loaded mules into Ali Masjid Fort. Take this chit, you. Give it to the sahib in command there.”

They stood and gaped at him, wide-eyed--then came closer to see his eyes and to catch any whisper that Ismail might have for them. But Ismail and Darya Khan seemed full of having been chosen to stay behind; they offered no suggestions--certainly no encouragement to mutiny.

“To hear is to obey!” said the nearest man, seizing the note, for at all events that was the easiest task. His action decided the other two. They took the mules' leading-reins and followed him. Before they had gone ten paces they were all swallowed in the mist that had begun to flow southeastward; it closed on them like a blanket, and in a minute more the clink of shod hooves had ceased. The night grew still, except for the whimpering of jackals. Ismail came nearer and squatted at King's feet.

“Why, sahib?” he asked: and Darya Khan came closer, too. King had tied the reins of the two horses and the one remaining mule together in a knot and was sitting on the pack.

“Why not?” he countered.

Solemn, almost motionless, squatted on their hunkers, they looked like two great vultures watching an animal die.

“What have they done that they should be sent away?” asked Ismail. “What have they done that they should be sent to the fort, where the arrficer will put them in irons?”

“Why should he put them in irons?” asked King.

“Why not? Here in the Khyber there is often a price on men's heads!”

“And not in Delhi?”

“In Delhi these were not known. There were no witnesses in Delhi. In the fort at Ali Masjid there will be a dozen ready to swear to them!”

“Then, why did they obey?” asked King.

“What is that on the sahib's wrist?”

“You mean--?”

“Sahib--if she said, 'Walk into the fire or over that Cliff!' there be many in these 'Hills' who would obey without murmuring!”

“I have nothing against them,” said King. “As long as they are my men I will not send them into a trap.”

“Good!” nodded Ismail and Darya Khan together, but they did not seem really satisfied.

“It is good,” said Ismail, “that she should have nothing against thee, sahib! Those three men are in thy keeping!”

“And I in thine?” King asked, but neither man answered him.

They sat in silence for five minutes. Then suddenly the two Hillmen shuddered, although King did not bat an eyelid. Din burst into being. A volley ripped out of the night and thundered down the Pass.

“How-utt! Hukkums dar?” came the insolent challenge half a minute after it--the proof positive that Ali Masjid's guards neither slept nor were afraid.

A weird wail answered the challenge, and there began a tossing to and fro of words, that was prelude to a shouted invitation:

“Ud-vance-frrrennen-orsss-werrul!”

English can be as weirdly distorted as wire, or any other supple medium, and native levies advance distortion to the point of art; but the language sounds no less good in the chilly gloom of a Khyber night.

Followed another wait, this time of half an hour. Then a man's footsteps--a booted, leather-heeled man, striding carelessly. Not far behind him was the softer noise of sandals. The man began to whistle Annie Laurie.

“Charles? That you?” called King.

“That you, old man?”

A man in khaki stepped into the moonlight. He was so nearly the image of Athelstan King that Ismail and Darya Khan stood up and stared. Athelstan strode to meet him. Their walk was the same. Angle for angle, line for line, they might have been one man and his shadow, except for three-quarters of an inch of stature.

“Glad to see you, old man,” said Athelstan.

“Sure, old chap!” said Charles; and they shook hands.

“What's the desperate proposal?” asked the younger.

“I'll tell you when we are alone.”

His brother nodded and stood a step aside. The three who had taken the note to the fort came closer--partly to call attention to themselves, partly to claim credit, partly because the outer silence frightened them. They elbowed Ismail and Darya Khan, and one of them received a savage blow in the stomach by way of retort from Ismail. Before that spark could start an explosion Athelstan interfered.

“Ismail! Take two men. Go down the Pass out of ear-shot, and keep watch! Come back when I whistle thus--but no sooner!”

He put fingers between his teeth and blew until the night shrilled back at him. Ismail seized the leather bag and started to obey.

“Leave that bag. Leave it, I say!”

“But some man may steal it, sahib. How shall a thief know there is no money in it?”

“Leave it and go!”

Ismail departed, grumbling, and King turned on Darya Khan.

“Take the remaining man, and go up the Pass!” he ordered. “Stand out of ear-shot and keep watch. Come when I whistle!”

“But this one has a belly ache where Ismail smote him! Can a man with a belly ache stand guard? His moaning will betray both him and me!” objected “Lord of the Rivers.”

“Take him and go!” commanded King.

“But--”

King was careful now not to show his bracelet.

But there was something in his eye and in his attitude--a subtle suggestive something-or-other about him--that was rather more convincing than a pistol or a stick. Darya Khan thrust his rifle-end into the hurt man's stomach for encouragement and started off into the mist.

“Come and ache out of the sahibs' sight!” he snarled.

In a minute King and his brother stood unseen, unheard in the shadow by a patch of silver moonlight. Athelstan sat down on the mule's pack.

“Well?” said the younger. “Tell me. I shall have to hurry. You see I'm in charge back there. They saw me come out, but I hope to teach 'em a lesson going back.”

Athelstan nodded. “Good!” he said. “I've a roving commission. I'm ordered to enter Khinjan Caves.”

His brother whistled. “Tall order! What's your plan?”

“Haven't one--yet. Know more when I'm nearer Khinjan. You can help no end.”

“How? Name it!”

“I shall go up in disguise. Nobody can put the stain on as well as you. But tell me something first. Any news of a holy war yet?”

His brother nodded. “Plenty of talk about one to come,” he said. “We keep hearing of that lashkar that we can't locate, under a mullah whose name seems to change with the day of the week. And there are everlasting tales about the 'Heart of the Hills.”'

“No explanation of 'em?” Athelstan asked him.

“None! Not a thing!”

“D'you know of Yasmini?”

“Heard of her of course,” said his brother.

“Has she come up the Pass?”

His brother laughed. “No, neither she nor a coach and four.”

“I have heard the contrary,” said Athelstan.

“Heard what, exactly?”

“She's up the Pass ahead of me.”

“She hasn't passed Ali Masjid!” said his brother, and Athelstan nodded.

“Are the Turks in the show yet?” asked Charles.

“Not yet. But I know they're expected in.”

“You bet they're expected in!” The younger man grinned from ear to ear. “They're working both tides under to prepare the tribes for it. They flatter themselves they can set alight a holy war that will put Timour Ilang to shame. You should hear my jezailchies talk at night when they think I'm not listening!”

“The jezailchies'll stand though,” said Athelstan.

“Stake my life on it!” said his brother. “They'll stick to the last man!”

“I can't tell you,” said Athelstan, “why we're not attacking brother Turk before he's ready. I imagine Whitehall has its hands full. But it's likely enough that the Turk will throw in his lot with the Prussians the minute he's ready to begin. Meanwhile my job is to help make the holy war seem unprofitable to the tribes, so that they'll let the Turk down hard when he calls on 'em. Every day that I can point to forts held strongly in the Khyber is a day in my favor. There are sure to be raids. In fact, the more the merrier, provided they're spasmodic. We must keep 'em separated--keep 'em from swarming too fast--while I sow other seeds among 'em.”

His brother nodded. Sowing seeds was almost that family's hereditary job. Athelstan continued:

“Hang on to Ali Masjid like a leech, old man! The day one raiding lashkar gets command of the Khyber's throat, the others'll all believe they've won the game. Nothing'll stop 'em then! Look out for traps. Smash 'em on sight. But don't follow up too far!”

“Sure,” said Charles.

“Help me with the stain now, will you?”

With his flash-light burning as if its battery provided current by the week instead of by the minute, Athelstan dragged open the mule's pack and produced a host of things. He propped a mirror against the pack and squatted in front of it. Then he passed a little bottle to his brother, and Charles attended to the chin-strap mark that would have betrayed him a British officer in any light brighter than dusk. In a few minutes his whole face was darkened to one hue, and Charles stepped back to look at it.

“Won't need to wash yourself for a month!” he said. “The dirt won't show!” He sniffed at the bottle. “But that stain won't come off if you do wash--never worry! You'll do finely.”

“Not yet, I won't!” said Athelstan, picking up a little safety razor and beginning on his mustache. In a minute he had his upper lip bare. Then his brother bent over him and rubbed in stain where the scrubby mustache had been.

After that Athelstan unlocked the leather bag that had caused Ismail so much concern and shook out from it a pile of odds and ends at which his brother nodded with perfect understanding. The principal item was a piece of silk--forty or fifty yards of it--that he proceeded to bind into a turban on his head, his brother lending him a guiding, understanding finger at every other turn. When that was done, the man who had said he looked in the least like a British officer would have lied.

One after another he drew on native garments, picking them from the pile beside him. So, by rapid stages he developed into a native hakim--by creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,--one of the men who practise yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and with a very great deal of added superstition, trickery and guesswork.

“I wouldn't trust you with a ha'penny!” announced his brother when he had done.

“Really? As good as all that?”

“The part to a T.”

“Well--take these into the fort for me, will you?” His brother caught the bundle of discarded European clothes and tucked them under his arm. “Now, re-member, old man! This is the biggest show there has ever been! We've got to hold the Khyber, and we can't do it by riding pell-mell into the first trap set for us! We must smash when the fighting starts--but we mayn't miss! We mayn't run past the mark! Be a coward, if that's the name you care to give it. You needn't tell me you've got orders to hunt skirmishers to a standstill, because I know better. I know you've just had your wig pulled for laming two horses!”

“How d'you know that?”

“Never mind! I've been seconded to your crowd. I'm your senior, and I'm giving you orders. This show isn't sport, but the real red thing, and I want to count on you to fight like a trained man, not like a natural-born fool. I want to know you're holding Ali Masjid like Fabius held Rome, by being slow and wily, just for the sake of the comfortable feeling it will give me when I'm alone among the 'Hills.' Hit hard when you have to, but for God's sake, old man, ware traps!”

“All right,” said his brother.

“Then good-by, old man!”

“Good-by, Athelstan!”

They stood facing and shook hands. Where had been a man and his reflection in the mist, there now seemed to be the same man and a native. Athelstan King had changed his very nature with his clothes. He stood like a native--moved like one; even his voice was changed, as if--like the actor who dyed himself all over to act Othello--he could do nothing by halves.

“I'm going to try to get in without my men seeing me!” said the younger.

“If they do see you, they'll shoot!”

“Yes, and miss! Trust a Khyber jezailchi not to hit much in the dark! It'll do 'em good either way. I'll have time to give 'em the password before they fire a second volley. They're not really dangerous till the third one. Good-by!”

“By, Charles!”

Officers in that force are not chosen for their clumsiness, or inability to move silently by night. His foot-steps died in the mist almost as quickly as his shadow. Before he had been gone a minute the Pass was silent as death again, and though Athelstan listened with trained ears, the only sound he could detect was of a jackal cracking a bone fifty or sixty yards away.

He repacked the loads, putting everything back carefully into the big leather envelopes and locking the empty hand-bag, after throwing in a few stones for Ismail's benefit. Then he went to sit in the moonlight, with his back to a great rock and waited there cross-legged to give his brother time to make good a retreat through the mist. When there was no more doubt that his own men, at all events, had failed to detect the lieutenant, he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Almost at once he heard sandals come pattering from both directions. As they emerged out of the mist he sat silent and still. It was Darya Khan who came first and stood gaping at him, but Ismail was a very close second, and the other three were only a little behind. For full two minutes after the man with the sore stomach had come they all stood holding one another's arms, astonished. Then--

“Where is he?” asked Ismail.

“Who?” said King, the hakim.

“Our sahib--King sahib--where is he?”

“Gone!”

Even his voice was so completely changed that men who had been reared amid mutual suspicion could not recognize it.

“But there are his loads! There is his mule!”

“Here is his bag!” said Ismail, pouncing on it, picking it up and shaking it. “It rattles not as formerly! There is more in it than there was!”

“His two horses and the mule are here,” said Darya Khan.

“Did I say he took them with him?” asked the hakim, who sat still with his back to a rock. “He went because I came! He left me here in charge! Should he not leave the wherewithal to make me comfortable, since I must do his work? Hah! What do I see? A man bent nearly double? That means a belly ache! Who should have a belly ache when I have potions, lotions, balms to heal all ills, magic charms and talismans, big and little pills--and at such a little price! So small a price! Show me the belly and pay your money! Forget not the money, for nothing is free except air, water and the Word of God! I have paid money for water before now, and where is the mullah who will not take a fee? Nay, only air costs nothing! For a rupee, then--for one rupee I will heal the sore belly and forget to be ashamed for taking such a little fee!”

“Whither went the sahib? Nay--show us proof!” objected Darya Khan; and Ismail stood back a pace to scratch his flowing beard and think.

“The sahib left this with me!” said King, and held up his wrist. The gold bracelet Rewa Gunga had given him gleamed in the pale moonlight.

“May God be with thee!” boomed all five men together.

King jumped to his feet so suddenly that all five gave way in front of him, and Darya Khan brought his rifle to the port.

“Hast thou never seen me before?” he demanded, seizing Ismail by the shoulders and staring straight into his eyes.

“Nay, I never saw thee!”

“Look again!”

He turned his head, to show his face in profile.

“Nay, I never saw thee!”

“Thou, then! Thou with the belly! Thou! Thou!”

They all denied ever having seen him.

So he stepped back until the moon shone full in his face and pulled off his turban, changing his expression at the same time.

“Now look!”

“Ma'uzbillah! (May God protect us!)”

“Now ye know me?”

“Hee-yee-yee!” yelled Ismail, hugging himself by the elbows and beginning to dance from side to side. “Hee-yee-yee! What said I? Said I not so? Said I not this is a different man? Said I not this is a good one--a man of unexpected things? Said I not there was magic in the leather bag? I shook it often, and the magic grew! Hee-yee-yee! Look at him! See such cunning! Feel him! Smell of him! He is a good one--good!”

Three of the others stood and grinned, now that their first shock of surprise had died away. The fourth man poked among the packs. There was little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out for an airing.

“Hee-yee-yee! She smelt out a good one! Hee-yee-yee! This is a man after my heart! Hee-yee-yee! God preserve me! God preserve me to see the end of this! This one will show sport! Oh-yee-yee-yee!”

Suddenly he closed with King and hugged him until the stout ribs cracked and bent inward and King sobbed for breath among the strands of the Afridi's beard. He had to use knuckles and knees and feet to win freedom, and though he used them with all his might and hurt the old savage fiercely, he made no impression on his good will.

“After my own heart, thou art! Spirit of a cunning one! Worker of spells! Allah! That was a good day when she bade me wait for thee!”

King sat down again, panting. He wanted time to get his breath back and a little of the ache out of his ribs, but he did not care to waste any more minutes, and his eyes watched the faces of the other four men. He saw them slowly waken to understanding of what Ismail meant by “worker of spells” and “magic in the bag” and knew that he had even greater hold on them now than Yasmini's bracelet gave him.

“Ma'uzbillah!” they murmured as Ismail's meaning dawned and they recognized a magician in their midst. “May God protect us!”

“May God protect me! I have need of it!” said King. “What shall my new name be? Give ye me a name!”

“Nay, choose thou!” urged Ismail, drawing nearer. “We have seen one miracle; now let us hear another!”

“Very well. Khan is a title of respect. Since I wish for respect, I will call myself Khan. Name me a village the first name you can think of--quick!”

“Kurram,” said Ismail, at a hazard.

“Kurram is good. Kurram I am! Kurram Khan is my name henceforward! Kurram Khan the dakitar!”

“But where is the sahib who came from the fort to talk?” asked the man whose stomach ached yet from Ismail and Darya Khan's attentions to it.

“Gone!” announced King. “He went with the other one!”

“Went whither? Did any see him go?”

“Is that thy affair?” asked King, and the man collapsed. It is not considered wise to the north of Jamrud to argue with a wizard, or even with a man who only claims to be one. This was a man who had changed his very nature almost under their eyes.

“Even his other clothes have gone!” murmured one man, he who had poked about among the packs.

“And now, Ismail, Darya Khan, ye two dunder-heads!--ye bellies without brains!--when was there ever a dakitar--a hakim, who had not two assistants at the least? Have ye never seen, ye blinder-than-bats--how one man holds a patient while his boils are lanced, and yet another makes the hot iron ready?”

“Aye! Aye!”

They had both seen that often.

“Then, what are ye?”

They gaped at him. Were they to work wonders too? Were they to be part and parcel of the miracle? Watching them, King saw understanding dawn behind Ismail's eyes and knew he was winning more than a mere admirer. He knew it might be days yet, might be weeks before the truth was out, but it seemed to him that Ismail was at heart his friend. And there are no friendships stronger than those formed in the Khyber and beyond--no more loyal partnerships. The “Hills” are the home of contrasts, of blood-feuds that last until the last-but-one man dies, and of friendships that no crime or need or slander can efface. If the feuds are to be avoided like the devil, the friendships are worth having.

“There is another thing ye might do,” he suggested, “if ye two grown men are afraid to see a boil slit open. Always there are timid patients who hang back and refuse to drink the medicines. There should be one or two among the crowd who will come forward and swallow the draughts eagerly, in proof that no harm results. Be ye two they!”

Ismail spat savagely.

“Nay! Bismillah! Nay, nay! I will hold them who have boils, sitting firmly on their bellies--so--or between their shoulders--thus--when the boils are behind! Nay, I will drink no draughts! I am a man, not a cess-pool!”

“And I will study how to heat hot irons!” said Darya Khan, with grim conviction. “It is likely that, having worked for a blacksmith once, I may learn quickly! Phaughghgh! I have tasted physic! I have drunk Apsin Saats! (Epsom Salts.)”

He spat, too, in a very fury of reminiscence.

“Good!” said King. “Henceforward, then, I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, and ye two are my assistants, Ismail to hold the men with boils, and Darya Khan to heat the irons--both of ye to be my men and support me with words when need be!”

“Aye!” said Ismail, quick to think of details, “and these others shall be the tasters! They have big bellies, that will hold many potions without crowding. Let them swallow a little of each medicine in the chest now, for the sake of practise! Let them learn not to make a wry face when the taste of cess-pools rests on the tongue--”

“Aye, and the breath comes sobbing through the nose!” said Darya Khan, remembering fragments of an adventurous career. “Let them learn to drink Apsin Saats without coughing!”

“We will not drink the medicines!” announced the man who had a stomach ache. “Nay, nay!”

But Ismail hit him with the back of his hand in the stomach again and danced away, hugging himself and shouting “Hee-yee-yee!” until the jackals joined him in discontented chorus and the Khyber Pass became full of weird howling. Then suddenly the old Afridi thought of something else and came back to thrust his face close to King's.

“Why be a Rangar? Why be a Rajput, sahib? She loves us Hillmen better!”

“Do I look like a Hillman of the 'Hills'?” asked King.

“Nay, not now. But he who can work one miracle can work another. Change thy skin once more and be a true Hillman!”

“Aye!” King laughed. “And fall heir to a blood-feud with every second man I chance upon! A Hill-man is cousin to a hundred others, and what say they in the 'Hills'?--'to hate like cousins,' eh? All cousins are at war. As a Rangar I have left my cousins down in India. Better be a converted Hindu and be despised by some than have cousins in the 'Hills'! Besides--do I speak like a Hillman?”

“Aye! Never an Afridi spake his own tongue better!”

“Yet--does a Hillman slip? Would a Hillman use Punjabi words in a careless moment?”'

“God forbid!”

“Therefore, thou dunderhead, I will be a Rangar Rajput,--a stranger in a strange land, traveling by her favor to visit her in Khinjan! Thus, should I happen to make mistakes in speech or action, it may be overlooked, and each man will unwittingly be my advocate, explaining away my errors to himself and others instead of my enemy denouncing me to all and sundry! Is that clear, thou oaf?”

“Aye! Thou art more cunning than any man I ever met!”

The great Afridi began to rub the tips of his fingers through his straggly beard in a way that might mean anything, and King seemed to draw considerable satisfaction from it, as if it were a sign language that he understood. More than any one thing in the world just then he needed a friend, and he certainly did not propose to refuse such a useful one.

“And,” he added, as if it were an afterthought, instead of his chief reason, “if her special man Rewa Gunga is a Rangar, and is known as a Rangar through out the 'Hills,' shall I not the more likely win favor by being a Rangar too? If I wear her bracelet and at the same time am a Rangar, who will not trust me?”

“True! Thou art a magician!”

“True!” agreed Ismail.

But the moon was getting low and Khyber would be dark again in half an hour, for the great crags in the distance to either hand shut off more light than do the Khyber walls. The mist, too, was growing thicker. It was time to make a move.

King rose. “Pack the mule and bring my horse!” he ordered and they hurried to obey with alacrity born of new respect, Darya Khan attending to the trimming of the mule's load in person instead of snarling at another man. It was a very different little escort from the one that had come thus far. Like King himself, it had changed its very nature in fifteen minutes!

They brought the horse, and King laughed at them, calling the idiots--men without eyes.

“The saddle?” Ismail suggested. “It is a government arrficer's saddle.”

“Stolen!” said King, and they nodded. “Stolen along with the horse!”

“Then the bridle?”

“Stolen too, ye men without eyes! Ye insects! A stolen horse and saddle and bridle, are they not a passport of gentility this side of the border?”

“Aye!”

“I am Kurram Khan, the dakitar, but who in the 'Hills' would believe it? Look now--look ye and tell me what is wrong?”

He pointed to the horse, and they stood in a row and stared.

“Shorten those stirrups, then, six holes at the least! Men will laugh at me if I ride like a British arrficer!”

“Aye!” said Ismail, hurrying to obey.

“Aye! Aye! Aye!” agreed the others.

“Now,” he said, gathering the reins and swinging into the saddle, “who knows the way to Khinjan?”

“Which of us does not!”

“Ye all know it? Then ye all are border thieves and worse! No honest man knows that road! Lead on, Darya Khan, thou Lord of Rivers! Do thy duty as badragga and beware lest we get our knees wet at the fords! Ismail, you march next. Now I. You other two and the mule follow me. Let the man with the belly ache ride last on the other horse. So! Forward march!”

So Darya Khan led the way with his rifle, and King's face glowed in cigarette light not very far behind him as he legged his horse up the narrow track that led northward out of the Khyber bed.

It would be a long time before he would dare smoke a cigar again, and his supply of cigarettes was destined to dwindle down to nothing before that day. But he did not seem to mind.

“Cheloh!” he called. “Forward, men of the mountains! Kuch dar nahin hai!”

“Thy mother and the spirit of a fight were one!” swore Ismail just in front of him, stepping out like a boy going to a picnic. “She will love thee! Allah! She will love thee! Allah! Allah!”

The thought seemed to appal him. For hours after that he climbed ahead in silence.

     Dear is the swagger that takes a man in
             Helmeted, clattering, proud.
     Sweet are the honors the arrogant win,
             Hot from the breath of a crowd.
     Precious the spirit that never will bend--
             Hot challenge for insolent stare!
     But--talk when you've tried it!--to win in the end,
     Go ahsti!*  Be meek!  And beware!

     [* Slowly.]

Even with the man with the stomach ache mounted on the spare horse for the sake of extra speed (and he was not suffering one-fifth so much as he pretended); with Ismail to urge, and King to coax, and the fear of mountain death on every side of them, they were the part of a night and a day and a night and a part of another day in reaching Khinjan.

Darya Khan, with the rifle held in both hands, led the way swiftly, but warily; and the last man's eyes looked ever backward, for many a sneaking enemy might have seen them and have judged a stern chase worth while.

In the “Hills” the hunter has all the best of it, and the hunted needs must run. The accepted rule is to stalk one's enemy relentlessly and get him first. King happened to be hunting, although not for human life, and he felt bold, but the men with him dreaded each upstanding crag, that might conceal a rifleman. Armed men behind corners mean only one thing in the “Hills.”

The animals grew weary to the verge of dropping, for the “road” had been made for the most part by mountain freshets, and where that was not the case it was imaginary altogether. They traveled upward, along ledges that were age-worn in the limestone--downward where the “hell-stones” slid from under them to almost bottomless ravines, and a false step would have been instant death--up again between big edged boulders, that nipped the mule's pack and let the mule between--past many and many a lonely cairn that hid the bones of a murdered man (buried to keep his ghost from making trouble)--ever with a tortured ridge of rock for sky-line and generally leaning against a wind, that chilled them to the bone, while the fierce sun burned them.

At night and at noon they slept fitfully at the chance-met shrine of some holy man. The “Hills” are full of them, marked by fluttering rags that can be seen for miles away; and though the Quran's meaning must be stretched to find excuse, the Hillmen are adept at stretching things and hold those shrines as sacred as the Book itself. Men who would almost rather cut throats than gamble regard them as sanctuaries.

When a man says he is holy he can find few in the “Hills” to believe him; but when he dies or is tortured to death or shot, even the men who murdered him will come and revere his grave.

Whole villages leave their preciousest possessions at a shrine before wandering in search of summer pasture. They find them safe on their return, although the “Hills” are the home of the lightest-fingered thieves on earth, who are prouder of villainy than of virtue. A man with a blood-feud, and his foe hard after him, may sleep in safety at a faquir's grave. His foe will wait within range, but he will not draw trigger until the grave is left behind.

So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan, although Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.

It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks, that fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber level, that King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced on him the role of questioner.

“How can'st thou see the Caves!” he asked, for King had hinted at his intention; and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold bracelet.

“Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when the first men found the Caves! Some--hundreds--have gained admission, lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for one, would not chance it!”

“Thou and I are two men!” answered King. “Allah gave thee qualities I lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one, and her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the Caves. I am not afraid.”

“Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many, many--aye, very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones. Did any return? Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the place. One died slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids missing and his eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the women of the place made sport with them. Those would rather have been crucified outside had they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan, entered the Caves. None ever came out again!”

“Then, what is my case to thee?” King asked him “If I can not come out again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is the trouble?”

“I love thee,” the Afridi answered simply. “Thou art a man after mine own heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!”

King shook his head.

“Be warned!”

Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed emotion.

“When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again, then I am her man, not thine!”

King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.

“I look like her man, too!”

“Thou!” Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real. “Thou chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers! Listen! Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly bones no peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on a raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there. How many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God recompense him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and ashes to eat! May rats eat his bones!”

“Had Abdurrahman this?” asked King, touching the bracelet.

“Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him! He knew of it, but never saw it.”

“I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not? Does not she know the secret?”

“She knows all that any man knows and more!”

“Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?” asked King, and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.

“I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!”

“Who saw thee this time?” Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the cruel humor of the “Hills,” that sees amusement in a man's undoing, or in the destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.

“The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang and burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is hanged and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to Khinjan Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British arrficer. It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding. It may be, too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some chief's son to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission! Listen--man o' my heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the Caves, when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and earn outlawry before they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and betray the secret, ten men follow each. They die by the hand of one or other of the ten unless they have slain their man within two weeks. So the secret has been kept more years than ten men can remember!” (That estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures and bore no relation to the length of a human generation.)

“Whom did she kill to gain admission?” King asked him unexpectedly.

“Ask her!” said Ismail. “It is her business.”

“And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?”

“Nay. I slew a mullah.”

The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for health, profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.

“Be warned and go back!” urged Ismail.

“Come with me, then.”

“Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!”

“I imagine she waits for me!” laughed King. “Forward! We have rested in this place long enough!”

So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,

“Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!” says Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks only of the goal ahead.

It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human habitation within a march because none dare build.

They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the animals could be guided down it.

“Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a third way.

“None from this side,” said Ismail.

“And on the other side?”

“There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops once came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days' march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little hakim--be warned and go back!”

“Thou bird of ill omen!” laughed King. “Must thou croak from every rock we rest on?”

“If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!” said Ismail.

“Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!” King answered. “She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth while beyond! Forward!”

The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather than walked down the track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil busy under it, stoking.

It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed dead, crackled in the heat.

“Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze!” urged Darya Khan.

Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.

“This glare makes my eyes ache!” he grumbled.

“Wait, sahib! Wait a while!” urged the others.

“Forward!” ordered King. “This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is beyond!”

They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster. Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind.

Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew numb.

“Forward!” ordered King.

After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun, another volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing further happened.

“Forward!” he ordered.

They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done, and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too weary to hold their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its sway. One of the men was half delirious.

“Who are ye?” howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet, a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he looked like a bandaged corpse.

“What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?”

King bethought him of Yasmini's talisman. He, held it up, and the gold band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman's eyes are keener than an eagle's, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that angle, and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him. He turned his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both hands.

“Ye may come!” howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing instantly.

King trembled--perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate, though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The “Hills,” that numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and in love there is no fear. Heat and cold and hunger were all in the day's work; thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had never meant more to him than work ahead to do.

But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for “all she's got.” And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across hot rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.

But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and waited for somebody to open it.

The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!

The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture and repair. The walls were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.

The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.

As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized hailed him good-humoredly.

“Salaam aleikoum!”

“And upon thee be peace!” King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the “Hills” are polite, whatever the other principles.

Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it seemed to him that the smile said, “Here you are, my man, and aren't you in for it?” He more than half suspected he was intended to understand that. But the Rangar's conversation took another line.

“By jove!” he chuckled. “She expected you. She guessed you are a hound who can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you will come in spite of all odds! But she didn't expect you in Rangar dress! No, by jove! You jolly well will take the wind out of her sails!”

King made no answer. For one thing, the word “hound,” even in English, is not essentially a compliment. But he had a better reason than that.

“Did you find the way easily?” the Rangar asked but King kept silence.

“Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?”

That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others, but King answered it.

“Oh, as for that,” he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner of a native gentleman, “I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my own Rajasthani. My name is Kurram Khan. I ask admittance.”

He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his head the Rangar laughed like a bell.

“Shabash!” he laughed. “Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome, thou and thy men. Be welcome in her name!”

Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind of courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky. King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign of window or stairs, or of any means of reaching the ledge from which the Rangar had addressed him. What he did see, as he faced that way, was that each of his men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he entered.

“Whom do ye salute?” he asked.

Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke a fool.

“Is this not her nest these days?” he answered. “It is well to bow low. She is not as other women. She is she! See yonder!”

Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came a one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun and stared at them under his hand. After a leisurely consideration of them he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger, spat contemptuously, and then used the finger to beckon them, crooking it queerly and turning on his heel. He did not say one word.

King led the way after him on foot, for even in the “Hills” where cruelty is a virtue, a man may be excused, on economic grounds, for showing mercy to his beast. His men tugged the weary animals along behind him, through the gap under the arch and along an almost interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of square stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff.

At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to overhead defenses. Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard but what was commanded from overhead. Khinjan had been rebuilt since its last destruction by some expert who knew all about street fighting. Like Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside army.

Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until unexpectedly at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and opened on a straight street, of fair width, and more than half a mile long. It is marked “Street of the Dwellings” on the secret army maps, and it has been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out of India, that a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it the same on his return.

It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were houses built of stolen corrugated iron--that cursed, hot, hideous stuff that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of wood--of stone--of mud--of mats--of skins--even of tent-cloth. Most of them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule. Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like wasp nests on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere penniless and the more or less useful men--not Khinjan's inner guard by any means.

There were Hindus--sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were little children--little naked brats with round drum tummies, who squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a stone that missed King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the far side and, started a fight among the mangy street curs, which proved a diversion and probably saved King's party from more accurate attentions.

Perhaps a thousand souls came out to watch, all told. Not an eye of them all missed the government marks on King's trappings, or the government brand on the mules, and after a minute or two, when the procession was half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown a stone, and he was backed up by the others. They classified King correctly, exactly as he meant they should. As a hakim--a man of medicine--he could fill a long-felt want; but by the brand on his accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a brother in crime. Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone.

He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times since he had seen it. It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just as on his previous visit, there stood a stone mosque, whose roof leaned back at a steep angle against the mountain-side. The fact that it was a mosque, and that it was the only building used as such in Khinjan, had saved it from being leveled to the ground by the last British expedition.

It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet is known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of time and the touch of infidels by priceless Afghan rugs before and behind, so that it hangs like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone wall. King had seen it. Very vividly he recalled his almost exposure by a suspicious mullah, when he had crept nearer to examine it at close range. For the Secret Service must probe all things.

There had been an attempt since his last visit to make the mosque's exterior look more in keeping with the building's use. It was cleaner. It had been smeared with whitewash. A platform had been built on the roof for the muezzin. But it still looked more like a fort than a place of worship.

Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the way, with the long, leisurely-seeming gait of a mountaineer. At the door, in the middle of the end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three times with his gun-butt. And that was a strange proceeding, to say the least, in a land where the mosque is public resting place for homeless ones, and all the “faithful” have a right to enter.

A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason--even his eyebrows and eyelashes had been removed--pushed his bare head through the door and blinked at them. There was some whispering and more staring, and at last the mullah turned his back.

The door slammed. The one-eyed guide grounded his gun-butt on the stone, and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had lost its interest sufficiently to talk and joke.

In two minutes the mullah returned and threw a mat over the threshold. It turned out to be the end of a long narrow strip that he kicked and unrolled in front of him all across the floor of the mosque. After that it was not so astonishing that the horses and mules were allowed to enter.

“Which proves I was right after all!” murmured King to himself.

In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former visit to the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan Caves might possibly be inside the mosque. Nobody had believed it likely, and he had not more than half favored it himself; but it is good, even when the next step may lead into a death-trap, to see one's first opinions confirmed.

He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them, for that was another most unusual circumstance.

A faint light shone through slit-like windows, changing darkness into gloom, and little more than vaguely hinting at the Prophet's bed-sheet. But for a section of white wall to either side of it, the relic might have seemed part of the shadows. The mullah stood with his back to it and beckoned King nearer. He approached until he could see the pattern on the covering rugs, and the pink rims round the mullah's lashless eyes.

“What is thy desire?” the mullah asked--as a wolf might ask what a lamb wants.

Supposing Yasmini to be jealous of invasion of her realm, King did not doubt she would be glad to have him break down at this point. Until he had actually gained access to her, nobody could reasonably charge her with his safety. If he had been done to death in the Khyber, the sirkar would have known it in a matter of hours. If he were killed here they might never know it.

“Answer!” said the mullah. “What is thy desire?”

“Audience with her!” he answered, and showed the gold bracelet on his wrist.

The red eye-rims of the mullah blinked a time or two, and though he did not salute the bracelet, as others had invariably done, his manner underwent a perceptible change.

“That is proof that she knows thee. What is thy name.”

“Kurram Khan.”

“And thy business?”

“Hakim.”

“We need thee in Khinjan Caves! But none enter who have not earned right to enter! There is but one key. Name it!”

King drew in his breath. He had hoped Yasmini's talisman would prove to be key enough. The nails his left hand nearly pierced the palm, but he smiled pleasantly.

“He who would enter must slay a man before witnesses in the teeth of written law!” he said.

“And thou?”

“I slew an Englishman!” The boast made his blood run cold, but his expression was one of sinful pride.

“Whom? When? Where?”

“Athelstan King--a British arrficer--sent on his way to these 'Hills' to spy!”

It was like having spells cast on himself to order!

“Where is his body?”

“Ask the vultures! Ask the kites!”

“And thy witnesses?”

Hoping against hope, King turned and waved his hand. As he did so, being quick-eyed, he saw Ismail drive an elbow home into Darya Khan's ribs, and caught a quick interchange of whispers.

“These men are all known to me,” said the mullah. “They all have right to enter here. They have right to testify. Did ye see him slay his man?”

“Aye!” lied Ismail, prompt as friend can be.

“Aye!” lied Darya Khan, fearful of Ismail's elbow.

“Then, enter!” said the priest resignedly, as one admits a communicant against his better judgment.

He turned his back on them so as to face the Prophet's bed-sheet and the rear wall, and in that minute a hairy hand gripped King's arm from behind, and Ismail's voice hissed hot-breathed in his ear.

“Ready of tongue! Ready of wit! Who told thee I would lie to save thy skin? Be thy kismet as thy courage, then--but I am hers, not thy man! Hers, thou light of life--though God knows I love thee!”

The mullah seized the Prophet's bed-sheet and its covering rugs in both hands, with about as much reverence as salesmen show for what they keep in stock. The whole lot slid to one side by means of noisy rings on a rod, and a wall lay bare, built of crudely cut but very well laid stone blocks. It appeared to reach unbroken across the whole width of the mosque's interior.

On the floor lay a mallet, a peculiar thing of bronze, cast in one piece, handle and all. The mullah took it in his hand and struck the stone floor sharply once--then twice again--then three times--then a dozen times in quick succession. The floor rang hollow at that spot.

After about a minute there came one answering hammer-stroke from beyond the wall. Then the mullah laid the mallet down and though King ached to pick it up and examine it he did not dare.

Excitement now was probably the least of his emotions. It had been swallowed in interest. But in his guise of hakim he had to beware of that superficial western carelessness, that permits folk to acknowledge themselves frightened or excited or amused. His business was to attract as little attention to himself as possible; and to that end he folded his hands and looked reverent, as if entering some Mecca of his dreams. Through his horn-rimmed spectacles his eyes looked far-away and dreamy. But it would have been a mistake to suppose that a detail was escaping him.

The irregular lines in the masonry began to be more pronounced. All at once the wall shook and they gaped by an inch or two, as happens when an earthquake has shaken buildings without bringing anything down. Then an irregular section of wall began to move quite smoothly away in front of him, leaving a gap through which eight men abreast could have marched.

As it receded he observed that the lowest course of stones was laid on a bronze foundation, that keyed in wide bronze grooves. There was oil enough in the grooves to have greased a ship's ways and there was neither squeak nor tremor as the tons of masonry slid back.

At the end of perhaps three minutes that section of the wall had become the fourth side of a twenty-foot-wide island that stood fair in the middle of a tunnel, splitting it in two to right and left. Judging by the angle of the two divisions they became one again before going very far.

The mullah stood aside and motioned King to enter. But the one-eyed guide who had led them to the mosque thrust himself between Darya Khan and Ismail, pushed King aside and took the lead.

“Nay!” he said, “I am responsible to her.”

It was the first time he had spoken and he appeared to resent the waste of words.

The tunnel that led to the left was pierced in twenty places in the roof for rifle-fire; a score of men with enough ammunition could have held it forever against an army. But the right-hand way looked undefended. Nevertheless, the guide led to the left, and King followed him, filled with curiosity.

“Many have entered!” sang the lashless mullah in a sing-song chant. “More have sought to enter! Some who remained without were wisest! I count them! I keep count! Many went in! Not all came out again by this road!”

“Then there is another road?” King wondered, but he held his tongue and followed the guide.

It proved to be fifty yards through part natural, part hand-hewn, tunnel to the neck of the fork where the left- and right-hand passages became one again. He stopped at the fork and looked back, for none of his men was following.

He caught the sound of scuffling--of clattering hoofs, and grunts and shouted oaths--and started to run back, since even a native hakim may protect his own, should he care to, even in the “Hills.”

For the sake of principle he chose the other passage, for Cocker says, “Look! Look! Look!” But the guide seized him by the arm from behind and swung him back again.

“Not that way!” he growled. But he offered no explanation.

In the “Hills” it is not good to ask “why” of strangers. It is good to be glad one was not knifed, and to be deferent until more suitable occasion. King started to run again, but this time along the same defended passage down which they had come. And now the guide made no objection but leaned on his long gun and waited.

The charger proved to be making the trouble--the horse that King had exchanged with the jezailchi in the Khyber. The terrified brute was refusing to enter the passage, and all the men, including Ismail and the mullah, were shoving, or else tugging at the reins.

At the moment King appeared the united strength of six men was beginning to prevail. The mullah let go the reins, and in that instant the horse saw King advance toward him out of the tunnel; so, after the manner of horses, he chose the other passage. King ran at full speed round the corner after him, remembering that the guide had admitted responsibility, and therefore that the chances were he would be rescued should he run into a trap.

Suddenly, ten yards in the lead down the dark tunnel the horse threw his weight back with a clatter of sparks and screamed as only a horse can. After that there was neither sight nor sound of him.

Creeping forward with both arms outstretched against the left-hand wall, he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were running water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed downward into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed, but there was neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp walls between. He went back to his men with a shiver between his shoulder-blades, and the mullah, standing in the gap of the mosque wall, blinked at him with lashless eyes.

“Many have entered,” he chanted maliciously. “Some went out by a different road!”

“Come!” Ismail growled at the other men, seizing the mule's bridle himself and leading to the left. “The ghosts will have a charger now for their captain to ride! Lead on, Hakim sahib!”

“Come!” called the one-eyed guide from the neck of the fork ahead. And as they all pressed forward after King the hairless mullah gave a signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a tombstone. It was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead.

“Lead along, Charon!” King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry to steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India would be like if her millions knew of this place.

     Oh, Abdul trod with a martial tread,
     Swinging his scimiter's weight.
     “I am overlord here,” he said,
     “And he who wishes may chance his head,
     “For my blade is long, and my arm is strong,
     “And the goods of the world to the bold belong!”
      So Abdul guarded the gate.

     Many a head did Abdul cleave,
     Turban and crown and chin,
     For all the 'venturers sought to know
     What it could be he guarded so.
     And since none give but eke receive,
     A thrust in his ribs made Abdul grieve
     For good blood outpourin'.

     His men wept, watching Abdul bleed
     And life's light waning dim,
     Till he cursed them. “Open the fort gate wide!
     To saddle, and scour the countryside
     For a leech!” he swore.  “God rot ye, ride!”
      'Twas thus, in the guise of a friend in need,
     His enemy came to him.

The second gap closed up behind them and the tunnel began to echo weirdly. The mule was the next to be panic-stricken. The noise of his plunging increased the echoes a thousand times and multiplied his fright, until the poor brute collapsed into meek obedience at last. But the guide strode on unconcerned with his easy Hillman gait, neither deigning to glance back nor making any verbal comment.

Over their heads, at irregular intervals, there were holes that if they led as King presumed into caves above, left not an inch of all the long passage that could not have been swept by rifle-fire. It was impregnable; for no artillery heavy enough to pound the mountain into pieces could ever be dragged within range. Whatever hiding place this entrance guarded could be held forever, given food and cartridges!

The tunnel wound to right and left like a snake, growing lighter and lighter after each bend; and soon their own din began to be swallowed in a greater one that entered from the farther end. After two sharp turns they came out unexpectedly into the blaze of blue day, nearly stunned by light and sound. A road came up from below like that of an ocean in the grip of a typhoon.

When his wits recovered from the shock, King struggled with a wild desire to yell, for before him, was what no servant of British India had ever seen and lived to tell about, and that is an experience more potent than unbroken rum.

They had emerged from a round-mouthed tunnel--it looked already like a rabbit-hole, so huge was the cliff behind--on to a ledge of rock that formed a sort of road along one side of a mile-wide chasm. Above him, it seemed a mile up, was blue sky, to which limestone walls ran sheer, with scarcely a foothold that could be seen. Beneath, so deep that eyes could not guess how deep, yawned the stained gorge of the underworld, many-colored, smooth and wet.

And out of a great, jagged slit in the side of the cliff, perhaps a thousand feet below them, there poured down into thunderous dimness a waterfall whose breadth seemed not less than half a mile. It spouted seventy or eighty yards before it began to curve, and its din was like the voice of all creation.

Ismail came and stood by King in silence, taking his hand, as a little child might. Presently he stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it over.

“Gone!” he said simply. “That down there is Earth's Drink!”

“And this is the 'Heart of the Hills' men boast about?”

“Nay! It is not!” snapped Ismail.

“Then, where--”

But the one-eyed guide beckoned impatiently, and King led the way after him, staring as hakim or prisoner or any man had right to do on first admission to such wonders. Not to have stared would have been to proclaim himself an idiot.

The least of all the wonders was that the secret of the place should have been kept all down the centuries; for it was the hollow middle of a limestone mountain, that could neither be looked down into from above, because the heights were not scalable, nor guessed at from the conformation of the country. The river, that flowed out of rock and went plunging down into the chasm, must be snow from the Himalayan peaks, on its way to swell the sea. There was no other way to account for that; but that explanation did explain why at least one Indian river is no greater than it is.

The road they followed was a fold in the natural rock, rising and falling and curving like a ribbon, but tending on the average downward. It looked to be about two miles to the point where it curved at the chasm's end and swept round and downward, to be lost in a fissure in the cliff.

They soon began to pass the mouths of caves. Some were above the road, now and then at crazy heights above it, reached by artificial steps hewn out of the stone. Others were below, reached from the road by means of ladders, that trembled and swayed over the dizzying waterfall. Most of the caves were inhabited, for armed men and sullen women came to their entrances to stare.

Ears grow accustomed to the sound of water sooner than to almost anything. It was not long before King's ears could catch the patter of his men's feet following, and the shod clink of the mule. He could hear when Ismail whispered:

“Be brave, little hakim! She loves fearless men.”

As the track descended caves became more numerous. In one there were horses, for as they passed there came a whiff of unclean stables, and the litter of fodder and dung was all about the entrance. The mouths of other caves were sealed, with great wax disks, strangely stamped, affixed to stout wooden doors. One cave smelt as if oil were stored in it, and King wondered whence the oil was brought--for the sirkar knows to a pint and an ounce what products travel up and down the Khyber.

At last the guide halted, in the middle of a short steep slope where the path was less than six feet wide and a narrow cave mouth gave directly on to it.

“Be content to rest here!” he said, pointing.

“Thy cave?” asked King.

“Nay. God's! I am the caretaker!”

(The “Hills” are very pious and polite, between the acts of robbing and shedding blood.)

“Allah, then, reward thee, brother!” answered King. “Allah give sight to thy blind eye! Allah give thee children! Allah give thee peace, and to all thy house!”

The guide salaamed, half-mockingly, half-wondering at such eloquence, pausing in the passage to point into the side-caves that debouched to either hand. There was a niche of a place, where a man might lie on guard near the entrance; another cave in which horses could be stabled, with plenty of fodder piled up ready; another beyond that for servants and baggage, with a fireplace and cooking pots; and at the last at the rear of all a great cavern full of eerie gloom, that opened out from the end of the passage like a bottle at the end of a long neck.

Peering about him into vastness, King became aware of frame beds, placed at intervals in a row, each with a mat beside it. And there were several brass basins and ewers for water. Also there were some little bronze lamps; the guide lit three of them, and King took up one to examine it. As he did so, involuntarily his hand almost went to his bosom, where the strange knife still reposed that he had taken from the would-be murderer in the train to Delhi.

There was no gold on the lamp; but the handle by which he lifted it had been cast, the devils of the Himalayas only knew how many centuries ago, in the form of a woman dancing; her size, and her shape, and the art with which she had been fashioned, were the same as the handle of the knife.

Watching him as a wolf eyes another one, the strange guide found his tongue.

“How many such hast thou ever seen?” he asked.

“None!” answered King, and the guide cackled at him, like a hen that has laid an egg.

“There be many strange things in Khinjan, but few strangers!” he remarked; and then, as if that were enough for any man to say on any occasion, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the cavern. It was the last King ever saw of him. He followed him down the passage to the entrance and watched him until his back disappeared round the first bend, but the man never turned his head once. He did not even look over the edge of the road, down into the amazing waterfall, nor up to the round disk of sky.

King turned back and looked into the other caves--saw the weary horse and mule fed, watered and bedded down--took note of the running water that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down another one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amply provided with blankets. There was nothing lacking that the most exacting traveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. There was more than the most exacting would have dared expect.

“Why isn't it damp in here?” he wondered, returning to his own cave. And then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smoke from the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made it do that, unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurrying underground; and then he remembered that at the entrance air had rushed downward into the hole down which the horse had disappeared, which partly confirmed his guess.

“Ismail!” he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of his voice.

Ismail came running.

“Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khan stay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants of Kurram Khan, the hakim!”

“They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!” clucked Ismail, but he hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.

Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to make a brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgical instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds and covered from view by a blanket.

It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck that one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.

There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapid succession.

“Does it pain thee, brother?” asked Kurram Khan the hakim.

“Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!”

The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmed spectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtues as assistant.

“This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan,” he boasted. “He can cure anything, and for a very little fee!”

“Nay, for no fee at all in this case!” said King.

The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row of instruments and bottles.

“Take a chance!” he advised. “None but the brave wins anything!”

The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismail and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had him down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, before the man could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, for Ismail drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep them open.

A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and cocaine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and allowed it time to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick succession, to make sure he had the right one.

Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass cup. Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as grateful as a wolf freed from a trap.

“Allah reward thee, since the service was free!” he smirked.

“Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?” King asked him.

“Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a sore or a scar or a sickness?”

“Then, tell them,” said King.

The man laughed.

“When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready, hakim! I go!”

He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed by the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the halt and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed with them, and no riot ever made more noise.

“Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man who knows yunani?”

Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order, and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating mad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that King rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to wonder.

The “Hills” are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact that the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand, coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made King horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because the man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.

When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out and flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.

Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man, laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. Then King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaesthetics when he must, but managing mostly without them.

They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee would be. Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and even clothing. Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they were men who did not expect to live. And King accepted every gift without comment, because that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossed money and clothes and every other thing they gave him into a corner at the back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal them back, although a man suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured to death as an heretic and would have had no sympathy.

For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as only battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come at last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on which the blood had caked but had not grown foul.

“There has been fighting in the Khyber,” somebody informed him, and he stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred faces swiftly in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps for him, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.

“Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove them back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!”

“Not a jihad yet?” King asked, as if the world might be coming to an end. The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstances he would never have asked that question so directly; but he had lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy war had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But the man laughed at him.

“Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little fight. The jihad shall come later!”

“And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” King wondered; but he did not ask that question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too much of a hurry to know things in the “Hills.”

As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left empty of all except his own five men. They carried away the men too sick to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's fingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.

“Why is that?” he asked Ismail. “Why did they go? Who shouted?”

“It is night,” Ismail answered. “It was time.”

King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him; his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.

“But who shouted?”

“Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who obey,” said Ismail.

“Whose men were the last ones?” King asked him, trying a new line.

“Bull-with-a-beard's.”

“And whose man art thou, Ismail?”

The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the same assurance in his voice as once there had been.

“I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan.”

King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless. For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat indignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King had, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.

He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of Yasmini all night long.

It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the faded photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cave became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi.

He dreamed that she called him by name. First, “King sahib!” Then, “Kurram Khan!” And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are strange things.

“He sleeps!” said the same voice presently. “It is good that he sleeps!” And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.

After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep, although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.

But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become two women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.

Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was actually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a hospital.

When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the passage into his cave.

“Ismail!” he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.

“Darya Khan!”

Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with the same result.

He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressed himself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did not believe he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized that permeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that the sick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth, summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff the fresh air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would know then whether his nose were deceiving him.

But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any of the other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, and everything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the presents the sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying about in confusion when he woke.

“Ismail!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be outside.

He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out to see. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and eyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.

“No farther!” he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.

“Why not?” King asked him.

“Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!”

He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at least civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!

He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent greeted him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs and filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special scent in Delhi, as Saunders swore it was, and her special scent on the note Darya Khan had carried down the Khyber, then it was hers now, and she had been in the cave.

He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.

His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger, wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients had brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robber who had robbed him.

At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener than once a week. So men learn sympathy.

“I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!” he admitted, sitting on the bed. “I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another man for that--or for less!”

He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted like ashes in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not very many men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the whole affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.

“Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” he wondered. “Nobody interfered with me until I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now, who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be? And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does 'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?”

   Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
   his leavings?
   Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
   and enemy.--Native Proverb

They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King went to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the “Hills,” where indirectness is the key to information, he stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of tumbling water and looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid like a knife in the ascending mist.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a Mahsudi--no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact. Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.

“There is an end to everything,” he remarked presently, addressing the world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth. “A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for instance, must thy watch be?”

“What is that to thee?” the fellow growled.

“There is an end to pain!” said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles. “I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him, but he must be well to-day.”

“Get in!” growled the guard. “She says it is sorcery! She says none are to let thee touch them!”

Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his hairy ear too recently.

“Get in!” he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.

“I can heal boils!” said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the hours went by.

“It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily at night! It is good not to flinch at another's touch. Boils are bad! Healing is easy and good!”

Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for the same man was back again that evening.

At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent messengers; so he ate, for “the thing to do,” says Cocker, “is the first that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry.” It is not easy to worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments, repacking them and making ready against opportunity.

“As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to everything!” he reflected. “May this come soon!”

When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird minor one to which the “Hills” have set their favorite love song (that is, all about hate in the concrete!).

The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a forgotten dog's.

So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang the words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.

“Allah preserve thee, brother!” he remarked. “Thine is a voice like a warrior's--bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!”

“Aye!” said the fellow, “that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle me another one!”

So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles of a Hillman's heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth's wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile above.

“Good!” said the bearded jailer. “Now begin again and I will sing!”

He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at him. When he left off singing at last, to drink from a water-bottle, that surely had been looted from a British soldier, King decided to be done with overtures and make the next move in the game.

“Didst thou ever sing for her?” he asked, and the man turned round to stare at him as if he were mad, King saw then a blood-soaked bandage on the right of his neck, not very far from the jugular.

“When she sings we are silent! When she is silent it is good to wait a while and see!” he answered.

“Hah!” said King. “Was that wound got in the Khyber the other day?”

“Nay. Here in Khinjan. I had my thumb in a man's eye, and the bastard bit me! May devils do worse to him where he has gone! I threw him into Earth's Drink!”

“A good place for one's enemies!” laughed King.

“Aye!”

“A man told me last night,” said King, drawing on imagination without any compunction at all, “that the fight in the Khyber was because a jihad is launched aleady.”

“That man lied!” said the guard, shifting position uneasily, as if afraid to talk too much.

“So I told him!” answered King. “I told him there never will be another jihad.”'

“Then art thou a greater liar than he!” the guard answered hotly. “There will be a jihad when she is ready, such an one as never yet was! India shall bleed for all the fat years she has lain unplundered! Not a throat of an unbeliever in the world shall be left un-slit! No jihad? Thou liar! Get in out of my sight!”

So King retired into the cave, with something new to think about. Was she planning the jihad! Or pretending to plan one? Every once in a while the guard leaned far into the cave mouth and huried adjectives at him, the mildest of which was a well of information. If his temper was the temper of the “Hills,” it was easy to read disappointment for a jihad that should have been already but had been postponed.

When they changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was no getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger. King let him alone and paced the cave for hours.

He was squatting on his bed-end in the dark, like a spectacled image of Buddha, when the first of the three men came on guard again and at last Ismail came for him holding a pitchy torch that filled the dim passage full of acrid smoke and made both of them cough. Ismail was red-eyed with it.

“Come!” he growled. “Come, little hakim!” Then he turned on his heel at once, as if afraid of being twitted with desertion. He seemed to want to get outside, where he could keep out of range of words, yet not to wish to seem unfriendly.

But King made no effort to speak to him, following in silence out on to the dark ledge above the waterfall and noticing that the guard with the boils was back again on duty. He grinned evilly out of a shadow as King passed.

“Make an end!” he advised, spitting over the Cliff into thunderous darkness to illustrate the suggestion. “Jump, hakim, before a worse thing happens!”

To add further point he kicked a loose stone over the edge, and the movement caused him to bend his neck and so inadvertently to hurt his boils. He cursed, and there was pity in King's voice when he spoke next.

“Do they hurt thee?”

“Aye, like the devil! Khinjan is a place of plagues!”

“I could heal them,” King said, passing on, and the man stared hard.

“Come!” boomed Ismail through the darkness, shaking the torch to make it burn better and beckoning impatiently, and King hurried after him, leaving behind a savage at the cave mouth who fingered his sores and wondered, muttering, leaning on a rifle, muttering and muttering again as if he had seen a new light.

Instead of waiting for King to catch up, Ismail began to lead the way at great speed along a path that descended gradually until it curved round the end of the chasm and plunged into a tunnel where the darkness grew opaque. In the tunnel the torch's smoke cast weird shadows on walls and roof, and the fitful light only confused, so that Ismail slowed down and let him come up close.

Then for thirty minutes he led swiftly down a crazy devil's stairway of uneven boulders, stopping to lend a hand at the worst places, but everlastingly urging him to hurry. They were both breathless, and King was bruised in a dozen places when they reached level going at least six or seven hundred feet below the cave from which they started.

Then the hell-mouth gloom began to grow faintly luminous, and the waterfall's thunder burst on their ears from close at hand. They emerged into fresh wet air and a sea of sound, on a rock ledge like the one above. Ismail raised the torch and waved it. The fire and smoke wandered up, until they flattened on a moving opal dome, that prisoned all the noises in the world.

“Earth's Drink!” he announced, waving the torch and then shutting his mouth tight, as if afraid to voice sacrilege.

It was the river, million-colored in the torch-light, pouring from a half-mile-long slash in the cliff above them and plunging past them through the gloom toward the very middle of the world. Its width was a matter of memory, and its depth unguessable, for although dim moonlight filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far such light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from deeps unimaginable.

He watched the overturning dome until his senses reeled. Then he crawled on hands and knees to the ledge's brink and tried to peer over. But Ismail dragged him back.

“Come!” he howled; but in all that din his shout was like a whisper.

“How deep is it?” King bellowed back.

“Allah! Ask Him who made it!”

The fear of the falls was on the Afridi, and he tugged at King's arm in a frenzy of impatience. Suddenly he let go and broke into a run. King trotted after him, afraid too, to look to right or left, lest the fear should make him throw himself over the brink. The thunder and the hugeness had their grip on him and had begun to numb his power to think and his will to be a man. Suddenly when they had run a hundred yards, Ismail turned sharp to the right into a tunnel that led straight back into the cliff and sloped uphill. As the din of the falls grew less behind him and his power to think returned, King calculated that they must be following the main direction of the river bed, but edging away gradually to the right of it. After ten minutes' hurrying uphill he guessed they must be level with the river, in a tunnel running nearly parallel.

He proved to be right, for they came to a gap in the wall, and Ismail thrust the torch through it. The light shone on swift black water, and a wind rushed through the gap that nearly blew the torch out. It accounted altogether for the dryness of the rock and the fresh air in the tunnel. The river's weight seemed to suck a hurricane along with it--air enough for a million men to breathe.

After that there was no more need to stop at intervals and beat the torch against the wall to make it burn brightly, for the wind fanned it until the flame was nearly white. Ismail kept looking back to bid King hurry and never paused once to rest.

“Come!” he urged fiercely. “This leads to the 'Heart of the Hills'!” And after that King had to do his best to keep the Afridi's back in sight.