For the thousand-and-first time Amber abandoned his efforts to divine the inscrutable, to overcome the insurmountable, to attain to the inaccessible, but abandoned them grudgingly, grimly denying the possibility of ultimate failure. Though he were never to know the dark heart of the mystery, yet would he snatch from its pythonic coils the woman he had sworn to save, the woman he loved!

And while the black steamer with the buff super-structure toiled on, cleaving its arduous way through the turbulent yellow flood between the contracting shores of the Sunderbunds, while the offshore wind buffeted Amber's cheeks with the hot panting breath of Bengal, his eyes, dimmed with dreaming, saw only Her face.

So often of late had he in solitude pondered her photograph, striving to solve the puzzle of her heart that was to him a mystery as unfathomable as that which threatened her, that he had merely to think of her to bring her picture vividly before him. He could close his eyes (he closed them now, shutting out the moving panorama of the river) and see the girl that he had known in those few dear hours: the girl with eyes as brown as sepia but illumined by traces of gold in the irides—eyes that could smile and frown and be sweetly grave, all in the time that a man needs to catch his breath; the girl with the immaculate, silken skin, milk-white, with the rose-blush of young blood beneath; with lips softly crimson as satin petals of a flower, that could smile a man into slavery; the girl to contemplate whose adorably modelled chin and firm, round, young neck would soften the austerity of an anchorite; in whose hair was blended every deep shade of bronze and gold....

Something clutched at his heart as with a hand of ice. He could never forget, dared not remember what he could not believe yet dared not deny. To him, reared as he had been, the barrier of mixed blood rose between them, a thing surmountable only at the cost of caste; the shadow of that horror lay upon his soul like ink—as black as the silhouetted rails and masts and rigging of the Poonah on her dead white decks. He could win her heart only to lose his world. And still he loved, still pursued his steadfast way toward her, knowing that, were he to find her and his passion to be returned, death alone could avert their union in marriage. He might not forget but ... he loved. With him the high wind of Romance was a living gale, levelling every obstacle between him and the desire of his heart.

This is to be borne in mind: it was the man's first love. Theretofore the habits of a thinker had set his feet in paths apart from those of other men. Pretty women he had always admired—from a discreet distance; that distance abridged, he had always found himself a little afraid of and dismayed by them. They were the world's disturbing element; they took men's lives in the rosy hollows of their palms and moulded them as they would. While Amber had desired to mould his own life. The theme of love that runs a golden thread through the drab fabric of existence had to him been an illusion—a hallucination to which others were subject, from which he was happily, if unaccountably, exempt. But that had been yesterday; to-day....

In the afternoon the Poonah touched at Diamond Harbour, landing the majority of her passengers. Amber was among those few who remained aboard.

When the steamer swung off from the jetty and, now aided by a favourable tide, resumed her progress up the river, he replaced his notice on the bulletin-board with one offering a hundred guineas for the return of the photograph before they docked in the port of Calcutta; the offer of fifty guineas for its return to the Great Eastern Hotel remained unaltered.

His anticipations were not disappointed; positively nothing came of it. All afternoon the Poonah plodded steadily on toward the pall of smoke that hemmed the northern horizon. The reedy river banks narrowed and receded, gorgeous with colour, unvaryingly monotonous, revealing nothing. Behind walls of rank foliage, dense green curtains almost impenetrable even to light, the flat and spongy delta of the Ganges lay decorously screened. If now and again the hangings parted they disclosed nothing more than a brief vista of half-stagnant water or a little clearing, half-overgrown, with the crumbling red brick walls of some roofless and abandoned dwelling.

In the lavender and gold and scarlet of a windless sunset, Calcutta lifted suddenly up before them, a fairy city, mystic and unreal with its spires and domes and minarets a-glare with hot colour behind a hedge of etched black masts and funnels—all dimmed and made indefinite by a heavy dun haze of smoke: lifted up in glory against the evening sky and was blotted out as if by magic by the swooping night; then lived again in a myriad lights pin-pricked upon the dense bluish-blackness.

The Poonah slipped in to her dock under cover of darkness. Amber, disembarking with Doggott, climbed into an open ghari on the landing stage and was driven swiftly to his hotel.

As he alighted and, leaving Doggott to settle with the ghariwallah, crossed the sidewalk to the hotel entrance, a beggar slipped through the throng of wayfarers, whining at his elbow:

"Give, O give, Protector of the Poor!"

Preoccupied, Amber hardly heard, and passed on; but the native stuck leech-like to his side.

"Give, hazoor—and the mercy of God shall be upon the Heaven-born for ten-thousand years!"

Now "Heaven-born" is flattery properly reserved for those who sit in high places. Amber turned and eyed the man curiously, at the same time dropping into the filthy, importunate palm a few annas.

"May the shadow of the Heaven-born be long upon the land, when he shall have passed through the Gateway of Swords!"

And like a flash the man was gone—dodging nimbly round the ghari and across Old Court House Street, losing himself almost instantly in the press of early evening traffic.

"The devil!" said Amber thoughtfully. "Why should it be assumed that I have any shadow of an intention of entering that damnable Gateway of Swords?"

An incident at the desk, while he was arranging for his room, further mystified him. He had given his name to the clerk, who looked up, smiling.

"Mr. David Amber?" he said.

"Why, yes—"

"We were expecting you, sir. You came by the Poonah?"

"Yes, but—"

"There's a note for you." The man turned to a rack, sorting out a small square envelope from others pigeon-holed under "A."

Could it be possible that Sophia Farrell had been advised of his coming? Amber's hand trembled slightly with eagerness and excitement as he took the missive.

"An Eurasian boy left it for you half an hour ago," said the clerk.

"Thank you," returned Amber, controlling himself sufficiently to wait until he should be conducted to his room before opening the note.

It was not, he observed later, superscribed in a feminine hand. Could it be from Quain's friend Labertouche? Who else?... Amber lifted his shoulders resignedly. "I wish Quain had minded his own business," he said ungratefully; "I can take care of myself. This Labertouche'll probably make life a misery for me."

There was a quality in the note, however, to make him forget his resentment of Quain's well-meant interference.

"My dear Sir," it began formally: "Quain's letter did not reach me until this afternoon; a circumstance which I regret. Otherwise I should be better prepared to assist you. I have, on the other hand, set afoot enquiries which may shortly result in some interesting information bearing upon the matters which engage you. I expect to have news of the Fs. to-night, and shall be glad to communicate it to you at once. I am presuming that you purpose losing no time in attending to the affair of the goldsmith, but I take the liberty of advising you that to attempt to find him without proper guidance or preparation would be an undertaking hazardous in the extreme. May I offer you my services? If you decide to accept them, be good enough to come before ten to-night to the sailors' lodging house known as 'Honest George's,' back of the Lal Bazaar, and ask for Honest George himself, refraining from mentioning my name. Dress yourself in your oldest and shabbiest clothing; you cannot overdo this, since the neighbourhood is questionable and a well-dressed man would immediately become an object of suspicion. Do not wear the ring; keep it about you, out of sight. Should this fail to reach you in time, try to-morrow night between eight and ten. You would serve us both well by burning this immediately. Pray believe me yours to command in all respects."

There was no signature.

Amber frowned and whistled over this. "Undoubtedly from Labertouche," he considered. "But why this flavour of intrigue? Does he know anything more than I do? I presume he must. It'd be a great comfort if.... Hold on. 'News of the Fs.' That spells the Farrells. How in blazes does he know anything about the Farrells? I told Quain nothing.... Can it be a trap? Is it possible that the chap who took that photograph recognised...?"

The problem held him in perplexity throughout the evening meal. He turned it over this way and that without being able to arrive at any comforting solution. Impulse in the end decided him—impulse and a glance at his watch which told him that the time grew short. "I'll go," he declared, "no matter what. It's nearly nine, but the Lal Bazaar's not far."

In the face of Doggott's unbending disapproval he left the hotel some twenty minutes later, having levied on Doggott's wardrobe for suitable clothing. Dressed in an old suit of soft grey serge, somewhat too large for him, and wearing a grey felt hat with the brim pulled down over his eyes, he felt that he was not easily to be identified with his every-day self—the David Amber whose exacting yet conservative "correctness" had become a by-word with his friends.

Once away from the Great Eastern he quietly insinuated himself into the tide of the city's night life that tirelessly ebbs and flows north of Dalhousie Square—the restless currents of native life that move ceaselessly in obedience to impulses so meaningless and strange to the Occidental understanding. Before he realised it he had left civilisation behind him and was breathing the atmosphere, heady and weird, of the Thousand-and-One Nights. The Lal Bazaar seethed round him noisily, with a roaring not unlike that of a surf in the hearing of him who had so long lived separate from such scenes. But gradually the strangeness of it passed away and he began to feel at home. And ere long he passed in a single stride from the glare of many lights and the tumult of a hundred tongues to the dark and the quiet hush of an alley that wormed a sinuous way through the hinterland of the bazaar. Here the air hung close and still and gravid with the odour of the East, half stench, half perfume, wholly individual and indescribable; here black shadows clung jealously to black and slimy walls, while lighter ones but vaguely suggestive of robed figures glided silently hither and yon; and odd noises, whispers, sobs, sounds of laughter and of rage, assailed the ear and excited the imagination....

At a corner where there was more light he came upon a policeman whose tunic, helmet, and truncheon were so closely patterned after those of the London Bobby that the simple sight of them was calculated to revive confidence in the security of one's person. He inspected Amber shrewdly while the latter was asking his way to Honest George's, and in response jerked a white-gloved thumb down the wide thoroughfare.

"You carn't miss it, sir—s'ylors' boardin'-'ouse, all lit up and likely with a row on at the bar. Mind your eye, guv'nor. It ayn't a plyce you'd ought to visit on your lone."

"Thanks; I've business there. I reckon to take care of myself."

Nevertheless it was with a mind preyed upon by forebodings that Amber stumbled down the cobbled way, reeking with filth, toward the establishment of Honest George. Why on earth should Labertouche make an appointment in so unholy a spot? Amber's doubts revived and he became more than half persuaded that this must be a snare devised by those acute intelligences which had instigated both the theft of the photograph and that snarled mock-benediction of the mendicant.

"I don't like it," he admitted ruefully; "it's so canny."

He stopped in front of a building whose squat brick facade was lettered with the reassuring sobriquet of its proprietor. A bench, running the width of the structure, was thick with sprawling loafers, who smoked and spat and spoke a jargon of the seas, the chief part of which was blasphemy. Within, visible through windows never closed, was a crowded barroom ablaze with flaring gas-jets, uproarious with voices thick with drink.

One needed courage of no common order to run the gauntlet of that rowdy room and brave the more secret dangers of the infamous den. "You've got to have your nerve with you," Amber put it. "But I suppose it's all in the game. Let's chance it." And he entered.

Compared with the atmosphere of that public-room a blast from Hell were sweet and cooling, thought Amber; the first whiff he had of it all but staggered him; and he found himself gasping, perspiration starting from every pore. Faint with disgust he elbowed his way through the mob to the bar, thankful that those about him, absorbed in the engrossing occupation of getting drunk, paid him not the least heed. Flattening himself against the rail he cast about for the proprietor. A blowsy, sweating barmaid caught his eye and without a word slapped down upon the sloppy counter before him a glass four fingers deep with unspeakable whiskey. And he realised that he would have to drink it; to refuse would be to attract attention, perhaps with unpleasant consequences. "It's more than I bargained for," he grumbled, making a pretence of swallowing the dose, and to his huge relief managing to spill two-thirds of it down the front of his coat. What he swallowed bit like an acid. Tears came to his eyes, but he choked down the cough, and as soon as he could speak paid the girl. "Where's the boss?" he asked.

"Who?" Her glance was penetrating. "Oh, he's wytin' for you." She nodded, lifting a shrill voice. "Garge, O Garge! 'Ere's that Yankee." With a bare red elbow she indicated the further end of the room. "You'll find 'im down there," she said, her look not unkindly.

Amber thanked her quietly and, extricating himself from the press round the bar, made his way in the direction indicated. A couple of billiard tables with a small mob of onlookers hindered him, but by main strength and diplomacy he wormed his way past and reached the rear of the room. There were fewer loafers here and he had little hesitation about selecting from an attendant circle of sycophants the genius of the dive—Honest George himself, a fat and burly ruffian who filled to overflowing the inadequate accommodation of an armchair. Sitting thus enthroned in his shirt-sleeves, his greasy and unshaven red face irradiating a sort of low good-humour that was belied by the cold cunning of his little eyes, he fulfilled admirably the requirements of the role he played self-cast.

"'Ere, you!" he hailed Amber brusquely. "You're a 'ell of a job-'unter, ain't you? Mister Abercrombie's been wytin' for you this hour gone. 'Know the w'y upstairs?"

His tone was boisterous enough to fix upon Amber the attention of the knot of loafers round the arm-chair. Amber felt himself under the particular regard of a dozen pair of eyes, felt that his measure was taken and his identification complete. Displeased, he answered curtly: "No."

"This w'y, then." Honest George hoisted himself ponderously out of his arm-chair and lumbered heavily across the room, shouldering the crowd aside with a high-handed contempt for the pack of them. Jerking open a small door in the side wall, he beckoned Amber on with a backward nod of his heavy head. "Be a bit lively, carn't you?" he growled; and Amber, in despite of qualms of distrust, followed the fellow into a small and noisome hallway lighted by a single gas-jet. On the one hand a flight of rickety steps ran up into repellent obscurity; on the other a low door stood open to the night.

The crimp lowered his voice. "Your friend's this w'y." He waved his fat red hand toward the door. "Them fools back there 'll think you're tryin' for a berth with Abercrombie, the ship-master. I 'opes you'll not tyke offense at the w'y I 'ad to rag you back there, sir."

"No," said Amber, and Honest George led the way out into a small, flagged well between towering black walls and left him at the threshold of a second doorway. "Two flights up, the door at the top," he said; "knock twice and then twice." And without waiting for an answer he lurched heavily back to his own establishment.

Amber watched his broad back fill the dimly-lighted doorway opposite and disappear, of two minds whether or not to turn tail and run. Suspicious enough in the beginning, the affair had now an exceeding evil smell—as repulsive figuratively as was the actual effluvium of the premises. He hung hesitant in doubt, with a heart oppressed by those grim and silent walls of blackness that loomed above him. With feet slipping on slimy flags he might be pardoned for harbouring suspicions of some fouler treachery. The yawning mouth of the narrow doorway, with the blackness of Erebus within, was deterring at its best; in such a hole a man might be snared and slain and his screams, though they rang to high Heaven, would fall meaningless on mundane ears. Honest George's with its flare of lights and its crowd had been questionable enough....

With a shrug, at length, he took his courage in his hands—and his life, too, for all he knew to the contrary—and moved on into the blackness, groping his way cautiously down a short corridor, his fingers on either side brushing walls of rotten plaster. He had absolutely nothing to guide him beyond the crimp's terse instructions. Underfoot the flooring seemed to sag ominously; it creaked hideously. Abruptly he stumbled against an obstruction, halted, and lighted a match.

The insignificant flame showed him a flight of stairs, leading up to darkness. With a drumming heart he began to ascend, counting twenty-one steps ere his feet failed to find another. Then groping again, one hand encountered a baluster-rail; with this for guide he turned and followed it until it began to slant upwards. This time he counted sixteen steps before his eyes, rising above the level of the upper floor, discovered to him a thin line of light, bright along the threshold of a door. He began to breathe more freely, yet apprehension kept him strung up to a high tension of nerves.

He knuckled the door loudly—one double knock followed by another.

From within a voice called cheerfully, in English: "Come in."

He fumbled for the knob, found and turned it, and entered a small, low-ceiled chamber, very cosy with lamplight, and simply furnished with a single chair, a charpoy, a water-jug, a large mirror, and beneath the latter a dressing-table littered with a collection of toilet gear, cosmetics and bottles, which would have done credit to an actress.

There was but a single person in the room and he occupied the chair before the dressing-table. As Amber came in, he rose; a middle-aged babu in a suit of pink satin, very dirty. In one hand something caught the light, glittering.

"Oah, Mister Amber, I believe?" he gurgled, oily and affable. "Believe me most charmed to make acquaintance." And he laughed agreeably.

But Amber's face had darkened. With an oath he sprang back, threw his weight against the door, and with his left hand shot the bolt, while his right whipped from his pocket Rutton's automatic pistol.

"Drop that gun, you monkey!" he cried sharply. "I was afraid of this, but I think you and I'll have an accounting before any one else gets in here."



CHAPTER IX

PINK SATIN

Shaking with rage, Amber stood for a long moment with pistol poised and eyes wary; then, bewildered, he slowly lowered the weapon. "Well," he observed reflectively, "I'm damned." For the glittering thing he had mistaken for a revolver lay at his feet; and it was nothing more nor less than a shoehorn. While as for the babu, he had dropped back into the chair and given way to a rude but reassuring paroxysm of gusty, silent laughter.

"I'm a fool," said Amber; "and if I'm not mistaken you're Labertouche."

With a struggle the babu overcame his emotion. "I am, my dear fellow, I am," he gasped. "And I owe you an apology. Upon my word, I'd forgotten; one grows so accustomed to living the parts in these masquerades, after a time, that one forgets. Forgive me." He offered a hand which Amber grasped warmly in his unutterable relief. "I'm really delighted to meet you," continued Labertouche seriously. "Any man who knows India can't help being glad to meet the author of 'The Peoples of the Hindu Kush.'"

"You did frighten me," Amber confessed, smiling. "I didn't know what to expect—or suspect. Certainly,"—with a glance round the incongruously furnished room—"I never looked forward to anything like this—or you, in that get-up."

"You wouldn't, you know," Labertouche admitted gravely. "I might have warned you in my note; but that was a risky thing, at best. I feared to go into detail—it might have fallen into the wrong hands."

"Whose?" demanded Amber.

"That, my dear man, is what we're here to find out—if we can. But sit down; we shall have to have quite a bit of talk." He scraped a heap of gaily-coloured native garments off one end of the charpoy and motioned Amber to the chair. At the same time he fished a cigar-case out of some recess in his clothing. "These are good," he remarked, opening the case and offering it to Amber; "I daren't smoke anything half so good when at work. The native tobacco is abominable, you know—quite three-fourths filth."

"At work?" questioned Amber, clipping the end of his cigar and lighting it. "You don't mean to say you travel round in those clothes?"

"But I do. It's business with me—though few people know it. Quain didn't; only I had a chance, one day, to tell him some rather startling facts about native life. This sort of thing, done properly, gives a man insight into a lot of unusual things."

Labertouche puffed his cigar into a glow and leaned back, clasping one knee with two brown hands and squinting up at the low, discoloured ceiling. And Amber, looking him over, was amazed by the absolute fidelity of his make-up; the brownish stain on face and hands, the high-cut patent-leather boots, the open-work socks through which his tinted calves showed grossly, his shapeless, baggy, soiled garments—all were hopelessly babu-ish.

"And if it isn't done properly?"

"Oh, then——!" Labertouche laughed, lifting his shoulders expressively. "No Englishman incapable of living up to a disguise has ever tried it more than once in India; few, very few, have lived to tell of the experiment."

"You're connected with the police?" Amber's brows contracted as he remembered Rutton's emphatic prohibition.

But Quain had not failed to mention that. "Officially, no," said Labertouche readily. "Now and again, of course, I run across a bit of valuable information; and then, somehow, indirectly, the police get wind of it. But this going fantee in an amateur way is simply my hobby; I've been at it for years—and very successfully, too. Of course, it'll have its end. One's bound to slip up eventually. You can train yourself to live the life of the native, but you can't train your mind to think as he thinks. That's how the missteps happen. Some day...." He sighed, not in the least unhappily.... "Some day I'll dodge into this hole, or another that I know of, put on somebody else's rags—say, these I'm wearing—and inconspicuously become a mysterious disappearance. That's how it is with all of us who go in for this sort of thing. But it's like opium, you know; you try it the first time for the lark of it; the end is tragedy."

Amber drew a long breath, his eyes glistening with wonder and admiration of the man. "You don't mean to tell me you run such risks for the pure love of it?"

"Well ... perhaps not altogether. But we needn't go into details, need we?" Labertouche's smile robbed the rebuke of its sting. "The opium simile is a very good one, though I say it who shouldn't. One acquires a taste for the forbidden, and one hires a little room like this from an unprincipled blackguard like Honest George, and insensibly one goes deeper and deeper until one gets beyond one's depth. That is all. It explains me sufficiently. And," he chuckled, "you'd never have known it if your case hadn't been exceptional."

"It is, I think." Amber's expression became anxious. "I want to know what you think of it—now Quain's told you. And, I say, what did you mean by 'news of the Fs.'?"

"News of the Farrells—father and daughter, of course." Labertouche's eyes twinkled.

"But how in the name of all that's strange—!"

"Did I connect the affair Rutton with the Farrells? At first by simple inference. You were charged with a secret errand, demanding the utmost haste, by Rutton; your first thought was to travel by the longer route—which, as it happens, Miss Farrell had started upon a little while before. You had recently met her, and I've heard she's rather a striking young woman. You see?"

"Yes," admitted Amber sheepishly. "But—"

"And then I remembered something," interrupted Labertouche. "I recalled Rutton. I knew him years ago, when he was a young man.... You know the yarn about him?"

"A little—mighty little. I know now that he was a Rajput—though he never told me that; I know that he married a Russian noblewoman"—Amber hesitated imperceptibly—"that she died soon after, that he chose to live out of India and to die rather than return to it."

"He was," said Labertouche, "a singular man, an exotic result of the unnatural conditions we English have brought about in India. The word renegade describes him aptly, I think: he was born and bred a Brahmin, a Rajput, of the hottest and bluest blood in Rajputana; he died to all intents and purposes a European—with an English heart. He is—was—by rights Maharana of Khandawar. As the young Maharaj he was sent to England to be educated. I'm told his record at Oxford was a brilliant one. He became a convert to Christianity—that was predestined—was admitted to the Church of England, a communicant. When his father died and he was summoned to take his place, Rutton at first refused. Pressure was brought to bear upon him by the English Government and he returned, was enthroned, and for a little time ruled Khandawar. It was then that I knew him. He was continually dissatisfied, however, and after a year or two disappeared. It was rumoured that he'd struck a bargain with his prime-minister, one Salig Singh. At all events Salig Singh contrived to usurp the throne, Government offering no objection. Rutton turned up eventually in Russia and married a woman there who died in childbirth—twenty years ago, perhaps. The child did not survive its mother...." Labertouche paused deliberately, his glance searching Amber's face. "So the report ran, at least," he concluded quietly.

"How do you know all this?" Amber countered evasively.

"Government watches its wards very tenderly," said Labertouche with a grin. "Besides, India's a great place for gossip.... And then," he pursued tenaciously, "I remembered something else. I recalled that Rutton had one very close friend, an Englishman named Farrell—"

"Oh, what's the use?" Amber cut in nervously. "You understand the situation too well. It's no good my trying to keep anything from you."

"Such as the fact that Colonel Farrell adopted Rutton's daughter, who, as it happens, did survive her mother? Yes; I knew that—or, rather, part I knew and part I guessed. But don't worry, Mr. Amber; I'll keep the secret."

"For the girl's sake," said Amber, twisting his hands together.

"For her sake. I pledge you my word."

"Thank you."

"And now ... for what purpose did Rutton ask you to come to India? Wasn't it to get Miss Farrell out of the country?"

"I think you're the devil himself," said Amber.

"I'm not," confessed Labertouche; "but I am a member of the Indian Secret Service—not officially connected with the police, observe!—and I know a deal that you don't. I think, in short, I can place my finger on the reason why Rutton was so concerned to get his daughter out of the country."

Amber looked his question.

"You read the papers, don't you, in America?"

"Rather." Amber smiled.

"You've surely not been so blind as to miss the occasional reports that leak out about native unrest in India?"

"Surely you don't mean——"

"I assuredly do mean that the Second Mutiny impends," declared Labertouche solemnly. "Such, at least, is my belief, and such is the belief of every thinking man in India who is at all informed. The entire country is undermined with conspiracy and sedition; day after day a vast, silent, underground movement goes on, fomenting rebellion against the English rule. The worst of it is, there's no stopping it, no way of scotching the serpent; its heads are myriad, seemingly. And yet—I don't know—since yesterday I have hoped that through you we might eventually strike to the heart of the movement."

"Through me!" cried Amber, startled.

Labertouche nodded. "Just so. The information you have already brought us is invaluable. Have you thought of the significance of Chatterji's 'Message of the Bell'?"

"'Even now,'" Amber quoted mechanically, "'The Gateway of Swords yawns wide, that he who is without fear may pass within; to the end that the Body be purged of the Scarlet Evil.'" He shook his head mystified. "No; I don't understand."

"It's so simple," urged Labertouche; "all but the Gateway of Swords. I don't place that—yet.... But the 'Body'—plainly that is India; the 'Scarlet Evil'—could anything more fittingly describe English rule from the native point of view?"

Amber felt of his head solicitously. "And yet," he averred plaintively, "it doesn't feel like wood."

Labertouche laughed gently. "Now to-night you will learn something from this Dhola Baksh—something important, undoubtedly. May I see this ring—this Token?"

Unbuttoning his shirt, Amber produced the Eye from the chamois bag. Labertouche studied it for a long time in silence, returning it with an air of deep perturbation.

"The thing is strange to me," he said. "For the present we may dismiss it as simply what it pretends to be—a token, a sign by which one man shall know another.... Wear it but turn the stone in; and keep your hands in your pockets when we're outside."

Amber obeyed. "We'll be going, now?"

"Yes." Labertouche rose, throwing away his cigar and stamping out its fire.

"But the Farrells?"

"Forgive me; I had forgotten. The Farrells are at Darjeeling, where the Colonel is stationed just now—happily for him."

"Then," said Amber, with decision, "I leave for Darjeeling to-morrow morning."

"I know no reason why you shouldn't," agreed Labertouche. "If anything turns up I'll contrive to let you know." He looked Amber up and down with a glance that took in every detail. "I'm sorry," he observed, "you couldn't have managed to look a trace shabbier. Still, with a touch here and there, you'll do excellently well as a sailor on a spree."

"As bad as that?"

"Oah, my dear fallow!"—it was now the babu speaking, while he hopped around Amber with his head critically to one side, like an inquisitive jackdaw, now and again darting forward to peck at him with hands that nervously but deftly arranged details of his attire to please a taste fastidious and exacting in such matters—"Oah, my dear fallow, surely you appreciate danger of venturing into nateeve quarters in European dress? As regular-out-and-out sahib, I am meaning, of course. It is permeesible for riff-raff, sailors and Tommies from the Fort, and soa on, to indulge in debauchery among nateeves, but first-class sahib—Oah, noah! You would be mobbed in no-time-at-all, where we are going."

"All right; I guess I can play the part, babu. At least, I've plenty of atmosphere," Amber laughed, mentioning the incident of the peg he had not consumed over Honest George's bar.

"I had noticed that; a happy accident, indeed. I think"—Labertouche stepped back to look Amber over again—"I think you will almost do. One moment."

He seized Amber's hat and, dashing it violently to the floor, deliberately stamped it out of shape; when restored to its owner it had aged five years in less than half as many minutes. Amber laughed, putting it on. "Surely you couldn't ask me to look more disreputable," he said with a dubious survey of himself in the mirror.

His collar had been confiscated with his tie; his coat collar was partially turned up in the back; what was visible of his shirt was indecently dirty. His polished shoes had been deprived of their pristine lustre by means of a damp rag, vigorously applied, and then rubbed with dust. An artistic stain had been added to one of his sleeves by the simple device of smudging it with the blacking from his shoes. As for his hat, with the brim pulled down in front, it was nothing more nor less than shocking.

"You'll do," chuckled Labertouche approvingly. "Just ram your hands into your trouser pockets without unbuttoning your coat, and shuffle along as if nocturnal rambles in the slums of Calcutta were an everyday thing to you. If you're spoken to, don't betray too much familiarity with the vernacular. You know about the limit of the average Tommy's vocabulary; don't go beyond it." He unbolted and locked the door by which Amber had entered, putting the key in his pocket, and turned to a second door across the room. "We'll leave this way; I chose this place because it's a regular rabbit warren, with half a dozen entrances and exits. I'll leave you in a passage leading to the bazaar. Wait in the doorway until you see me stroll past; give me thirty yards lead and follow. Keep in the middle of the way, avoid a crowd as the plague, and don't lose sight of me. I'll stop in front of Dohla Baksh's shop long enough to light a cheroot and go on without looking back. When you come out I'll be waiting for you. If we lose one another, get back to your hotel as quickly as possible. I may send you word. If I don't, I shall understand you've taken the first morning train to Darjeeling. I think that's all."

As Amber left the room Labertouche extinguished the lamp, shut and locked the door, and followed, catching Amber by the arm and guiding him through pitch darkness to the head of the stairs. "Don't talk," he whispered; "trust me." They descended an interminable flight of steps, passed down a long, echoing corridor, and again descended. From the foot of the second flight Labertouche shunted Amber round through what seemed a veritable maze of passages—in which, however, he was evidently quite at home. At length, "Now go ahead!" was breathed at Amber's ear and at the same time his arm was released.

He obeyed blindly, stumbling down a reeking corridor, and in a minute more, to his unutterable relief, was in the open air of the bazaar.

Blinking with the abrupt transition from absolute night to garish light, he skulked in the shadow of the doorway, waiting. Beneath his gaze Calcutta paraded its congress of peoples—a comprehensive collection of specimens of every tribe in Hindustan and of nearly every other race in the world besides: red-bearded Delhi Pathans, towering Sikhs, lean sinewy Rajputs with bound jaws, swart agile Bhils, Tommies in their scarlet tunics, Japanese and Chinese in their distinctive dress, short and sturdy Gurkhas, yellow Saddhus, Jats stalking proudly, brawling knots of sailormen from the Port, sleek Mahrattas, polluted Sansis, Punjabis, Bengalis, priests, beggars, dancing girls; a blaze of colour ever shifting, a Babel of tongues never stilled, a seething scum on a witch's brew of humanity....

Like a fat, tawdry moth in his garments of soiled pink, a babu loitered past, with never a sidelong glance for the loaferish figure in the shadowed doorway; and the latter seemed himself absorbed in the family of Eurasians who were shrilly squabbling with the keeper of a vegetable-stall adjacent. But presently he wearied of their noise, yawned, thrust both hands deep in his pockets, and stumbled away. The bazaar accepted him as a brother, unquestioning, and he picked his way through it with an ease that argued nothing but absolute familiarity with his surroundings. But always you may be sure, he had the gleam of pink satin in the corner of his eye.

Before long Pink Satin diverged into the Chitpur Road, with Amber a discreet shadow. So far the latter had been treading known ground, but a little later, when Pink Satin dived abruptly into a darksome alleyway to the right, drawing Amber after him as a child drags a toy on a string, the Virginian lost his bearings utterly and was thereafter helplessly dependent upon the flutter of Pink Satin, and unworried only so long as he could see him, in a fidget of anxiety whenever the labyrinth shut Labertouche from his sight for a moment or two.

It was quiet enough away from the main thoroughfare, but with a sinister quiet. Tall dwellings marched shoulder to shoulder along the ways, shuttered, dark, grim, with an effect of conspirators, their heads together in lawless conference. The streets were intolerably narrow, the paving a farce; pools of stagnant water stood in the depressions, piles of refuse banked the walls. The fetid air hung motionless but sibilant with stealthy footsteps and whisperings.... Preferable to this seemed even the infinitely more dangerous and odorous Coolootollah purlieus into which they presently passed—nesting place though it were for the city's most evil and desperate classes.

In time broad Machua Bazaar Street received them—Pink Satin and the sailorman out for a night of it. And now Pink Satin began to stroll more sedately, manifesting a livelier interest in the sights of the wayside. Amber's impatience—for he guessed that they neared the goldsmith's stall—increased prodigiously; the shops, the stalls, the thatched dance-halls in which arose the hideous music of the nautch, had no lure for him, though they illustrated all that was most evil and most depraved in the second city of the Empire. He was only eager to have done with this unsavoury adventure, to know again the clean walls of his room in the Great Eastern, to taste again the purer air of the Maidan.

Without warning Pink Satin pulled up, extracted from the recesses of his costume a long, black and vindictive-looking native cigar, and lighted it, thoughtfully exhaling the smoke through his nose while he stared covetously at the display of a slipper-merchant whose stand was over across from the stall of a goldsmith.

With true Oriental deliberation Pink Satin finally made up his mind to move on; and Amber lurched heavily into the premises occupied by one Dhola Baksh, a goldsmith.

A customer, a slim, handsome Malayan youth, for the moment held the attention of the proprietor. The two were haggling with characteristic enjoyment over a transaction which seemed to involve less than twenty rupees. Amber waited, knowing that patience must be his portion until the bargain should be struck. Dhola Baksh himself, a lean, sharp-featured Mahratta grey with age, appraised with a single look the new customer, and returned his interest to the Malay. But Amber garnered from that glance a sensation of recognition. He wondered dimly, why; could the goldsmith have been warned of his coming?

Two or three more putative customers idled into the shop. Beyond its threshold the stream of native life rolled on, ceaselessly fluent; a pageant of the Middle Ages had been no more fantastic and unreal to Western eyes. Now and again a wayfarer paused, his interest attracted by the goldsmith's rush of business.

Unexpectedly the proprietor made a substantial concession. Money passed upon the instant, sealing the bargain. The Malay rose to go. Dhola Baksh lifted a stony stare to Amber.

"Your, pleasure, sahib?" he enquired with a thinly-veiled sneer. What need to show deference to a down-at-the-heel sailor from the Port?

"I want money—I want to borrow," said Amber promptly.

"On your word, sahib?"

"On security."

"What manner of security can you offer?"

"A ring—an emerald ring."

Dhola Baksh shrugged. His eyes shifted from Amber to the encircling faces of the bystanders. "I am a poor man," he whined. "How should I have money to lend? Come to me on the morrow; then mayhap I may have a few rupees. To-night I have neither cash nor time."

The hint was lost upon Amber. "A stone of price——" he persisted.

With a disturbed and apprehensive look, the money-lender rose. "Come, then," he grumbled, "if you must——"

A voice cried out behind Amber—"Heh!"——more a squeal than a cry. Intuitively, as at a signal of danger, he leaped aside. Simultaneously something like a beam of light sped past his head. The goldsmith uttered one dreadful, choking scream, and went to his knees. For as many as three seconds he swayed back and forth, his features terribly contorted, his thin old hands plucking feebly at the handle of a broadbladed dagger which had transfixed his throat. Then he tumbled forward on his face, kicking.

There followed a single instant of suspense and horror, then a mad rush of feet as the street stampeded into the shop. Voices clamoured to the skies. Somehow the lights went out.

Amber started to fight his way out. As he struggled on, making little headway through the press, a hand grasped his arm and drew him another way.

"Make haste, hazoor!" cried the owner of the hand, in Hindustani. "Make haste, lest they seek to fasten this crime upon your head."



CHAPTER X

MAHARANA OF KHANDAWAR

Both hand and voice might well have been Labertouche's; Amber believed they were. And the darkness rendered visual identification impossible. No shadow of doubt troubled him as he yielded to the urgent hand, and permitted himself to be dragged, more than led, through the reeking, milling mob, whose numbers seemed each instant augmented. He had thought, dully, to find it a difficult matter to worm through and escape, but somehow his guide seemed to have little trouble. Others, likewise, evidently wished to get out of sight before the arrival of the police, and in the wake of a little knot of these Amber felt himself drawn along until, within less than two minutes, they were on the outskirts of the crowd.

He drew a long breath of relief. Ever since that knife had flown whining past his cheek, his instinct of self-preservation had been dominated by a serene confidence that Pink Satin was at hand to steer him in safety away from the brawl. For his own part he was troubled by a feeling of helplessness and dependence unusual with him, who was of a self-reliant habit, accustomed to shift for himself whatever the emergency. But this was something vastly different from the run of experiences that had theretofore fallen to his lot. In. the foulest stews of a vast city, with no least notion of how to win his way back to the security of the Chowringhee quarter; in the heart of a howling native rabble stimulated to a pitch of frenzy by the only things that ever seem really to rouse the Oriental from his apathy—the scent and sight of human blood; and with a sense of terror chilling him as he realised the truth at which his guide had hinted—that the actual assassin would not hesitate an instant to cry the murder upon the head of one of the Sahib-logue: Amber felt as little confidence in his ability to work out his salvation as though he had been a child. He thanked his stars for Labertouche—for the hand that clasped his arm and the voice that spoke guardedly in his ear.

And then, by the light of the street, he discovered that his gratitude had been premature and misplaced. His guide had fallen a pace behind and was shouldering him along with almost frantic energy; but a glance aside showed Amber, in Labertouche's stead, a chunky little Gurkha in the fatigue uniform of his regiment of the British Army in India. Pink Satin was nowhere in sight and it was immediately apparent that an attempt to find him among the teeming hundreds before the goldsmith's stall would be as futile as foolish—if not fatal. Yet Amber's impulse was to wait, and he faltered—something which seemed to exasperate the Gurkha, who fairly danced with excitement and impatience.

"Hasten, hazoor!" he cried. "Is this a time to loiter? Hasten ere they charge you with this spilling of blood. The gods lend wings to our feet this night!"

"But who are you?" demanded Amber.

"What matter is that? Is it not enough that I am here and well disposed toward you, that I risk my skin to save yours?" He cannoned suddenly against Amber, shunting him unceremoniously out of the bazaar road and into a narrow black alley.

Simultaneously Amber heard a cry go up, shrill above the clamour of the mob, screaming that a white sailor had knifed the goldsmith. And he turned pale beneath his tan.

"You hear, hazoor? They are naming you to the police-wallahs. Come!"

"You're right." Amber fell into a long, free stride that threatened quickly to distance the Gurka's short, sturdy legs. "Yet why do you take this trouble for me?"

"Why ask?" panted the Gurkha. "Did I not stand behind you and see that you did not throw the knife? Am I a dog to stand by and see an innocent man yoked to a crime?" He laughed shortly. "Am I a fool to forget how great is the generosity of Kings? This way, hazoor!"

"Why call me King?" Amber hurdled a heap of offal and picked up his pace again. "Yet you will find me generous, though but a sahib."

"The sahibs are very generous." Again the Gurkha laughed briefly and unpleasantly. "But this is no time for words. Save your breath, for now we must run."

He broke into a springy lope, with his chin up, elbows in and chest distended, his quick small feet slopping regardlessly through the viscous mud of the unpaved byway. "Hear that!" he cried, as a series of short, sharp yells rose in the bazaar behind them. "The dogs have found the scent!" And for a time terror winged their flight. Eastern mobs are hard to handle; if overtaken the chances were anything-you-please to one that the fugitives would be torn to pieces as by wild animals ere the police could interfere.

They struck through stranger and more awful quarters than Amber had believed could be tolerated, even in India. For if there were a better way of escape they had no time to pause and choose it. From the racket in their rear the pursuit was hot upon their trail, and with every stride, well-nigh, they were passing those who would mark them down and, when the rabble came up, cry it on with explicit directions.

And so Amber found himself pounding along at the heels of his Gurkha, threading acres of flimsy huts huddled together in meaningless confusion—frail boxes of bamboo, mud, and wattles thrown roughly together upon corrupt, naked earth that reeked of the drainage of uncounted generations. Whence they passed through long, brilliant, silent streets lined with open hovels wherein Vice and Crime bred cheek-by-jowl, the haunts of Shame, painted and unabashed, sickening in the very crudity of its nakedness.... There is no bottom to the Pit wherein the native sinks.... And on, panting, with labouring chests and aching limbs, into the abandoned desolation of the Chinese quarter, and back through the still, deadly ways which Amber had threaded in the footsteps of Pink Satin—where the houses towered high and were ornamented with dingy, crumbling stucco and rusty, empty, treacherous balconies of iron, and the air hung in stagnation as if the very winds here halted to eavesdrop upon the iniquities that were housed behind the jealous, rotting blinds of wood and iron.

By now the voice of the chase had subsided to a dull and distant muttering far behind them, and the way was clear. Beyond its age-old, ineradicable atmosphere of secret infamy there was nothing threatening in the aspect of the neighbourhood. And the Gurkha pulled up, breathing like a wind-broken horse.

"Easily, hazoor!" he gasped. "There is time for rest."

Willingly Amber dropped into a wavering stride, so nearly exhausted that his legs shook under him and he reeled drunkenly; and, fighting for breath, they stumbled on, side by side, in the shadow of the overhanging walls, until as they neared a corner the Gurkha stopped and halted Amber with an imperative gesture.

"The police, sahib, the police!" he breathed, with an expressive sweep of his hand toward the cross street. "Let us wait here till they pass." And in evident panic he crowded Amber into the deep and gloomy recess afforded by a door overhung by a balcony.

Taken off his guard, but with growing doubt, Amber was on the point of remonstrating. Why should the police concern themselves with peaceful wayfarers? They could not yet have heard of the crime in the Bazaar, miles distant. But as he opened his lips he heard the latch click behind him, and before he could lift a finger, the Gurkha had flung himself bodily upon him, fairly lifting the American across the threshold.

They went down together, the Gurkha on top. And the door crashed to with a rattle of bolts, leaving Amber on his back, in total darkness, betrayed, lost, and alone with his enemies....

Now take a man—a white man—an American by preference—such an one as David Amber—who has led an active if thoughtful life and lived much out of doors, roughing it cheerfully in out-of-the-way corners of the world, and who has been careful to maintain his physical condition at something above par; bedevil him with a series of mysterious circumstances for a couple of months, send him on a long journey, entangle him in a passably hopeless love affair, work his expectations up to a high pitch of impatience, exasperate him with disappointment, and finally cause him to be tripped up by treachery and thrust into a pitch-black room in an unknown house in one of the vilest quarters of Calcutta: treat him in such a manner and what may you expect of him? Not discretion, at least.

Amber went temporarily mad with rage. He was no stranger to fear—no man with an imagination is; but for the time being he was utterly foolhardy. He forgot his exhaustion, forgot the hopelessness of his plight, forgot everything save his insatiable thirst for vengeance. He was, in our homely idiom, fighting-mad.

One instant overpowered by and supine beneath the Gurkha, the next he had flung the man off and bounded to his feet. There was the automatic pistol in his coat-pocket, but he, conscious that many hands were reaching out in the darkness to drag him down again, found no time to draw it. He seemed to feel the presence of the nearest antagonist, whom he could by no means see; for he struck out with both bare, clenched fists, one after the other, with his weight behind each, and both blows landed. The sounds of their impact rang like pistol-shots, and beneath his knuckles he felt naked flesh crack and give. Something fell away from him with a grunt like a poled ox. And then, in an instant, before he could recover his poise, even before he knew that the turned-in stone of the emerald ring had bitten deep into his palm, he was the axis of a vortex of humanity. And he fought like a devil unchained. Those who had thrown themselves upon him, clutching desperately at his arms and legs and hanging upon his body, seemed to be thrown off like chips from a lathe—for a time. In two short minutes he performed prodigies of valour; his arms wrought like piston-rods, his fists flew like flails; and such was the press round him that he struck no blow that failed to find a mark. The room rang with the sounds of the struggle, the shuffle, thud, and scrape of feet both booted and bare, the hoarse, harsh breathing of the combatants, their groans, their whispers, their low tense cries....

And abruptly it was over. He was borne down by sheer weight of numbers. Though he fought with the insanity of despair they were too many for him. He went a second time to the floor, beneath a dozen half-nude bodies. Below him lay another, with an arm encircling his throat, the elbow beneath his chin compressing his windpipe. Powerless to move hand or foot, he gave up ... and wondered dully why it was that a knife had not yet slipped between his ribs—between the fifth and sixth—or in his back, beneath the left shoulder-blade, and why his gullet remained unslit.

Gradually it was forced upon him that his captors meant him no bodily harm, for the present at least. His wrath subsided and gave place to curiosity while he rested, regaining his wind, and the natives squirmed away from him, leaving one man kneeling upon his chest and four others each pinioning a limb.

There followed a wait, while some several persons indulged in a whispered confabulation at a distance from him too great for their words to be articulate. Then came a croaking laugh out of the darkness and words intended for his ear.

"By Malang Shah! but my lord doth fight like a Rajput!"

Amber caught his breath and exploded. "Half a chance, you damned thugs, and I'd show you how an American can fight!"

But he had spoken in English, and his hearers gathered the import of his words only from his tone, apparently. He who had addressed him laughed applausively.

"It was a gallant fight," he commented, "but like all good things hath had its end. My lord is overcome. Is my lord still minded for battle or for peace? Dare I, his servant, give orders for his release, or——"

Here Amber interrupted; stung by the bitter irony, he told the speaker in fluent idiomatic Hindustani precisely what he might expect if his "lord" ever got the shadow of a chance to lay hands upon him.

The grim cackling laugh followed his words, a mocking echo, and was his only answer. But for all his defiance, he presently heard orders issued to take him up and bear him to another chamber. Promptly the man on his chest moved away, and his fellows lifted and carried Amber, gently and with puzzling consideration, some considerable distance through what he surmised to be an underground corridor. He suffered this passively, realising his impotence, and somewhat comforted if perplexed by the tenderness accorded him in return for his savage fight for freedom.

Unexpectedly he was let down upon the floor and released. Bare feet scurried away in the darkness and a door closed with a resounding bang. He was alone, for all he could say to the contrary—alone and unharmed. He was more: he was astonished; he had not been disarmed. He got up and felt of himself, marvelling that his pocket still sagged with the weight of the pistol as much as at the circumstance that, aside from the inevitable damage to his clothing—a coat-sleeve ripped from the arm-hole, several buttons missing, suspenders broken—he had come out of the melee unhurt, not even bruised, save for the hand that had been cut by the emerald. He wrapped a handkerchief about this wound, and took the pistol out, deriving a great deal of comfort from the way it balanced, its roughened grip nestling snugly in his palm.

He fairly itched to use the thing, but lacking an excuse, had time to take more rational counsel of himself. It were certainly unwise to presume upon the patience of his captors; though he had battered some of them pretty brutally and himself escaped reprisals, the part of wisdom would seem to be to save his ammunition.

With this running through his mind, the room was suddenly revealed to his eyes, that had so long strained fruitlessly to see. A flood of lamplight leaped through some opening behind him and showed him his shadow, long and gigantic upon a floor of earth and a wall of stone. He wheeled about, alert as a cat; and the sight of his pistol hung steady between the eyes of one who stood at ease, with folded arms, in an open doorway. Over his shoulder was visible the bare brown poll of an attendant whose lank brown arm held aloft the lamp.

One does not shoot down in cold blood a man who makes no aggressive move, and he who stood in the doorway endured impassively the mute threat of the pistol. Above its sight his eyes met Amber's with a level and unwavering glance, shining out of a dark, set face cast in a mould of insolence and pride. A bushy black beard was parted at his chin and brushed stiffly back. Between his thin hard lips, parted in a shadowy smile, his teeth gleamed white. Standing a head taller than Amber and very gracefully erect in clothing of a semi-military cut and of regal magnificence, every inch of his pose bespoke power, position, and the habit of authority. His head was bound with a turban of spotless white from whose clasp, a single splendid emerald, a jewelled aigret nodded; the bosom of his dark-green tunic blazed with orders and decorations; at his side swung a sabre with richly jewelled hilt. Heavy white gauntlets hid his hands, top-boots of patent leather his legs and feet.

At once impressed and irritated by his attitude, Amber lowered his weapon. "Well?" he demanded querulously. "What do you want? What's your part in this infamous outrage?"

On the other's face the faint smile became more definite. He nodded nonchalantly at Amber's pistol. "My lord intends to shoot?" he enquired in English, his tone courteous and suave.

"That's as may be," retorted Amber defiantly. "I'm going to have satisfaction for this outrage if I die getting it. You may count on that, first and last."

The man lifted his eyebrows and his shoulders in deprecation; then turned to his attendant. "Put down the light and leave us," he said curtly in Hindustani.

Bowing obsequiously, the servant entered and departed, leaving the lamp upon a wooden shelf braced against one side of the four-square, stone-walled dungeon. As he went out he closed the door, and Amber noted that it was a heavy sheet of iron or steel, very substantial. His face darkened.

"I presume you know what that means," he said, with a significant jerk of his head toward the door. "It'll never be shut on me alone. We'll leave together, you and I, if we both go out feet first." He lifted the pistol and took the measure of the man, not in any spirit of bravado but with absolute sincerity. "I trust I make my meaning plain?"

"Most clear, hazoor." The other showed his teeth in an appreciative smile. "And yet"—with an expressive outward movement of both hands—"what is the need of all this?"

"What!" Amber choked with resentment. "What was the need of setting your thugs upon me—of kidnapping me?"

"That, my lord, was an error of judgment on the part of one who shall pay for it full measure. I trust you were not rudely treated."

"I'd like to know what in blazes you call it," snapped Amber. "I'm dogged by your spies—Heaven knows why!—lured to this place, butted bodily into the arms of a gang of ruffians to be manhandled, and finally locked up in a dark cell. I don't suppose you've got the nerve to call that courteous treatment."

He had an advantage, and knowing it, was pushing it to the limit; for all his nonchalance the black man was not unconscious of the pistol; his eye never forgot it. And Amber's eyes left his not an instant. Despite that the fellow's next move was a distinct surprise.

Suddenly and with superb grace, he stepped forward and dropped to one knee at Amber's feet, bowing his head and offering the hilt of his sword to the American.

"My lord," he said swiftly in Hindustani, "if I have misjudged thee, if I have earned thy displeasure, upon my head be it. See, I give my life into thy hands; but a little quiver of thy forefinger and I am as dust.... An ill report of thee was brought to me, and I did err in crediting it. It is true that I set this trap for thee; but see, my lord! though I did so, it was with no evil intent. I thought but to make sure of thee and bid thee welcome, as a faithful steward should, to thy motherland.... Maha Rao Rana, Har Dyal Rutton Bahadur, Heaven-born, King of Kings, Chosen of the Voice, Cherished of the Eye, Beloved of the Heart, bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of the Body, Guardian of the Gateway of Swords!... I, thy servant, Salig Singh, bid thee welcome to Bharuta!"

Sonorous and not unpleasing, his voice trembled with intense and unquestionable earnestness; and when it ceased he remained motionless in his attitude of humility. Amber, hardly able to credit his hearing, stared down at the man stupidly, his head awhirl with curiously commingled sensations of amazement and enlightenment. Presently he laughed shortly.

"Get up," he said; "get up and stand over there by the wall and don't be a silly ass."

"Hazoor!" There was reproach in Salig Singh's accents; but he obeyed, rising and retreating to the further wall, there to hold himself at attention.

"Now see here," began Amber, designedly continuing his half of the conversation in English—far too much misunderstanding had already been brought about by his too-ready familiarity with Urdu. He paused a little to collect his thoughts, then resumed: "Now see here, you're Salig Singh, Maharana of Khandawar?" This much he recalled from his conversation with Labertouche a couple of hours gone.

"Hazoor, why dost thou need ask? Thou dost know." The Rajput, on his part, steadfastly refused to return to English.

"But you are, aren't you?"

"By thy favour, it is even so."

"And you think I'm Rutton—Har Dyal Rutton, as you call him, the former Maharana who abdicated in your favour?"

The Rajput shrugged expressively, an angry light in his dark, bold eyes. "It pleases my lord to jest," he complained; "but am I a child, to be played with?"

"I'm not joking, Salig Singh, and this business is no joke at all. What I'm trying to drive into your head is the fact that you've made the mistake of your life. I'm not Rutton and I'm nothing like Rutton; I am an American citizen and——"

"Pardon, hazoor, but is this worth thy while? I am no child; what I know I know. If thou art indeed not Har Dyal Rutton, how is it that thou dost wear upon thy finger the signet of thy house"—Salig Singh indicated the emerald which Amber had forgotten—"the Token sent thee by the Bell? If thou are not my lord the rightful Maharana of Khandawar, how is it that thou hast answered the summons of the Bell? Are the servants of the Body fools who have followed the hither, losing trace of thee no single instant since thou didst slay the Bengali who bore the Token to thee? Am I blind—I, Salig Singh, thy childhood's playmate, the Grand Vizier of thy too-brief rule, to whom thou didst surrender the reins of government of Khandawar? I know thee; thou canst not deceive me. True it is that thou art changed—sadly changed, my lord; and the years have not worn upon thee as they might—I had thought to find thee an older man and, by thy grace, a wiser. But even as I am Salig Singh, thou art none other than my lord, Har Dyal Rutton."

Salig Singh put his shoulders against the wall and, leaning so with arms folded, regarded Amber with a triumph not unmixed with contempt. It was plain that he considered his argument final, his case complete, the verdict his. While Amber found no words with which to combat his false impression, and could only stare, open-mouthed and fascinated. But at length he recollected himself and called his wits together.

"That's all very pretty," he admitted fairly, "but it won't hold water. I don't suppose these faithful servants of the Bell you mentioned happened to tell you that Chatterji himself mistook me for Rutton, to begin with, and just found out his mistake in time to recover the Token. Did they?"

The man shook his head wearily. "Nothing to that import hath come to mine ears," he said.

"All right. And of course they didn't tell you that Rutton committed suicide down there on Long Island, just after he had killed the babu?"

Again Salig Singh replied by a negative movement of his head.

"Well, all I've got to say is that your infernal 'Body' employs a giddy lot of incompetents to run its errands."

Salig Singh said nothing, and Amber pondered the situation briefly. He understood now how the babu's companion had fallen into error: how Chatterji, possessing sufficient intelligence to recognise his initial mistake, had, having rectified it, saved his face by saying nothing to his companion of the incident; and how the latter had remained in ignorance of Rutton's death after the slaying of Chatterji, and had pardonably mistaken Amber for the man he had been sent to spy upon. The prologue was plain enough, but how to deal with this its sequel was a problem that taxed his ingenuity. A single solution seemed practicable, of the many he debated: to get in touch with Labertouche and leave the rest to him.

He stood for so long in meditation that the Rajput began to show traces of impatience. He moved restlessly, yawned, and at length spoke.

"Is not my lord content? Can he not see, the dice are cast? What profit can he think to win through furtherance of this farce?"

"Well," curiosity prompted Amber to ask, "what do you want of me, then?"

"Is there need to ask? Through the Mouthpiece, the Bengali, Behari Lai Chatterji, whom thou didst slay, the message of the Bell was brought to thee. Thou hast been called; it is for thee to answer."

"Called——?"

"To the Gateway of Swords, hazoor."

"Oh, yes; to be sure. But where in thunderation is it?"

"That my lord doth know."

"You think so? Well, have it your own way. But suppose I decline the invitation?"

Salig Singh looked bored. "Since thou hast come so far," he said, "thou wilt go farther, hazoor."

"Meaning—by force?"

"Of thine own will. Those whom the Voice calleth are not led to the Gateway by their noses."

"But," Amber persisted, "suppose they won't go?"

"Then, hazoor, doth the Council of the Hand sit in judgment upon them."

The significance was savagely obvious, but Amber merely laughed. "And the Hand strikes, I presume?" Salig Singh nodded. "Bless your heart, I'm not afraid of your 'Hand'! But am I to understand that compulsion is not to be used in order to get me to the Gateway—wherever that is? I mean, I'm free to exercise my judgment, whether or not I shall go—free to leave this place and return to my hotel?"

Gravely the Rajput inclined his head. "Even so," he assented. "I caused thee to be brought hither solely to make certain what thou hast out of thine own mouth confirmed—the report that thou hadst become altogether traitor to the Bell. So be it. There remains but the warning that for four days more, and four days only, the Gateway remains open to those summoned. On the fifth it closes."

"And to those who remain in the outer darkness on that fifth day, Salig Singh——?"

"God is merciful," said the Rajput piously.

"Very well. If that is all, I think I will now leave you, Salig Singh," said Amber, fondling his pistol meaningly.

"One word more," Salig Singh interposed, very much alive to Amber's attitude: "I were unfaithful to the trust thou didst once repose in me were I not to warn thee that whither thou goest, the Mind will know; what thou dost, the Eye will see; the words thou shalt utter, the Ear will hear. To all things there is an end, also—even to the patience of the Body. Shabash!"

"Thank you 'most to death, Salig Singh. Now will you be good enough to order a ghari to take me back to the Great Eastern?"

"My lord's will is his servant's." Salig Singh started for the door the least trace too eagerly.

"One moment," said Amber sharply. "Not so fast, my friend." He tapped his palm with the barrel of the pistol to add weight to his peremptory manner. "I think if you will lift your voice and call, some one will answer. I've taken a great fancy to you, if you don't know it, and I don't purpose letting you out of my sight until I'm safely out of this house."

With a sullen air the Rajput yielded. From his expression Amber would have wagered much that there was a bad quarter of an hour in store for those who had neglected to disarm him when the opportunity was theirs.

"As you will," conceded Salig Singh; and he clapped his hands smartly, crying: "Ohe, Moto!"

Almost instantly the iron door swung open and the lamp-bearer appeared, salaaming.

"Tell him," ordered Amber, "to bring me a cloak of some sort—not too conspicuous. I've no fancy to kick up a scandal at the hotel by returning with these duds visible. You can charge it up to profit and loss; if it hadn't been for the tender treatment your assassins gave me, I'd be less disreputable."

A faint smile flickered in Salig Singh's eyes—a look that was not wholly devoid of admiration for the man who had turned the tables on him with such ease. "Indeed," he said, "I were lacking in courtesy did I refuse thee that." And turning to the servant he issued instructions in accordance with Amber's demands, adding gratuitously an order that the way of exit should be kept clear.

As the man bowed and withdrew Amber grinned cheerfully. "It wasn't a bad afterthought, Salig Singh," he observed; "precautions like that relieve the mind wonderfully sometimes."

But the humour of the situation seemed to be lost upon the Rajput.

In the brief wait that followed Amber shifted his position to one wherefrom he could command both the doorway and Salig Singh; his solicitude, however, was without apparent warrant; nothing happened to justify him of his vigilance. Without undue delay the servant returned with a light cloak and the announcement that the ghari was in waiting.

His offer to help the American don the garment was graciously declined. "I've a fancy to have my arms free for the present," Amber explained; "I can get it on by myself in the ghari." He took the cloak over his left arm. "I'm ready; lead on!" he said, and with a graceful wave of the pistol bowed Salig Singh out of the cellar.

Moto leading with the light, they proceeded in silence down a musty but deserted passage, Amber bringing up the rear with his heart in his mouth and his finger nervous upon the trigger. After a little the passage turned and discovered a door open to the street. Beyond this a ghari could be seen.

Amber civilly insisted that both the servant and his master leave the house before him, but, once outside, he made a wary detour and got between them and the waiting conveyance. Then, "It's kind of you, Salig Singh," he said; "I'm properly grateful. I'll say this for you: you play the game fairly when anybody calls your attention to the rules. Good-night to you—and, I say, be kind enough to shut the door as you go in. I'll just wait until you do."

The Rajput found no answer; conceivably, his chagrin was intense. With a curt nod he turned and reentered the house, Moto following. The door closed and Amber jumped briskly into the ghari.

"Home, James," he told the ghariwallah, in great conceit with himself. "I mean, the Great Eastern Hotel—and juldee jao!"

The driver wrapped a whiplash round the corrugated flanks of his horse and the ghari turned the corner with gratifying speed. In half a minute they were in the Chitpur Road. In fifteen they drew up before the hotel.

It was after midnight and the city had begun to quiet down, but Old Court House Street was still populous with carriages and pedestrians, black and tan and white. There was a Viceregal function of some sort towards in the Government House, and broughams and victorias, coaches, hansoms, and coupes, with lamps alight and liveried coachmen—turn-outs groomed to the last degree of smartness—crowded the thoroughfare to the peril and discomfort of the casual ghari. The scene was unbelievably brilliant. Amber felt like rubbing his eyes. Here were sidewalks, pavements, throbbing electric arcs, Englishmen in evening dress, fair Englishwomen in dainty gowns and pretty wraps, the hum of English voices, the very smell of civilisation. And back there, just across the border he had so recently crossed, still reigned the midnight of the Orient, glamorous with the glamour of the Arabian Nights, dreadful with its dumb menace, its atmosphere of plot and counterplot, mutiny, treason, intrigue, and death. Here, a little island of life and light and gay, heedless laughter; there, all round it, pressing close, silence and impenetrable darkness, like some dark sea of death lapping its shores....

In a cold sweat of horror Amber got out of the vehicle and paid his fare. As he turned he discovered an uniformed policeman stalking to and fro before the hotel, symbol of the sane power that ruled the land. Amber was torn by an impulse to throw himself upon the man and shriek aloud his tale of terror—to turn and scream warning in the ears of those who lived so lightly on the lip of Hell....

A Bengali drifted listlessly past, a bored and blase babu in a suit of pink satin, wandering home and interested in nothing save his own bland self and the native cigarette that drooped languidly from his lips. He passed within a foot of Amber, and from somewhere a voice spoke—the Virginian could have taken an oath that the babu's lips did not move—in a clear yet discreet whisper.

"To-morrow," it said; "Darjeeling."

Amber hitched his cloak round him and entered the hotel.



CHAPTER XI

THE TONGA

"Badshah Junction, Mr. Amber ... Badshah Junction ... We'll be there in 'alf an hour ..."

Inexorably the voice droned on, repeating the admonition over and over.

Mutinous, Amber stirred and grumbled in his sleep; stirred and, grumbling, wakened to another day. Doggott stood over him, doggedly insistent.

"Not much time to dress, sir; we're due in less than 'alf an hour."

"Oh, all right." Drowsy, stiff and sore in bone and muscle, Amber sat up on the edge of the leather-padded bunk and stared out of the window, wondering. With thundering flanges the train fled from east to west across a landscape that still slept wrapped in purple shadows. Far in the north the higher peaks of a long, low range of treeless hills were burning with a pale, cold light. A few stars glimmered in the cloudless vault—glimmered wan, doomed to sudden, swift extinction. Beside the railroad a procession of telegraph poles marched with dipping loops of wire between. There was nothing else to see. None the less the young man, now fully alive to the business of the day, said "Thank God!" in all sincerity.

"Even a tonga will be a relief after three days of this, Doggott," he observed, surrendering himself to the ministrations of the servant.

It was the third morning succeeding that on which he had risen from his bed in the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, possessed by a wild anxiety to find his way with the least possible delay to Darjeeling and Sophia Farrell—a journey which he was destined never to make. For while he breakfasted a telegram had been brought to him.

"Your train for Benares," he read, "leaves Howrah at nine-thirty. Imperative." It was signed: "Pink Satin."

He acted upon it without thought of disobedience; he was in the hands of Labertouche, and Labertouche knew best. Between the lines he read that the Englishman considered it unwise to attempt further communication in Calcutta. Something had happened to eliminate the trip to Darjeeling. Labertouche would undoubtedly contrive to meet and enlighten him, either on the way or in Benares itself.

In the long, tiresome, eventless journey that followed his faith was sorely tried; nor was it justified until the train paused some time after midnight at Mogul Serai. There, before Amber and Doggott could alight to change for Benares, their compartment was invaded by an unmistakable loafer, very drunk. Tall and burly; with red-rimmed eyes in a pasty pockmarked face, dirty and rusty with a week-old growth of beard; clothed with sublime contempt for the mode and exalted beyond reason with liquor—a typical loafer of the Indian railways—he flung the door open and himself into Amber's arms, almost knocking the latter down; and resented the accident at the top of his lungs.

"You miserable, misbegotten blighter of a wall-eyed American——" At this point he became unprintably profane, and Doggott fell upon him with the laudable intention of throwing him out. In the struggle Amber caught his eye, and it was bright with meaning. "Pink Satin!" he hissed. "He's gone ahead.... You're to keep on to Agra.... Change for Badshah Junction, Rajputana Route.... Then tonga to Kuttarpur.... Farrell's there and his daughter.... That's right, my man, throw me out!..."

His downfall was spectacular. In his enthusiasm for the part he played, he had erred to the extent of delivering a blow in Doggott's face more forcible, probably, than he had intended it to be. Promptly he landed sprawling on the station platform and, in the sight of a multitude of natives, but the moment gone by his shrieks roused from their sleep in orderly ranks upon the floor, was gathered into the arms of the stationmaster and had the seriousness of his mistake pointed out to him forthwith and without regard to the sensitiveness of human anatomy.

And the train continued on its appointed way, bearing both Amber and the injured Doggott.

Thus they had come to the heart of Rajputana.

In the chill of dawn they were deposited at Badshah Junction. A scanty length of rude platform received them and their two small travelling bags.

On their left the Haiderabad express roared away, following the night, its course upon the parallel ribbons of shining steel marked by a towering pillar of dust. On their right, beyond the sharp-cut edge of the world, the sun had kindled a mighty conflagration in the skies. On every hand, behind and before them, the desert lay in ebbing shadows, a rolling waste seared by arid nullahs—the bone-dry beds of long-forgotten streams. Off in the north the hills cropped up and stole purposelessly away over the horizon.

They stood, then, forlorn in a howling desolation. For signs of life they had the station, a flimsy shelter roofed with corrugated iron, a beaten track that wandered off northwards and disappeared over a grassless swell, a handful of mud huts at a distance, and the ticket-agent. The latter a sleepy, surly Eurasian in pyjamas, surveyed them listlessly from the threshold of the station, and without a sign either of interest or contempt turned and locked himself in.

Amber sat down on his upturned suit-case and laughed and lit a cigarette. Doggott growled. The noise of the train died to silence in the distance, and a hyena came out of nowhere, exhibited himself upon the ridge of a dry desert swell, and mocked them sardonically. Then he, like the ticket-agent, went away, leaving an oppressive silence.

Presently the sun rose in glory and sent its burning level rays to cast a shadow several rods long of an enraged American beating frantically with clenched fists upon the door of an unresponsive railway station.

He hammered until he was a-weary, then deputised his task to Doggott, who resourcefully found him a stone of size and proceeded to make dents in the door. This method elicited the Eurasian. He came out, listened attentively to abuse and languidly to their demands for a tonga to bear them to Kuttarpur, and observed that the mail tonga left once a day—at three in the afternoon. Doggott caught him as he was on the point of returning to his interrupted repose and called his attention to the unwisdom of his ways.

Apparently convinced, this ticket-agent announced his intention of endeavouring to find a tonga for the sahib. Besides, he was not unwilling to acquire rupees. He scowled thoughtfully at Amber, ferociously at Doggott, went back into the station, gossipped casually with the telegraph sounder for a quarter of an hour, and finally reappearing, without a word or a nod left the platform for the road and walked and walked and walked and walked. Within thirty yards his figure was blurred by the dance of new-born heat devils. Within a hundred he disappeared; the desert swallowed him up.

An hour passed as three. The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. Lulled by the hushed chatter of the telegraph sounder, Doggott nodded and slept audibly; Amber nodded, felt himself going, roused with a struggle, and lapsed into a dreary mid-world of semi-stupor.

In the simple fulness of Asiatic time a tonga came from Heaven knew where and roused him by rattling up beside the platform. He got up and looked it over with a just eye and a temper none the sweeter for his experience. It was a brute of a tonga, a patched and ramshackle wreck of what had once been a real tonga, with no top to protect the travellers from the sun, and accommodation only for three, including the driver.

The Eurasian ticket-agent alighted and solicited rupees. He got them and with them Amber's unvarnished opinion of the tonga; something which was not received with civility by the driver.

He remained in his seat—a short, swart native with an evil countenance and, across his knees, a sheathed tulwar—arguing with Amber in broken English and, abusing him scandalously in impurest Hindi, flinging at him in silken tones untranslatable scraps of bazaar Billingsgate. For, as he explained in an audible aside to the ticket-agent, this sahib was an outlander and, being as ignorant as most sahibs, could not understand Hindi. At this the Eurasian turned away to hide a grin of delight and the driver winked deliberately at Amber the while he broadly sketched for him his ancestry and the manner of his life at home and abroad.

Thunderstruck, Amber caught himself just as he was on the point of attempting to drag the driver from his seat and beat him into a more endurable frame of mind. He swallowed the hint and gave up the contest.

"Oh, very well," he conceded. "I presume you're trying to say there isn't another tonga to be had and it can't be helped; but I don't like your tone. However, there doesn't seem to be anything to do but take you. How much for the two of us?"

"Your servant, sahib? He cannot ride in this tonga," asserted the driver impassively.

"He can't! Why not?"

"You can see there is room for but two, and I have yet another passenger."

"Where?"

"At the first dak-bungalow, Sahib, where the mail-tonga broke down last night. This tonga, which I say is an excellent tonga, an aram tonga, a tonga for ease, is sent to take its place. More than this, I am bidden to go in haste; therefore there is little time for you to decide whether or not you will go with me alone. As for your servant, he can follow by this afternoon's mail tonga."

Upon this ultimatum he stood, immovable; neither threats nor bribery availed. It was an order, he said: he had no choice other than to obey. Shabash! Would the sahib be pleased to make up his mind quickly?

Perforce, the sahib yielded. "It'll be Labertouche; he's arranged this," he told himself. "That loafer said he'd gone on ahead of us." And comforted he issued his orders to Doggott, who received and acceded to them with all the ill-grace imaginable. He was to remain and follow to Kuttarpur by the afternoon's tonga. He forthwith sulked—and Amber, looking round upon the little Tephet that was Badshah Junction, had not the heart to reprove the man.

"It's all very well, sir," said Doggott. "I carn't s'y anything, I know. But, mark my words, sir—beggin' your pardon—there'll be trouble come of this. That driver's as ill-favoured a scoundrel as ever I see. And as for this 'ere ape, if 'e smiles at me just once more, I'll give 'im what-for." And he scowled so blackly upon the Eurasian that that individual hastily sought the seclusion which the station granted.

Amber left him, then, with a travelling-bag and a revolver for company, and the ticket-agent and his bad temper to occupy his mind.

Climbing aboard, the Virginian settled himself against the endless discomforts of the ride which he foresaw; the tonga was anything but "an aram tonga—a tonga for ease," there was no shade and no breeze, and the face of the land crawled with heat-bred haze.

To a crisp crackling of the whip-lash over the backs of the two sturdy, shaggy, flea-bitten ponies, the tonga swept away from the station, swift as a hunted fox with a dusty plume. The station dropped out of sight and the desert took them to its sterile heart.

On every hand the long swales rolled away, sunbaked, rocky, innocent of any sign of life other than the trooping telegraph poles in the south, destitute of any sort of vegetation other than the inevitable ak and gos. Wherever the eye wandered the prospect was the same—limitless expanses of raw blistering ochres, salmon-pinks, and dry faded reds, under a sky of brass and fire.

Amber leaned forward, watching the driver's face. "Your name, tonga-wallah?" he enquired.

"Ram Nath, sahib." The man spoke without moving his head, attending diligently to the management of his ponies.

"And this other passenger, who awaits us at the dak-bungalow, Ram Nath—is he, perchance, one known both to you and to me?"

Ram Nath flicked the flagging ponies. "How should I know?" he returned brusquely.

"One," persisted Amber, "who might be known by such a name as, say, Pink Satin?"

"What manner of talk is this?" demanded Ram Nath. "I am no child to be amused by a riddle. I know naught of your 'Pink Satin.'" He bent forward, shortening his grasp upon the reins, as if to signify that the interview was at an end.

Amber sat back, annoyed by the fellow's impudence yet sensitive to a suspicion that Ram Nath was playing his part better than his passenger, that the rebuke was merited by one who had ventured to speak of secret things in a land whose very stones have ears. For all that he could say their every move was watched by invisible spies, of whom the rock-strewn waste through which they sped might well harbour a hidden legion.... But perhaps, after all, Ram Nath had nothing whatever to do with Labertouche. Undeniable as had been his wink, it might well have been nothing more than an impertinence. At the thought Amber's eyes darkened and hardened and he swore bitterly beneath his breath. If that were so, he vowed, the tonga-wallah would pay dearly for the indiscretion. He set his wits to contrive a way to satisfy his doubts.

Meanwhile the tonga rocked and bounded fiendishly over an infamous parody of a road, turning and twisting between huge boulders and in and out of pebbly nullahs, Ram Nath tooling it along with the hand of a master. But all his attention was of necessity centred upon the ponies, and presently his tulwar slipped from his knees and clattered upon the floor of the tonga. Amber saw his chance and put his foot upon it.

"Ram Nath," he asked gently, "have you no other arms?"

"I were a fool had I not." The man did not deign to glance round. "He hath need of weapons who doth traffick with the Chosen of the Voice, sahib."

"Ah, that Voice!" cried Amber in exasperation. "I grow weary of the word, am Nath."

"That may well be," returned the man, imperturbable. "None the less it were well for you to have a care how you fondle the revolver in your pocket, sahib. Should it by any chance go off and the bullet find lodgment in your tonga-wallah, you are like to hear more of that Voice, and from less friendly lips."

"I think you have eyes in the back of your head, Ram Nath." Amber withdrew his hand from his coat pocket and laughed shortly as he spoke.

"There is a saying in this country, sahib, that even the stones in the desert have ears to hear and eyes to see and tongues withal to tell what they have seen and heard."

"Ah-h!... That is a wise saying, Ram Nath."

"There be those I could name who would do well to lay that saying to heart, sahib."

"You are right, indeed.... Now if there be aught of truth in that saying, and if one were unwisely to speak a certain name, even here——"

"The echo of that name might be heard beyond the threshold of a certain Gateway, sahib."

Amber grunted and said no more, contented now with the assurance that he was in truth in touch with Labertouche, that this Ram Nath was an employee of the I.S.S. The wink was now explained away with all the rest of the tonga-wallah's churlishness. Since there was a purpose behind it all, the Virginian was satisfied to contain his curiosity. Nevertheless he could not help thinking that there must be some fantastic exaggeration in the excessive degree of caution that was thus tacitly imposed upon him.

He looked round him, narrowing his eyes against the sun-glare; and the desert showed itself to his eyes a desert waste and nothing more. The day lay stark upon its lifeless face and it seemed as if, within the wide rim of the horizon, no thing moved save the tonga. They were then passing rapidly over higher ground and seemed to have drawn a shade nearer to the raw red northern hills. Amber would have said that they could never have found a solitude more absolute.

The thought was still in his mind when the tonga dipped unexpectedly over another ridge, began to descend another long grade of dead, parched earth, and discovered some distance ahead of them on the wagontrack a cloud of dust like a tinted veil, so dense, opaque, and wide and high that its cause was altogether concealed in its reddish, glittering convolutions. But the Virginian knew the land well enough to recognise the phenomenon and surmise its cause, even before his ears began to be assailed by the hideous rasping screech of wheels of solid wood revolving reluctantly on rough-hewn axles guiltless of grease. And as the tonga swiftly lessened the distance, his gaze, penetrating the thinning folds, discerned the contours of a cotton-wain drawn by twin stunted bullocks, patient noses to the ground, tails a-switch. Beside his cattle the driver plodded, goad in hand, a naked sword upon his hip. Within his reach, between the rude bales of the loaded cart, the butt of a brass-bound musket protruded significantly.... All men went armed in that wild land: to do as much is one of the boons attendant upon citizenship in an unprogressive, independent native State.