Chapter Ten.

Chapter Ten.The Markhôr Cave.“There is a large section of our fellow subjects that votes Alpine climbing the most incomprehensible form of lunacy known to science, on the ground that to spend half one’s life, and putting the whole of it in pawn, scrambling up rocks and ice and snow, for the sake of getting to the top of some pinnacle which a hundred people have already got to, and thousands more eventually will, is to place one’s self beyond the pale of ordinary intelligence. But I wonder what such would say of a being of mature age, and laying claim to the possession of ordinary intelligence, who skips up in the middle of the night, and under the guidance of an Asiatic whom he can’t understand, and who can’t understand him, spends several hours crawling over boulders and along blood curdling precipices, on the off-chance of one shot—and the certainty of a miss—at an infernal wild goat, which is of no earthly use to you when you get him, except to stick up his head and brag about it ever after. The Alp-climber would have to cede to him the proud distinction of prize imbecile, I guess.”Thus mused Campian, as, following in the wake of Bhallu Khan, he wormed himself warily around an elbow of rock, between which and space, was a foothold just twenty inches as to width, and precarious as to stability, he bearing in mind the while two considerations—firstly, the desirability of refraining from dislodging so much as a pebble; secondly, the necessity of refraining from dislodging himself. The first grey of early dawn was just breaking upon the mountain world, and here he was spread-eagled against a cliff of dizzy height and well nigh perpendicular formation: raked by a piercing wind, and wondering whether he should eventually get off it by the ordinary tedious process of slow and sure progression or by the rapid one of a false step—leading to pulverisation. As to one consideration, however, he laboured under no ambiguity of mind. Nothing on earth should induce him to return by the way he had come, even if it must needs take a week to go round by some safer way.In due course however, the situation improved. The rock face grew less perpendicular, the path wider, and finally they found themselves in a steep gully. Here the old Pathân, pointing upward began signalling vehemently, the gist of which Campian took to be that he must proceed more noiselessly than ever, and that the ridge above being gained, they would find markhôr.A clamber of a hundred feet—one pebble dislodged with a clatter, bringing his heart to his mouth, and a reproachful glance from Bhallu Khan—and they were cowering behind the top of the ridge. Campian wanted a few moments to steady himself after their long, hard climb. He could not shoot straight in a state of breathlessness, he declared.It was quite light up here now, but the sun had not risen above the eastern mountain-tops. As they peered over the ridge, the valley beneath still lay in the grey half-dawn. But between it and their point of vantage, on the rock-strewn slopes beneath, something was moving, and it needed not the touch on the arm from the old Pathân and the barely articulated whisper to set Campian’s nerves tingling. He had already taken the rifle from the forester so as to be in readiness.“Markhôr,” he whispered.Bhallu Khan nodded. A solitary ram, with fine horns, was browsing unconcernedly. There was no getting any nearer. Campian set the sight at four hundred yards. Then resting the rifle upon the rock in front of him, he took a steady aim and drew trigger.The roar of the piece among the echoing stillness of the craggy solitudes was like a peal of thunder. The markhôr gave one wild bound into the air, and a thrill of exultation went through the shooter. But the disappointed headshake of Bhallu Khan would promptly have undeceived him, even had not the quarry taken to its heels and gone bounding down the slope at a flying gallop. He let go a couple more shots from the magazine, but wider than the first. Then he threw up the rifle in mingled disgust and resignation, the markhôr now being a mere bounding and very badly frightened speck.“No good!” he exclaimed. “Can’t do anything with certainty over two hundred yards, and that brute was nearer five than four. Well, I didn’t expect to, so am not disappointed, and it doesn’t really matter a little damn.”The only word of this reflection understood by Bhallu Khan being the last, he smiled, and proceeded to expatiate in Hindustani, profusely illustrating his harangue with signs. But of this, for his part, Campian understood not even the last word.He cared the less for his failure to bring down the game in that this had not been his primary object. The pretext of sport had been a pretext only. He wanted to explore the markhôr cave, and that quietly and by himself, wherefore, when a couple of days after their visit to Jermyn he had suggested to Upward a markhôr stalk, the latter, remembering his expressed views on the subject of hard toil inadequately rewarded, had evinced considerable surprise, but excused himself from joining on that very ground, which was exactly what Campian had expected.Now they were no great distance above that cave, and he soon signalled Bhallu Khan his desire to proceed thither. Somewhat to his surprise, remembering the superstition attached, the old Pathân cheerfully acquiesced, and a downhill climb of about three quarters of an hour brought them to a position commanding its entrance. Signing him to remain there and watch, the forester crawled round to the rock above the gaping black fissure, where by dint of making a considerable noise, and rattling down showers of stones, he hoped to drive forth its inmate. But there came forth nothing.“This markhôr is a fraud, anyway,” said Campian to himself. And he signalled Bhallu Khan to return just as that estimable Asiatic had himself arrived at the conclusion that there was no point in making further efforts to scare out of a hole something which was not within it. Then they sat on the rock together and conversed, as best they could by signs, while Campian breakfasted on some sandwiches and the contents of a business-like flask.The sun had risen now, and was reddening the great craggy pinnacles on high with the new glow of day. Later on these would bear an arid and depressing aspect, but now they seemed to soar up proudly to the deepening blue. Meditatively Campian watched the line of light as it dropped lower and lower, soon to flood the valley with its fierce heatwave. Now it had reached thekotal, now it was just touching the junipers which embedded the forest bungalow. He could not see the latter from his present position, it being shut off by a rounded spur; but the immediate surroundings of it drew his glance. Not that they reminded him—oh, no! He had needed no mere reminder since that chance meeting three days ago. Bother thinking! Thinking was worse than useless. Springing to his feet, he signed Bhallu Khan that he wanted to explore the cave.The fissure was easily approached, opening as it did on to a grass ledge. Campian produced a couple of candles, thereby betraying premeditation in this quest, and, lighting one, gave the other to the old Pathân. Then they advanced into the darkness.The fissure ran at a slant for about ten yards, then it widened out, with a tolerably level floor, to an irregularly shaped rock chamber, seeming to extend about thirty yards back. The light was flickering and uncertain, and Campian, who was a little in front, felt his arm suddenly and violently seized, and a voice vociferated in his ear. For a brief fraction of a second the idea of treachery flashed through his mind; then he recognised in Bhallu Khan’s tone the vehemence not of menace but of warning.He had been about to step on a broad, black stripe which lay across the floor of the cavern. Now he halted, his foot already raised. He lowered his candle. The broad, black stripe was a fissure—a crevasse. Of no great width was it—at that point only just wide enough to admit his own body—still itwaswide enough. But what of its depth?Motioning him to stand still, the forester picked up a handful of loose stones, and dropped them in one by one. Both listened. The stones took some time to strike anything, and then it was very far down. There was yet a further and fainter concussion. Bhallu Khan smiled significantly, and shook his head. Campian whistled. Both looked at each other. Then they examined the crevasse again. No current of air arose, which argued no outlet. But the thing was of ghastly depth.“Your markhôr is a fraud, Bhallu Khan,” said Campian, as they inspected the floor of the cave, and emphasising the statement by signs. “There is no trace of such a thing ever having been into it.”The other smiled again, and nodded assent. But just then a sound outside made them start and look at each other. It was that of a human voice. Bhallu Khan blew out his light, and Campian followed his example. Thus for a moment they waited.Footsteps were advancing into the cave. Then the striking of a match. They made out the figure of a man approaching—a native—bearing a lighted candle, which he shaded with his hand. Behind him came another figure, which they could not make out.“Salaam, brother,” said Bhallu Khan in Hindustani, at the same time lighting his own candle.The effect on the newcomer was disturbing. He gave a violent start, dropping the candle, which went out. But by their own light Campian could see a business-like revolver pointed straight at him, while a full, clear, feminine voice cried out in purest English:“Don’t move, or I fire!”It was his turn to start now. That voice! There was no other like it in the world. He replied calmly:“Yes. Pull off. You may as well. It won’t really matter much.”“Oh!” Just a little cry escaped Vivien Wymer. She lowered the weapon, then laughed, and there was a note in her laugh which, in one less self possessed, less self reliant, might almost have been taken for hysterical. “Who would have thought of finding you—anyone—here?” she went on. “But I believe I was the more startled of the two.”“Yes, I am sure you were,” he replied, advancing now into the light. “We haven’t said ‘How d’you do?’ yet, and it’s as well to keep up the conventionalities.”She put forth her hand to meet his, and again they clasped hands. Again they had met under strange and unlooked for circumstances—here, in the semi-gloom of the mountain cave.“I was so interested in hearing about this place,” she said. “Mr Upward’s account of it seemed to hold my imagination, and I felt moved to explore it for myself. I did not feel inclined to wait for a scheme that might never come off. Besides, the associations of mystery and a touch of eeriness would have no effect in the midst of an every day, sceptical crowd.”“Great minds jump together! That was precisely my own idea. But who is with you? Surely you are not alone, with only one servant, and not a very reliable one at that, judging from his behaviour just now. It is hardly safe, is it?”“Yes, it is. All these northern border tribes are of the best type of Mohammedan, and respect women. No, I am not afraid.”“You did not seem so just now, at any rate. But it is not only of that sort of danger I was thinking. A gloomy hole like this might conceal all kinds of hidden peril. It might be the den of a panther, or a wolf, or even a snake. For instance, look at this. Keep behind me, though.”He led the way—it was only a few steps—to the scene of his own narrow escape. There yawned the cleft, black and hideous.“Keep back,” he said, extending an arm instinctively, as though to bar a nearer advance, and in doing so his hand accidentally closed upon hers. He did not let it remain there, but it seemed as though a magnetic touch were conveyed from frame to frame, and there came a softness into his tone which accorded well with the protecting, shielding attitude.“Is it very deep?” asked Vivien, holding her candle over the brim, and peering down into the blackness.“Well, judging by the sound, it takes a stone a good while to get to the bottom. I should have been there myself long before this but for Bhallu Khan here. In fact, I was placidly walking into it when he laid violent hands on me.”“Really? How horrible! Let’s leave it now, and go outside. The idea of such a thing oppresses one in here.”She turned away. Her voice was unshaken. Beyond just a faint quickening in her tone, she might have been listening to some mere abstract risk run by somebody she had never seen or heard of before, and Campian could not see her face.“Just take one more look around before you go outside,” he said. “The idea of those hidden valuables being here won’t wash. Both floor and walls are of solid rock. There is no possibility of burying anything.”“Hardly, I should think,” she answered, after a few moments’ critical survey of the interior. “But, this is not an artificial cavern, surely?”“No. I have seen others rather like it, though none quite of its size. But if you follow out the formation of the place, it is all on the same slant. The crevasse, to be sure, is at something of a different angle, but that is nothing to go by here, where the whole side of a mountain is seamed and criss-crossed with the most irregular network of fissures.”“What if the things are at the bottom of that cleft?” said Vivien.At the bottom of it! This was a new idea. Was it a new light? But he replied:“Then they will remain there till the crack of doom. The hole is of immense depth—Bhallu Khan and I sounded it from every point—and is sure to contain noxious gas at a certain distance below the surface. Do you mind if I ask you a favour?—oh nothing very great!” seeing her start. “It is not to talk about this, or speculate before others as to the possibility of such a thing existing.”“Why, of course, if you wish it! But—do you believe in it, then?”“Perhaps partly. But it may be that I have something to go upon. When I have more I will tell you more—but—I am forgetting—how on earth can it interest you?”“But it will interest me very much—and—” “you know it,” she was going to add, but substituted: “life is prosaic enough for a romantic search of this sort to add new interest to it. How is it I did not know you were here?”“Here—on this spot, or in this country?”“On this spot, I mean. The other is easily understood. We have been living out of the way so long, and I see so few people. And you have only recently arrived?”“Yes. As to being in here, I had no pony to leave outside. I have been climbing the mountains after markhôr, hence a tolerably disreputable old Khaki suit, and a battered and general air of not having been to bed all night.”“Did you have any success?”“No. I got in one shot, but missed it of course, just as I was saying when up at your place the other day. However, what I really wanted to do was to come in quietly here and explore.”“So did I. Where is my syce, I wonder? There is my pony,” looking around, for they had regained the entrance of the cave. “Ah! I see him. He is at his prayers. Your man has joined him.”“Yes. Old Bhallu Khan is a whale at piety. I should think he stood a first-class chance of the seventh heaven.”“These people are very devout,” said Vivien, looking towards the two Mohammedans, who, with their shoes off, and their chuddas spread on the ground as praying carpets, were prostrating their foreheads to the earth, and otherwise following out the prescribed formula—facing towards the holy city. “I sometimes wonder if it is all on the surface.”“I don’t know why it should be. We make a good deal of show, too, though in a different way; but I doubt if we are any better than they. In fact, it is more than possible we are actually worse. But John Bull has a fine, hearty, overgrown, schoolboy contempt for anything he can’t understand, and to him the bowings and prostrations enjoined by the Moslem form of worship is sheer nonsense. For my part, I am not sure it is not even too refined for him.”“Perhaps. I have often thought that to these people we must seem something worse than Pagans. I hardly wonder at their fanatical hatred of us.”“Neither do I, the more so that our attitude towards them is for the most part well exemplified in the remark made to me by a fine wooden specimen of John Bull the other day coming down the Red Sea. Two or three of these travelling traders had got up on the forecastle, and were praying towards Mecca. ‘Ever see such humbug in your life?’ says this chump. I said I had, and far greater humbug; in fact, couldn’t see any humbug in the present performance at all. Oh, but it was all on the surface! How did he know that? I asked him. Oh, because they would lie and cheat and so forth. But so would nine-tenths of the English commercially engaged, I answered. Whereat he snorted, and moved off. He thought I was a fool. I knew he was one.”“Very much so,” assented Vivien. “I detest that wooden-headedness which no amount of moving about the world will ever teach to think. And now that those two good people are through with their devotions, it is time I got home again. Oh, Meran Buksh,ghora lao!”The syce sprang to execute this order, and in a minute Vivien’s pony was before her, ready to mount.“Why this is the first time you have ever put me on a horse,” she said, as Campian seemed to be arranging her skirt with minute care, “and how well you did it.”“Thanks,” he said. “There. I hope you will not have too hot a ride home. Good-bye.”“Good-bye. You will be coming up to see us again soon, I suppose, or we shall be going to see Mrs Upward. You are going to make some stay, are you not?”He replied in the affirmative, and, looking at her as she sat there with easy grace, he felt that never had his self-possession been in greater peril. Cool and fresh and sweet in her light blouse and riding-skirt—her glance full and serene meeting his—the flush of health mantling beneath the soft skin, she was a picture in her dark, brilliant attractiveness, framed against the background of savage rocks and ragged junipers.“Good-bye,” was all he said.A pressure of the hand, and she turned her pony and rode away at a walk, the syce following.Campian watched her out of sight. Then he did a curious thing—at any rate for a man of mature age and judgment. He returned to the cave and picked up a small rough stone, quite an ordinary stone it was, but while they had stood talking Vivien had been rolling this stone absently to and fro beneath the sole of her boot. Now he picked it up, and, glancing at it for a moment, put it in his pocket. But he seemed to change his mind, for, pulling it forth again, he hurled it away far over the rocks.Then he started out in the direction of Upward’s camp, old Bhallu Khan, carrying the rifle, following close at his heels.

“There is a large section of our fellow subjects that votes Alpine climbing the most incomprehensible form of lunacy known to science, on the ground that to spend half one’s life, and putting the whole of it in pawn, scrambling up rocks and ice and snow, for the sake of getting to the top of some pinnacle which a hundred people have already got to, and thousands more eventually will, is to place one’s self beyond the pale of ordinary intelligence. But I wonder what such would say of a being of mature age, and laying claim to the possession of ordinary intelligence, who skips up in the middle of the night, and under the guidance of an Asiatic whom he can’t understand, and who can’t understand him, spends several hours crawling over boulders and along blood curdling precipices, on the off-chance of one shot—and the certainty of a miss—at an infernal wild goat, which is of no earthly use to you when you get him, except to stick up his head and brag about it ever after. The Alp-climber would have to cede to him the proud distinction of prize imbecile, I guess.”

Thus mused Campian, as, following in the wake of Bhallu Khan, he wormed himself warily around an elbow of rock, between which and space, was a foothold just twenty inches as to width, and precarious as to stability, he bearing in mind the while two considerations—firstly, the desirability of refraining from dislodging so much as a pebble; secondly, the necessity of refraining from dislodging himself. The first grey of early dawn was just breaking upon the mountain world, and here he was spread-eagled against a cliff of dizzy height and well nigh perpendicular formation: raked by a piercing wind, and wondering whether he should eventually get off it by the ordinary tedious process of slow and sure progression or by the rapid one of a false step—leading to pulverisation. As to one consideration, however, he laboured under no ambiguity of mind. Nothing on earth should induce him to return by the way he had come, even if it must needs take a week to go round by some safer way.

In due course however, the situation improved. The rock face grew less perpendicular, the path wider, and finally they found themselves in a steep gully. Here the old Pathân, pointing upward began signalling vehemently, the gist of which Campian took to be that he must proceed more noiselessly than ever, and that the ridge above being gained, they would find markhôr.

A clamber of a hundred feet—one pebble dislodged with a clatter, bringing his heart to his mouth, and a reproachful glance from Bhallu Khan—and they were cowering behind the top of the ridge. Campian wanted a few moments to steady himself after their long, hard climb. He could not shoot straight in a state of breathlessness, he declared.

It was quite light up here now, but the sun had not risen above the eastern mountain-tops. As they peered over the ridge, the valley beneath still lay in the grey half-dawn. But between it and their point of vantage, on the rock-strewn slopes beneath, something was moving, and it needed not the touch on the arm from the old Pathân and the barely articulated whisper to set Campian’s nerves tingling. He had already taken the rifle from the forester so as to be in readiness.

“Markhôr,” he whispered.

Bhallu Khan nodded. A solitary ram, with fine horns, was browsing unconcernedly. There was no getting any nearer. Campian set the sight at four hundred yards. Then resting the rifle upon the rock in front of him, he took a steady aim and drew trigger.

The roar of the piece among the echoing stillness of the craggy solitudes was like a peal of thunder. The markhôr gave one wild bound into the air, and a thrill of exultation went through the shooter. But the disappointed headshake of Bhallu Khan would promptly have undeceived him, even had not the quarry taken to its heels and gone bounding down the slope at a flying gallop. He let go a couple more shots from the magazine, but wider than the first. Then he threw up the rifle in mingled disgust and resignation, the markhôr now being a mere bounding and very badly frightened speck.

“No good!” he exclaimed. “Can’t do anything with certainty over two hundred yards, and that brute was nearer five than four. Well, I didn’t expect to, so am not disappointed, and it doesn’t really matter a little damn.”

The only word of this reflection understood by Bhallu Khan being the last, he smiled, and proceeded to expatiate in Hindustani, profusely illustrating his harangue with signs. But of this, for his part, Campian understood not even the last word.

He cared the less for his failure to bring down the game in that this had not been his primary object. The pretext of sport had been a pretext only. He wanted to explore the markhôr cave, and that quietly and by himself, wherefore, when a couple of days after their visit to Jermyn he had suggested to Upward a markhôr stalk, the latter, remembering his expressed views on the subject of hard toil inadequately rewarded, had evinced considerable surprise, but excused himself from joining on that very ground, which was exactly what Campian had expected.

Now they were no great distance above that cave, and he soon signalled Bhallu Khan his desire to proceed thither. Somewhat to his surprise, remembering the superstition attached, the old Pathân cheerfully acquiesced, and a downhill climb of about three quarters of an hour brought them to a position commanding its entrance. Signing him to remain there and watch, the forester crawled round to the rock above the gaping black fissure, where by dint of making a considerable noise, and rattling down showers of stones, he hoped to drive forth its inmate. But there came forth nothing.

“This markhôr is a fraud, anyway,” said Campian to himself. And he signalled Bhallu Khan to return just as that estimable Asiatic had himself arrived at the conclusion that there was no point in making further efforts to scare out of a hole something which was not within it. Then they sat on the rock together and conversed, as best they could by signs, while Campian breakfasted on some sandwiches and the contents of a business-like flask.

The sun had risen now, and was reddening the great craggy pinnacles on high with the new glow of day. Later on these would bear an arid and depressing aspect, but now they seemed to soar up proudly to the deepening blue. Meditatively Campian watched the line of light as it dropped lower and lower, soon to flood the valley with its fierce heatwave. Now it had reached thekotal, now it was just touching the junipers which embedded the forest bungalow. He could not see the latter from his present position, it being shut off by a rounded spur; but the immediate surroundings of it drew his glance. Not that they reminded him—oh, no! He had needed no mere reminder since that chance meeting three days ago. Bother thinking! Thinking was worse than useless. Springing to his feet, he signed Bhallu Khan that he wanted to explore the cave.

The fissure was easily approached, opening as it did on to a grass ledge. Campian produced a couple of candles, thereby betraying premeditation in this quest, and, lighting one, gave the other to the old Pathân. Then they advanced into the darkness.

The fissure ran at a slant for about ten yards, then it widened out, with a tolerably level floor, to an irregularly shaped rock chamber, seeming to extend about thirty yards back. The light was flickering and uncertain, and Campian, who was a little in front, felt his arm suddenly and violently seized, and a voice vociferated in his ear. For a brief fraction of a second the idea of treachery flashed through his mind; then he recognised in Bhallu Khan’s tone the vehemence not of menace but of warning.

He had been about to step on a broad, black stripe which lay across the floor of the cavern. Now he halted, his foot already raised. He lowered his candle. The broad, black stripe was a fissure—a crevasse. Of no great width was it—at that point only just wide enough to admit his own body—still itwaswide enough. But what of its depth?

Motioning him to stand still, the forester picked up a handful of loose stones, and dropped them in one by one. Both listened. The stones took some time to strike anything, and then it was very far down. There was yet a further and fainter concussion. Bhallu Khan smiled significantly, and shook his head. Campian whistled. Both looked at each other. Then they examined the crevasse again. No current of air arose, which argued no outlet. But the thing was of ghastly depth.

“Your markhôr is a fraud, Bhallu Khan,” said Campian, as they inspected the floor of the cave, and emphasising the statement by signs. “There is no trace of such a thing ever having been into it.”

The other smiled again, and nodded assent. But just then a sound outside made them start and look at each other. It was that of a human voice. Bhallu Khan blew out his light, and Campian followed his example. Thus for a moment they waited.

Footsteps were advancing into the cave. Then the striking of a match. They made out the figure of a man approaching—a native—bearing a lighted candle, which he shaded with his hand. Behind him came another figure, which they could not make out.

“Salaam, brother,” said Bhallu Khan in Hindustani, at the same time lighting his own candle.

The effect on the newcomer was disturbing. He gave a violent start, dropping the candle, which went out. But by their own light Campian could see a business-like revolver pointed straight at him, while a full, clear, feminine voice cried out in purest English:

“Don’t move, or I fire!”

It was his turn to start now. That voice! There was no other like it in the world. He replied calmly:

“Yes. Pull off. You may as well. It won’t really matter much.”

“Oh!” Just a little cry escaped Vivien Wymer. She lowered the weapon, then laughed, and there was a note in her laugh which, in one less self possessed, less self reliant, might almost have been taken for hysterical. “Who would have thought of finding you—anyone—here?” she went on. “But I believe I was the more startled of the two.”

“Yes, I am sure you were,” he replied, advancing now into the light. “We haven’t said ‘How d’you do?’ yet, and it’s as well to keep up the conventionalities.”

She put forth her hand to meet his, and again they clasped hands. Again they had met under strange and unlooked for circumstances—here, in the semi-gloom of the mountain cave.

“I was so interested in hearing about this place,” she said. “Mr Upward’s account of it seemed to hold my imagination, and I felt moved to explore it for myself. I did not feel inclined to wait for a scheme that might never come off. Besides, the associations of mystery and a touch of eeriness would have no effect in the midst of an every day, sceptical crowd.”

“Great minds jump together! That was precisely my own idea. But who is with you? Surely you are not alone, with only one servant, and not a very reliable one at that, judging from his behaviour just now. It is hardly safe, is it?”

“Yes, it is. All these northern border tribes are of the best type of Mohammedan, and respect women. No, I am not afraid.”

“You did not seem so just now, at any rate. But it is not only of that sort of danger I was thinking. A gloomy hole like this might conceal all kinds of hidden peril. It might be the den of a panther, or a wolf, or even a snake. For instance, look at this. Keep behind me, though.”

He led the way—it was only a few steps—to the scene of his own narrow escape. There yawned the cleft, black and hideous.

“Keep back,” he said, extending an arm instinctively, as though to bar a nearer advance, and in doing so his hand accidentally closed upon hers. He did not let it remain there, but it seemed as though a magnetic touch were conveyed from frame to frame, and there came a softness into his tone which accorded well with the protecting, shielding attitude.

“Is it very deep?” asked Vivien, holding her candle over the brim, and peering down into the blackness.

“Well, judging by the sound, it takes a stone a good while to get to the bottom. I should have been there myself long before this but for Bhallu Khan here. In fact, I was placidly walking into it when he laid violent hands on me.”

“Really? How horrible! Let’s leave it now, and go outside. The idea of such a thing oppresses one in here.”

She turned away. Her voice was unshaken. Beyond just a faint quickening in her tone, she might have been listening to some mere abstract risk run by somebody she had never seen or heard of before, and Campian could not see her face.

“Just take one more look around before you go outside,” he said. “The idea of those hidden valuables being here won’t wash. Both floor and walls are of solid rock. There is no possibility of burying anything.”

“Hardly, I should think,” she answered, after a few moments’ critical survey of the interior. “But, this is not an artificial cavern, surely?”

“No. I have seen others rather like it, though none quite of its size. But if you follow out the formation of the place, it is all on the same slant. The crevasse, to be sure, is at something of a different angle, but that is nothing to go by here, where the whole side of a mountain is seamed and criss-crossed with the most irregular network of fissures.”

“What if the things are at the bottom of that cleft?” said Vivien.

At the bottom of it! This was a new idea. Was it a new light? But he replied:

“Then they will remain there till the crack of doom. The hole is of immense depth—Bhallu Khan and I sounded it from every point—and is sure to contain noxious gas at a certain distance below the surface. Do you mind if I ask you a favour?—oh nothing very great!” seeing her start. “It is not to talk about this, or speculate before others as to the possibility of such a thing existing.”

“Why, of course, if you wish it! But—do you believe in it, then?”

“Perhaps partly. But it may be that I have something to go upon. When I have more I will tell you more—but—I am forgetting—how on earth can it interest you?”

“But it will interest me very much—and—” “you know it,” she was going to add, but substituted: “life is prosaic enough for a romantic search of this sort to add new interest to it. How is it I did not know you were here?”

“Here—on this spot, or in this country?”

“On this spot, I mean. The other is easily understood. We have been living out of the way so long, and I see so few people. And you have only recently arrived?”

“Yes. As to being in here, I had no pony to leave outside. I have been climbing the mountains after markhôr, hence a tolerably disreputable old Khaki suit, and a battered and general air of not having been to bed all night.”

“Did you have any success?”

“No. I got in one shot, but missed it of course, just as I was saying when up at your place the other day. However, what I really wanted to do was to come in quietly here and explore.”

“So did I. Where is my syce, I wonder? There is my pony,” looking around, for they had regained the entrance of the cave. “Ah! I see him. He is at his prayers. Your man has joined him.”

“Yes. Old Bhallu Khan is a whale at piety. I should think he stood a first-class chance of the seventh heaven.”

“These people are very devout,” said Vivien, looking towards the two Mohammedans, who, with their shoes off, and their chuddas spread on the ground as praying carpets, were prostrating their foreheads to the earth, and otherwise following out the prescribed formula—facing towards the holy city. “I sometimes wonder if it is all on the surface.”

“I don’t know why it should be. We make a good deal of show, too, though in a different way; but I doubt if we are any better than they. In fact, it is more than possible we are actually worse. But John Bull has a fine, hearty, overgrown, schoolboy contempt for anything he can’t understand, and to him the bowings and prostrations enjoined by the Moslem form of worship is sheer nonsense. For my part, I am not sure it is not even too refined for him.”

“Perhaps. I have often thought that to these people we must seem something worse than Pagans. I hardly wonder at their fanatical hatred of us.”

“Neither do I, the more so that our attitude towards them is for the most part well exemplified in the remark made to me by a fine wooden specimen of John Bull the other day coming down the Red Sea. Two or three of these travelling traders had got up on the forecastle, and were praying towards Mecca. ‘Ever see such humbug in your life?’ says this chump. I said I had, and far greater humbug; in fact, couldn’t see any humbug in the present performance at all. Oh, but it was all on the surface! How did he know that? I asked him. Oh, because they would lie and cheat and so forth. But so would nine-tenths of the English commercially engaged, I answered. Whereat he snorted, and moved off. He thought I was a fool. I knew he was one.”

“Very much so,” assented Vivien. “I detest that wooden-headedness which no amount of moving about the world will ever teach to think. And now that those two good people are through with their devotions, it is time I got home again. Oh, Meran Buksh,ghora lao!”

The syce sprang to execute this order, and in a minute Vivien’s pony was before her, ready to mount.

“Why this is the first time you have ever put me on a horse,” she said, as Campian seemed to be arranging her skirt with minute care, “and how well you did it.”

“Thanks,” he said. “There. I hope you will not have too hot a ride home. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. You will be coming up to see us again soon, I suppose, or we shall be going to see Mrs Upward. You are going to make some stay, are you not?”

He replied in the affirmative, and, looking at her as she sat there with easy grace, he felt that never had his self-possession been in greater peril. Cool and fresh and sweet in her light blouse and riding-skirt—her glance full and serene meeting his—the flush of health mantling beneath the soft skin, she was a picture in her dark, brilliant attractiveness, framed against the background of savage rocks and ragged junipers.

“Good-bye,” was all he said.

A pressure of the hand, and she turned her pony and rode away at a walk, the syce following.

Campian watched her out of sight. Then he did a curious thing—at any rate for a man of mature age and judgment. He returned to the cave and picked up a small rough stone, quite an ordinary stone it was, but while they had stood talking Vivien had been rolling this stone absently to and fro beneath the sole of her boot. Now he picked it up, and, glancing at it for a moment, put it in his pocket. But he seemed to change his mind, for, pulling it forth again, he hurled it away far over the rocks.

Then he started out in the direction of Upward’s camp, old Bhallu Khan, carrying the rifle, following close at his heels.

Chapter Eleven.Introspect.“You’re late, child. Had a long ride?” said Colonel Jermyn, who was already at breakfast when Vivien entered.“Not very. The mountain paths here are so rough, you have to keep almost entirely to a walk. And I met Mr Campian, so we stopped and chatted a little.”“Did you? Where?”“Somewhere on the side of the mountain. I don’t know the localities here yet,” replied Vivien, with perfect ease. She had been about to say, “at the markhôr cave,” but remembering Campian’s hint, refrained. “He had been out after markhôr, with that nice-looking old forester of Mr Upward’s, and was on his way back.”“Did he get any shots?”“One, and missed it. He was quite unconcerned about it though, and didn’t go out of his way to invent half a hundred excuses for having missed it.”“Ha, ha!” laughed the colonel. “So many of these young fellows—and old ones too—are always full of reasons of that kind. A stone slipped from under their foot, or theshikarisneezed, or something. There is something I rather like about that man. Who is he? Do you know anything about him?”This was shooting the bolt home with a vengeance. But Vivien’s self-possession was equal to the strain.“Isn’t there a family of that name in Brackenshire?” she asked carelessly.“I believe there is. Yes, very likely. I thought we might ask him to come and stay a week or so when he has done with the Upwards, or even before. What do you think about it, Vivien?”“Wouldn’t he find it desperately slow here, Uncle Edward?” she said, as serenely as before.“Perhaps; I don’t know. If he did, he could always take himself off again. And now, if you’ll excuse me, dear, I’ll do likewise, for that confounded Levy sowar will be here directly for thedâk, and I’ve got a whole pile of letters to write. It’s mail day, too.”Left to herself, Vivien moved about the room arranging here, dusting a little there. No flowers were obtainable in this arid region of rocks, save a few wild ones, but even of these she had made the best; and what with little touches of feminine tastefulness in the arrangement of the rooms, the old forest bungalow, rough and racketty, and hardly better than a mere rest-house, stood quite transformed. Then, passing into her own room, she shut the door, and sat down to think.Far away from wild, craggy Baluchistan her thoughts went back. A chance call, a chance introduction in a room full of people. A few minutes of ordinary conversation as between strangers who met for the first time, and—she had learned the mystery of life when life is young—though not always then—had gazed within the golden gates of love; had trodden the flower-springing sod of that radiant and mystic realm; and not only that, but she had known, with a wondrous magnetic instinct, that in the same moment of time another had learned that mystery too. Then she had begun to live; then she had begun to realise what life could contain.Other scenes rose before her as she sat here thinking—a vision of the Park corner, in all the joyous glow and brilliancy of the London season at its height—with one ever at her side—one who there in the midst of all the varied types of beauty, and style and attractiveness of the kingdom collected together, never—as she used to tell him half playfully, but all proudly—never had eyes for any but herself. Ah, it was something to be loved like that; and yet this was not the perfervid enthusiasm, the red-hot glow of youthful adoration, but the love of one considerably past that illusive stage; whose experiences had been multifold, and frequently bitter. Again, she saw the green glories of the Cliveden woods, mirrored in the broad placid surface, as she and one other floated down that loveliest of lovely reaches in the fire-path of the westering sunlight, alone together, the murmur of their voices and the dipped wing of the hovering swallow blending with the lazy splash of the sculls. Again, in the opera box, while the most splendid staging perhaps that “Faust” had ever been put on with, held the entranced and densely packed multitude in the lowered light,shedwelt in a paradise all her own, for had she not the presence, even the contact of that one? Many and many a scene came before her now. Ah, that year! It had been indeed a year of love. And in every such scene, in every such recollection he had been ever the same. Never a moment of time that he could spare but had been spent with her—indeed not a few also that he could not—and throughout it all how perfectly free and happy together, how thoroughly at home with each other they had been.Why, then, had such a state of things been allowed to come to a close? Heavens! It is a rare—well nigh unique—one, in all conscience. Had he deceived her—disappointed her? Not any. But there had come stalking along that goggle-eyed, sheet-and-turnip bogey hight Duty—that Juggernaut which has crushed far more lives than it has ever fortified, and now, in her retrospect, Vivien Wymer realised, not for the first time, and no less bitterly, that this is just what it had done for hers. For at the period to which her thoughts went back, she owned a mother—and a selfish one, as mothers now and again are, all cant to the contrary notwithstanding—and this devoted parent could not do without her daughter, although she had another. Here was the jagged rock beneath the surface of their unruffled sea, and upon it their freight of happiness had been wrecked and cast away.At the time Vivien had thought herself passing strong, and the consciousness of this had done much to buoy her up amid such an experience of agony and heartbreak that even now she hardly cares to look back to. That had been five years ago. She was young then, and now that she is nearer thirty than twenty she is able to realise that she acted insanely; is able to realise that the love which that one had lavished upon her was worth more than that of all the kindred in the world ten times over, let alone such a consideration as an imaginary duty towards a thoroughly selfish and exacting woman, merely because the latter happened to be her nearest relation. She has come to realise the absolute truth of his words, and the realisation brings with it no solace, for, like most other experiences worth gaining, it has come too late. Her mother has been dead for three years past, and her younger sister, now married, is not eager to see too much of her; and to Duty, as represented by these, Vivien has sacrificed her life.But he—will he not relent and return? Can he live without her? Well, five years have passed since they parted, and he has kept to their agreement. She knows his nature—unswerving, vindictive—indeed the very contrast afforded between this and the completeness of his love for herself had not a little to do with drawing her to him. His words during that awful parting had been few, and their raging bitterness to some degree suppressed, and that he should come second to anything or anybody, was what he never could and never would forgive.Would he relent? Never. She went back to their chance meeting in the markhôr cave but a few hours ago, recalled every word of their conversation. The very tone of his voice had never swerved. Her ear, quick to detect any change, had detected none—not even by the smallest inflection. His manner had been kind, friendly, full of a certain modicum of regard—but that was all. Had he not often told her that a lost illusion was gone for ever? Never could it be set up again. His love was dead, and she had killed it.But—was it? Surely not. It was only sleeping, deeply perhaps, but would re-awaken. She would re-awaken it. It was impossible that such a love as theirs had been could die in either of them as long as life should last. Then a blank misgiving seized her. They had not met for five years. Then she was twenty-three. What changes had the intervening period effected in her?She gazed into her mirror long and steadily. Yes, she was growing old—old and plain, decidedly, she told herself with an aching bitterness of heart. The soft sprightliness of five years earlier was no longer in her face. It had gone. Alone with herself she need not dissimulate. In those days the bright and sunny spirits of rejoicing youth had radiated from her eyes; now, though her eyes were as lustrous and brilliant as ever, their glance was a tired one, reflecting but the sadness of a lonely and disappointed woman. Undoubtedly the change had struck him, and with startling force. No; his love would never re-awaken now. Why should it? In the day of her power she had let it go; now her power had departed.Then another thought came to her. That blue-eyed girl staying with the Upwards—she was wondrously pretty. Vivien had seen her once in Shâlalai. The two would be thrown together day after day, and all day long—had been so thrown together. They had even shared a common peril. And she had youth on her side. What sort of tone would his voice have taken while talking to her, Vivien wondered, again recalling the perfect composure of his conversation but an hour or two ago in the cave. No reference—not even a veiled one—to the past; no remark upon the unexpectedness of their first meeting. True, he had seemed a trifle disconcerted on the occasion of that meeting; but that was only natural—and momentary. Yes, Nesta Cheriton was wonderfully pretty and taking. Thus she tortured herself.But while she could do that alone and with her own thoughts, Vivien would rather have died than have allowed any glimmering of their gist to be so much as suspected by any living soul, let alone the object of them. She forgot to wonder at her own self-possession on the occasion of that first meeting; and indeed on that of the subsequent one. It had proved even more complete than his own, and she forgot to speculate as to whether he might not be taking his cue from her and playing up to her lead. That is the worst of introspection of the vehement kind, it is absolutely blinding as regards the attitude towards the object which inspires it.Then, by a curious twist in her meditations, pride sprang into arms. If one man could so completely dismiss her from his heart and memory, there were others who could not. She unlocked a drawer of her writing-table and took out a letter. Spreading it open before her, she glanced through it. It was from one who was the owner of a fine old country place and a good many thousands a year, and contained a passionate appeal to her to reconsider her former refusals. This letter she had intended to answer last week. But now?She read it through again. Why should she continue to throw away life, grieving over what was past and done with; what was inevitable; what was dead and buried? It was more sensible to take life as it is, and make the best of things. She would accept the man. There was no reason why she should not, and every reason why she should.She drew a sheet of paper to her, but before she had got further than the address, a new thought struck her. What if she had so replied by last mail—that is to say, the day before this other had been so unexpectedly thrown back into her life? Nay, worse. What if she had so replied to a like appeal from the same quarter nearly a year ago? That decided her. She wrote her reply—and it was in the negative, very unequivocally so—stamped and directed it, and threw it aside.Then she did a strange—and in view of her former meditations—an utterly inconsequent thing. She took another sheet of paper and wrote:“We were to be strangers to each other. Had we not better remain so? You will understand my meaning fully within the next few days. Of course I have no right to try and influence your movements, so must leave it to your own judgment to order them in what seems to me the only rational and sensible way.“Vivien.”This she put into an envelope, which she sealed, but did not stamp. Then she directed it to “Howard Campian, Esquire, Chirria Bach.”No; she could not bear it. To be under the same roof with him for days, possibly weeks at a time, and keep up therôleof strangers to each other, would be too great a strain. Now, when he should receive her uncle’s invitation he would know what to do. On the face of such an intimation there was but one course open to him. A rap came at the door, and her uncle’s voice:“Got any letters to send, Viv? The Levy sowar is here.”“Only one,” she answered, opening the door, and handing him the one bearing the English address. “The other I want to go in the opposite direction. The man can take it this evening when he passes here with the Upwards’dâk.”“All right.” And in a moment more the clatter of the horse’s hoofs died away down the path, and the swarthy Baluchi, in his Khaki uniform, jogged indifferently upon his way, as though he were not the bearer of that which by a turn or freak of thought had just escaped being an agency for entailing solemn consequences upon one or more lives.“By George! this hill air seems to suit you, child,” cried the jolly colonel, gazing upon his niece with undisguised admiration. “I can’t make out what all these young fellows—young fools, I call them—are about. Eh?”“Have I not got a dear old uncle, who talks shocking nonsense on privileged occasions?” returned Vivien, slipping her hand within his arm. “Why, I am getting as old as the hills, and am ‘going off’ perceptibly every hour. Do I not own a looking-glass?”“A looking-glass? Pooh! it’s a lying one then. We’ll pitch it over thekhud, and send Der’ Ali down to the bazaar for one that is more truthful. But, then—I am forgetting. This isn’t Baghnagar, and there’s no bazaar.”“No, there isn’t, and a good thing too, if it is going to conduce to such scandalous waste,” retorted Vivien brightly.“I believe it’s not fair, eh? It seems hard lines on you, child, shutting you up here, with no one to talk to but a prosy old fellow like me, eh?”“Now, Uncle Edward, it is you who will have to go over thatkhudinstead of my poor, unoffending, candid looking-glass, if you persist in talking such a prodigious quantity of nonsense.”That evening the Levy sowar arrived in due course, with Colonel Jermyn’s post, and clattered off, bearing that of Upward. But the letter addressed to Howard Campian, at Chirria Bach, still lay upon Vivien’s writing-table.

“You’re late, child. Had a long ride?” said Colonel Jermyn, who was already at breakfast when Vivien entered.

“Not very. The mountain paths here are so rough, you have to keep almost entirely to a walk. And I met Mr Campian, so we stopped and chatted a little.”

“Did you? Where?”

“Somewhere on the side of the mountain. I don’t know the localities here yet,” replied Vivien, with perfect ease. She had been about to say, “at the markhôr cave,” but remembering Campian’s hint, refrained. “He had been out after markhôr, with that nice-looking old forester of Mr Upward’s, and was on his way back.”

“Did he get any shots?”

“One, and missed it. He was quite unconcerned about it though, and didn’t go out of his way to invent half a hundred excuses for having missed it.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed the colonel. “So many of these young fellows—and old ones too—are always full of reasons of that kind. A stone slipped from under their foot, or theshikarisneezed, or something. There is something I rather like about that man. Who is he? Do you know anything about him?”

This was shooting the bolt home with a vengeance. But Vivien’s self-possession was equal to the strain.

“Isn’t there a family of that name in Brackenshire?” she asked carelessly.

“I believe there is. Yes, very likely. I thought we might ask him to come and stay a week or so when he has done with the Upwards, or even before. What do you think about it, Vivien?”

“Wouldn’t he find it desperately slow here, Uncle Edward?” she said, as serenely as before.

“Perhaps; I don’t know. If he did, he could always take himself off again. And now, if you’ll excuse me, dear, I’ll do likewise, for that confounded Levy sowar will be here directly for thedâk, and I’ve got a whole pile of letters to write. It’s mail day, too.”

Left to herself, Vivien moved about the room arranging here, dusting a little there. No flowers were obtainable in this arid region of rocks, save a few wild ones, but even of these she had made the best; and what with little touches of feminine tastefulness in the arrangement of the rooms, the old forest bungalow, rough and racketty, and hardly better than a mere rest-house, stood quite transformed. Then, passing into her own room, she shut the door, and sat down to think.

Far away from wild, craggy Baluchistan her thoughts went back. A chance call, a chance introduction in a room full of people. A few minutes of ordinary conversation as between strangers who met for the first time, and—she had learned the mystery of life when life is young—though not always then—had gazed within the golden gates of love; had trodden the flower-springing sod of that radiant and mystic realm; and not only that, but she had known, with a wondrous magnetic instinct, that in the same moment of time another had learned that mystery too. Then she had begun to live; then she had begun to realise what life could contain.

Other scenes rose before her as she sat here thinking—a vision of the Park corner, in all the joyous glow and brilliancy of the London season at its height—with one ever at her side—one who there in the midst of all the varied types of beauty, and style and attractiveness of the kingdom collected together, never—as she used to tell him half playfully, but all proudly—never had eyes for any but herself. Ah, it was something to be loved like that; and yet this was not the perfervid enthusiasm, the red-hot glow of youthful adoration, but the love of one considerably past that illusive stage; whose experiences had been multifold, and frequently bitter. Again, she saw the green glories of the Cliveden woods, mirrored in the broad placid surface, as she and one other floated down that loveliest of lovely reaches in the fire-path of the westering sunlight, alone together, the murmur of their voices and the dipped wing of the hovering swallow blending with the lazy splash of the sculls. Again, in the opera box, while the most splendid staging perhaps that “Faust” had ever been put on with, held the entranced and densely packed multitude in the lowered light,shedwelt in a paradise all her own, for had she not the presence, even the contact of that one? Many and many a scene came before her now. Ah, that year! It had been indeed a year of love. And in every such scene, in every such recollection he had been ever the same. Never a moment of time that he could spare but had been spent with her—indeed not a few also that he could not—and throughout it all how perfectly free and happy together, how thoroughly at home with each other they had been.

Why, then, had such a state of things been allowed to come to a close? Heavens! It is a rare—well nigh unique—one, in all conscience. Had he deceived her—disappointed her? Not any. But there had come stalking along that goggle-eyed, sheet-and-turnip bogey hight Duty—that Juggernaut which has crushed far more lives than it has ever fortified, and now, in her retrospect, Vivien Wymer realised, not for the first time, and no less bitterly, that this is just what it had done for hers. For at the period to which her thoughts went back, she owned a mother—and a selfish one, as mothers now and again are, all cant to the contrary notwithstanding—and this devoted parent could not do without her daughter, although she had another. Here was the jagged rock beneath the surface of their unruffled sea, and upon it their freight of happiness had been wrecked and cast away.

At the time Vivien had thought herself passing strong, and the consciousness of this had done much to buoy her up amid such an experience of agony and heartbreak that even now she hardly cares to look back to. That had been five years ago. She was young then, and now that she is nearer thirty than twenty she is able to realise that she acted insanely; is able to realise that the love which that one had lavished upon her was worth more than that of all the kindred in the world ten times over, let alone such a consideration as an imaginary duty towards a thoroughly selfish and exacting woman, merely because the latter happened to be her nearest relation. She has come to realise the absolute truth of his words, and the realisation brings with it no solace, for, like most other experiences worth gaining, it has come too late. Her mother has been dead for three years past, and her younger sister, now married, is not eager to see too much of her; and to Duty, as represented by these, Vivien has sacrificed her life.

But he—will he not relent and return? Can he live without her? Well, five years have passed since they parted, and he has kept to their agreement. She knows his nature—unswerving, vindictive—indeed the very contrast afforded between this and the completeness of his love for herself had not a little to do with drawing her to him. His words during that awful parting had been few, and their raging bitterness to some degree suppressed, and that he should come second to anything or anybody, was what he never could and never would forgive.

Would he relent? Never. She went back to their chance meeting in the markhôr cave but a few hours ago, recalled every word of their conversation. The very tone of his voice had never swerved. Her ear, quick to detect any change, had detected none—not even by the smallest inflection. His manner had been kind, friendly, full of a certain modicum of regard—but that was all. Had he not often told her that a lost illusion was gone for ever? Never could it be set up again. His love was dead, and she had killed it.

But—was it? Surely not. It was only sleeping, deeply perhaps, but would re-awaken. She would re-awaken it. It was impossible that such a love as theirs had been could die in either of them as long as life should last. Then a blank misgiving seized her. They had not met for five years. Then she was twenty-three. What changes had the intervening period effected in her?

She gazed into her mirror long and steadily. Yes, she was growing old—old and plain, decidedly, she told herself with an aching bitterness of heart. The soft sprightliness of five years earlier was no longer in her face. It had gone. Alone with herself she need not dissimulate. In those days the bright and sunny spirits of rejoicing youth had radiated from her eyes; now, though her eyes were as lustrous and brilliant as ever, their glance was a tired one, reflecting but the sadness of a lonely and disappointed woman. Undoubtedly the change had struck him, and with startling force. No; his love would never re-awaken now. Why should it? In the day of her power she had let it go; now her power had departed.

Then another thought came to her. That blue-eyed girl staying with the Upwards—she was wondrously pretty. Vivien had seen her once in Shâlalai. The two would be thrown together day after day, and all day long—had been so thrown together. They had even shared a common peril. And she had youth on her side. What sort of tone would his voice have taken while talking to her, Vivien wondered, again recalling the perfect composure of his conversation but an hour or two ago in the cave. No reference—not even a veiled one—to the past; no remark upon the unexpectedness of their first meeting. True, he had seemed a trifle disconcerted on the occasion of that meeting; but that was only natural—and momentary. Yes, Nesta Cheriton was wonderfully pretty and taking. Thus she tortured herself.

But while she could do that alone and with her own thoughts, Vivien would rather have died than have allowed any glimmering of their gist to be so much as suspected by any living soul, let alone the object of them. She forgot to wonder at her own self-possession on the occasion of that first meeting; and indeed on that of the subsequent one. It had proved even more complete than his own, and she forgot to speculate as to whether he might not be taking his cue from her and playing up to her lead. That is the worst of introspection of the vehement kind, it is absolutely blinding as regards the attitude towards the object which inspires it.

Then, by a curious twist in her meditations, pride sprang into arms. If one man could so completely dismiss her from his heart and memory, there were others who could not. She unlocked a drawer of her writing-table and took out a letter. Spreading it open before her, she glanced through it. It was from one who was the owner of a fine old country place and a good many thousands a year, and contained a passionate appeal to her to reconsider her former refusals. This letter she had intended to answer last week. But now?

She read it through again. Why should she continue to throw away life, grieving over what was past and done with; what was inevitable; what was dead and buried? It was more sensible to take life as it is, and make the best of things. She would accept the man. There was no reason why she should not, and every reason why she should.

She drew a sheet of paper to her, but before she had got further than the address, a new thought struck her. What if she had so replied by last mail—that is to say, the day before this other had been so unexpectedly thrown back into her life? Nay, worse. What if she had so replied to a like appeal from the same quarter nearly a year ago? That decided her. She wrote her reply—and it was in the negative, very unequivocally so—stamped and directed it, and threw it aside.

Then she did a strange—and in view of her former meditations—an utterly inconsequent thing. She took another sheet of paper and wrote:

“We were to be strangers to each other. Had we not better remain so? You will understand my meaning fully within the next few days. Of course I have no right to try and influence your movements, so must leave it to your own judgment to order them in what seems to me the only rational and sensible way.

“Vivien.”

This she put into an envelope, which she sealed, but did not stamp. Then she directed it to “Howard Campian, Esquire, Chirria Bach.”

No; she could not bear it. To be under the same roof with him for days, possibly weeks at a time, and keep up therôleof strangers to each other, would be too great a strain. Now, when he should receive her uncle’s invitation he would know what to do. On the face of such an intimation there was but one course open to him. A rap came at the door, and her uncle’s voice:

“Got any letters to send, Viv? The Levy sowar is here.”

“Only one,” she answered, opening the door, and handing him the one bearing the English address. “The other I want to go in the opposite direction. The man can take it this evening when he passes here with the Upwards’dâk.”

“All right.” And in a moment more the clatter of the horse’s hoofs died away down the path, and the swarthy Baluchi, in his Khaki uniform, jogged indifferently upon his way, as though he were not the bearer of that which by a turn or freak of thought had just escaped being an agency for entailing solemn consequences upon one or more lives.

“By George! this hill air seems to suit you, child,” cried the jolly colonel, gazing upon his niece with undisguised admiration. “I can’t make out what all these young fellows—young fools, I call them—are about. Eh?”

“Have I not got a dear old uncle, who talks shocking nonsense on privileged occasions?” returned Vivien, slipping her hand within his arm. “Why, I am getting as old as the hills, and am ‘going off’ perceptibly every hour. Do I not own a looking-glass?”

“A looking-glass? Pooh! it’s a lying one then. We’ll pitch it over thekhud, and send Der’ Ali down to the bazaar for one that is more truthful. But, then—I am forgetting. This isn’t Baghnagar, and there’s no bazaar.”

“No, there isn’t, and a good thing too, if it is going to conduce to such scandalous waste,” retorted Vivien brightly.

“I believe it’s not fair, eh? It seems hard lines on you, child, shutting you up here, with no one to talk to but a prosy old fellow like me, eh?”

“Now, Uncle Edward, it is you who will have to go over thatkhudinstead of my poor, unoffending, candid looking-glass, if you persist in talking such a prodigious quantity of nonsense.”

That evening the Levy sowar arrived in due course, with Colonel Jermyn’s post, and clattered off, bearing that of Upward. But the letter addressed to Howard Campian, at Chirria Bach, still lay upon Vivien’s writing-table.

Chapter Twelve.Umar Khan—Freebooter.Umar Khan was a Baluchi who bore a very bad record indeed.One of his earlier exploits, in fact, that which was destined to start him in his career ofbudmâshi, and ultimately, in all probability, land him on the scaffold and faggot pyre (Note 1), had taken place many years before the events narrated in our story. He had been summoned before the Political Agent to answer for complicity—real or alleged—in the raiding upon and blackmailing of certain wandering herdsmen, belonging to a weaker clan. The British official found him guilty, and sentenced him to a term of imprisonment, a terrible punishment to the free, wild man of the deserts and mountains.The manner in which this one received the penalty to which he was doomed was characteristic. His eyes blazed, and, his features working with demoniacal fury, he spat forth a volume of curses and threats.“What does he say?” inquired the Political Agent.The interpreter replied that, apart from calling down all the most forcible anathemas known to the Moslem creed upon the heads of those concerned in his then discomfiture, the substance of the prisoner’s declaration was as follows:—TheSirkâr(Ruling power,i.e., Government) was strong, but those who had borne witness against him were not. Let them beware. He would have ten lives for that day’s work. TheSirkârcould not shut him up for ever. It could kill him, but there were plenty left—several, even, who heard him that day—who would accept his legacy of vengeance; and the witnesses against him had better go across the wide sea, if haply they might, for no corner of the land wherein they now dwelt was remote enough to hide them from the vengeance of Umar Khan.To this manifesto the Political Agent replied in words of weighty warning. As the prisoner had said, theSirkârwas strong—strong to punish, as he had already discovered. If, on the expiration of his term of imprisonment he continued his evil ways, or made any attempt to fulfil his threat, he would speedily find that there was no corner of the land remote enough to hide him from the vengeance of theSirkâr, which in that case would be swift, condign, and terrible—in fact the most terrible that could overtake him, viz: death with ignominy.So Umar Khan duly served his term, and in the fulness of time was released. For a while the authorities kept an eye on him, and all went well. He was in no hurry, this wild, brooding, vindictive mountaineer. He employed his period of enforced quietude in secretly locating every one of those who had borne witness against him, and when the surveillance over his movements had relaxed, he became as good as his word. One night he started for some of the objects of his feud, and, taking them by surprise, killed three. Two more he found in a neighbouring village, and these also felt the weight of histulwar. But now things grew too lively. With half of his account of vengeance settled, Umar Khan found himself forced to flee, unless he were prepared to forego—and that forever—the other half. So flee he did, both fast and far, hotly pursued by the Political Agent and a strong posse of Levy sowars.Now, the said Political was a staff corps man who had seen some service, and, moreover a very energetic and zealous official; consequently, he allowed the fugitive no more start than he could help, with the result that the latter had no time to collect any following so as to afford him the satisfaction of selling his life dearly. So day and night fled Umar Khan; but turn and double as he would, the avenging force pressed him hard, for the Levy sowars were men of the country, and knew all the twists and turns of the mountains as well as he did; and their commander was a seasoned campaigner, and as hard as nails. However, fortune favoured him, and the hunted man succeeded in reaching a place of refuge and of safety—as he thought.As he thought! For, persistent as bloodhounds, that avenging band held steadily upon his track. Finally they came up with him. Umar Khan was in a tent asleep. Stealthily the pursuers drew up in crescent formation, and their commander summoned Umar to come forth. For a moment there was dead silence. Then swift as thought, a rifle muzzle was poked through the flap of the tent. A loud report, and a bullet sang past the official’s ear. The latter, more than ever bent on securing his prisoner alive, reiterated the summons, with the alternative in the event of noncompliance, of ordering a volley to be fired into the tent. The reply came as before, in the shape of another bullet, which this time killed the horse of one of the sowars. The order was given to fire.The rattle and smoke of the volley rolled away—and lo! the sides of the tent were riddled like a sieve. There was a moment or two of silence, and again the officer challenged any who might be left alive to come forth. There emerged from the tent door, a figure clad in the full voluminous draperies and close veil of an Afghan woman.She did not even look at the troop. She fled away over the plain as fast as her legs could carry her, uttering shrill screams. Those who looked on were filled with wild amaze. How could any living thing have escaped that volley? A movement made to pursue her was simultaneously checked, and then the Political Agent and some of the sowars entered the tent, but cautiously.Their caution in this instance was unnecessary. One human being alone was in that tent—lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Such rude furniture and utensils as there were had been riddled, and the ground itself ploughed up with bullets. The human figure was limp and lifeless, and—it was that of another woman.An idea struck the official. He leaped outside the tent; his gaze directed at the fast fleeing figure, now some distance away. He—and those present—saw it drag out a horse from among the rocks and stones of a dry nullah, and, flinging off the female attire, spring upon the animal’s back. Then darting forth a hand with defiant gesture, and hurling back a final curse and menace, the fugitive—a wiry, muscular male—flogged his steed into a furious gallop, and was speedily out of range of the hurried volley sent after him.The officer stared, and, we fear, cursed. The Levy sowars stared, and certainly invoked Allah and his Prophet; while laughing at both, yet storing up deeper vengeance for the slaughter of one of his most faithful wives—who had shared and aided his flight, and eventually laid down her life for him—fled Umar Khan far over the plains of Afghanistan—further and further into that welcome land of refuge.There lay the rub. They dare not pursue him further. Already a violation of international law had been committed in carrying the pursuit thus far. Well might the official feel foolish. That their bird should be allowed to skip off right under their very noses in the garb of the supposed female whom they had so very humanely spared was enough to make him feel foolish. But he was destined to feel more so subsequently, when an acrid representation from the Amir of Kâbul entailed upon him a Departmental wigging, although but a technical one. After all, a man may be too zealous.After that Umar Khan disappeared for a while. The Amir of Kâbul, when mildly requested to hand him over, declined crustily, on the ground that an armed force had pursued a fugitive over his border without so much as a by-your-leave. If the English attempted to police his country and failed, he was not going to step in where they left off.So the years went by, and Umar Khan was lost sight of and forgotten. Then, suddenly, he reappeared in his old haunts.Changes of administration had supervened. The Government did not care to bother itself over a man who had been a desperate outlaw under its predecessors, as long as he behaved himself and showed a disposition to amend the error of his ways. Moreover, he was a member of one of the most powerful and turbulent tribes in Baluchistan. TheSirkârconcluded to let sleeping dogs lie. So it shut its eyes, and Umar Khan was left in peace.In peace? Yes, so far as he was concerned. But he fixed his dwelling among the wildest and most impracticable of mountain deserts—always ensuring for himself a safe retreat—and thence he began to prey upon all and any who had the wherewithal to pay up smartly for further immunity.Then complaints began to reach Shâlalai. Peaceablebanyashad been plundered of all the gains they had made during a travelling trade. Merchants on a larger scale trading with Kâbul had been relieved on a proportionate scale, or even held to ransom. Umar Khan adopted a method of his own for putting a stop to the complaints of such. It was the method best expressed by the saw, “Dead men tell no tales”—and by way of doing the thing thoroughly, he seized the whole of the plunder instead of merely the half as heretofore, but took care that the owner should not be on hand to lay any complaint. And leaving out many other unchronicled misdeeds, we think we have said enough to establish our opening statement, viz: that Umar Khan was a Baluchi who bore a very bad record indeed.He was not a sirdar, nor even a malik. He was, in fact, a nobody, who—as not unfrequently happens among barbarian races—had raised himself to a sort of sinister eminence by a daring fearlessness and a combination of shrewdness and luck in evading the consequences of his countless acts of aggression. Added to this, his enforced outlawry and the exploits, half mythical, wherewith rumour credited him during that period, had thrown a kind of halo around him in the eyes of his wild, predatory fellow-tribesmen. Nominally he lived under and was responsible to the Sirdar Yar Hussain Khan, who was chief over a large section of the powerful Marri tribe; actually he was responsible to nobody in the wide world. His own particular following was made up of all the “tough” characters of the tribe, which is saying much, for the Marris bore the reputation of numbering in their midst some very “tough” characters.The saw relative to the endowment of anybody with a sufficiency of rope was beginning to hold good in the matter of Umar Khan. Things were going badly with him. He had been obliged to be more than liberal with his ill-gotten gains in order to retain the adherence of his following, and the shoe was beginning to pinch. Then his tribal chief had given him a hint to sit tight; in short, had given him two alternatives—either to behave himself or clear out.He had about concluded to embrace the latter of these—and the motive which had led him up to this conclusion was dual—and akin to that which tells with like effect upon men far more civilised than the Baluchi ex-outlaw. Umar Khan was hard up; likewise he was hipped. He was perfectly sick of sitting still. Times were too peaceful altogether. So he sold what few possessions he had left, and with the proceeds laid in a stock of Snider rifles and ammunition.Umar Khan sat in his village at sunrise. It was the hour of prayer, and several of the faithful, dotted about, were devoutly prostrating themselves, in the most approved fashion; indeed Umar himself had only just finished the performance of his devotions, for your Moslem is a logician in such matters, and has no idea of heaping up great damnation to himself by committing two sins instead of one, as would be the case were he to omit the prescribed devotion simply because he had just cut somebody’s throat. The low, flat, mud-walled houses were in keeping with the surroundings—looking indeed as if they had but been dumped down and left to dry, like other piles of earth and stones which had rolled down the arid slopes and remained where they fell. A flock of black goats and fat-tailed sheep, mingled together, was scattered over the plain, though where they could find sustenance in such a desert, Heaven alone knew. Camels, too, were stalking around, also making what seemed an ironical attempt at browsing.The sun had just risen beyond the far off limit of the desert plain, tinging blood-red the line of jagged peaks shooting skyward behind the village. Umar Khan sat in gloomy silence, smoking a narghileh, and, like most Orientals, indulging in much expectoration. His grim, hawk-like face, with the shaggy hanging brows meeting over his hooked nose, looked more cruel and repulsive than ever, as he stroked his beard, or pulled at the long black tresses, which hung down on each side of his face. Then he looked up. A fellow-tribesman was coming towards him. Umar Khan’s glance now lit up with animation. The man came to him and sat down. Their talk was short, but the ex-outlaw’s expression of countenance grew positively radiant, as the new arrival went on unfolding his tidings.Umar Khan rose and ordered his best horse to be saddled. As he rose, it might have been noticed that he suffered from a slight limp. Then taking with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself—if that were possible—he rode forth.For many hours they fared onward, avoiding the more frequented ways, and travelling over precipitous mountain path and through wildtangi, by routes well known to themselves, halting at convenient places to rest and water their horses. All had rifles, as well as their curved tulwars, and this savage band of hook-nosed, scowling copper-coloured ruffians, armed to the teeth, looked about as forbidding, even terror striking a crew as the peaceable wayfarer wouldnotwish to meet—say half way through atangiwhere there was precious little room to pass each other.The sun was now considerably past the meridian, and at length the band, at a word from Ihalil Mohammed—the man who had brought the news which had led to this undertaking—halted amid some rock overlooking a broad high-road.Far away along its dusty length a speck appeared, growing larger as it drew rapidly nearer, until it took the shape of a vehicle, containing but one man, and he the driver. It was an ordinary “gharri,” or hackney cab. To meet this Ihalil and four others now rode down.“Salaam, brother,” they exclaimed, drawing up across the road.“Salaam, Sirdar sahib,” returned the driver, in tremulous tones, turning pale at the sight of these fierce armed figures barring his way. The man was an ordinary specimen of the low caste Hindu, and as such held in utter contempt by these stalwart sons of the desert, and in repulsion as a heathen and an idolater.“Who art thou, brother; and whither faring?” queried Ihalil.The man replied, in quaking tones, that he was but a poor “gharri-wallah” hired to meet a certain holymûllahwho was travelling from Shâlalai to a village away far out in the desert. He was to bring him on a stage of his journey, and expected to meet him not far from that point.“Good. Now turn thine old box on wheels out of the road and follow to where we shall lead thee,” commanded Ihalil.The poor wretch dared not so much as hesitate, and presently the rickety old rattle trap was drawn up behind the rocks. At sight of the rest of the band the miserable Hindu gave himself up for dead.“Salaam, Sirdar sahib,” he faltered, cowering before the grim stare of Umar Khan.The latter then questioned him, in process of which one of the freebooters stole up behind, his tulwar raised. The badly scared “gharri-wallah,” his eyes starting from his head, had no attention to spare from the threatening scowl and searching questions of Umar Khan; and of danger from behind was utterly unconscious. Then, at a nod from Umar Khan, down came the tulwar upon the neck of the doomed Hindu.It was badly aimed and did not sever the head, but cut far and deep into the neck and shoulder. The miserable wretch fell to the ground, deluged with a great spout of blood, but yet wailing dismally in agony and terror. In a moment two more tulwars swung through the air, and the sufferings of the murdered man—literally cut to pieces—were over, though his limbs still beat the ground in convulsive struggles.Umar Khan spat in derision, while the other barbarians laughed like demons over this atrocious deed. The murderers wiped their swords on the garments of their victim, and examined the keenly-ground edges solicitously, lest they should be in any way notched or turned. But now their attention was diverted. Another speck was growing larger and larger on the road, this time advancing from the direction in which their late victim had been proceeding. Drawing nearer it soon took shape. Another “gharri” similar to the one whose driver they had slaughtered.The whole band rode down to meet it. Besides the driver it contained another man.“Peace, my sons,” said the latter as they drew up.“And on you peace,” returned Umar Khan. “But first—for this dog. Hold—Alight, both of ye.”There was that about the aspect of these armed brigands that would admit of no hesitation. Both obeyed. This driver, too, was a low caste Hindu. His “fare” was an old man, white-bearded, and wearing a green turban.No sooner were both fairly out of the “gharri,” than Ihalil Mohammed rode at the Hindu and cut him down. Others fell upon him with their tulwars, and the miserable wretch, like his fellow-craftsman, was literally hewn to pieces then and there. With savage shouts the murderers waved their bloodstained weapons aloft, curvetting their steeds around the survivor.The latter turned pale. Quick as thought, however, he had drawn a volume of the Korân from beneath his garments, and placed it upon his head.“La illah il Allah”—he began.”—Mohammed er rasool Allah,” (Note 2) chorused the blood thirsty savages, as though in one fierce war shout, turning to hack once more at the mangled carcase of the miserable Hindu.“Hearken, my father,” said Umar Khan, pointing his rifle at the traveller. “A true believer is safe at the hands of other believers. But, father, delay not to deliver over the seven hundred rupees which are in thy sash.”The other turned paler still.“Seven hundred rupees?” he exclaimed, holding up his hands. “What should a poormûllahdo with such a sum?”“Thou hast said it, my father. What indeed?” sneered Umar Khan. “What indeed, save as alms for the poor, and the debtors and the insolvent, as enjoins the holy Korân? And such thou seest before thee. Wherefore we will receive them, father, and pray the blessing of Allah, and a rich place in the seventh heaven for thee and thine.”“Do ye not fear God, O impious ones, that ye would rob His servant?” said themûllah, waxing wroth in his desperation.“We fear nobody,” returned Umar Khan, with an evil sneer. “Yet, my father, delay not any longer, lest this gun should go off by accident.”“Wah—wah!” sighed themûllah. “Be content my children—it may be ye are poorer than I. Receive this packet, and the blessing of a servant of the Prophet go with it. And now I will proceed upon my way.”“Wait but a few moments,” replied Umar Khan, receiving the bag which the other tendered him, and which he immediately handed to Ihalil with one word—“Count!”“It may not be, for the hour of evening prayer draws near. Peace be with you, my children.” And he made as though to move on.“We will say it together then,” replied Umar Khan, barring the way. “What is this? Two hundred and fifty rupees? Two more packets hast thou forgotten, my father, and—delay not, for the hour of evening prayer draws near.”There was a grim, fell significance in the speaker’s tone and countenance. Themûllahno longer hesitated. With almost trembling alacrity he drew forth the remaining bags, which being counted, were found to contain the exact sum named.“We give thee five rupees as an alms, my father,” said Umar Khan, tendering him that amount. Gloomily themûllahpocketed it. “And surely God is good to thee, that in these days thou hast been able to relieve the necessities of Umar Khan.”A start of surprise came over the face of the other, at the mention of the name of the dreaded ex-outlaw. He had more than a shrewd suspicion that but for his sacred office he would be now even as his Hindu driver—which went far to console him for the loss of his substance.“Wah—wah!” he moaned, sitting down by the roadside. “My hard earned substance which should comfort my old age—all gone! all gone!”“The faithful will provide for thine old age, my father. And now, peace be with thee, for we may not tarry here. But,”—sinking his voice to a bloodcurdling whisper—“it is well to give alms in secret, for he who should boast too loud of having bestowed them upon Umar Khan, not even the holy sanctuary of Mecca would avail to shelter him.”“Blaspheme not, my son,” cried themûllah, affecting great horror, and putting his fingers to his ears—though, as a matter of fact, the warning was one which he thoroughly understood.They left him seated there by the roadside, despondent over his loss. They left the two mangled bodies of their victims to the birds and beasts of prey, and gave vent to their glee as they dashed off, in shouts and blood thirsty witticisms. They were in high good humour, those jovial souls. They had slain a couple of human beings—that was to keep their hands in. They had robbed another of seven hundred rupees—that would replenish the wasted exchequer for a time; and now they cantered off to see if they could not do a little more in both lines—and the goal for which they were heading was the Kachîn valley.Umar Khan had burnt his boats behind him.Note 1. To lend additional terror to capital punishment in the eyes of Moslems on the northern border, the dead bodies of those executed for fanatical murder were sometimes burned.Note 2. “God is the God of gods—Mohammed the Prophet of God.”—The Moslem confession of faith.

Umar Khan was a Baluchi who bore a very bad record indeed.

One of his earlier exploits, in fact, that which was destined to start him in his career ofbudmâshi, and ultimately, in all probability, land him on the scaffold and faggot pyre (Note 1), had taken place many years before the events narrated in our story. He had been summoned before the Political Agent to answer for complicity—real or alleged—in the raiding upon and blackmailing of certain wandering herdsmen, belonging to a weaker clan. The British official found him guilty, and sentenced him to a term of imprisonment, a terrible punishment to the free, wild man of the deserts and mountains.

The manner in which this one received the penalty to which he was doomed was characteristic. His eyes blazed, and, his features working with demoniacal fury, he spat forth a volume of curses and threats.

“What does he say?” inquired the Political Agent.

The interpreter replied that, apart from calling down all the most forcible anathemas known to the Moslem creed upon the heads of those concerned in his then discomfiture, the substance of the prisoner’s declaration was as follows:—TheSirkâr(Ruling power,i.e., Government) was strong, but those who had borne witness against him were not. Let them beware. He would have ten lives for that day’s work. TheSirkârcould not shut him up for ever. It could kill him, but there were plenty left—several, even, who heard him that day—who would accept his legacy of vengeance; and the witnesses against him had better go across the wide sea, if haply they might, for no corner of the land wherein they now dwelt was remote enough to hide them from the vengeance of Umar Khan.

To this manifesto the Political Agent replied in words of weighty warning. As the prisoner had said, theSirkârwas strong—strong to punish, as he had already discovered. If, on the expiration of his term of imprisonment he continued his evil ways, or made any attempt to fulfil his threat, he would speedily find that there was no corner of the land remote enough to hide him from the vengeance of theSirkâr, which in that case would be swift, condign, and terrible—in fact the most terrible that could overtake him, viz: death with ignominy.

So Umar Khan duly served his term, and in the fulness of time was released. For a while the authorities kept an eye on him, and all went well. He was in no hurry, this wild, brooding, vindictive mountaineer. He employed his period of enforced quietude in secretly locating every one of those who had borne witness against him, and when the surveillance over his movements had relaxed, he became as good as his word. One night he started for some of the objects of his feud, and, taking them by surprise, killed three. Two more he found in a neighbouring village, and these also felt the weight of histulwar. But now things grew too lively. With half of his account of vengeance settled, Umar Khan found himself forced to flee, unless he were prepared to forego—and that forever—the other half. So flee he did, both fast and far, hotly pursued by the Political Agent and a strong posse of Levy sowars.

Now, the said Political was a staff corps man who had seen some service, and, moreover a very energetic and zealous official; consequently, he allowed the fugitive no more start than he could help, with the result that the latter had no time to collect any following so as to afford him the satisfaction of selling his life dearly. So day and night fled Umar Khan; but turn and double as he would, the avenging force pressed him hard, for the Levy sowars were men of the country, and knew all the twists and turns of the mountains as well as he did; and their commander was a seasoned campaigner, and as hard as nails. However, fortune favoured him, and the hunted man succeeded in reaching a place of refuge and of safety—as he thought.

As he thought! For, persistent as bloodhounds, that avenging band held steadily upon his track. Finally they came up with him. Umar Khan was in a tent asleep. Stealthily the pursuers drew up in crescent formation, and their commander summoned Umar to come forth. For a moment there was dead silence. Then swift as thought, a rifle muzzle was poked through the flap of the tent. A loud report, and a bullet sang past the official’s ear. The latter, more than ever bent on securing his prisoner alive, reiterated the summons, with the alternative in the event of noncompliance, of ordering a volley to be fired into the tent. The reply came as before, in the shape of another bullet, which this time killed the horse of one of the sowars. The order was given to fire.

The rattle and smoke of the volley rolled away—and lo! the sides of the tent were riddled like a sieve. There was a moment or two of silence, and again the officer challenged any who might be left alive to come forth. There emerged from the tent door, a figure clad in the full voluminous draperies and close veil of an Afghan woman.

She did not even look at the troop. She fled away over the plain as fast as her legs could carry her, uttering shrill screams. Those who looked on were filled with wild amaze. How could any living thing have escaped that volley? A movement made to pursue her was simultaneously checked, and then the Political Agent and some of the sowars entered the tent, but cautiously.

Their caution in this instance was unnecessary. One human being alone was in that tent—lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Such rude furniture and utensils as there were had been riddled, and the ground itself ploughed up with bullets. The human figure was limp and lifeless, and—it was that of another woman.

An idea struck the official. He leaped outside the tent; his gaze directed at the fast fleeing figure, now some distance away. He—and those present—saw it drag out a horse from among the rocks and stones of a dry nullah, and, flinging off the female attire, spring upon the animal’s back. Then darting forth a hand with defiant gesture, and hurling back a final curse and menace, the fugitive—a wiry, muscular male—flogged his steed into a furious gallop, and was speedily out of range of the hurried volley sent after him.

The officer stared, and, we fear, cursed. The Levy sowars stared, and certainly invoked Allah and his Prophet; while laughing at both, yet storing up deeper vengeance for the slaughter of one of his most faithful wives—who had shared and aided his flight, and eventually laid down her life for him—fled Umar Khan far over the plains of Afghanistan—further and further into that welcome land of refuge.

There lay the rub. They dare not pursue him further. Already a violation of international law had been committed in carrying the pursuit thus far. Well might the official feel foolish. That their bird should be allowed to skip off right under their very noses in the garb of the supposed female whom they had so very humanely spared was enough to make him feel foolish. But he was destined to feel more so subsequently, when an acrid representation from the Amir of Kâbul entailed upon him a Departmental wigging, although but a technical one. After all, a man may be too zealous.

After that Umar Khan disappeared for a while. The Amir of Kâbul, when mildly requested to hand him over, declined crustily, on the ground that an armed force had pursued a fugitive over his border without so much as a by-your-leave. If the English attempted to police his country and failed, he was not going to step in where they left off.

So the years went by, and Umar Khan was lost sight of and forgotten. Then, suddenly, he reappeared in his old haunts.

Changes of administration had supervened. The Government did not care to bother itself over a man who had been a desperate outlaw under its predecessors, as long as he behaved himself and showed a disposition to amend the error of his ways. Moreover, he was a member of one of the most powerful and turbulent tribes in Baluchistan. TheSirkârconcluded to let sleeping dogs lie. So it shut its eyes, and Umar Khan was left in peace.

In peace? Yes, so far as he was concerned. But he fixed his dwelling among the wildest and most impracticable of mountain deserts—always ensuring for himself a safe retreat—and thence he began to prey upon all and any who had the wherewithal to pay up smartly for further immunity.

Then complaints began to reach Shâlalai. Peaceablebanyashad been plundered of all the gains they had made during a travelling trade. Merchants on a larger scale trading with Kâbul had been relieved on a proportionate scale, or even held to ransom. Umar Khan adopted a method of his own for putting a stop to the complaints of such. It was the method best expressed by the saw, “Dead men tell no tales”—and by way of doing the thing thoroughly, he seized the whole of the plunder instead of merely the half as heretofore, but took care that the owner should not be on hand to lay any complaint. And leaving out many other unchronicled misdeeds, we think we have said enough to establish our opening statement, viz: that Umar Khan was a Baluchi who bore a very bad record indeed.

He was not a sirdar, nor even a malik. He was, in fact, a nobody, who—as not unfrequently happens among barbarian races—had raised himself to a sort of sinister eminence by a daring fearlessness and a combination of shrewdness and luck in evading the consequences of his countless acts of aggression. Added to this, his enforced outlawry and the exploits, half mythical, wherewith rumour credited him during that period, had thrown a kind of halo around him in the eyes of his wild, predatory fellow-tribesmen. Nominally he lived under and was responsible to the Sirdar Yar Hussain Khan, who was chief over a large section of the powerful Marri tribe; actually he was responsible to nobody in the wide world. His own particular following was made up of all the “tough” characters of the tribe, which is saying much, for the Marris bore the reputation of numbering in their midst some very “tough” characters.

The saw relative to the endowment of anybody with a sufficiency of rope was beginning to hold good in the matter of Umar Khan. Things were going badly with him. He had been obliged to be more than liberal with his ill-gotten gains in order to retain the adherence of his following, and the shoe was beginning to pinch. Then his tribal chief had given him a hint to sit tight; in short, had given him two alternatives—either to behave himself or clear out.

He had about concluded to embrace the latter of these—and the motive which had led him up to this conclusion was dual—and akin to that which tells with like effect upon men far more civilised than the Baluchi ex-outlaw. Umar Khan was hard up; likewise he was hipped. He was perfectly sick of sitting still. Times were too peaceful altogether. So he sold what few possessions he had left, and with the proceeds laid in a stock of Snider rifles and ammunition.

Umar Khan sat in his village at sunrise. It was the hour of prayer, and several of the faithful, dotted about, were devoutly prostrating themselves, in the most approved fashion; indeed Umar himself had only just finished the performance of his devotions, for your Moslem is a logician in such matters, and has no idea of heaping up great damnation to himself by committing two sins instead of one, as would be the case were he to omit the prescribed devotion simply because he had just cut somebody’s throat. The low, flat, mud-walled houses were in keeping with the surroundings—looking indeed as if they had but been dumped down and left to dry, like other piles of earth and stones which had rolled down the arid slopes and remained where they fell. A flock of black goats and fat-tailed sheep, mingled together, was scattered over the plain, though where they could find sustenance in such a desert, Heaven alone knew. Camels, too, were stalking around, also making what seemed an ironical attempt at browsing.

The sun had just risen beyond the far off limit of the desert plain, tinging blood-red the line of jagged peaks shooting skyward behind the village. Umar Khan sat in gloomy silence, smoking a narghileh, and, like most Orientals, indulging in much expectoration. His grim, hawk-like face, with the shaggy hanging brows meeting over his hooked nose, looked more cruel and repulsive than ever, as he stroked his beard, or pulled at the long black tresses, which hung down on each side of his face. Then he looked up. A fellow-tribesman was coming towards him. Umar Khan’s glance now lit up with animation. The man came to him and sat down. Their talk was short, but the ex-outlaw’s expression of countenance grew positively radiant, as the new arrival went on unfolding his tidings.

Umar Khan rose and ordered his best horse to be saddled. As he rose, it might have been noticed that he suffered from a slight limp. Then taking with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself—if that were possible—he rode forth.

For many hours they fared onward, avoiding the more frequented ways, and travelling over precipitous mountain path and through wildtangi, by routes well known to themselves, halting at convenient places to rest and water their horses. All had rifles, as well as their curved tulwars, and this savage band of hook-nosed, scowling copper-coloured ruffians, armed to the teeth, looked about as forbidding, even terror striking a crew as the peaceable wayfarer wouldnotwish to meet—say half way through atangiwhere there was precious little room to pass each other.

The sun was now considerably past the meridian, and at length the band, at a word from Ihalil Mohammed—the man who had brought the news which had led to this undertaking—halted amid some rock overlooking a broad high-road.

Far away along its dusty length a speck appeared, growing larger as it drew rapidly nearer, until it took the shape of a vehicle, containing but one man, and he the driver. It was an ordinary “gharri,” or hackney cab. To meet this Ihalil and four others now rode down.

“Salaam, brother,” they exclaimed, drawing up across the road.

“Salaam, Sirdar sahib,” returned the driver, in tremulous tones, turning pale at the sight of these fierce armed figures barring his way. The man was an ordinary specimen of the low caste Hindu, and as such held in utter contempt by these stalwart sons of the desert, and in repulsion as a heathen and an idolater.

“Who art thou, brother; and whither faring?” queried Ihalil.

The man replied, in quaking tones, that he was but a poor “gharri-wallah” hired to meet a certain holymûllahwho was travelling from Shâlalai to a village away far out in the desert. He was to bring him on a stage of his journey, and expected to meet him not far from that point.

“Good. Now turn thine old box on wheels out of the road and follow to where we shall lead thee,” commanded Ihalil.

The poor wretch dared not so much as hesitate, and presently the rickety old rattle trap was drawn up behind the rocks. At sight of the rest of the band the miserable Hindu gave himself up for dead.

“Salaam, Sirdar sahib,” he faltered, cowering before the grim stare of Umar Khan.

The latter then questioned him, in process of which one of the freebooters stole up behind, his tulwar raised. The badly scared “gharri-wallah,” his eyes starting from his head, had no attention to spare from the threatening scowl and searching questions of Umar Khan; and of danger from behind was utterly unconscious. Then, at a nod from Umar Khan, down came the tulwar upon the neck of the doomed Hindu.

It was badly aimed and did not sever the head, but cut far and deep into the neck and shoulder. The miserable wretch fell to the ground, deluged with a great spout of blood, but yet wailing dismally in agony and terror. In a moment two more tulwars swung through the air, and the sufferings of the murdered man—literally cut to pieces—were over, though his limbs still beat the ground in convulsive struggles.

Umar Khan spat in derision, while the other barbarians laughed like demons over this atrocious deed. The murderers wiped their swords on the garments of their victim, and examined the keenly-ground edges solicitously, lest they should be in any way notched or turned. But now their attention was diverted. Another speck was growing larger and larger on the road, this time advancing from the direction in which their late victim had been proceeding. Drawing nearer it soon took shape. Another “gharri” similar to the one whose driver they had slaughtered.

The whole band rode down to meet it. Besides the driver it contained another man.

“Peace, my sons,” said the latter as they drew up.

“And on you peace,” returned Umar Khan. “But first—for this dog. Hold—Alight, both of ye.”

There was that about the aspect of these armed brigands that would admit of no hesitation. Both obeyed. This driver, too, was a low caste Hindu. His “fare” was an old man, white-bearded, and wearing a green turban.

No sooner were both fairly out of the “gharri,” than Ihalil Mohammed rode at the Hindu and cut him down. Others fell upon him with their tulwars, and the miserable wretch, like his fellow-craftsman, was literally hewn to pieces then and there. With savage shouts the murderers waved their bloodstained weapons aloft, curvetting their steeds around the survivor.

The latter turned pale. Quick as thought, however, he had drawn a volume of the Korân from beneath his garments, and placed it upon his head.

“La illah il Allah”—he began.

”—Mohammed er rasool Allah,” (Note 2) chorused the blood thirsty savages, as though in one fierce war shout, turning to hack once more at the mangled carcase of the miserable Hindu.

“Hearken, my father,” said Umar Khan, pointing his rifle at the traveller. “A true believer is safe at the hands of other believers. But, father, delay not to deliver over the seven hundred rupees which are in thy sash.”

The other turned paler still.

“Seven hundred rupees?” he exclaimed, holding up his hands. “What should a poormûllahdo with such a sum?”

“Thou hast said it, my father. What indeed?” sneered Umar Khan. “What indeed, save as alms for the poor, and the debtors and the insolvent, as enjoins the holy Korân? And such thou seest before thee. Wherefore we will receive them, father, and pray the blessing of Allah, and a rich place in the seventh heaven for thee and thine.”

“Do ye not fear God, O impious ones, that ye would rob His servant?” said themûllah, waxing wroth in his desperation.

“We fear nobody,” returned Umar Khan, with an evil sneer. “Yet, my father, delay not any longer, lest this gun should go off by accident.”

“Wah—wah!” sighed themûllah. “Be content my children—it may be ye are poorer than I. Receive this packet, and the blessing of a servant of the Prophet go with it. And now I will proceed upon my way.”

“Wait but a few moments,” replied Umar Khan, receiving the bag which the other tendered him, and which he immediately handed to Ihalil with one word—“Count!”

“It may not be, for the hour of evening prayer draws near. Peace be with you, my children.” And he made as though to move on.

“We will say it together then,” replied Umar Khan, barring the way. “What is this? Two hundred and fifty rupees? Two more packets hast thou forgotten, my father, and—delay not, for the hour of evening prayer draws near.”

There was a grim, fell significance in the speaker’s tone and countenance. Themûllahno longer hesitated. With almost trembling alacrity he drew forth the remaining bags, which being counted, were found to contain the exact sum named.

“We give thee five rupees as an alms, my father,” said Umar Khan, tendering him that amount. Gloomily themûllahpocketed it. “And surely God is good to thee, that in these days thou hast been able to relieve the necessities of Umar Khan.”

A start of surprise came over the face of the other, at the mention of the name of the dreaded ex-outlaw. He had more than a shrewd suspicion that but for his sacred office he would be now even as his Hindu driver—which went far to console him for the loss of his substance.

“Wah—wah!” he moaned, sitting down by the roadside. “My hard earned substance which should comfort my old age—all gone! all gone!”

“The faithful will provide for thine old age, my father. And now, peace be with thee, for we may not tarry here. But,”—sinking his voice to a bloodcurdling whisper—“it is well to give alms in secret, for he who should boast too loud of having bestowed them upon Umar Khan, not even the holy sanctuary of Mecca would avail to shelter him.”

“Blaspheme not, my son,” cried themûllah, affecting great horror, and putting his fingers to his ears—though, as a matter of fact, the warning was one which he thoroughly understood.

They left him seated there by the roadside, despondent over his loss. They left the two mangled bodies of their victims to the birds and beasts of prey, and gave vent to their glee as they dashed off, in shouts and blood thirsty witticisms. They were in high good humour, those jovial souls. They had slain a couple of human beings—that was to keep their hands in. They had robbed another of seven hundred rupees—that would replenish the wasted exchequer for a time; and now they cantered off to see if they could not do a little more in both lines—and the goal for which they were heading was the Kachîn valley.

Umar Khan had burnt his boats behind him.

Note 1. To lend additional terror to capital punishment in the eyes of Moslems on the northern border, the dead bodies of those executed for fanatical murder were sometimes burned.

Note 2. “God is the God of gods—Mohammed the Prophet of God.”—The Moslem confession of faith.

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