Part 30 (1/2)

They al money at him Few of theht hiht old-fashi+oned fire-ar accepted every gift without co with the part he played He tossed ave him into a corner at the back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal theh a man suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured to death as an heretic and would have had no syruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as only battles and evil living can produce, until an to come at last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on which the blood had caked but had not grown foul

”There has been fighting in the Khyber,” somebody, informed hi a hundred faces swiftly in the sht There were ten men who held lamps for hihting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove them back into their fort! Aye! we slewasked, as if the worldto an end The words were startled out of him Under other circumstances he would never have asked that question so directly; but he had lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dreaaged on a forlorn hope But the hed at him

”Nay, not yet Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet This was a little fight The jihad shall co wondered; but he did not ask that question because his ere awake again It pays not to be in too s in the ”Hills”

As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left empty of all except his own five men They carried away thethe lastthe bandage on his wound

”Why is that?” he asked Isht,” Is stared about him He had not realized until then that without aid of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of hilooeons in the sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet

”But who shouted?”

”Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders We be many who obey,” said Is asked hi a new line

”Bull-with-a-beard's”

”And whose man art thou, Ismail?”

The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the same assurance in his voice as once there had been

”I aainst the toil to made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless For one thing he was so weary that his very bones ater; for another, Isestion that they should help was put to the others they clainantly Izzat and sharuishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both nerve and resolution to drive a Hill had, but his resolution was asleep He was too tired to care

He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed He was asleep before his head had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he drea

It seemed to him that she caeneral had given hie intoxicating scent that had first wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi

He drea sahib!” Then, ”Kurraly fas

”He sleeps!” said the saood that he sleeps!” And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Isrunted an answer

After that he was very sure in his dreanize and that he was quite sure was a drea to hirew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to becoa cahed at both and called theed and drew a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt

Then intelligible dreaether, and he, slept like a dead estion ever with him that Yasmini was not very far away, and that she was interested in hi It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a hospital

When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the passage into his cave