Dewes found the Political Officer propped up on pillows on his camp-bed.  The door from the courtyard was open, and the morning light poured brightly into the room.

“Sit here, close to me, Dewes,” said Luffe in a whisper, “and listen, for I am very tired.”  A smile came upon his face.  “Do you remember Linforth’s letters?  How that phrase came again and again:  ‘I am very tired.’”

The Doctor arranged the pillows underneath his shoulders, and then Luffe said: 

“All right.  I shall do now.”

He waited until the Doctor had gone from the room and continued: 

“I am not going to talk to you about the Fort.  The defence is safe in your hands, so long as defence is possible.  Besides, if it falls it’s not a great thing.  The troops will come up and trample down Wafadar Nazim and Abdulla Mahommed.  They are not the danger.  The road will go on again, even though Linforth’s dead.  No, the man whom I am afraid of is—­the son of the Khan.”

Dewes stared, and then said in a soothing voice: 

“He will be looked after.”

“You think my mind’s wandering,” continued Luffe.  “It never was clearer in my life.  The Khan’s son is a boy a week old.  Nevertheless I tell you that boy is the danger in Chiltistan.  The father—­we know him.  A good fellow who has lost all the confidence of his people.  There is hardly an adherent of his who genuinely likes him; there’s hardly a man in this Fort who doesn’t believe that he wished to sell his country to the British.  I should think he is impossible here in the future.  And everyone in Government House knows it.  We shall do the usual thing, I have no doubt—­pension him off, settle him down comfortably outside the borders of Chiltistan, and rule the country as trustee for his son—­until the son comes of age.”

Dewes realised surely enough that Luffe was in possession of his faculties, but he thought his anxiety exaggerated.

“You are looking rather far ahead, aren’t you, sir?” he asked.

Luffe smiled.

“Twenty-one years.  What are twenty-one years to India?  My dear Dewes!”

He was silent.  It seemed as though he were hesitating whether he would say a word more to this Major who in India talked of twenty-one years as a long span of time.  But there was no one else to whom he could confide his fears.  If Dewes was not brilliant, he was at all events all that there was.

“I wish I was going to live,” he cried in a low voice of exasperation.  “I wish I could last just long enough to travel down to Calcutta and make them listen to me.  But there’s no hope of it.  You must do what you can, Dewes, but very likely they won’t pay any attention to you.  Very likely you’ll believe me wrong yourself, eh?  Poor old Luffe, a man with a bee in his bonnet, eh?” he whispered savagely.

“No, sir,” replied Dewes.  “You know the Frontier.  I know that.”

“And even there you are wrong.  No man knows the Frontier.  We are all stumbling in the dark among these peoples, with their gentle voices and their cut-throat ways.  The most that you can know is that you are stumbling in the dark.  Well, let’s get back to the boy here.  This country will be kept for him, for twenty-one years.  Where is he going to be during those twenty-one years?”