“You will ride on my right hand,” he said.  “You need have no fear.”

The seven nobles clustered behind, and the party rode at a walk over the fan of shale and through the defile into the broad valley of Kohara.  Shere Ali did not speak.  He rode on with a set and brooding face, and the Resident fell once more to pondering the queer scene of which he had been the witness.  Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed.  There was the tomb itself—­an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident at Kohara.  It was appropriate and seemly to the man without friends, or family, or wife, but to whom the Frontier had been all these.  He would have wished for no more himself, since vanity had played so small a part in his career.  He had been the great Force upon the Frontier, keeping the Queen’s peace by the strength of his character and the sagacity of his mind.  Yet before his grave, invoking him as an unknown saint, the nobles of Chiltistan had knelt to pray for the destruction of such as he and the overthrow of the power which he had lived to represent.  And all because his advice had been neglected.

Captain Phillips was roused out of his reflections as the cavalcade approached a village.  For out of that village and from the fields about it, the men, armed for the most part with good rifles, poured towards them with cries of homage.  They joined the cavalcade, marched with it past their homes, and did not turn back.  Only the women and the children were left behind.  And at the next village and at the next the same thing happened.  The cavalcade began to swell into a small army, an army of men well equipped for war; and at the head of the gathering force Shere Ali rode with an impassive face, never speaking but to check a man from time to time who brandished a weapon at the Resident.

“Your Highness has counted the cost?” Captain Phillips asked.  “There will be but the one end to it.”

Shere Ali turned to the Resident, and though his face did not change from its brooding calm, a fire burned darkly in his eyes.

“From Afghanistan to Thibet the frontier will rise,” he said proudly.

Captain Phillips shook his head.

“From Afghanistan to Thibet the Frontier will wait, as it always waits.  It will wait to see what happens in Chiltistan.”

But though he spoke boldly, he had little comfort from his thoughts.  The rising had been well concerted.  Those who flocked to Shere Ali were not only the villagers of the Kohara valley.  There were shepherds from the hills, wild men from the far corners of Chiltistan.  Already the small army could be counted with the hundred for its unit.  To-morrow the hundred would be a thousand.  Moreover, for once in a way there was no divided counsel.  Jealousy and intrigue were not, it seemed, to do their usual work in Chiltistan.  There was only one master, and he of unquestioned authority.  Else how came it that Captain Phillips rode amidst that great and frenzied throng, unhurt and almost unthreatened?