“Kohara is already a great mart.  In your bazaars at summer-time you see traders from Turkestan and Tibet and Siberia, mingling with the Hindoo merchants from Delhi and Lahore.  The road will bring you still more trade.”

The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.

But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways.  But treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a habit.  There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to tell as illustrative of the Chilti character.

“There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet close to Kohara.  His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a long while he would not.  He did not wish to marry.  Finally, however, he fell in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her home, to his mother’s delight.  But the mother’s delight lasted for just five days.  She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife replied, and the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man, besides making him an object of ridicule to his neighbours.  One evening, in a fit of passion, both women said they would stand it no longer.  They ran out of the house and up the hillside, but as there was only one path they ran away together, quarrelling as they went.  Then the young Chilti rose, followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn hand and foot, laid them side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut their throats.

“‘Women talk too much,’ he said, as he came back to a house unfamiliarly quiet.  ‘One had really to put a stop to it.’”

Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while on the alert.  Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of Kohara, Peshawur, and even of Benares in India proper.  He heard of the growing power of the old Mullah by the river-bank.  He was aware of the accusations against the ruling Khan.  He knew that after night had fallen Wafadar Nazim, the Khan’s uncle, a restless, ambitious, disloyal man, crept down to the river-bank and held converse with the priest.  Thus he was ready so far as he could be ready.

The news that the road was broken was flashed to him from the nearest telegraph station, and within twenty-four hours he led out a small force from his Agency—­a battalion of Sikhs, a couple of companies of Gurkhas, two guns of a mountain battery, and a troop of irregular levies—­and disappeared over the pass, now deep in snow.

“Would he be in time?”

Not only in India was the question asked.  It was asked in England, too, in the clubs of Pall Mall, but nowhere with so passionate an outcry as in the house at the foot of the Sussex Downs.