“They were without water for all that time—­and in August?” cried Shere Ali.

“No,” the Doctor answered.  “But they would have been had the Sepoy not found his equal.  A bheestie”—­and he nodded his head to emphasise the word—­“not a soldier at all, but a mere water-carrier, a mere camp-follower, volunteered to go down to the river.  He crept out of the tower after nightfall with his water-skins, crawled down between the sangars—­and I can tell you the hill-side was thick with them—­to the brink of the Swat river below there, filled his skins, and returned with them.”

“That man, too, earned the Victoria Cross,” said Shere Ali.

“Yes,” said the Doctor, “no doubt, no doubt.”

Something of flurry was again audible in his voice, and this time Shere Ali noticed it.

“Earned—­but did not get it?” he went on slowly; and turning to the Doctor he waited quietly for an answer.  The answer was given reluctantly, after a pause.

“Well!  That is so.”

“Why?”

The question was uttered sharply, close upon the words which had preceded it.  The Doctor looked upon the ground, shifted his feet, and looked up again.  He was a young man, and inexperienced.  The question was repeated.

“Why?”

The Doctor’s confusion increased.  He recognised that his delay in answering only made the answer more difficult to give.  It could not be evaded.  He blurted out the truth apologetically.

“Well, you see, we don’t give the Victoria Cross to natives.”

Shere Ali was silent for a while.  He stood with his eyes fixed upon the tower, his face quite inscrutable.

“Yes, I guessed that would be the reason,” he said quietly.

“Well,” said his companion uncomfortably, “I expect some day that will be altered.”

Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders, and turned to go down.  At the gateway of the Fort, by the wire bridge, his escort, mounted upon their horses, waited for him.  He climbed into the saddle without a word.  He had been labouring for these last days under a sense of injury, and his thoughts had narrowed in upon himself.  He was thinking.  “I, too, then, could never win that prize.”  His conviction that he was really one of the White People, bolstered up as it had been by so many vain arguments, was put to the test of fact.  The truth shone in upon his mind.  For here was a coveted privilege of the White People from which he was debarred, he and the bheestie and the Sepoy.  They were all one, he thought bitterly, to the White People.  The invidious bar of his colour was not to be broken.

“Good-bye,” he said, leaning down from his saddle and holding out his hand.  “Thank you very much.”

He shook hands with the Doctor and cantered down the road, with a smile upon his face.  But the consciousness of the invidious bar was rankling cruelly at his heart, and it continued to rankle long after he had swung round the bend of the road and had lost sight of Chakdara and the English flag.