“He shall go to Eton and to Oxford, and much good for my people will come of it,” said the Khan.  Luffe listened gravely and politely; but he was thinking of an evening when he had taken out to supper a reigning queen of comic opera.  The recollection of that evening remained with him when he ascended once more to the roof of the fort and saw the light of the fires above the sangars.  A voice spoke at his elbow.  “There is a new sangar being built in the garden.  We can hear them at work,” said Dewes.

Luffe walked cautiously along the roof to the western end.  Quite clearly they could hear the spades at work, very near to the wall, amongst the almond and the mulberry trees.

“Get a fireball,” said Luffe in a whisper, “and send up a dozen Sikhs.”

On the parapet of the roof a rough palisade of planks had been erected to protect the defenders from the riflemen in the valley and across the river.  Behind this palisade the Sikhs crept silently to their positions.  A ball made of pinewood chips and straw, packed into a covering of canvas, was brought on to the roof and saturated with kerosene oil.  “Are you ready?” said Luffe; “then now!” Upon the word the fireball was lit and thrown far out.  It circled through the air, dropped, and lay blazing upon the ground.  By its light under the branches of the garden trees could be seen the Pathans building a stone sangar, within thirty yards of the fort’s walls.

“Fire!” cried Luffe.  “Choose your men and fire.”

All at once the silence of the night was torn by the rattle of musketry, and afar off the tom-toms beat yet more loudly.

Luffe looked on with every faculty alert.  He saw with a smile that the Doctor had joined them and lay behind a plank, firing rapidly and with a most accurate aim.  But at the back of his mind all the while that he gave his orders was still the thought, “All this is nothing.  The one fateful thing is the birth of a son to the Khan of Chiltistan.”  The little engagement lasted for about half an hour.  The insurgents then drew back from the garden, leaving their dead upon the field.  The rattle of the musketry ceased altogether.  Behind the parapet one Sikh had been badly wounded by a bullet in the thigh.  Already the Doctor was attending to his hurts.

“It is a small thing, Huzoor,” said the wounded soldier, looking upwards to Luffe, who stood above him; “a very small thing,” but even as he spoke pain cut the words short.

“Yes, a small thing”; Luffe did not speak the words, but he thought them.  He turned away and walked back again across the roof.  The new sangar would not be built that night.  But it was a small thing compared with all that lay hidden in the future.

As he paced that side of the fort which faced the plain there rose through the darkness, almost beneath his feet, once more the cry which had reached his ears while he sat at dinner in the courtyard.

He heard a few paces from him the sharp order to retire given by a sentinel.  But the voice rose again, claiming admission to the fort, and this time a name was uttered urgently, an English name.