“Five years, your Highness,” said Rahat Mian, quietly, as though there were nothing very strange in so long a confinement within his doors.

“Have you never crossed your threshold for five years?” asked Ralston.

“No, your Highness.  I should not have stepped back over it again, had I been so foolish.  Before, yes.  There was a deep trench dug between my house and the road, and I used to crawl along the trench when no-one was about.  But after a little my enemies saw me walking in the road, and watched the trench.”

Rahat Mian lived in one of the square mud windowless houses, each with a tower at a corner which dot the green wheat fields in the Khyber Pass wherever the hills fall back and leave a level space.  His house was fifty yards from the road, and the trench stretched to it from his very door.  But not two hundred yards away there were other houses, and one of these held Rahat Mian’s enemies.  The feud went back many years to the date when Rahat Mian, without asking anyone’s leave or paying a single farthing of money, secretly married the widowed mother of Futteh Ali Shah.  Now Futteh Ali Shah was a boy of fourteen who had the right to dispose of his mother in second marriage as he saw fit, and for the best price he could obtain.  And this deprivation of his rights kindled in him a great anger against Rahat Mian.  He nursed it until he became a man and was able to buy for a couple of hundred rupees a good pedigree rifle—­a rifle which had belonged to a soldier killed in a hill-campaign and for which inquiries would not be made.  Armed with his pedigree rifle, Futteh Ali Shah lay in wait vainly for Rahat Mian, until an unexpected bequest caused a revolution in his fortunes.  He went down to Bombay, added to his bequest by becoming a money-lender, and finally returned to Peshawur, in the neighbourhood of which city he had become a landowner of some importance.  Meanwhile, however, he had not been forgetful of Rahat Mian.  He left relations behind to carry on the feud, and in addition he set a price on Rahat Mian’s head.  It was this feud which Ralston had it in his mind to settle.

He turned to Rahat Mian.

“You are willing to make peace?”

“Yes,” said the old man.

“You will take your most solemn oath that the feud shall end.  You will swear to divorce your wife, if you break your word?”

For a moment Rahat Mian hesitated.  There was no oath more binding, more sacred, than that which he was called upon to take.  In the end he consented.

“Then come here at eight to-morrow morning,” said Ralston, and, dismissing the man, he gave instructions that he should be safely lodged.  He sent word at the same time to Futteh Ali Shah, with whom, not for the first time, he had had trouble.

Futteh Ali Shah arrived late the next morning in order to show his independence.  But he was not so late as Ralston, who replied by keeping him waiting for an hour.  When Ralston entered the room he saw that Futteh Ali Shah had dressed himself for the occasion.  His tall high-shouldered frame was buttoned up in a grey frock coat, grey trousers clothed his legs, and he wore patent-leather shoes upon his feet.