The bullocks, nervous little brutes, startled by the huge white animal, swerved, and before the man who sat a-straddle of the one shaft gathered tight the cord to their nostrils, whisked the cart to the roadside where it toppled over the bank for a fall of fifteen feet into a ravine, carrying bullocks and driver with it.

The moonlight fell full upon the face of the horseman, its light making still whiter the face of Captain Barlow.

And Bootea recognised him.  It was the face that had been in her vision night and day since the nautch.

“Save me, Sahib!” she cried; “these men are thieves; save me, Sahib!”

The hunting crop in Barlow’s hand crashed upon the thick head of Hunsa in ready answer to the appeal.  And as the sahib threw himself from the saddle the jamadar, with a snarl like a wounded tiger, dropped the girl and, whirling, grappled with the Englishman.

Barlow was strong; few men in the force, certainly none in the officers’ mess, could put him on his back; and he was lithe, supple as a leopard; and in combat cool, his mind working like the mind of a chess player:  but he realised that the arms about him were the arms of a gorilla, the chest against which he was being crushed was the chest of a trained wrestler; a smaller man would have heard his bones cracking in that clutch.

He raised a knee and drove it into the groin of the jamadar; then in the slight slackening of the holding arms as the Bagree shrank from the blow, he struck at the bearded chin; it was the clean, trained short-arm jab of a boxer.

But even as the gorilla wavered staggeringly under the blow, a soft something slipped about Barlow’s throat and tightened like the coils of a python.  And behind something was pressing him to his death.  The other Bagree springing to the assistance of Hunsa had looped his roomal about the Sahib’s throat with the art of a thug.

Barlow’s senses were going; his brain swam; in his fancy he had been shot from a cliff and was hurtling through space in which there was no air—­his lungs had closed; in his brain a hammer was beating him into unconsciousness.

Then suddenly the pressure on his throat ceased, it fell away; the air rushed to the parched lungs.  With a wrench his brain cleared, and he went down; but now with power in his arms, the arms that still clung about the dazed Hunsa, and he was on top.

Scarce aware of the action, out of a fighting instinct, he dragged from its holster his heavy pistol, and beat with its butt the ugly head beneath, beat it till it was still.  Then he staggered to his feet and looked wonderingly at the form of the Bagree behind who lay sprawled on the road, a great red splash across the white jacket on his breast.

In the Gulab’s hand was still clutched the dagger she had drawn from her girdle and driven home to save the sahib who had sat like a god in her heart.  With the other hand she held out from contact with her limbs the muslin sari that was crimsoned where the blood of the Bagree had fountained when she drew forth her knife.