“Hunsa, you will wait until I give you a command to kill the Chief.  If you do not, it is very likely that you will be the sacrifice, for he is not one to be driven.”  She vowed that if he broke this injunction she would denounce him to Amir Khan; she would have done so at first but for the idea that treachery to her people could not be justified but by dire necessity.

Every day the Gulab, as she walked through the crowded street, scanned the faces of men afoot and on horseback, looking for one clothed as a Patan, but in his eyes the something she would know, the something that would say he was the deified one.  And she had told Amir Khan that there was a Patan coming with a message for him, and that when such an one asked for audience that he should say nothing, but see that he was admitted.

Then one day—­it was about two weeks of waiting—­Captain Barlow came.  He was rather surprised at the readiness with which he was admitted for an audience with the Chief.  It was in the audience hall that he was received, and the Chief was surrounded, as he sat on the Raja’s dais, by officers.

Barlow had come as Ayub Alli, an Afghan, and as it was a private interview he desired, he made the visit a formal one, the paying of respects, with the usual presenting of the hilt of his sword for the Chief to touch with the tips of his fingers in the way of accepting his respects.

The Chief, knowing this was the one Bootea had spoken of, wrote on a slip of yellow paper something in Persian and tendered it to Barlow, saying, “That will be your passport when you would speak with me if there is in your heart something to be said.”

Going, Barlow saw that he had written but the one word [Transcriber’s note:  three Afghan or Persian characters], translated, “the Afghan.”

Hunsa, too, had watched for the coming of Barlow.  The same whisper that had come to Bootea’s ears that he would ride as a Patan had been told him by the Dewan.  Knowing that when Barlow arrived he would endeavour to see the Chief in his quarters, Hunsa daily hovered near the palace and chatted with the guard at the gates; the heavy double teak-wood gates, on one side of which was painted, on a white stone-wall, a war-elephant and the other side a Rajput horseman, his spear held at the charge.  This was the allegorical representation, so general all over Mewar, of Rana Pertab charging a Mogul prince mounted on an elephant.

Thus Hunsa had seen the tall Patan and heard him make the request for an audience with Amir Khan.  It was the walk, the slight military precision, that caused the decoit to mutter, “No hill Afghan that.”

And when Barlow had come forth the Bagree trailed him up through the chowk; and just as the man he followed came to the end of the narrow crowded way, Hunsa saw Bootea, coming from the opposite direction, suddenly stop, and her eyes go wide as they were fixed on the face of the tall Patan.