“And many have offered to buy?” inquired the colonel.

“Many.”

When the colonel appeared at supper, simple but substantial, he was a new man.  He stood up straight, though his back still smarted from the lash.  Kathlyn was delighted at the change.

After the meal was over and coffee was drunk, the Khan conducted his guests to his armory, of which he was very proud.  Guns of all descriptions lined the walls.  Some of them Bruce would have liked to own, to decorate the walls of his own armory, thousands of miles away.

The colonel whispered a forgotten prayer as, later, he laid down his weary aching limbs upon the rope bed.  Almost immediately he sank into slumber as deep and silent as the sea.

Kathlyn and Bruce, however, went up to the hanging gardens and remained there till nine, marveling over the beauty of the night.  The Pathan city lay under their gaze with a likeness to one of those magic cities one reads about in the chronicles of Sindbad the Sailor.  But they spoke no word of love.  When alone with this remarkable young woman, Bruce found himself invariably tongue-tied.

At the same hour, less than fifty miles away, Umballa stood before the opening of his elaborate tent, erected at sundown by the river’s brink, and scowled at the moon.  He saw no beauty in the translucent sky, in the silvery paleness of the world below.  He wanted revenge, and the word hissed in his brain as a viper hisses in the dark of its cave.

Dung fires twinkled and soldiers lounged about them, smoking and gossiping.  They had been given an earnest against their long delinquent wages; and they were in a happy frame of mind.  Their dead comrades were dead and mourning was for widows; but for them would be the pleasures of swift reprisals.  The fugitives had gone toward the desert, and in that bleak stretch of treeless land it would not be difficult to find them, once they started in pursuit.

Midnight.

In the compound the moonlight lay upon everything; upon the fat sides and back of the sacred white elephant, upon the three low caste keepers, now free of the vigilant eye of their Brahmin chief.  The gates were barred and closed; all inside the house of Bala Khan were asleep.  Far away a sentry dozed on his rifle, on the wall.  The three keepers whispered and chuckled among themselves.

“Who will know?” said one.

“The moon will not speak,” said another.

“Then, let us go and smoke.”

The three approached the elephant.  A bit of gymnastics and one of them was boosted to the back of the elephant to whom this episode was more or less familiar.  Another followed; the third was pulled up, and from the elephant’s back they made the top of the wall and disappeared down into the street.  Here they paused cautiously, for two guards always patrolled the front of the compound during the night.  Presently the three truants stole away toward the bazaars which in this desert town occupied but a single street.  Down they went into a cellar way and the guru’s curse stalked beside them.  For opium is the handmaiden of all curses.