“I would weigh that Kurd’s information twice!” said I.  “He cut those Turks down in cold blood.  What is he but a cutthroat robber?”

“Let him weigh what I told him, then, three times!” he answered with a laugh.  “Have you any men hurt?”

“No,” said I.

“Then give me a mile start, and follow!” he ordered.  And in another minute he was riding away at the head of his forty, slowly for sake of the horses, but far faster than I could go with all those laden carts.  And I had to give a start of much more than a mile because of the trouble we had in fitting the saddles to our mounts.  I wished he had left the captured Turkish officer behind to explain his nation’s cursed saddle straps!

We rode on presently over the battle-ground; and although I have seen looting on more than one battlefield I have never seen anything so thorough as the work those Kurds had done.  They had left the dead naked, without a boot, or a sock, or a rag of cloth among them.  Here and there fingers had been hacked off, for the sake of rings, I suppose.  There were vultures on the wing toward the dead, some looking already half-gorged, which made me wonder.  I wondered, too, whither the Kurds had ridden off in such a hurry.  What could be happening to the southward?  Ranjoor Singh had gone due east.

It was not long before Ranjoor Singh rode out of sight in a cloud of dust, disappearing between two low hills that seemed to guard the rim of the hollow we were crossing.  At midday I let the column rest in the cleft between those hills, not troubling to climb and look beyond because the men were turbulent and kept me watchful, and also because I knew well Ranjoor Singh would send back word of any danger ahead.  And so he did.  I was sitting eating my own meal when his messenger came galloping through the gap with a little slip of twisted paper in his teeth.

“Bring them along,” said the message.  “Don’t halt again until you overtake me.”

So I made every one of the mounted men take up a man behind, and the rest of the unmounted men I ordered into the carts, including Tugendheim’s Syrians, judging it better to overtax the animals than to be too long on the road.  And the long and short of that was that we overtook Ranjoor Singh at about four that afternoon.  Our animals were weary, but the men were fit to fight.

Ranjoor Singh ordered Abraham to take the Syrians and all the carts and horses down into a hollow where there was a water-hole, and to wait there for further orders.  Tugendheim was bidden come with us on foot; and without any explanation he led us all toward a low ridge that faced us, rising here and there into an insignificant hill.  It looked like blown sand over which coarse grass had grown, and such it proved to be, for it was on the edge of another desert.  It was fifty or sixty feet high, and rather difficult to climb, but he led us straight up it, cautioning us to be silent and not to show ourselves on the far side.  On the top we crawled forward eighteen or twenty yards on our bellies, until we lay at last gazing downward.  It was plain then whence those half-gorged vultures came.