We did not take the track up which the Kurdish chief had galloped, but the ten guides led us by a dreadful route round almost the half of a circle, ever mounting upward.  When night fell we camped without fires in a hollow among crags, and about midnight when the moon rose there was a challenge, and a short parley, and a Kurd rode in with a message from his chief for Ranjoor Singh.  The message was verbal, and had to be translated by Abraham, but I did not get to hear the wording of it.  I was on guard.

“It is well,” said Ranjoor Singh to me, when he went the rounds and found me perched on a crag like a temple minaret, “they are keeping faith.  The Wassmuss men are in the pass below us, and our friends deny them passage.  At dawn there will be a fight and our friends will probably give ground.  Two hours before dawn we will march, and come down behind the Wassmuss men.  Be ready!”

The sahib will understand now better what I meant by saying Anim Singh has ears too big for his head.  Because of his big ears, that could detect a foot-fall in the darkness farther away than any of us, he had been sent to share the guard with me, and now he came looming up out of the night to share our counsels; for since the news of Gooja Singh’s defection there was no longer even a pretense at awkwardness in approaching Ranjoor Singh.  Anim Singh had been among the first to fling distrust to the winds and to make the fact evident.

But into those great ears, during all our days and weeks and months of marching, Gooja Singh had whispered—­whispered.  The things men whisper to each other are like deeds done in the dark—­like rats that run in holes—­put to shame by daylight.  So Anim Singh came now, and Ranjoor Singh repeated to him what he had just told me.  Anim Singh laughed.

“Leave the Kurds to fight it out below, then!” said he.  “While they fight, let us eat up distance into Persia, gold and all!”

Ranjoor Singh, with the night mist sparkling like jewels on his beard, eyed him in silence for a minute.  Then: 

“I give thee leave,” he said, “to take as many men as share that opinion, and to bolt for your skins into Persia or anywhither!  The rest of us will stay and keep the regiment’s promise!”

That was enough for Anim Singh.  I have said he is a Sikh with a soldier’s heart.  He wept, there on the ledge, where we three leaned, and begged forgiveness until Ranjoor Singh told him curtly that forgiveness came of deeds, not words.  And his deeds paid the price that dawn.  He is a very good man with the saber, and the saber he took from a Turkish officer was, weight and heft and length, the very image of the weapon he was used to.  Nay, who was I to count the Kurds he slew.  I was busy with my own work, sahib.

The fight below us began before the earliest color of dawn flickered along the heights.  And though we started when the first rifle-shot gave warning, hiding our plunder and mules among the crags in charge of the Syrians, but taking Tugendheim with us, the way was so steep and devious that morning came and found us worrying lest we come too late to help our friends—­even as once we had worried in the Red Sea!