“Oh, well—­consider it!” said Cunningham, saluting him and making for the door, close followed by Mahommed Gunga.  The two went out and it left Alwa to stride up and down alone—­to wrestle between desire and circumspection—­to weigh uncomfortable fact with fact—­and to curse his wits that could not settle on the wisest and most creditable course.  They turned into another chamber of the tunnelled rock, and there until long after the hour of law allowed to Alwa they discussed the situation too.

“The point was well taken, sahib,” said Mahommed Gunga, “but he should have been handled rather less abruptly.”

“Eh?”

“Rather less abruptly, sahib.”

“Oh!  Well—­if his mind isn’t clear as to which side he’ll fight on, I don’t want him, and that’s all!” said Cunningham.  And Mahommed Gunga bitted his impatience fiercely, praying the one God he believed in to touch the right scale of the two.  Later, Cunningham strode out to pace the courtyard in the dark, and the Rajput followed him.

CHAPTER XXVII

    The trapped wolf bared his fangs and swore,
    “But set me this time free,
    And I will hunt thee never more! 
    By ear and eye and jungle law,
    I’ll starve—­I’ll faint—­I’ll die before
    I bury tooth in thee!”

While Alwa raged alone, and while Mahommed Gunga talked to Cunningham in a rock-room near at hand, Rosemary McClean saw fit to take a hand in history.  It was not her temperament to sit quite idle while others shaped her destiny; nor was she given to mere brooding over wrongs.  When a wrong was being done that she could alter or alleviate it was her way to tackle it at once without asking for permission or advice.

From where her chair was placed under the long veranda she could see the passage in the rock that led to Jaimihr’s cell.  She saw his captors take him up the passage; she heard the door clang shut on him, and she saw the men come back again.  She heard them laugh, too, and she overheard a few words of a jest that seemed the reason for the laughter.

In Rajputana, as in other portions of the East, men laugh with meaning as a rule, and seldom from mere amusement.  Included in the laugh there usually lies more than a hint of threat, or hate, or cruelty.  And, in partial confirmation of the jest she unintentionally overheard, she saw no servant go to the chuckling spring to fill a water-jar.  She recalled that Jaimihr only sipped as much as he could dip up in the hollow of his hand, and that physical exertion and suffering of the sort that he had undergone produces prodigious thirst in that hot, dry atmosphere.

She waited until dark for Cunninham, growing momentarily more restless.  She recalled that she was a guest of Alwa’s, and as such not free to interfere with his arrangements or to suggest insinuations anent his treatment of prisoners.  She recalled the pride of all Rajputs, and its accompanying corollary of insolence when offended.  There would come no good—­she knew—­from asking anybody whether Jaimihr was allowed to drink or not.