“The mohurs, sahib!” she demanded.  “Three golden mohurs!”

“Ay, three!” said Ali Partab, giving her a hand and yanking her off the ground.  She sprang across his horse’s rump behind him, and he seemed to have less compunction about personal defilement than the others had.

“Is she thy wife or thy mother-in-law?” laughed Alwa.

“Nay, sahib, but my creditor!  The mother of confusion tells me that the Miss-sahib and her father are in Howrah’s palace!”

They halted, all together in a cluster in the middle of the street—­ shut in by darkness—­watched for all they knew, by a hundred enemies.

“Of their own will or as prisoners?”

“As prisoners, sahib.”

“Back to the side street!  Quickly!  Jaimihr’ rat’s nest is one affair,” he muttered; “Howrah’ beehive is another!”

CHAPTER XIX

    Now, secrets and things of the Councils of Kings
    Are deucid expensive to buy,
    For it wouldn’t look nice if a Councillor’s price
    Were anything other than high. 
    Be advised, though, and note that the price they will quote
    Is less at each grade you go deeper,
    And—­(Up on its toes it’s the Underworld knows!)—­
    The cheapest of all is the Sweeper.

Joanna—­when Alwa forgot about her and loosed her to run just where she chose—­had sneaked, down alleys and over roof-tops, straight for the mission house.  She found there nothing but a desultory guard and an impression, rather than the traces, of an empty cage.  About two minutes of cautious questioning of neighbors satisfied her where the missionaries were; nothing short of death seemed able to deprive her of ability to flit like a black bat through the shadows, and the distance to Howrah’s palace was accomplished, by her usual bat’s entry route, in less time than a pony would have taken by the devious street.  Before Alwa had thundered on Jaimihr’s gate Joanna had mingled in the crowd outside the palace and was shrewdly questioning again.

She arrived too late to see McClean and his daughter seized; what she did hear was that they were prisoners, and that the Maharajah, Jaimihr, and the priests were all of them engaged in the secret ceremony whose beginning was a monthly spectacle but whose subsequent developments—­ supposed to be somewhere in the bowels of the earth—­were known only to the men who held the key.

Like a rat running in the wainscot holes, she tried to follow the procession; like everybody else, she knew the way it took from the palace gate, and—­as few others were—­she was aware of a scaling-place on the outer wall where a huge baobab drooped century-scarred branches nearly to the ground on either side.  The sacred monkeys used that route and where they went Joanna could contrive to follow.