“Is he good-looking?”

“Yes.  Stands and looks like a soldier.  I’ve seen a plainsman in Wyoming who’d have matched him to a T all except the parted hair and the mustache.”

“I like a mustache on a tall man.”

“It suits Monty.  The first idea you get of him is strength—­strength and gentleness; and it grows on you as you know him better.  It’s not just muscles, nor yet will-power, but strength that makes your heart flutter, and you know for a moment how a woman must feel when a fellow asks her to be his wife.  That’s Monty.”

I got up and retraced a quarter of a mile, to wait for Fred where I could not accuse myself of “listening in.”

“Fred,” I said, when he overtook me at last and we strode along side by side, “you were right.  America’s way with a woman is beyond belief!”

I told him what I had heard, and he thought a while.

“How about Maga Jhaere’s way, when she and Will and the Vanderman meet?” he said at last, smiling grimly.

Chapter Thirteen “‘Take your squadron and go find him, Rustum Khan!’ And I, sahib, obeyed my lord bahadur’s orders.”

“To-morrow we die”

All that is cynical; all that refuses
Trust in an altruist aim;
Every specious plea that excuses
Greed in necessity’s name;
Studied indifference; scorn that amuses;
Cleverness, shifting the blame;
Selfishness, pitying trust it abuses—­
Treason and these are the same. 
Finally, when the last lees ye shall turn from
(E’en intellectuals flinch in the end!)
Ashes of loneliness then ye shall learn from—­
All that’s worth keeping’s the faith of a friend.

Never to be forgotten is that journey to Zeitoon.  We threaded toward the heart of opal mountains along tracks that nothing on wheels—­not even a wheel-barrow—­could have followed.  Perpetually on our right there kept appearing brilliant green patches of young rice, more full of livid light than flawless emeralds.  And, as in all rice country, there were countless watercourses with frequently impracticable banks along which fugitives felt their way miserably, too fearful of pursuit to risk following the bridle track.

There is a delusion current that fugitives go fast.  But it stands to reason they do not; least of all, unarmed people burdened with children and odds and ends of hastily snatched household goods.  We found them hiding everywhere to sleep and rest lacerated feet, and there was not a mile of all that distance that did not add twenty or thirty stragglers to our column, risen at sight of us out of their lurking places.  We scared at least as many more into deeper hiding, without blame to them, for there was no reason why they should know us at a distance from official murderers.  Hamidieh regiments, the militia of that land, wear uniforms of their own choosing, which is mostly their ordinary clothes and weapons added.