“It looks as if there once had been a road here,” he shouted down to us, “but nothing less than fire would clear it now, and everything is sopping wet.  I never saw such a tangle of roots and rocks.  A dog couldn’t get thought!”

Will volunteered to cross to the right-hand side and hunt over there for a practicable path.  Gloria stayed beside me, and I had my first opportunity to talk with her alone.  She was very pale from the effects of the wound in her wrist, which was painful enough to draw her young face and make her eyes burn feverishly.  Even so, one realized that as an old woman she would still be beautiful.

I watched the eagles for a minute or two, wondering what to say to her, and she did not seem to object to silence, so that I forced an opening at last as clumsily as Peter Measel might have done it.

“What is it about Will that makes all women love him?” I asked her.

“Oh, do they all love him?”

“Looks like it!” said I.

She still wore the bandolier they had stripped from the man with the bandaged feet, although Will had relieved her of the rifle’s weight.  To the bottom of the bandolier she had tied the little bag of odds and ends without which few western women will venture a mile from home.  Opening that she produced a small round mirror about twice the size of a dollar piece, and offered it to me with a smile that disarmed the rebuke.

“Perhaps it’s his looks,” she suggested.

I took the mirror and studied what I saw in it.  In spite of a cracking headache due to that and the gaining sun (for I had lost my hat when the Kurd rode me down with his lance) the episode of Rustum Khan carrying me back out of death’s door on his bay mare had not lingered in memory.  There had been too much else to think about.  Now for the first time I realized how near that lance-point must have come to finishing the chapter for me.  I had washed in the Jihun when we bivouacked, but had not shaved; later on, my scalp had bled anew, so that in addition to unruly hair tousled and matted with dry blood I had a week-old beard to help make me look like a graveyard ghoul.

“I beg pardon!” I said simply, handing her the mirror back.

At that she was seized with regret for the unkindness, and utterly forgot that I had blundered like a bullock into the sacred sanctuary of her newborn relationship to Will.

“Oh, I don’t know which of you is best!” she said, taking my hand with her unbandaged one.  “You are great unselfish splendid men.  Will has told me all about you!  The way you have always stuck to your friend Monty through thick and thin—­and the way you are following him now to help these tortured people—­oh, I know what you are—­Will has told me, and I’m proud—­”

The embarrassment of being told that sort of thing by a young and very lovely woman, when newly conscious of dirt and blood and half-inch-long red whiskers, was apparently not sufficient for the mirth of the exacting gods of those romantic hills.  There came interruption in the form of a too-familiar voice.