“I suspect she was making signals!” growled Rustum Khan.  “To whom —­about what I do not know.  After a little while she mounted and rode on, choosing unerringly a new track through the bushes.  I went to where she had been, and examined the ground where she had made her signals.  As I say, my eyes are good, but hers are better.  I could see nothing but the hoof-marks of her clumsy gray brute of a stallion, and in one place the depressions on soft earth where she had knelt to paw the ground!”

Monty was beginning to talk now.  I could see him smiling at Kagig over Maga’s head, and the girl was growing angry.  Rustum Khan was watching them as closely as we were, pausing between sentences.

“It may be she buried something there, but if so I did not find it.  I could not stay long, for when she rode away she went like wind, and I needed to follow at top speed or else be lost.  So I let my mare feel the spurs a time or two, and so it happened that I gained on the woman; and I suppose she heard me.  Whether or no, she waited in ambush, and sprang out at me as I passed so suddenly that I know not what god of fools and drunkards preserved her from being cut down!  Not many have ridden out at me from ambush and lived to tell of it!  But I saw who she was in time, and sheathed my steel again, and cursed her for the gipsy that she half is.  The other half is spawn of Eblis!”

A hundred yards ahead of us Kagig had reached a decision, but it seemed to be not too late yet in Maga’s judgment to try to convert him.  She was speaking vehemently, passionately, throwing down her reins to expostulate with both hands.

“Kagig isn’t the man you’d think a young woman would choose to be familiar with,” Fred said quietly to me, and I wondered what he was driving at.  He is always observant behind that superficial air of mockery he chooses to assume, but what he had noticed to set him thinking I could not guess.

Rustum Khan threw away the cigarette I had given him, and went on with his tale.

“That woman has no virtue.”

“How do you know?” demanded Will.

“She laughed when I cursed her!  Then she asked me what I had seen.”

“What did you say?”

“To test her I said I had seen her lover, and would know him again by his smell in the dark!”

“What did she say to that?’

“She laughed again.  I tell you the woman has no shame!  Then she said if I would tell that tale to Kagig as soon as I see him she would reward me with leave to live for one whole week and an extra hour in which to pray to the devil——­meaning, I suppose, that she intends to kill me otherwise.  Then she wheeled her stallion—­the brute was trying to tear out the muscles of my thigh all that time —­and rode away—­and I followed—­and here I am!”

“How much truth is there in your assertion that you saw her lover?” Will demanded.

“None.  I but said it to test her.”