“Salaam, Bellairs sahib!” The voice was growing feebler.  “I would have done more for thy father’s son!  Thou art welcome.  Aie!  But thy charger is a good one!  Good-by!  Time is short, and I would talk with the colonel sahib!”

He waved Bellairs away with a motion of his hand and the lieutenant went back to his wife again.

“He sent me away just like that, too!” she told him.  “He said he had no time left to talk to women!”

Colonel Carter bent down again above the Risaldar, and listened to as much as he had time to tell of what had happened.

“But couldn’t you have ridden round them, Risaldar?” he asked them.

“Nay, sahib!  It was touch and go!  I gave the touch!  I saw as I rode how close the issue was and I saw my chance and took it!  Had the memsahib been slain, she had at least died in full view of the English—­and there was a battle to be won.  What would you?  I am a soldier—­I.”

“Indeed you are!” swore Colonel Carter.

“Sahib!  Call my sons!”

His sons were standing near him, but the colonel called up his grandsons, who had been told to stand at a little distance off.  They clustered round the Risaldar in silence, and he looked them over and counted them.

“All here?” he asked.

“All here!”

“Whose sons and grandsons are ye?”

“Thine!” came the chorus.

“This sahib says that having done my bidding and delivered her ye rode to rescue, ye are no more bound to the Raj.  Ye may return to your homes if ye wish.”

There was no answer.

“Ye may fight for the rebels, if ye wish!  There will be a safe-permit written.”

Again there was no answer.

“For whom, then, fight ye?”

“For the Raj!” The deep-throated answer rang out promptly from every one of them, and they stood with their sword-hilts thrust out toward the colonel.  He rose and touched each hilt in turn.

“They are now thy servants!” said the Risaldar, laying his head back.  “It is good!  I go now.  Give my salaams to General Turner sahib!”

“Good-by, old war-dog!” growled the colonel, in an Anglo-Saxon effort to disguise emotion.  He gripped at the right hand that was stretched out on the ground beside him, but it was lifeless.

Risaldar Mahommed Khan, two-medal man and pensionless gentleman-at-large, had gone to turn in his account of how he had remembered the salt which he had eaten.

MACHASSAN AH

I.

Waist-held in the chains and soused in the fifty-foot-high spray, Joe Byng eyed his sounding lead that swung like a pendulum below him, and named it sacrilege.

“This ’ere navy ain’t a navy no more,” he muttered.  “This ’ere’s a school-gal promenade, ‘and-in-’and, an’ mind not to get your little trotters wet, that’s what this is, so ‘elp me two able seamen an’ a red marine!”