“Hookum hai!” he screamed suddenly, waving his sound hand upward, and bringing it down suddenly with a jerk, as though by sheer force he was blasting them.

“Down with you!” ordered Brown, and all except Brown and the Beluchi tumbled over backward.

“Keep hold of your rifles!” ordered Brown.

The fakir’s wailing continued for a while.  With his own hand he took the noose from his neck and, now that the flames had died away to nothing but spasmodic spurts above a dull red underglow, there was no one in the watching ring who could see Brown’s sword-point.  Only Brown and the fakir knew that it was scratching at the skin between the fakir’s shoulder-blades.

“It is done!” said the fakir presently.  “Now take me back to my dais again!” And the Beluchi translated.

“I’d like to hear their trigger-springs released,” suggested Brown.  “This has all been a shade too slick for me.  I’ve got my doubts yet about it’s being done.  Tell him to order them to uncock their rifles, so that I can hear them do it.”

“He says that they are gone already!” translated the Beluchi.

“Tell him I don’t believe it!” answered Brown, whose eyes were straining to pierce the darkness, which was blacker than the pit again by now.

The fakir raised his voice into a howl—­a long, low, ululating howl like that he had uttered when they found him on his dais.  From the distance, beyond the range of rifles, came a hundred answering howls.  The fakir waited, and a minute later a hundred howls were raised again, this time from an even greater distance.

Then he spoke.

“He says that they are gone,” translated the Beluchi.  “He says he will go back to his dais again.”

“’Tshun!” ordered Brown.  “Now, men, just because we’ve saved our skins so far is no reason why we should neglect precautions.  We’re going to put this imitation angel back on his throne again, so the same two carry him that brought him here.  There’s no sense in giving two more men the itch, and all the other ailments the brute suffers from!  Form up round him, the rest.  Take open order—­say two paces—­ and go slow.  Feel your way with your fixed bayonet, and don’t take a step in the dark until you’re sure where it will lead you.  Forward-march!  One of you bring that rope along.”

The weird procession crawled and crept and sidled back to where it had started from not so long before—­jumping at every sound, and at every shadow that showed deeper than the coal-black night around them.  It took them fifteen minutes to recross a hundred yards.  But when they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown’s command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the rifles in his charge.

They were scarcely visible to him or one another in the blackness, but he sensed the change in them, and changed his own tune to fit the changed condition.