He turned to his half-brother.  “Unbind the thing he lies with!” he commanded, and the giant unwrapped a twisted piece of linen from the High Priest’s mouth.

“So the big fox peeped through the trapdoor, because he feared to trust the other foxes; and the big fox fell into the trap!” grinned the Risaldar.  “Bring me that table over yonder, thou!”

The half-brother did as he was told.

“Lay it here, legs upward, on the floor.

“Now, bind him to it—­an arm to a leg and a leg to a leg.

“Remove his shoes.

“Put charcoal in yon brazier.  Light it.  Bring it hither!”

He seized a brass tongs, chose a glowing coal and held it six inches from the High Priest’s naked foot.

Ruth screamed.

“Courage, heavenborn!  Have courage!  This is naught to what he would have done to thee! ....  Now, speak, thou priest of infidels!  What plans are laid and who will rise and when?”

III.

“Sergeant!”

“Sir!”

The close-cropped, pipe-clayed non-commissioned officer spurred his horse into a canter until his scabbard clattered at young Bellairs’ boot.  Nothing but the rattling and the jolting of the guns and ammunition-wagon was audible, except just on ahead of them the click-clack, click-click-clack of the advance-guard.  To the right and left of them the shadowy forms of giant banian-trees loomed and slid past them as they had done for the past four hours, and for ten paces ahead they could see the faintly outlined shape of the trunk road that they followed.  The rest was silence and a pall of blackness obscuring everything.  They had ridden along a valley, but they had emerged on rising ground and there was one spot of color in the pall now, or else a hole in it.

“What d’you suppose that is burning over there?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“How far away is it?”

“Very hard to tell on a night like this, sir.  It might be ten miles away and might be twenty.  By my reckoning it’s on our road, though, and somewhere between here and Jundhra.”

“So it seems to me; our road swings round to the right presently, doesn’t it?  That’ll lead us right to it.  That would make it Doonha more or less.  D’you suppose it’s at Doonha?”

“I was thinking it might be, sir.  If it’s Doonha, it means that the sepoy barracks and all the stores are burning—­there’s nothing else there that would make all that flame!”

“There are two companies of the Thirty-third there, too.”

“Yes, sir, but they’re under canvas; tents would blaze up, but they’d die down again in a minute.  That fire’s steady and growing bigger!”

“It’s the sepoy barracks, then!”

“Seems so to me, sir!”

“Halt!” roared Bellairs.  The advance-guard kicked up a little shower of sparks, trace-chains slacked with a jingle and the jolting ceased.  Bellairs rode up to the advance-guard.