“I’d like to know what these rascally guards are doing off their post!  Give these sons of camp-followers an inch and they’ll take three leagues, every mother’s son of them!  Halt, there, you!  Now then, where’s your officer?  Give an account of yourselves!”

There followed an interlude in Rajasthani.* Tom Tripe becoming more blasphemously vehement as it grew clearer that the risaldar had done entirely right. [* The native language of Rajputana.]

“Lady,” he said presently, riding round to Tess’s side of the dog-cart.  “I’m going to have hard work to convince this man.  I’d orders from Gungadhura to search your house, Krishna knows what for, and I rode up to ask your leave to do it, hoping you’d be alone after the party.  Chamu told me you and your husband had gone out, and one of the three beggars gave me a message intended for you that tallied pretty close with one I knew you’d received already, so I guessed where to head for, and sent the dog in advance.  He came back with his hair on end reporting trouble, and then as luck would have it I rode into these two men on their way to Gungadhura.  If they’d reached him, we’d all have had to make new plans tomorrow morning!  You want to see the princess, of course?  But what have you got that can get by the guard?”

Tess produced Samson’s scribbled note, and he studied it in the carriage lamplight.  Then she recalled Yasmini’s warning that Tom Tripe had no brains and must be told what to do.  Her own wits began to work desperately.

“I’m the lady doctor, Tom.  That is my written order from the burra sahib.” (Commissioner).

Tom scratched his head and swore in a low voice fervently.

“The difficulty’s this, lady:  since the escape from the palace across the river, the maharajah has taken the posting of palace guards out of my hands entirely.  I’ve still the duty to inspect and make sure they’re on the job—­Oh, I see!  I have it!”

He turned on the corporal with all the savagery that the white man generates in contact with Eastern subordinates.

“What do you mean,” he demanded in the man’s own language, “by standing in the way of the maharajah sahib’s orders?  Here’s his highness sending a lady doctor to the princess for an excuse to confine her elsewhere and have all this trouble off our hands, and you, like a blockhead, stand in the way to prevent it!  See—­there’s the letter!”

The Rajput looked perplexed.  All the world knows what privileges the rare American women doctors enjoy in that land of sealed seraglios.

“But it is written in English,” he objected.  “The maharajah sahib does not write English.”

“Idiot!  Of what use would a letter in Persian be to an American lady doctor?’

“But to me?  It is I who command the guard and must read the letter.  How can I read the letter?”

“I’ll read it to you.  What’s more, I’ll explain it.  The princess has been appealing to the commissioner sahib—­”