"It is well."
"You have a wonderful elephant out there in the compound," said Bruce,
who had remained a silent listener to all that had gone before.
"Ah! That is a curiosity. He is worshiped by Hindus and reverenced by
my own people. I am his official custodian. There is a saying among
the people that ill will befall me should I lose, sell, or permit him
to be stolen."
"And many have offered to buy?" inquired the colonel.
"Many."
When the colonel appeared at supper, simple but substantial, he was a
new man. He stood up straight, though his back still smarted from the
lash. Kathlyn was delighted at the change.
After the meal was over and coffee was drunk, the Khan conducted his
guests to his armory, of which he was very proud. Guns of all
descriptions lined the walls. Some of them Bruce would have liked to
own, to decorate the walls of his own armory, thousands of miles away.
The colonel whispered a forgotten prayer as, later, he laid down his
weary aching limbs upon the rope bed. Almost immediately he sank into
slumber as deep and silent as the sea.
Kathlyn and Bruce, however, went up to the hanging gardens and remained
there till nine, marveling over the beauty of the night. The Pathan
city lay under their gaze with a likeness to one of those magic cities
one reads about in the chronicles of Sindbad the Sailor. But they
spoke no word of love. When alone with this remarkable young woman,
Bruce found himself invariably tongue-tied.
At the same hour, less than fifty miles away, Umballa stood before the
opening of his elaborate tent, erected at sundown by the river's brink,
and scowled at the moon. He saw no beauty in the translucent sky, in
the silvery paleness of the world below. He wanted revenge, and the
word hissed in his brain as a viper hisses in the dark of its cave.
Dung fires twinkled and soldiers lounged about them, smoking and
gossiping. They had been given an earnest against their long
delinquent wages; and they were in a happy frame of mind. Their dead
comrades were dead and mourning was for widows; but for them would be
the pleasures of swift reprisals. The fugitives had gone toward the
desert, and in that bleak stretch of treeless land it would not be
difficult to find them, once they started in pursuit.
Midnight.
In the compound the moonlight lay upon everything; upon the fat sides
and back of the sacred white elephant, upon the three low caste
keepers, now free of the vigilant eye of their Brahmin chief. The
gates were barred and closed; all inside the house of Bala Khan were
asleep. Far away a sentry dozed on his rifle, on the wall. The three
keepers whispered and chuckled among themselves.