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I will give him his missionary people, and say, 'There, Mahommed Gunga, cousin mine, there is my word redeemed there is thy man into the bargain there are three horses for thee and I I am at Howrah's beck and call! Allah! What a swearing there will be!" There was swearing, viler and more blasphemous than any of which Mahommed Gunga might be capable, where Jaimihr waited in the dark.
Any but the purblind British could have told at half a glance, merely by the attitude of Howrah's armed sepoys, that a concerted movement of some kind was afoot that there was a tight-held thread of plan running through the whole confusion; but no man not even a native could have guessed what secret plotting might be going on within the acres of the straggling palace.
There was a pause, and the clang repeated another pause a third reverberating, humming metal notice of an interruption, and the doors swung wide. A Hindoo, salaaming low so that the expression of his face could not be seen, called out down the long length of the hall. "The Alwa-sahib waits, demanding audience!" There was no change apparent on Howrah's face.
"Nay, sahib, but my creditor! The mother of confusion tells me that the Miss-sahib and her father are in Howrah's palace!" They halted, all together in a cluster in the middle of the street shut in by darkness watched for all they knew, by a hundred enemies. "Of their own will or as prisoners?" "As prisoners, sahib." "Back to the side street! Quickly!
Forewarned, Alwa held on down the pitch-dark side street, into whose steep-sided chasm the moon's rays would not reach for an hour or two to come, and once again he led his party in a sweeping, wide-swung circle, loose-reined and swifter than the silent night wind this time for Howrah's palace. There was his given word, plighted to Mahommed Gunga, to redeem.
Jaimihr, finding that his palace was intact, and that only the prisoner and three horses from his stable were missing, placed the whole guard under arrest stormed futilely, while his hurrying swarm flocked to him through the dinning streets and then, mad-angry and made reckless by his rage, rode with a hundred at his back to Howrah's palace, scattering the bee-swarm of inquisitive but so far peaceful citizens right and left.
The question uppermost in Maharajah Howrah's mind was whether the Rangars the Moslem descendants of once Hindoo Rajputs, who formed such a small but valuable proportion of the local population could or could not be induced to throw in their lot with him.
Joanna, very much as usual, snoozed comfortably, curled in a blanket in a corner. They would run about a hundred different risks, not least of which was the chance of falling in with a party of Howrah's men. In fact, if they should encounter anybody before bringing up at Jaimihr's palace it was likely that the whole plan would fizzle into nothing.
Then, by a trail that no one would have guessed at and few could have followed, she made her way to Jaimihr's palace three miles away from Howrah's where a dozen sulky-looking sepoys lolled, dismounted, by the wooden gate.
Surely this was a crisis out of which the priests must come triumphant; they held all the cards knew how and when rebellion was timed, and could compare, as the principals themselves could not do, Howrah's strength with Jaimihr's. And the priests had the crowd to back them the ignorant, superstitious crowd that can make or dethrone emperors.
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