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With thee in my camp as hostage I would risk agreement with them, but not otherwise. Escape with me now, or follow. But bring no Rangars, sahiba! Come alone!" "I will not. I would not dare trust you." Jaimihr laughed. "I have been reckoning, sahiba, how many hours will pass before my army comes to rip this nest of Alwa's from its roots, and defile the whole of it!
Five minutes later the Sikh's horse thundered out across the plain from under Alwa's iron gate, and the news, such as it was, was on its way to Byng-bahadur. "A clear road at the price of a horse-hide rope!" laughed Alwa. "Now for some real man's work!"
All three men looked in each other's eyes and a bond was sealed between them that nothing less than death could sever. "Thank you," said Cunningham quite quietly. There is little time. Jaimihr must escape tonight!" "Sahib, did I understand aright?" Alwa's jaw had actually dropped. He looked as though he had been struck. Mahommed Gunga slammed his sabre ferule on the stone floor.
Alwa's eight slipped down the defile as quickly as phantoms would have dared in that tricky moon-light. One of them shouted from below. Alwa jerked the cord, and the great gate yawned, well-oiled and silent.
Alwa's was the point of view that was amazing, unexpected, brilliant, soldierly, unselfish all the things, in fact, that no one had the least right to expect it to turn out to be.
"If you were released now what would you proceed to do?" "To obey my orders." Jaimihr changed his tactics and assumed the frequently successful legal line of pretending to know far more than he really did. "I am told by one who overheard you speak that you were to take the missionary and his daughter to Alwa's place.
"A horseman from the West!" he announced, breaking in on Alwa's privacy without ceremony. "One?" "One only." "For us or them?" "I know not, sahib." Alwa glad enough of the relief from puzzling his brain ran to the rampart and looked long at the moving dot that was coming noisily toward his fastness but that gave no sign of its identity or purpose. "Whoever he is can see them," he vowed.
"I follow Cunnigan-bahadur!" said Mahommed Gunga; and he spurred off to his squadron. Alwa could see nothing better than to follow suit, for Cunningham closed his lips tight in a manner unmistakable. And whatever Alwa's misgivings might have been, he had the sense and the soldierly determination not to hint at them to his men.
He knew that the members of the little band on Alwa's rock would keep their individual and collective word, and therefore that Rosemary McClean would come to him.
So on which should a gentleman settle? He held his chin high, although he gazed at the bubbling spring thirstily; and, thirsty though he must have been, he asked no favors. One of Alwa's men brought him a brass dipper full of water, after washing it out first thoroughly and ostentatiously. But Jaimihr smiled. His caste forbade.
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