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So he marched them back to the guard-room once again, and sent two of them in to drag out the shivering Beluchi, who had taken cover underneath a cot and refused to come out until he was dragged out by the leg.
The Beluchi let himself be dragged, trembling, between two of them. It was he who first saw something move, or heard some one breathe. For he was absolutely on edge, and had nothing to attend to but his own fear. The others had to keep both eyes and ears lifting, to please Brown the exacting. The Beluchi struggled and held back, almost breaking loose, and actually tearing his loin-cloth.
The Beluchi ran ahead, just before they reached the tree. He stopped and held the lantern up to let its light fall on some object that was close against the tree-trunk. At a good ten-pace distance from the object Brown stopped and stared. The lamplight fell on two little dots that gleamed. Brown stepped two paces nearer. Two deadly, malicious human eyes blinked once, and then stared back at him.
The Beluchi interpreted, and Brown thought that the fakir's eyes gleamed with something rather more than their ordinary baleful light. It might have been the dancing flames that lit them, but Brown thought he saw the dawn of reason. "Say that if I let my men kill him, my men will believe me superhuman, and his men will know that he is only a man with a withered arm!
"Does he never sleep?" asked Brown. The Beluchi said something or other in a language that was full of harsh hard gutturals, and the owner of the eyes chuckled. His voice seemed to be coming from the tree itself, and there was nothing of him visible except the cruel keen eyes that had not blinked once since Brown drew nearer. "Well?" "Sahib, he does not answer."
"Hookum hai!" he screamed suddenly, waving his sound hand upward, and bringing it down suddenly with a jerk, as though by sheer force he was blasting them. "Down with you!" ordered Brown, and all except Brown and the Beluchi tumbled over backward. "Keep hold of your rifles!" ordered Brown. The fakir's wailing continued for a while.
The Beluchi translated. "He says you dare not, sahib!" "Advise him to talk sense." "He says, sahib, 'You have had one lesson!" "Now it's my turn to give him one. Men! We'll have to give up that sleep I talked about. This limping dummy of a fakir thinks he's got us frightened, and we've got to teach him different. There's some reason why we're not being attacked as yet.
"They bring the Afghan!" somebody cried and pointed to where Barlow sat strapped to the saddle of his Beluchi mare.
"Come on, there! Lend a hand!" The prisoners and Brown's men and Juggut Khan and the Beluchi bent their backs above the lever, or hauled taut on the rope, and the fakir wriggled with some secret joke. "At the word three!" said Brown. "Then all together!" "One!" "Two!" The fakir writhed delightedly. He seemed more than ever like a wickedly malicious child. "Three!"
What speck sails in the sky there? Even the vultures come! Ho-ho-ho-ho!" "I hear a horse, sir!" said one of the men who watched. "I heard it more than a minute ago," said Brown. The fakir stopped his mockery, and even he listened. "Ask him," said Brown, "where are the men who set fire to the guardroom?" "He says they are in the village, waiting till he sends for them!" said the Beluchi.
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