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Two days after Dermot's return to the Fort he was informed that three Bhuttias wanted to see him. On going out on to the verandah of his bungalow he found an old man whom he recognised as the headman of a mountain village just inside the British border, ten miles from Ranga Duar. Beside him stood two sturdy young Bhuttias with a hang-dog expression on their Mongol-like faces.
While the raiders, who had put out no sentries, lay about in groups unconscious of the proximity of an enemy, Dermot touched Badshah with his hand, and the elephant broke noiselessly out of the undergrowth and suddenly appeared in their midst. There was a moment's consternation among the Bhuttias. Then they sprang to their feet and began to draw their dahs.
For from the peaks above the pass through which he had once gone to the Death Place of the elephants, Dermot had looked down upon an invading force of Chinese regulars supported by levies of Bhutanese from the interior and a wild mob of masterless Bhuttias from both sides of the border.
The occurrence astonished him. Bhuttias from the hills beyond the border occasionally raided villages and tea-gardens in British territory in search of loot, but were generally careful to avoid Europeans. Such an outrage as the carrying off of an Englishwoman had never been heard of on the North-East Frontier.
"It is an evil and a dangerous thing to molest those whom he protects. The Bhuttias, ignorant pagans that they are, carried off the missie baba he favours. What, think ye, has been their fate? With your own eyes ye have all seen the blood and the flesh of men upon the tusk and legs of his sacred elephant."
Two of the Government Secret Service agents among these Bhuttias had followed them cautiously to the frontier and seen them received there by a party of the Tuna Penlop's armed retainers. These men reported that the watch on all the passes into Bhutan was stricter than ever, and, as one of them phrased it, not even a rat could creep through unobserved.
But he feared that harm might come to the girl in the fight if any of the Bhuttias carried fire-arms, for they would probably fire wildly, and a stray bullet might hit the girl. So he resolved on a bolder policy.
They were not the Bhuttias again, for those had no guns. And the man that he had just shot was not a mountaineer.
"Bhuttias from across the border do not possess weapons like these, as you know. Nor do they carry English-made pocket-books with contents like those this one has." He handed a leather case to Granger who opened it and took out a packet of bank notes and counted them. "Eight hundred and fifty rupees," he said. The men around him looked at the notes and at each other.
They may have thought that the carrying off of an Englishwoman would make more impression than the mere bombing of a police officer or a magistrate we are too used to that." "But why employ Bhuttias?" asked Payne. "To throw the pursuers off the track and prevent their being run down. The search would stop if we thought they'd gone across the frontier, so they could get away easily.
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