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Updated: June 6, 2025
He stood up in his stirrups and cut down with his broadsword, so that the blade was driven through the head and shoulders of his foe as a woodsman splits a log half through, and grunts with the power of his stroke. Then he turned to the lad. "What stranger calls by the word of our tribe?" he asked. "I am Cumner's Son," was the answer, "and my father is brother-in-blood with Pango Dooni.
And elsewhere Boonda Broke was showing Cumner's Son how to throw a kris towards one object and make it hit another. He gave an illustration by aiming at a palm-tree and sticking a passing dog behind the shoulder. The dog belonged to Cumner's Son, and the lad's face suddenly blazed with anger.
Their path lay towards it, for Pango Dooni hid in the hills, where the sun hung a roof of gold above his stronghold. "Forty to one!" said Tang-a-Dahit suddenly. "Now indeed we ride for our lives!" Looking down the track of the hillsman's glance Cumner's Son saw a bunch of horsemen galloping up the slope. Boonda Broke's men!
The sorrel sprang forward, sniffed the air, and threw up his head. His feet struck the resounding timbers of the bridge, and, as they did so, he shied; but Cumner's Son, looking down sharply, could see nothing to either the right or left no movement anywhere save the dim trees on the banks waving in the light wind which had risen.
They could not see the front of the Palace, nor yet the Residency Square, but, even as they looked, a cannonade began, and the smoke of the guns curled through the showering peach-trees. Hoarse shoutings and cries came rolling over the pink roofs, and Cumner's Son could hear through all the bugle-call of the artillery.
My father hath passed on this honour to me, but I yield it up to one who hath saved ye from a double death, even to the great Cumner's Son. He rode, as ye know, through peril to Pango Dooni, bearing the call for help, and he hath helped to save the whole land from the Red Plague. But for him Mandakan would be only a place of graves. Speak, children of heavenly Mandakan, whom will ye choose?"
When the plainsmen came to the cape of green, they paused not by the secret place, for it seemed to them that two had ridden past and not one. The Son of Pango Dooni had drawn pursuit after himself, for it is the law of the hills that a hillsman shall give his life or all that he has for a brother-in-blood. When Cumner's Son had gone a little way he understood it all!
"Give me the sorrel," said he. "Quick dismount!" Cumner's Son did as he was bid. Going a little to one side, the hillsman pushed through a thick hedge of bushes, rolled away a rock, and disclosed an opening which led down a steep and rough-hewn way to a great misty valley beneath, where was never a bridle-path or causeway over the brawling streams and boulders. "I will ride on.
There came a knocking at the door. The beggar frowned, but Cumner's Son turned eagerly. He had only been in this room ten hours, but it seemed like years in which he had lived alone-alone. But he met firmly the passive, inquisitorial eyes of the healer of the plague, and he turned, dropped another bar across the door, and bade the intruder to depart. "It is I, Tang-a-Dahit.
When Cumner's Son first set out from Mandakan he could scarcely see at all, and he kept his way through the native villages more by instinct than by sight. As time passed he saw more clearly; he could make out the figures of natives lying under trees or rising from their mats to note the flying horseman. Lights flickered here and there in the houses and by the roadside.
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