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Updated: June 13, 2025
Tower and minaret were like inverted cups of ruddy gold, and the streets all velvet dust, as Pango Dooni, guided by Cushnan Di, halted at the wood of wild peaches, and a great thicket near to the Aqueduct of the Failing Fountain, and looked out towards the Palace of the Dakoon.
The eye of the chief ran up and down his form, from his keen blue eyes to his small strong ankle. "It is the body of a perfect man," said he. "In the days when our State was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud.
Ceaseless, alert, silent, they had watched and waited, and at last the beggar knelt with his eyes fixed on the sleeper, and did not stir. A little way off from him stood Cumner's Son-patient, pale, worn, older by ten years than he was three days before. In the city dismay and misery ruled. Boonda Broke and the dead Dakoon were forgotten.
Behind the gun-carriage, which bore the body, walked the nephew of the great Dakoon, then came a clear space, and then Pango Dooni, and Cumner, and behind these twenty men of the artillery, at whose head rode McDermot and Cumner's Son. As they passed the Path by the Bazaar every eye among the hillsmen and among the handful of British was alert.
"A man will ride for a face that he loves, even to the Dreadful Gates," answered Tang-a-Dahit. "But what is this of the men of my clan?" Then the lad told him of those whose heads hung on the rear Palace wall, where the Dakoon lay dying, and why he rode to Pango Dooni. "It is fighting and fighting, naught but fighting," said Tang-a-Dahit after a pause; "and there is no peace.
Pango Dooni should be Dakoon! Pango Dooni came forward and said: "If as ye say I have saved ye, then will ye do after my desire, if it be right. I am too long at variance with this Palace to sit comfortably here. Sometime, out of my bitter memories, I should smite ye.
"A hundred years ago," said he, "it hung in the belt of the Dakoon of Mandakan; it will hang as well in thine." Then he added, for he saw a strange look in the lad's eyes: "The father of my father's father wore it in the Palace, and it has come from his breed to me, and it shall go from me to thee, and from thee to thy breed, if thou wilt honour me."
No man knew from Cumner's speech who was to be Dakoon, yet every man in Mandakan said in the quiet of his home that night: "To-morrow Pango Dooni will be Dakoon. We will be as the stubble of the field before him. But Pango Dooni is a strong man."
Ceaseless, alert, silent, they had watched and waited, and at last the beggar knelt with his eyes fixed on the sleeper, and did not stir. A little way off from him stood Cumner's Son-patient, pale, worn, older by ten years than he was three days before. In the city dismay and misery ruled. Boonda Broke and the dead Dakoon were forgotten.
The danger is a matter of hours. A hundred men, and a score of niggers what would that be against thirty thousand natives?" "Pango Dooni is as likely to butcher us as the Dakoon," said McDermot, the captain of artillery.
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