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Somehow the lights went out. Amber started to fight his way out. As he struggled on, making little headway through the press, a hand grasped his arm and drew him another way. "Make haste, hazoor!" cried the owner of the hand, in Hindustani. "Make haste, lest they seek to fasten this crime upon your head." Both hand and voice might well have been Labertouche's; Amber believed they were.
"In the matter of a certain photograph, hazoor." "By thunder!" Labertouche's name was on Amber's lips, but he repressed it. "Wait a bit." He gulped down the last dregs of sleep. "Let me think and see." This last was an afterthought. As it came to him he dropped the pistol by his side and felt for matches in the pocket of his coat, which hung over the back of a bedside chair.
Such, at least, was the superficial man. Now upon the morning of the day that found the steamship Poonah nuzzling up the Hooghly's dirty yellow flood, Mr. Labertouche's clerk arrived at the Dhurrumtollah Street office at the usual hour; which, in the absence of his employer, was generally between eleven o'clock and noon.
He led the way from the cell at a brisk pace one, indeed, that taxed Sophia's powers of endurance to maintain. Amber aided her as much as he might, but that was little; the walls of the passageway were too close together to permit him to be by her side much of the time. For the most part he had to lead the way, himself guided by the swiftly moving patch of light cast by Labertouche's bull's-eye.
Amber, of New York. We're just escaped from that rock over there and if you'll pardon I'd suggest you set a strong guard over the ford behind those tamarisks." "One moment, please." The officer strode off to issue instructions in accordance with Labertouche's advice.
And," he chuckled, "you'd never have known it if your case hadn't been exceptional." "It is, I think." Amber's expression became anxious. "I want to know what you think of it now Quain's told you. And, I say, what did you mean by 'news of the Fs.?" "News of the Farrells father and daughter, of course." Labertouche's eyes twinkled. "But how in the name of all that's strange !"
For himself, his path of duty lay clear to the Virginian's vision; like Labertouche's, it was the road to Kathiapur. He had no more doubt that Sophia had been conveyed thither than he had of Farrell's presence before him.
His guide had fallen a pace behind and was shouldering him along with almost frantic energy; but a glance aside showed Amber, in Labertouche's stead, a chunky little Gurkha in the fatigue uniform of his regiment of the British Army in India.
She's disappeared, vanished, been spirited away! Don't you understand me? She's been kidnapped!" In dumb torment, Amber heard a swift, sharp hiss of breath as pregnant with meaning as a spoken word, and turned to meet Labertouche's eyes, and to see that the same thought was in both their minds. Salig Singh had found the way to lure Amber to Kathiapur.
Labertouche's smile robbed the rebuke of its sting. "The opium simile is a very good one, though I say it who shouldn't. One acquires a taste for the forbidden, and one hires a little room like this from an unprincipled blackguard like Honest George, and insensibly one goes deeper and deeper until one gets beyond one's depth. That is all. It explains me sufficiently.