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For that matter, the old woman was gazing intently at Ali Partab and listening eagerly; he stood almost underneath the arch, and Miss McClean was staring at him frowning with the effort to translate her thoughts into a language that is very far from easy. They would none of them have seen the roof descending on them.
She was torn between an inclination to laugh at the daring or shiver at the indiscretion of taking to task a man whose one word could place them at the mercy of the priests of Siva, or the mob. But Duncan McClean, a little bowed about the shoulders, peered through his spectacles and waited quite unawed by all the splendor for the Maharajah's answer.
Both Rajputs saluted her as she started back for the cell, and whatever their Mohammedan ideas on women may have been, they chose to honor this one, who was so evidently one of them in the hour of danger. Duncan McClean seemed to be praying softly, for his lips moved.
Ten turnings further away by that time, Rosemary McClean pressed on through the hot, dinning swarm of humanity, missing no opportunity to slip her pony through an opening, but trying, too, to seem unaware that she was followed.
Cunningham, after fossicking for a long time in Aliva's armory that contained, besides weapons of the date, a motley assortment of the tools of war that would have done great credit to a museum of antiquities produced two pistols. He handed, one to the missionary and one to Miss McClean, advising her to hide hers underneath her clothing. "You know what they're for?" he asked. "No.
"Evening, Miss McClean," said Cunningham; and she all but fainted, she was strained to such a pitch of nervousness. "Where have you come from, Miss McClean?" asked Cunningham. And she told him. She was not quite so stiff-chinned as she had been. "What were you doing there?" She told him that, too. "Where is your father?" "In his chair on the veranda, Mr. Cunningham. There, in that deep shadow."
It is likely to be dangerous a desperate service. But the Company needs all that it can muster." "Of course we do!" Again both answered in one breath. "Do you understand that that involves taking my orders?" This time Duncan McClean did the answering, and now it was he who seized the lamp. He held it high, and scanned Cunningham's face as though he were reading a finely drawn map.
She arrived too late to see McClean and his daughter seized; what she did hear was that they were prisoners, and that the Maharajah, Jaimihr, and the priests were all of them engaged in the secret ceremony whose beginning was a monthly spectacle but whose subsequent developments supposed to be somewhere in the bowels of the earth were known only to the men who held the key.
But Cunningham was too intent on cross-examination to waste time on giving any information. "I want you to tell me, quite quietly and without hurry, all you can about Howrah," he said, sitting close to Miss McClean. "I want you to understand that I am the sole representative of my government in the whole district, and that whatever can be done depends very largely on what information I can get.
Somebody's word has got to break, and you may take it from me that it will be the word of the weakest man! I think that that man is Jaimihr, but I can't be sure in advance, and we've got to accept his promise to begin with. Go to him, Miss McClean, and make a very careful bargain with him along the line I mapped out for you. Alwa-sahib, I want witnesses, or rather overhearers.
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