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Updated: June 27, 2025
The saice was generally squatting near by, with his bag of food and his three-sided kitchen of stones, blackened with the fire from his last meal, beside him; sometimes in the act of cooking his chowpatties, sometimes eating them, according to the time of day.
"He is coming now," she said. There was a sound of horse's hoofs at the gate, and in a moment Everard Monck came into view, riding his tall Waler which was smothered with dust and foam. He waved to his wife as he rode up the broad path. His dark face was alight with a grim triumph. A saice ran forward to take his animal, and he slid to the ground and stamped his feet as if stiff.
I might have ridden five miles with Kiramat Ali behind me on a sturdy tat, when I was surprised by the appearance of an unknown saice in plain white clothes, holding a pair of strong young ponies by the halter and salaaming low. "Pundit Ram Lal sends your highness his peace, and bids you ride without sparing. The dâk is laid to the fire-carriages."
She yielded, considering the matter too trivial for argument, and watched his rupee fall with a tinkle upon the tin plate which the snake-charmer extended at the length of his sinewy arm. Fletcher speedily made a way for her through the now shifting crowd; and after a little they found the saice, waiting with the mare under a tree. The animal was tormented by flies and restless.
Mahommed Gunga saluted him, bolt-upright as a lance, and without the slightest change in his expression. "The word is sufficient, cousin!" Alwa returned his salute, and raised his voice in a gruff command. A saice outside the window woke as though struck by a stick sprang to his feet and passed the order on.
Fletcher pulled up altogether, and turned to the silent woman beside him. "Mrs. Denvers, you are splendid!" he said simply. She laughed rather tremulously. The tension over, she was feeling very weak. The saice was already at the mare's head, and Fletcher let the reins go. He dismounted without another word and went round to her side.
But first he must save his palace, if it could be saved. The priests must have deceived him, so he wasted no time in arguing with them; he ran, with his guards behind him, to the outer wall of Siva's temple where the horses waited, each with a saice squatting at his head.
Then Mahommed Gunga called for his own horse and the lone armed man of his own race who acted squire to him. "Did any overhear our talk?" he asked. "No, sahib." "Not the saice, even?" "No, sahib. He slept." "He awoke most suddenly, and at not much noise." "For that reason I know he slept, sahib. Had he been pretending, he would have wakened slowly." "Thou art no idiot!" said Mahommed Gunga.
'My servant has returned to Farabad to a man he knows. We will rest under the trees but a furlong from this place till he comes back. But, most gracious, he will not come back. There is no place at Farabad at this time of the fair where the work could be done. Moreover, the saice has his orders, and he will not seek one. He will go back to Kundaghat with the mare, but he will walk all the way.
The saice seemed more weathered than the twenty-year-old girl, for he limped back into the smelly shelter of the servants' quarters to cook his breakfast and mumble about dogs and sahibs who prefer the sun. She looked shrunk inside the riding-habit not shrivelled, for she sat too straight, but as though the cotton jacket had been made for a larger woman.
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