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None save the sayis knew she had come to the tents this night, and he was faithful and as dumb as a dog. Besides the Oriental had shrugged his shoulders if he should prove to be otherwise, what easier than to silence him for all eternity? And if a life barren of love stretched as bleak and limitless as the desert before him, what then?
Accustomed to the flowing robes of the Arab, it is not as difficult as it might be imagined to break a desert-trained horse to side-saddle; but the mare, Pi-Kay, spoilt and sensitive, behaved like a very demon whilst the sayis exchanged the ma'araka, which is the native pad without stirrups, for the lady's saddle. She was not really bad, not she!
Followed by the dogs, they walked slowly down the incline to a mound of rubbish flung up and left by an excavating party many years back; behind it they found the stallion Sooltan in the care of his sayis, also the one donkey which had wandered off in search of grass and got lost, and whose absence in the cavalcade had not been noticed on account of the disorder of the descent.
At his cuming to facland he learnit that his Matie was a huntting, quhair eftir brekfast he addrest him self. My lord being at dennar Andro Hendirsone cwmes and sayis to his Lordship that the kingis Matie was cummand. My lord . . . quhat his Matie . . . his hienes was.
Think ye not shame Kin as the world sayis that ilk In hurt and sklander of your name?"
For many days she had been ridden alternately astride and side by the sayis, who loved her better than his wife and almost as much as his son; ridden from the Tents of Purple and Gold and not over-willingly did she go to the Gate of To-morrow at sunset, to be taken back at a tearing gallop to the Tents, without restraining or guiding hand upon the reins, at sunrise.
"Guide her not, lady," shouted the sayis to Damaris, who answered to the movement of the mare like a reed in the wind, but otherwise seemed to take no notice of horse, or man, or moon, or untoward circumstance; he hung on for a moment to the silken mane and stared up into the girl's unseeing eyes; then, with a ringing shout, let go and jumped nimbly to one side.
And the stallion, who had broken from his sayis as he was being led from the stable in readiness for the sad procession to the river, and who, terrified at the sight of the burning tents, had rushed on in search of his master, stopped dead, with his head up and tail and mane streaming in the wind. He had not found his master, but he knew the voice that called. "Irja Sooltan!" it came again. "Irja!
"I warrand you," sayis Mr. James, "they know you will speik your mynd friely; and thairfoir, hes concludit to make that a meines to keip yow from going home to Scotland."
El-Sooltan, connecting the sayis with the bucketsful of water he stood so badly in need of, stopped short, nearly unseating Damaris with the suddenness of his decision and then with the hand of the groom upon his heaving flank trotted docilely back to the Obelisk, where Wellington, risking curvature of the spine, turned himself into a canine picture of ecstatic welcome.
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