outside to do the foul deed."

"Liar! lazy sleeper!"--he smashed with his foot the _hookah_ that sat
on the marble floor, its long stem coiled like a snake--"While you
busied over such, and opium, one has slipped by."

He reached out a powerful hand and seized the shoulder of a Pindari and
jerked him to the step, commanding: "Stay here with this monkey of the
tall trees, and see that none pass. I go to the Chief. When the
Afghan comes have him brought up."

Hunsa had stood among the Pindaris, shoved hither and thither as they
surged back and forth. Once the flat of a _tulwar_ had smote him
across the back, but when he turned his face to the striker who
recognised him as a man of privilege, one of the amusers, he was
allowed to remain.

The startling cry, "The Chief has been murdered! the Sultan is dead!"
swept out over the desert sand that lay white in the moonlight, and the
night air droned with the hum of fifty thousand voices that was like
the song of a world full of bees. And the night palpitated with the
beat of horses' feet upon the hard sand and against the stony ford of
the parched river as the Pindari horsemen swept to Rajgar as if they
rode in the sack of a city.

Hoarse bull-throated cries calling the curse of Allah upon the murderer
were like a deep-voiced hymn of hate--it was continuous.

The _bunnias_, and the oilmen, and the keepers of cookshops hid their
wares and crept into dark places to hide. The flickering oil lamps