caught us both, and drove us downwind like pieces of paper.

I don't know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs
and the roar of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon
through the yellow mist seemed to have gone on for years and years,
and I was literally drenched with sweat from my helmet to my
gaiters when the gray stumbled, recovered himself, and pulled up
dead lame. My brute was used up altogether. Edith Copleigh was in
a sad state, plastered with dust, her helmet off, and crying
bitterly. "Why can't you let me alone?" she said. "I only wanted
to get away and go home. Oh, PLEASE let me go!"

"You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has
something to say to you."

It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss
Copleigh; and, though I was playing Providence at the cost of my
horse, I could not tell her in as many words what Saumarez had told
me. I thought he could do that better himself. All her pretence
about being tired and wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked
herself to and fro in the saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind
blew her black hair to leeward. I am not going to repeat what she
said, because she was utterly unstrung.

This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I,
almost an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez
loved her and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I
made myself understood, for she gathered the gray together and made
him hobble somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm
went thundering down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain