"Say!" he shouted, "I'm certainly not going down with you two only half-married—she a bride and you not a groom! You forget that as Senior Inspector of Constabulary I am an ex-officio Justice of the Peace! Come on!"
He lifted the Major by the arm and shot him through the doorway with an exuberant shove that left him no alternative save a jarring leap to the ground. Terry landed beside him as light as a cat, and catching him by the elbow he hurried him on through the woods and into the fading light of the big fires that burned before Ohto's house.
Terry, his eyes dancing joyously, broke up the dance with which a hundred Hill People were keeping the ceremonial pot boiling, and despatched two women to fetch the bride, who had sought a brief respite from the interminable ritual. Shortly Ahma appeared before them, her dark eyes shadowed with fatigue, but radiant with exaltation.
Understanding from Terry's few words that the Major desired that they be united also in accordance with the rites of his own people, she stepped quietly before Terry and took the Major's outstretched hand. The crowd of natives, who had crowded about them, waited the alien ritual curiously.
Ahma was clad in the white costume in which the Major had first seen her. A scarlet hibiscus blossom, the Hillmen's nuptial flower, was thrust in her black hair, but there was no other addition to her scant covering.
Possessed of a sudden spirit of banter Terry turned to the Major: "Before I begin, Major, I wish to congratulate you upon having won to the bliss of matrimony without violating that bachelor formula which you so often boasted."
"What formula?"
Terry's voice deepened in mimicry: "'No petticoats for mine!'"
A moment he enjoyed the Major's embarrassment, then composed himself to the business in hand, happy, confident.
But—the competent Terry fumbled. Swept away in the exuberance of having found a way out for the Major, he had forgotten that, never having exercised his legal privilege of joining in marriage in a province where all of the natives were either Catholic or Mohammedan, he was wanting in the phraseology the ceremony demanded.