"Farewell, sahib," he whispered. "We will wait. I believe that you will escape. If not, rest assured, we will avenge you."
He was gone. Owen could hear his faint footfall as he slipped down the stairs. Then followed silence, complete silence, broken after a little while by the awakening noises from the city outside.
"Forewarned!" said Owen as calmly as he could, though his heart beat more forcibly now that he had heard Mulha's news. "So they will murder me, and make that a cause for war, as if there was not enough already! Ah! I know whom I have to thank for this! It is the Frenchman; but why? Why?"
Why indeed? Had our hero devoted himself to elucidating the reason for such display of malice for a week or even more he would have been no nearer the answer. The fact remained that Colonel Le Pourton had taken a sudden and none too friendly interest in him, and, moreover, appeared to be in some manner connected with his earlier history. What was there which could possibly make this English youth—a poorhouse boy, a beggar almost till friends came forward to help him—an enemy to be feared by one in such high command as this French colonel? And yet——
"He fears me, and he knows something of my earlier history. His conscience hurts him perhaps. Who knows, he may have been the very one who arranged for my abduction, for I was certainly stolen when I was a child. But a Frenchman! It seems impossible."
Owen looked at the matter from all sides, and could not fail to see the unlikelihood of this man having had anything to do with him in former days; for, as he had just said, Colonel Le Pourton was a Frenchman, and we[Pg 284] had been at war with his country for a long while. True, there had been a truce every now and again, even in India, where the two nations had been struggling the one against the other. English possessions had been captured and handed back again at the end of hostilities, and the same could be said of Pondicherry and other French holdings. It was possible that this Frenchman had known, in times of peace, some of the British officers, and then——
"What is the good of worrying about the matter?" thought Owen peevishly. "My life is of far more value to me than is this matter, and I will leave it. Now, how to escape? I will get away if it is possible. But how?"
He went over to the window again and stood there, leaning against the wall and staring down at the streets beneath. And as he did so he noted the surroundings of the palace, the courtyard below with its outer gates, the sentries stationed there, magnificent men of Holkar's bodyguard. And outside the very building to which Mulha had alluded. Yes, and as he looked there was the figure of the faithful servant entering the quarters allotted to his comrades. Owen waved his hand to him, and Mulha, happening to look up at his window, as he had done many a time in the last few hours without doubt, wondering behind which his master lay a prisoner, saw the signal and answered it. Then he disappeared, and our hero saw no more of him. He followed the courtyard round to its limits, and then traced the walls which surrounded the palace. They were evidently part of the defences of the town, and were armed with[Pg 285] heavy guns, some of brass and some of iron, and all of large proportions.
"That is certainly the largest I have ever seen in my life," thought Owen as his eye lit on one piece of gigantic size which towered over the others. "Its muzzle must be a couple of feet across."