So, swift as light, aid and prevention hustled each other, all so quickly that a snapshot would hardly have registered the contest, until a click, faint yet loud enough to fill each heart with joy or anger told that the King's stick catching the ball fairly ere it fell had sent it away in a clear swooping flight.
"He has it--ride! ride!" rose the cry from both sides and away they went helter-skelter, pell-mell.
Too late, however, for either side to intervene, for the ball driven with a will, dropped, rebounded, fell again within a foot of the fatal line at the end and so easily, softly, trickled over it.
"Well hit, father!" called Prince Salîm forgetful of anything but sheer pride in the King's prowess. His face, nevertheless, lowered again as in accordance with custom the defeated five rode back along the sides of the ground toward the starting end, pausing every twenty paces to pirouette their ponies and to salaam to the victors who, when the conquered had reached their places, rode triumphantly at a canter down the middle to take up theirs.
But consolation comes in all games, and the next throw-up decreed that the King should--not unwillingly--make obeisance to his son after a hard tussle.
The third goal also went to the juniors, for, whether due to the replacing in the King's team of Râjah Mân Singh by that inferior player his cousin Bhâwun Singh, or to a trifle of lameness in Akbar's little Arab, certain it is that after much swinging and driving of the ball backward and forward the cry arose amongst the spectators "He hath it--Khodadâd hath it this time!" And there was the Tarkhân, his eyes glued on the ground, deliberately trundling the ball along safe clipped in the crook of his stick, while the Prince and Dhâra beside him rode off all attempts at rescue.
"He hath bird-lime on it," muttered Birbal, as he swooped down fruitlessly. The ball trickled on deftly and even the King galloped forward to defend the goal, but it was in vain, for in the final mêlée someone--in the dust and glamour--God knows who, gave the final impetus, and the victors and vanquished wiped their streaming foreheads ere recommencing another struggle.
It began on both sides with almost fierce determination.
"God's truth! It stirs the blood!" gasped Ralph Fitch. He had seen many wonders at the court of the Great Mogul, but none so germane to his temperament as this. It was a game worthy of Englishmen he thought almost prophetically; since its lineal descendant, polo, has made India bearable to generations of an English garrison. So while John Newbery's eyes wandered over the jewels of the spectators around him, and William Leedes found his attention too much concentrated on the King's figure for due grip on the game as a whole, it was Ralph Fitch, who despite distance, dusk, and dust, cried excitedly:
"He hath it again--the Sindi hath it once more!"