The voice broke suddenly. He threw out one hand in a sort of passionate despair, and walked over to the Belooch.
"I'll do everything you could possibly do in my place, Erlton."
The words came clear and stern, and the next instant the thud of the Arab's galloping hoofs filled the still night air. The sound sent a spasm of angry pain through Major Erlton. The chance had been his, and he had had to give it up because he rode three stone heavier; and, curse it! knew only too well what a difference a pound or two might make in a race.
Nevertheless Jim Douglas had been right when he said the chance was neither his nor the Major's. For, less than an hour afterward, riding all he knew, doing his level best, the Arab put his foot in a rat hole just as his rider was congratulating himself on having headed the rebels, just as, across the level plain stretching from Ghazeabad to the only bridge over the Jumna, he fancied he could see a big shadowy bubble on the western sky, the dome of the Delhi mosque. Put its foot in a rat hole and came down heavily! The last thing Jim Douglas saw was--on the road which he had hoped to rejoin in a minute or two--a strange ghostlike figure. An old man on a lame camel, which bumped along as even no earthly camel ought to bump.
As he fell, the rushing roar in his ears which heralds unconsciousness seemed by a freak of memory to take a familiar rhythm:
"La! il-lah-il-Ullaho! La! il-lah-il-Ul-la-ho!"
[CHAPTER II.]
DAWN.
The chill wind which comes with dawn swayed the tall grass beyond the river, and ruffling the calm stretches below the Palace wall died away again as an oldish man stepped out of a reed hut, built on a sandbank beside the boat-bridge, and looked eastward. He was a poojari, or master of ceremonial at the bathing-place where, with the first streak of light, the Hindoos came to perform their religious ablutions. So he had to be up betimes, in order to prepare the little saucers of vermilion and sandal and sacred gypsum needed in his profession; for he earned his livelihood by inherited right of hallmarking his fellow-creatures with their caste-signs when they came up out of the water. Thus he looked out over those eastern plains for the dawn, day after day. He looks for it still; this account is from his lips. And this dawn there was a cloud of dust no bigger than a man's hand upon the Meerut road. Someone was coming to Delhi.
But someone was already on the bridge, for it creaked and swayed, sending little shivers of ripples down the calm stretches. The poojari turned and looked to see the cause; then turned eastward again. It was only a man on a camel with a strange gait, bumping noiselessly even on the resounding wood. That was all.