Only just in time; for the voices were close at hand, the steps upon the outside stair that led to the roof.
'Lo! we can do so much, if naught else,' came savagely: 'we can end their boast, brothers!' The voice was an educated one, and there was some answering laughs, as five or six white figures passed upwards.
'Have no fear, mem-sahiba!' whispered the toothless comforter. 'Jân-Ali-shân will settle them.'
Apparently he did; or some one else carrying on the tradition of the dead man who lay in the Hollow of Heroes; for almost ere the last climber could have reached the top, they were down the narrow stairs again helter-skelter.
'Trra!' said one vexedly. 'To think they should not have forgotten that! Truly, it is ill doing aught against them, and they so wise! Let us go back to the city--there be plenty of fools there.'
'Said I not so?' whispered the toothless comforter triumphantly, as the steps died away. 'He hath sent them forth discomfited. It was even so before, when Mohubbut was khânsâman to Ricketts-sahib who was killed--but the mem, was not.'
Mrs. Chris, however, was past comfort. Had they come back again she would not have stirred; and she sat in the darkness behind the heap of stones, shuddering and sobbing, too terrified even to hear that monotonous refrain--'Have no fear! Have no fear!'
They are idle words when the heart is full of forebodings. Grace Arbuthnot was finding them so but a few hundred yards away, though she stood calmly saying them to herself.
'There can be no fear!' she said. 'Why should they do him an injury?'
'Why, indeed?' echoed Sir George with an inward groan, born of wider experience of what men can do in such times as these; 'but what can have become of the child?'