Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted hospitality on the road to Sar.
He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.
"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.
"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug. "Treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. It often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."
"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"
"Oh, not a bit! they admire them. It's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. Prevents costly mistakes. The etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."
The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive Paradise.
But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.
Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.
He set to work upon the Fort with the Bakót levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next day.