The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice ring along the empty mess-room.
II
As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. He had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.
There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. They had known him five years before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.
It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.
Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.
Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar.
He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.
The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.