“It is fighting and fighting, naught but fighting,” said Tang-a-Dahit after a pause; “and there is no peace. It is fighting and fighting, for honour, and glory, and houses and cattle, but naught for love, and naught that there may be peace.”
Cumner’s Son turned round in his saddle as if to read the face of the man, but it was too dark.
“And naught that there maybe peace.” Those were the words of a hillsman who had followed him furiously in the night ready to kill, who had cloven the head of a man like a piece of soap, and had been riding even into Mandakan where a price was set on his head.
For long they rode silently, and in that time Cumner’s Son found new thoughts; and these thoughts made him love the brown hillsman as he had never loved any save his own father.
“When there is peace in Mandakan,” said he at last, “when Boonda Broke is snapped in two like a pencil, when Pango Dooni sits as Dakoon in the Palace of Mandakan—”
“There is a maid in Mandakan,” interrupted Tanga-Dahit, “and these two years she has lain upon her bed, and she may not be moved, for the bones of her body are as the soft stems of the lily, but her face is a perfect face, and her tongue has the wisdom of God.”
“You ride to her through the teeth of danger?”
“She may not come to me, and I must go to her,” answered the hillsman.
There was silence again for a long time, for Cumner’s Son was turning things over in his mind; and all at once he felt that each man’s acts must be judged by the blood that is in him and the trail by which he has come.
The sorrel and the chestnut mare travelled together as on one snaffle-bar, step by step, for they were foaled in the same stable. Through stretches of reed-beds and wastes of osiers they passed, and again by a path through the jungle where the briar-vines caught at them like eager fingers, and a tiger crossed their track, disturbed in his night’s rest. At length out of the dank distance they saw the first colour of dawn.