"What is your business?" asked the Englishman again.
And the reply came faintly back from the man, who had already passed by, and spoke without checking his step.
"I AM A SHARPENER OF SWORDS!"
And he vanished into the night.
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE RUINED REST-HOUSE
The travellers proceeded with their meal almost in silence.
The two younger men had felt subdued and chastened ever since they had left Rawal Pindi, some days before. Major Endicott was too good a fellow to insist on the disapproval with which he regarded their company, but they were conscious of being on sufferance, which was the more irksome because of the whole-hearted admiration they were ready to lavish upon him. His mission was a delicate one,--one which, to any but a political officer of the frontier, would have appeared not a little hazardous; and he felt that it was gratuitously complicated by the journey of two young civilians through so wild a region at this particular time. A tribe in one of the valleys west of the mountain road, some three days' march from the spot on which the travellers were now encamped, had been giving trouble of late. It had always been troublesome. Only once had it been visited by a white man, Major Endicott himself; yet, accompanied by no more than a dozen troopers, he was venturing alone among these wild hill-men, to demand the payment of a fine in expiation of a recent raid upon their neighbours, and security for their future good behaviour. The alternative was an expedition in force, and Major Endicott had preferred to take whatever personal risks a visit might involve, rather than recommend a hill campaign, with all its difficulties and its heavy cost in money and men.
But he did not relish the accidental responsibility cast upon him by the presence of these two young Englishmen, little more than lads, who had no concern in his business, and were indeed strangers to the country. He regarded it as a very unfortunate coincidence that they arrived in Rawal Pindi at the moment of his setting out, and that the road they proposed to follow in their further journey northward would be for several days the same as his own. They were travelling at their own risk; it was no part of his duty to safeguard them; but he could do no less than suggest that they should accompany him over so much of the road as was common to their party and his. Privately he wished them at Halifax.
His attitude was after all more political than personal. Great changes had recently occurred in the politics of Central Asia. The fall of the Manchu dynasty and the establishment of a Republic in China had resulted in the secession of the princes of Mongolia. They had first placed themselves under the protection of Russia, only to find that they had exchanged King Log for King Stork. Russia had sufficiently recovered from the staggering effects of the Japanese war to recommence her forward movement in Asia, which for long had seemed as gradual and as irresistible as the encroachment of the tide upon a sandy beach. The Mongols soon came to loggerheads with their adopted protector, and were beginning to experience the same process of assimilation that had in previous generations been the fate of Bokhara and Western Turkestan. A sudden conflagration in which Russia became involved in Europe, together with the rise to power of a prince of exceptional ambition and capacity, gave the Mongols an opportunity of striking for complete independence, of which they were not slow to take advantage. The advance of a Russian army of 20,000 men was checked near Urga for want of supplies from the north. With an Austro-German army threatening Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Russian government recalled the greater part of their Eastern forces, leaving the Mongolian expedition to extricate itself as best it could. It might still have proved equal to the strain but for a Mussulman rising, which, after long smouldering, now broke into flame in the conquered Khanates eastward of the Caspian. The revolt spread with the rapidity of a prairie fire from Khiva to Tashkend, paralysing any efforts that might have been made to relieve the army destined for Mongolia. A raid of many thousands of Tartars who cut the railway at Irkutsk turned the check into a retreat. The first sign of wavering brought against the Russians every man who possessed a pony and a rifle from the Great Wall of China to the Altai mountains. Under this pressure the retreat became a rout, and the rout a slaughter. Within a year Mongolia became the most powerful of the Central Asian States, and with the guns and equipment of the annihilated Russian army as a nucleus, the Mongol Napoleon set about building up a new empire extending from the shrunken frontiers of the Chinese Republic to the shores of the Caspian. Five years had sufficed to transform the political aspect of Central Asia. Russia, exhausted by a three years' struggle with her western neighbours, was powerless to stem the flood of Mongol conquest. For the moment the tide had apparently spent itself on the eastern border of Asiatic Turkey, and the mountain chain dividing Persia. There had been a lull for more than a year, during which the world wondered with no little apprehension what would happen next. Some thought that the Mongol prince who had inspired this recrudescence of the Tartar spirit might now be content to consolidate his empire. Others looked for a new movement still more stupendous, for there were not wanting many in Europe who trembled at the name of Ubacha Khan as their forefathers in bygone centuries had trembled at the names of Genghis Khan and Timur.