"I don't suppose Nurla knows anything about that," said Lawrence with a smile. "But look here: don't these bushes look as if they'd been disturbed recently?"
He nodded his head towards some scrubby bushes at their right hand.
"You'd think so, certainly," said Bob. "Still, we may be wrong. I remember old Colonel Fanshawe warning us against the danger of seeing what we wanted to see."
After sitting a few minutes longer, keeping up the appearance of aimlessness by careless tossing of pebbles into the water, they rose and resumed their walk. But just at this moment Lawrence caught sight of a dark object among the bushes that grew sparsely on the hillside above the track, twenty yards away. At the distance, partially concealed by the foliage, the nature of the object was not apparent; but Lawrence clambered up by means of the bushes, and discovered a long coil of thin strong cord, lying between two inflated water-skins. He left them where they were, and returned to the track.
"It's clear as daylight," said Bob, when he had heard his report. "The fellow fastened the cord to the rock and held on to it when he took the water. He supported himself on the skins, and when he got to the other side, attached cord and skins to the dangling rope. When he came back, he hauled himself hand over hand against the stream, and pulled in the cord after him. That cord will, metaphorically speaking, hang the fellow, but he's clever enough to have deserved a better fate."
They returned slowly to the compound, well pleased with the result of their investigations.
A few minutes after they had gone, a small figure rose from among the bushes within a few yards of the spot where the cord was placed. Clambering up the hillside, and screening himself as much as possible behind clumps of vegetation, and by the natural inequalities of the ground, the little man made his way rapidly in the same direction as the Englishmen, and descended unseen among the huts of the Kalmuck miners. His narrow little eyes were gleaming with excitement. The men were just returning to work. The Pathans had already crossed the drawbridge; the Kalmucks were crossing. Black Jack pushed his way into the throng, apparently in a great hurry. He overtook Nurla Bai at the entrance to the mine gallery, and together they disappeared.
The boys lost no time in communicating their discoveries to Mr. Appleton.
"This is getting warm," he said. "We can do nothing yet. Act as though nothing had happened: to-night we'll talk things over. You're sure none of the men suspect you?"
"There's no sign of it," said Lawrence. "They saw us go, and come back with a bird: a very ordinary thing, that. I flatter myself that a Scotland Yard detective wouldn't have guessed from our manner that there was any other object in our walk."