The shadowy, unreal circle of faces turned for an instant. Vahana bowed his head in assent.
"I have told you the truth," Barclay went on. "The best and the worst. I have risked life to tell it you. I knew what might await me here—a knife in the dark perhaps without a word spoken—and yet I had to come. Life can be more bitter than death. A man cannot live alone as I have done—there comes a time when his soul cries for his people."
They looked at him silently, without pity. The agony in his hoarse voice did not touch them. For them also he was the Pariah—the outcaste. He read their answer in their eyes and turned back to Ayeshi with a burst of passion.
"Take me—claim me—make me one of you! I have power—I have money—I can do for you what no other man could do. Either you must kill me or make me one of your blood. I know too much. There is no other way out for either of us."
Ayeshi did not move or speak. One of the two priests crept closer, avoiding Barclay's shadow.
"What can you do for us?" he whispered.
"You know very well, O Heera Singh! The drought is on us. The crops will fail. Is there a man in your village who does not owe all that he has to me? What if I make our Lord Ayeshi their deliverer—if he should free them from me? And I have money. Is all that nothing?"
The priest was silent, fingering his sacred cord with eager fingers. But Ayeshi knelt down and looked full into the Eurasian's face.
"You said that you would have betrayed us for their friendship," he said. "What if they came now and offered you their hands——"
"It is not in their power," was the swift and bitter answer. "They have tried—the river is too wide for them."