"I don't believe it," he said shortly. "That was a tame animal, which strays in and out of the temple like a tame cat."
"Will the sahib look at the dust upon the ground. Is there sign of feet, marks of the body, or the lashing of the tail upon the dust?"
Truly the dust, save for the deer marks, was undisturbed, but Cuxson shook his head stoutly, and refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
"The sahib will not believe! Then will I make her, the white woman, see thee, the man she desires as husband, a prisoner in the House of Kali, covered in blood, and she will hasten forthwith to thee—and to me!"
Cuxson sprang to his feet with murder in his eyes, but stopped and flung out his hands as though to thrust aside some obstacle.
The priest laughed softly.
"O babe in wisdom! Behold, thou shalt not be bound, yet shalt thou not stir beyond yon temple wall until she come, and with her the son of princes who yearns for her; then shall I lift my will from thee and tie thee to the wall that thou mayst behold the double sacrifice of love and life made to Kali the Terrible."
The priest was gone, and Jan Cuxson sat down upon a fallen block of masonry, covering his face with his wounded hands; and faintly from the temple echoed the voice of the priest as he prayed to his god before projecting his will across the space that divided him from the white woman.
Only for a little moment of despondency, and then he sat back and shook his great shoulders with the light of battle in his eyes, and grim determination in every line of the powerful jaw.
How he was going to circumvent the priest and save his beloved he did not know—he had no plan, but—he was going to pull it off.