"You hear, hazoor? They are naming you to the police-wallahs. Come!"
"You're right." Amber fell into a long, free stride that threatened quickly to distance the Gurka's short, sturdy legs. "Yet why do you take this trouble for me?"
"Why ask?" panted the Gurkha. "Did I not stand behind you and see that you did not throw the knife? Am I a dog to stand by and see an innocent man yoked to a crime?" He laughed shortly. "Am I a fool to forget how great is the generosity of Kings? This way, hazoor!"
"Why call me King?" Amber hurdled a heap of offal and picked up his pace again. "Yet you will find me generous, though but a sahib."
"The sahibs are very generous." Again the Gurkha laughed briefly and unpleasantly. "But this is no time for words. Save your breath, for now we must run."
He broke into a springy lope, with his chin up, elbows in and chest distended, his quick small feet slopping regardlessly through the viscous mud of the unpaved byway. "Hear that!" he cried, as a series of short, sharp yells rose in the bazaar behind them. "The dogs have found the scent!" And for a time terror winged their flight. Eastern mobs are hard to handle; if overtaken the chances were anything-you-please to one that the fugitives would be torn to pieces as by wild animals ere the police could interfere.
They struck through stranger and more awful quarters than Amber had believed could be tolerated, even in India. For if there were a better way of escape they had no time to pause and choose it. From the racket in their rear the pursuit was hot upon their trail, and with every stride, well-nigh, they were passing those who would mark them down and, when the rabble came up, cry it on with explicit directions.
And so Amber found himself pounding along at the heels of his Gurkha, threading acres of flimsy huts huddled together in meaningless confusion—frail boxes of bamboo, mud, and wattles thrown roughly together upon corrupt, naked earth that reeked of the drainage of uncounted generations. Whence they passed through long, brilliant, silent streets lined with open hovels wherein Vice and Crime bred cheek-by-jowl, the haunts of Shame, painted and unabashed, sickening in the very crudity of its nakedness…. There is no bottom to the Pit wherein the native sinks…. And on, panting, with labouring chests and aching limbs, into the abandoned desolation of the Chinese quarter, and back through the still, deadly ways which Amber had threaded in the footsteps of Pink Satin—where the houses towered high and were ornamented with dingy, crumbling stucco and rusty, empty, treacherous balconies of iron, and the air hung in stagnation as if the very winds here halted to eavesdrop upon the iniquities that were housed behind the jealous, rotting blinds of wood and iron.
By now the voice of the chase had subsided to a dull and distant muttering far behind them, and the way was clear. Beyond its age-old, ineradicable atmosphere of secret infamy there was nothing threatening in the aspect of the neighbourhood. And the Gurkha pulled up, breathing like a wind-broken horse.
"Easily, hazoor!" he gasped. "There is time for rest."