“I find a man whose hands have been bound, and who has been also wounded by what might have been an arrow. Note further that No. 1 was found stripped, although his hands were bound. Ergo, he was stripped before he was killed, otherwise they’d have had to undo his hands to get his kit off.
“No. 2, on the other hand, has clothes and escapes, and what is more is armed. You don’t tie up an armed man to shoot. Note also that my old relative makes no mention of his fellow’s legs having been tied, and my man’s did not seem to have been.
“Now, I thought an awful lot over these two. And this is what it seems to me. Quite obviously men whose arms are bound are prisoners. Execution without the gates was a very typical method in all old countries, and common even now in the East.
“My own idea—perhaps fanciful—is, therefore, that whoever run this place, when they want to kill off any one, they put him outside the gates with his arms bound, and shoot him with arrows either from the gates or from the arrow-slits. Possibly the idea of leaving his legs free is to give the fellow a last sporting chance of getting away to take his luck in the desert if he can bolt before he’s killed.
“Now, my fellow seems to have had a sister—a cultured person, one would say—not the sort of sister you’d associate with a common criminal.
“My idea is that she bribed the executioners not to shoot straight, and that he bolted into the valley, where, by some preconceived arrangement, he found clothes and food, and then freed his hands against a sharp rock. He was a strongly built young fellow, and probably would make the best fight he could, even despite his wound. Possibly he knew that they were going to drop him stuff over the cliffs somewhere in the valley.
“Now, in view of the sister, it seems unlikely that he was a common criminal. A more likely solution would be either some particularly tyrannical rulers, or possibly some kind of bitter civil war. I have my own ideas as to how he got across the desert, which I can explain better when we get there.
“What do you think of my solution so far?”
We had to agree that it was as logical as any interpretation we could put upon it.
“Well, then, and this is why I’ve given it at length. If we find the place, and if we succeed in getting in, we want to be well armed, and, what’s more, have some one more reliable than the local Turkestani camel men. I have Firoz still. Could you, Harry, rake up a reliable sepoy to come?”