“Sahib, the gate opens; the little one on the right there.”
I looked, and, as he said, there was a growing shadow as if it was being opened slowly. Then the chink widened, the gate opened, and two figures stumbled out.
I say “stumbled,” for they gave me the impression of being pushed out. The gate swung to behind them noiselessly.
The leading figure was that of an old man with long white beard and white locks. His arms were bound behind his back, and he moved slowly, walking rather oddly, as though something dragged at his feet. But the second figure was that of a woman, young and white, with a mass of auburn hair. She, too, had her hands bound behind her.
The old man tripped, and I saw the girl all but fall. Then they moved forward a few slow paces and stopped.
Then again onward, and now I realized, as I watched through my glasses, why they stumbled. Their movement seemed constrained, and it was only as they came over a little rise that I grasped the fact that they were shackled together, left ankle to right.
I heard Payindah’s guttural grunt behind me.
“Who be these swine that maltreat an old man and a woman like that, turning them out of the gates stripped and bound?”
A few more yards and the old man halted, looking dazedly up at the sky. Then he moved forward once more, the girl stepping jerkily at his side. Again he checked and swayed, and then I saw the girl bend toward him and evidently say something. I think she was urging him to another effort. Poor soul; I suppose they thought they might yet escape.
They had come slowly and hesitatingly perhaps sixty yards, and I was racking my brain as to some means of helping them, when suddenly the old man stopped dead, then shot forward on to his face, pulling the girl to the ground. I could see him as he lay; he only moved once, and up from between his shoulders stuck a long arrow-shaft.