As the riders neared the post its outline showed, stern and clear-cut, against the blue of the sky. A single circular room, loop-holed and battlemented, set upon an outward sloping base of immense solidity, and surrounded by a massive stone wall:—a tower in which ten men could hold their own against five hundred. The look-out sentry, sighting the detachment afar off, gave the word to his companions, who lowered the ladder that served them for staircase; and when Desmond's party drew rein the door in the wall stood open to receive them.
During the halt that followed, the men, having fed and watered their horses, took what rest they might in patches of burning shadow within the wall. Though the sun-saturated masonry breathed fire, it served to shelter them from the withering wind that scours the Border at this fiery time of year.
Desmond, who had breakfasted five hours earlier on stale bread and a few sardines, lunched, with small appetite, on biscuits and a slab of chocolate, and moistened his parched throat with tepid whisky-and-water. Quenching his thirst was an achievement past hoping for till Kohat itself should be reached.
He had left the station with his detachment early on the previous day; had relieved four outposts between dawn and dusk, covering eighty miles of desert road, with four brief halts for rest; and had spent a night of suffocating wakefulness in a sun-baked windowless room, built out from the base of the last post relieved. It was all in the day's work—as Frontier men understand work. The exposure and long hours in the saddle had little effect upon his whipcord and iron frame: but a sharp attack of fever—unrecorded in his letter to his wife—had slackened his alertness of body and spirit; and it was with an unusual sense of relief that he faced the last twenty-mile stretch of road, leaving behind him six fresh men to take up the task of watching the blank, unchanging face of the hills.
Three hours later, the little party turned their horses' heads towards Kohat. The sun still smote the uncomplaining earth, and many miles of riding lay before them. But at least it was the beginning of the end; a fact which the two stout-hearted chargers seemed to recognise as clearly as their riders. The Ressaldar, who had not failed to note his Captain's slight change of bearing, proposed a short cut across country well known to himself.
"Hazúr," he urged, "there runs a long deep nullah, straight as a lance, across the plain; and as the sun falls lower, it would give some measure of shade."
"Well spoken, Ressaldar Sahib! I have had my fill of the road. I'm for the nullah. Come on, men."
And, striking out across country, they vanished from the earth's surface, entering one of those giant clefts in the clay soil formed by the early downrush of torrents from the hills.
Suddenly, in the midst of a swinging canter, the Ressaldar reined in his horse, and the rest followed suit. The old Sikh threw up his head, as a stag will do at the first whisper of danger. In the strong light his chiselled face, with its grey beard scrupulously parted and drawn up under his turban, showed lifeless as a statue; and his eyes had the far-off intentness of one who listens with every fibre of his being.