Limping down the lane in which stood the tall silent house that his master often visited, he saw three men emerge from the well-known low doorway.
Two approached him while one departed in the opposite direction. One of these two held the arm of the other.
"I must hear his voice again. I have not heard his voice again," urged this one insistently to the other.
"Nay—but I have heard thine, thou Dog!" said Moussa Isa to himself, and turning, followed.
In a neighbouring bazaar the man who seemed to lead the other left him at the entrance to a mosque—a dark and greasy entry with a short flight of stone steps.
As he set his foot upon the lowest of these, a hand fell upon the neck of the man who had been led, and a voice hissed:—
"Salaam! O Ibrahim the Weeper! Salaam! A 'Hubshi' would speak with thee…." and another hand joined the first, encircling his throat….
"Art thou dead, Dog?" snarled Moussa Isa, five minutes later….
Moussa Isa never boasted (if he realized the fact) that the collapse of the revolt and mutiny in Gungapur, before the arrival of troops, was due as much to the death of its chief ringleader and director, the blind faquir, as to the disastrous repulse of the great assault upon the Military Prison.
§ 2.