Yasmini saw Utirupa every night, she apparently as much a man as he in turban and the comfortable Rajput costume—shorter by a bead, but as straight-standing and as agile. Tess and Hasamurti used to watch them under the trees, ready to give the alarm in case of interruption, sometimes near enough to catch the murmured flow of confidence uniting them in secrecy of sacred, unconforming interviews. It was common knowledge that Yasmini was in the camp, but she was always supposed to be tented safely on the outskirts, with her women and a guard of watchful servants all about her. There was no risk of an affront to her in any case; it was known that Utirupa would attend to that.
Each night between the bonfires there was entertainment—men who walked tight-ropes, wrestlers, a performing horse, ballad-singers and, dearest delight of all, the tellers of Eastern tales, who sat with silent rings of men about them and reeled off the old, loved, impossible adventures of the days when the gods walked with men on earth—stories of miracles and love and derring-do, with heroes who could fight a hundred men unscathed, and heroines to set the heart on fire.
Then off again before sunrise in the cool amid the shouting and confusion of a breaking camp, with truant ponies to be hunted, and everybody yelling for his right of road, and the elephants sauntering urbanely through it all with trunks alert for pickings from the hay-carts. They were nights and days superbly gorgeous, all-entertaining, affluent of humor.
Then on the third day, nearing Sialpore toward evening they filed past two batteries of Royal Horse Artillery, drawn up on a level place beside the road to let them by—an act of courtesy not unconnected with its own reward. It is never a bad plan to let the possibly rebellious take a long look at the engines of enforcement.
"Ah!" laughed Yasmini, up in the howdah now beside Tess on the elephant, "the guns of the gods! I said the gods were helping us!"
"Look like English guns to me," Tess answered.
"So think the English, too. So thinks Samson who sent for them. So, too, perhaps Gungadhura will think when he knows the guns are coming! But I know better. I never promise the gods too much, but let them make me promises, and look on while they perform them. I tell you, those are the guns of the gods!"
Chapter Twenty
A bad man ruined by the run of luck
May shed the slime—they've done it,
Times and again they've done it.
That turn to aspiration out of muck
Is quick if heart's begun it,
If heart's desire's begun it.
But 'ware revenge if greater craft it is
That jockeyed him to recognize defeat,
Or greater force that overmastered his—
Efficiency more potent than deceit
That craved his crown and won it!
Safer the she-bear with her suckling young,
Kinder the hooked shark from a yardarm hung,
More rational a tiger by the hornets stung
Than perfidy outcozened. Shun it!
"Millions! Think of it! Lakhs and crores!"