“Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?” King asked him.
“Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a sore or a scar or a sickness?”
“Then, tell them,” said King.
The man laughed.
“When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready, hakim! I go!”
He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed by the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the halt and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed with them, and no riot ever made more noise.
“Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man who knows yunani?”
Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order, and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating mad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that King rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to wonder.
The “Hills” are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact that the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand, coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made King horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because the man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.
When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out and flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.