He hunted high and low and found no bracelet.
His pistol was gone, too, and his cartridges, but not the dagger, wrapped in a handkerchief, under his shirt. The money, that his patients had brought him, lay on the floor untouched. It was an unusual robber who had robbed him.
At least once in his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener than once a week. So men learn sympathy.
“I should have been awake to change the guard every two hours!” he admitted, sitting on the bed. “I wouldn't hesitate to shoot another man for that--or for less!”
He let the thought sink in, until the very lees of shame tasted like ashes in his mouth. Then, being what he was,--and there are not very many men good enough to shoulder what lay ahead of him--he set the whole affair behind him as part of the past and looked forward.
“Who's 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” he wondered. “Nobody interfered with me until I doctored his men. He's in opposition. That's a fair guess. Now, who in thunder--by the fat lord Harry--can 'Bull-with-a-beard' be? And why fighting in the Khyber so early as all this? And why does 'Bull-with-a-beard,' whoever he is, hang back?”
Chapter X
Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat
his leavings?
Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend
and enemy.--Native Proverb
They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King went to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the “Hills,” where indirectness is the key to information, he stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of tumbling water and looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid like a knife in the ascending mist.