“Where is he?” asked King.
“Caught him coming down the Khyber on his black mare and arrested him. He's in the next room! I hope he's to be hanged. So that I can buy the mare,” he added cheerfully.
King whistled softly to himself, and the general looked at him through half-closed eyes.
“Go in and talk to him, King. Let me know the result.”
He had picked King to go up the Khyber on that errand not for nothing. He knew King and he knew the symptoms. Without answering him King obeyed. He went out of the room into a dark corridor and rapped on the door of the next room to the right. There was a muffled answer from within. Courtenay shouted something to the sentry outside the door and he called another man who fitted a key in the lock. King walked into a room in which one lamp was burning and the door slammed shut behind him.
He was in there an hour, and it never did transpire just what passed, for he can hold his tongue on any subject like a clam, and the general, if anything, can go him one better. Courtenay was placed under orders not to talk, so those who say they know exactly what happened in the room between the time when the door was shut on King and the time when he knocked to have it opened and called for the general, are not telling the truth.
What is known is that finally the general hurried through the door and ejaculated, “Well, I'm damned!” before it could close again. The sentry (Punjabi Mussulman) has sworn to that over a dozen camp-fires since the day.
And it is known, too, for the sentry has taken oath on it and has told the story so many times without much variation that no one who knows the man's record doubts any longer--it is known that when the door opened again King and the general walked out, with the Rangar between them. And the Rangar had no turban on, but carried it unwound in his hand. And his golden hair fell nearly to his knees and changed his whole appearance. And he was weeping. And he was not a Rangar at all, but she, and how anybody can ever have mistaken her for a man, even in man's clothes and with her skin darkened, was beyond the sentry's power to guess. He for one, etc.... But nobody believed that part of his tale.
As Yussuf bin Ali said over the camp-fire up the Khyber later on, “When she sets out to disguise herself, she is what she will be, and he who says he thinks otherwise has two tongues and no conscience!”
What is surely true is that the four of them--Yasmini, the general, Courtenay and King sat up all night in a room in the fort, talking together, while a succession of sentries overstrained their ears endeavoring to hear through keyholes. And the sentries heard nothing and invented very much.