"Unto thee, oh, brother!" Cleek said. "Thou, too, art of us, for thou, too, dost acknowledge the sacred shrine. These eyes have beheld thee."
All his hopes rested on the slim pillar of that one word, "shrine," and his heart almost ceased to beat as he watched to see how it was received. It broke, however, into a very tumult of disturbance in the next instant, for the man positively beamed as he gave reply.
"Sacred be the shrine!" he answered in Hindustani. "Clearly thou art of us—not of those others."
"Others? What others? I am but newly come to this country."
"Walk with me, then, to my abode, sup with me, eat of my salt, and I will tell thee then, oh, brother. But I forget: thou hast no knowledge of me. Listen, then. I am Arjeeb Noosrut, father of the High Priest Seydama,
and it is among the people of my house that the gun is yet preserved. Nor has the blood of Seydama been ever washed from the wood of it! Come."
All in a moment a light seemed to break over Cleek's brain. The missing link had been supplied—the one thing that could make possible the wild thought which had come to him last night had been given into his hands. Here at last was the key to the amazing mystery! He turned without a word and went with Arjeeb Noosrut.
"What an ass!" he said to himself in the soundless words of thought. "What an ass never to have suspected it when it is all so clear!"
Meantime Ailsa and the boy, dismissed from any further need of service, walked on through the deepening dusk and turned their faces homeward. But they had not gone twenty yards from the spot where Cleek had seen them last when the little boy set up a joyful cry and pointed excitedly to a claret-coloured limousine which at that moment swung in from the middle of the roadway and slowed down as it neared the kerb.
"Oh, look, Miss Lorne; here's mummie's motor-car; and I do believe that's Bimbi peeping out of it!" exclaimed the child—"Bimbi" being his pet name for Captain Hawksley—then broke, in wild excitement, from Ailsa's detaining hand and fled to a tall, military-looking man with a fair beard and moustache who had just that moment alighted from the vehicle. "It is Bimbi—it is!—it is!" he shouted as he ran. "Oh, Bimbi, I am glad!"