The guard saluted, venturing: "Commander, none could have entered from outside to do the foul deed."
"Liar! lazy sleeper!"—he smashed with his foot the hookah that sat on the marble floor, its long stem coiled like a snake—"While you busied over such, and opium, one has slipped by."
He reached out a powerful hand and seized the shoulder of a Pindari and jerked him to the step, commanding: "Stay here with this monkey of the tall trees, and see that none pass. I go to the Chief. When the Afghan comes have him brought up."
Hunsa had stood among the Pindaris, shoved hither and thither as they surged back and forth. Once the flat of a tulwar had smote him across the back, but when he turned his face to the striker who recognised him as a man of privilege, one of the amusers, he was allowed to remain.
The startling cry, "The Chief has been murdered! the Sultan is dead!" swept out over the desert sand that lay white in the moonlight, and the night air droned with the hum of fifty thousand voices that was like the song of a world full of bees. And the night palpitated with the beat of horses' feet upon the hard sand and against the stony ford of the parched river as the Pindari horsemen swept to Rajgar as if they rode in the sack of a city.
Hoarse bull-throated cries calling the curse of Allah upon the murderer were like a deep-voiced hymn of hate—it was continuous.
The bunnias, and the oilmen, and the keepers of cookshops hid their wares and crept into dark places to hide. The flickering oil lamps were blotted out; but some of the Pindaris had fastened torches to their long spears, and the fluttering lights waved and circled like shooting stars.
Rajgar was a Shoel; it was as if from the teak forests and the jungles of wild mango had rushed its full holding of tigers, and leopards, and elephants, and screaming monkeys.
Soon a wedge of cavalry, a dozen wild-eyed horsemen, pushed their way through the struggling mob, at their head the jamadar bellowing: "Make way—make the road clean of your bodies."
"They bring the Afghan!" somebody cried and pointed to where Barlow sat strapped to the saddle of his Beluchi mare.