He lifted her bodily, calling to the man upon the ground, the other having mounted behind the bullocks. "Put back the leather wall of the cart that I may hurl this outcast widow of a dead Hindu within."
Bootea clawed at his face; she kicked and fought; her voice screaming a call to Ajeet.
There was a heavy rolling thump of hoofs upon the roadway, unheard of Hunsa because of the vociferous struggle. Then from the shimmer of moonlight thrust the white form of a big Turcoman horse that was thrown almost to his haunches, his breast striking the back of the decoit.
The bullocks, nervous little brutes, startled by the huge white animal, swerved, and before the man who sat a-straddle of the one shaft gathered tight the cord to their nostrils, whisked the cart to the roadside where it toppled over the bank for a fall of fifteen feet into a ravine, carrying bullocks and driver with it.
The moonlight fell full upon the face of the horseman, its light making still whiter the face of Captain Barlow.
And Bootea recognised him. It was the face that had been in her vision night and day since the nautch.
"Save me, Sahib!" she cried; "these men are thieves; save me, Sahib!"
The hunting crop in Barlow's hand crashed upon the thick head of Hunsa in ready answer to the appeal. And as the sahib threw himself from the saddle the jamadar, with a snarl like a wounded tiger, dropped the girl and, whirling, grappled with the Englishman.
Barlow was strong; few men in the force, certainly none in the officers' mess, could put him on his back; and he was lithe, supple as a leopard; and in combat cool, his mind working like the mind of a chess player: but he realised that the arms about him were the arms of a gorilla, the chest against which he was being crushed was the chest of a trained wrestler; a smaller man would have heard his bones cracking in that clutch.
He raised a knee and drove it into the groin of the jamadar; then in the slight slackening of the holding arms as the Bagree shrank from the blow, he struck at the bearded chin; it was the clean, trained short-arm jab of a boxer.