"There will be a guard at the cage."
"A German?"
"Yes, sahib."
"They have seen me with Doctor Boelke; perhaps we can turn the trick. But," and his hard grey eyes rested on Darna Singh's face, "if, when we go down there is no chance, I won't play the giddy goat; I'll come back." He handed Boelke's Mauser to the rajput, saying: "I have a pistol in my belt."
Darna Singh slid the panel, and they passed from the room to a landing and down a dozen stone steps to a dim-lighted passage. Here the rajput whispered: "I can take the sahib by a dark way to where he can see the cage in which the two sahibs will be."
"Hurry!" Foley answered, for he was thinking ruefully of his money.
The underground place was a cross-hatch of many tunnels, and Darna Singh led the way through a circuitous maze till they came to a bright-lighted cross passage, and, peeping around a corner, Foley saw, fifty feet away, a solitary German leaning against the wall, a rifle resting at his side. Raising his voice in the utterance of Hindustani words, Foley rounded the corner at a steady pace, followed by Darna Singh. The sentry grasped his rifle, and, standing erect, challenged. In German Foley answered: "We come from the Herr Doctor."
The sentry, having seen Foley with Doctor Boelke, was unsuspicious, and, grounding his rifle tight against his hip, he clicked his heels together at attention.
"The two prisoners are wanted above for examination," Foley said. "You are to bind their arms behind their backs and accompany us."
"The one sahib is a giant," the other answered, when this order, percolating slowly through his heavy brain, had found no objection.