his duty.

Perhaps that was the reason why he was such a conspicuous success in
civil life. They still talk of how Bill Brown, with Jane his wife and
Juggut Khan the Rajput to advise him, was Resident Political Adviser to
a Maharajah, and of how the Maharajah loathed him, and looked sidewise
at him--but obeyed. That, though, is not a war-story. It is a story of
the saving of a war, and shall go on record, some day, beneath a title
of its own.

FOR THE SALT HE HAD EATEN

Prologue

To the northward of Hanadra, blue in the sweltering heat-haze, lay
Siroeh, walled in with sun-baked mud and listless. Through a wooden gate
at one end of the village filed a string of women with their water-pots.
Oxen, tethered underneath the thatched eaves or by the thirsty-looking
trees, lay chewing the cud, almost too lazy to flick the flies away.
Even the village goats seemed overcome with lassitude. Here and there
a pariah dog sneaked in and out among the shadows or lay and licked
his sores beside an offal-heap; but there seemed to be no energy in
anything. The bone-dry, hot-weather wind had shriveled up verdure and
ambition together.

But in the mud-walled cottages, where men were wont to doze through the
long, hot days, there were murmurings and restless movement. Men lay
on thong-strung beds, and talked instead of dreaming, and the women
listened and said nothing--which is the reverse of custom. Hanadra was
what it always had been, thatched, sun-baked lassitude; but underneath
the thatch there thrummed a beehive atmosphere of tension.

In the center of the village, where the one main road that led from the
main gate came to an abrupt end at a low mud wall, stood a house that
was larger than the others and somewhat more neatly kept; there had been
an effort made at sweeping the enclosure that surrounded it on all four
sides, and there was even whitewash, peeling off in places but still
comparatively white, smeared on the sun-cracked walls.

Here, besides murmurings and movement, there was evidence of real
activity. Tethered against the wall on one side of the house stood a row
of horses, saddled and bridled and bearing evidence of having traveled
through the heat; through the open doorway the sunshine glinted on a
sword-hilt and amid the sound of many voices rang the jingling of a
spur as some one sat cornerwise on a wooden table and struck his toe
restlessly against the leg.

Another string of women started for