ce and left it, up to
where a self-appointed guard had refused at first to open the city gate
for him, there was a trail that did honor to the man who taught him
swordsmanship. One man lay headless, and another's head was only part of
him, because the sword had split it down the middle and the two halves
were still joined together at the neck.

There were men who claimed afterward that of the twenty-three who lay
between his lance-shaft and the city gate, some five or six had been
slain in brawls and looting forays. And Juggut Khan was never known
to discuss the matter. But the fact remains that every man of them was
killed by the blade or point of a cavalry-saber, and that Juggut Khan
broke out of the place untouched.

And another fact worthy of record is, that underneath a stone floor, in
a building that was partly powder-magazine-surrounded at every end and
side by mutineers who searched for them, and very nearly stifled by the
dust of decaying ages--there lay three women and a child, with a jar of
water close beside them and a sack of hastily collected things to eat.
They lay there in all but furnace-heat, close-huddled in the darkness,
and they shuddered and sobbed and blessed Juggut Khan alternately.
Below them the whispering echoes sighed mysteriously through a maze of
tunnels. Around them, and around their sack of food, the rats scampered.
Above them, where a ten-ton stone trapdoor lay closed over their heads,
black powder stood in heaps and sacks and barrels. Closing the trapdoor
had been easy. One pushed it and it fell. Not all the mutineers in
Jailpore nor Juggut Khan nor any one could open it again without the
secret. And no man living knew the secret. The three women and the child
were safe from immediate intrusion!

Those three women and that child were not so exceptionally placed for
India, of that date. Two of the women had seen their husbands slain
that afternoon, before their eyes. They were mother and daughter and
grandson; and the fourth was an English nurse, red-cheeked still from
the kiss of English Channel breezes.

"If only Bill were here!" the nurse wailed. "I know he'd find a way out.
There wasn't never nothing nowhere that beat Bill. Bill wouldn't
ha' left us! Bill'd ha' took us out o' here, an' saved our lives.
Bill--snnff, snnff--Bill wouldn't ha'--snnff, snnff--shoved us in a
rat-hole and took hisself off!"

She had not yet lost her English point of view. She still believed that
the s