unningham. And Mahommed Gunga
bitted his impatience fiercely, praying the one God he believed in to
touch the right scale of the two. Later, Cunningham strode out to pace
the courtyard in the dark, and the Rajput followed him.

CHAPTER XXVII

The trapped wolf bared his fangs and swore,
"But set me this time free,
And I will hunt thee never more!
By ear and eye and jungle law,
I'll starve--I'll faint--I'll die before
I bury tooth in thee!"

WHILE Alwa raged alone, and while Mahommed Gunga talked to Cunningham
in a rock-room near at hand, Rosemary McClean saw fit to take a hand
in history. It was not her temperament to sit quite idle while others
shaped her destiny; nor was she given to mere brooding over wrongs. When
a wrong was being done that she could alter or alleviate it was her way
to tackle it at once without asking for permission or advice.

From where her chair was placed under the long veranda she could see the
passage in the rock that led to Jaimihr's cell. She saw his captors take
him up the passage; she heard the door clang shut on him, and she saw
the men come back again. She heard them laugh, too, and she overheard a
few words of a jest that seemed the reason for the laughter.

In Rajputana, as in other portions of the East, men laugh with meaning
as a rule, and seldom from mere amusement. Included in the laugh there
usually lies more than a hint of threat, or hate, or cruelty. And, in
partial confirmation of the jest she unintentionally overheard, she saw
no servant go to the chuckling spring to fill a water-jar. She recalled
that Jaimihr only sipped as much as he could dip up in the hollow of his
hand, and that physical exertion and suffering of the sort that he had
undergone produces prodigious thirst in that hot, dry atmosphere.

She waited until dark for Cunninham, growing momentarily more restless.
She recalled that she was a guest of Alwa's, and as such not free to
interfere with his arrangements or to suggest insinuations anent his
treatment of prisoners. She recalled the pride of all Rajputs, and its
accompanying corollary of insolence when offended. There would come no
good--she knew--from asking anybody whether Jaimihr was allowed to drink
or not.

Cunningham, with that middle-aged air of authority laid over the fire
and ability of youth, would be able, no doubt, to enforce his wishes in
the matter after finding out the truth about it. But Cunningham di