lence.

He was wakened from a revery by Duncan McClean, who raised his daughter
tenderly and got up on his feet.

"The dawn will be here soon, Mr. Cunningham. We had better get ready.
Well--in case we never meet again--I'm glad I met you."

"Better start before the sun gets up," he answered, gripping the
missionary's hand. He was a soldier again. He had had the answer to
his thoughts! If the man who was to sacrifice his daughter--or risk
her sacrifice--was pleased to have met him, there was not much sense in
harboring self-criticism! He shook it off, and squared his shoulders,
beginning again to think of all that lay ahead.

"Trust to the old woman to guide you and show you a place to rest at,
if you must rest. You ought to reach Howrah at dusk tomorrow, for you'll
find it quite impossible to travel fast--you're both of you too stiff,
for one thing. Lie up somewhere--Joanna will know of a place--until the
old woman has taken in a message to Jaimihr, and wait until he sends
you some men to escort you through the outskirts of the city. I've got
disguises ready for you--a pugree for you, Mr. McClean, and a purdah for
your daughter--you'll travel as a Hindoo merchant and his wife. If you
get stopped, say very little, but show this."

He produced the letter written once by Maharajah Howrah to the
Alwa-sahib and sent by galloper with the present of a horse. It was
signed, and at the bottom of it was the huge red royal seal. "Now go and
put the disguise on, while I see to the horses; I'm going to pick out
quiet ones, if possible, though I warn you they're rare in these parts."

Some twenty minutes later he led their horses for them gingerly down the
slippery rock gorge, and waited at the bottom while six men wound the
gate up slowly. Rosemary McClean was quite unrecognizable, draped from
head to foot in a travelling veil that might have been Mohammedan or
Hindoo, and gave no outward sign as to her caste, or rank. McClean, in
the full attire of a fairly prosperous Hindoo, but with no other mark
about him to betoken that he might be worth robbing, rode in front of
her, high-perched on a native saddle. In front, on a desert pony, rode
Joanna, garbed as a man.

"She ought to be travelling in a carriage of some kind," admitted
Cunningham, "but we haven't got a single wheeled thing here. If any one
asks pertinent questions on the road, you'd better say that she had an
ekka, but that some Rangars took it from you. D'you think