tween
us--we were on firm soil again, and swinging along over the bit of easy
level path. It would have been out of the question to go in doolies, and
no pony could keep a foothold for five minutes on the uncertain ground.

At last, as we emerged into the bright moonlight on a little platform of
rock at an angle of the path, we paused. Ram Lal, who seemed to know the
way, was in front, and held up his hand to silence us; Isaacs and I
kneeled down and looked over the brink. Some two hundred feet below, on
a broad strip of green bordering the steep cliffs, was picketed a small
body of horse. We could see the men squatting about in their small
compact turbans and their shining accoutrements; the horses tethered at
various distances on the sward, cropping so vigorously that even at that
height we could hear the dull sound as they rhythmically munched the
grass. We could see in the middle of the little camp a man seated on a
rug and wrapped in a heavy garment of some kind, quietly smoking a
common hubble-bubble. Beside him stood another who reflected more
moonlight than the rest, and who was therefore, by his trappings, the
captain of the band. The seated smoker could be no other than Shere Ali.

Cautiously we descended the remaining windings of the steep path,
turning whenever we had a chance, to look down on the horsemen and their
prisoner below, till at last we emerged in the valley a quarter of a
mile or so beyond where they were stationed. Here on the level of the
plain we stopped a moment, and Ram Lal renewed his instructions to me.

"If the captain," he said, "lays his hand on Isaacs' shoulder, seize him
and throw him. If you cannot get him down kill him--any way you
can--shoot him under the arm with your pistol. It is a matter of life
and death."

"All right." And we walked boldly along the broad strip of sward. The
moon was now almost immediately overhead, for it was midnight, or near
it. I confess the scene awed me, the giant masses of the mountains above
us, the vast distances of mysterious blue air, through which the
snow-peaks shone out with a strange look that was not natural. The swish
of the quickly flowing stream at the edge of the plot we were walking
over sounded hollow and unearthly; the velvety whirr of the great
mountain bats as they circled near us, stirred from the branches as we
passed out, was disagreeable and heavy to hear. The moon shone brighter
and brighter.

We were perhaps thirty yards fr