towards the clump of trees where he had
tied it up.

"Will you fetch it?" said Shere Ali, and as Phillips walked off, he
turned towards the nobles and the old mullah who stood amongst them.
Phillips heard his voice, as he began to speak, and was surprised by a
masterful quiet ring in it. "The doubtful quantity seems to have grown
into a man," he thought, and the thought gained strength when he rode
his horse back from the clump of trees towards the group. Shere Ali met
him gravely.

"You will ride on my right hand," he said. "You need have no fear."

The seven nobles clustered behind, and the party rode at a walk over the
fan of shale and through the defile into the broad valley of Kohara.
Shere Ali did not speak. He rode on with a set and brooding face, and the
Resident fell once more to pondering the queer scene of which he had been
the witness. Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his
thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed.
There was the tomb itself--an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so
much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident
at Kohara. It was appropriate and seemly to the man without friends, or
family, or wife, but to whom the Frontier had been all these. He would
have wished for no more himself, since vanity had played so small a part
in his career. He had been the great Force upon the Frontier, keeping the
Queen's peace by the strength of his character and the sagacity of his
mind. Yet before his grave, invoking him as an unknown saint, the nobles
of Chiltistan had knelt to pray for the destruction of such as he and the
overthrow of the power which he had lived to represent. And all because
his advice had been neglected.

Captain Phillips was roused out of his reflections as the cavalcade
approached a village. For out of that village and from the fields about
it, the men, armed for the most part with good rifles, poured towards
them with cries of homage. They joined the cavalcade, marched with it
past their homes, and did not turn back. Only the women and the children
were left behind. And at the next village and at the next the same thing
happened. The cavalcade began to swell into a small army, an army of men
well equipped for war; and at the head of the gathering force Shere Ali
rode with an impassive face, never speaking but to check a man from time
to time who brandished a weapon at the Resident.

"Your Highness h