ak it;" and he spoke reverently the
sacred countersign.

By a little fire kindled in the road, the bodies of their foe beside
them, they vowed to each other, mingling their blood from dagger pricks
in the arm. Then they mounted again and rode towards the Neck of Baroob.

In silence they rode awhile, and at last the hillsman said: "If fathers
be brothers-in-blood, behold it is good that sons be also."

By this the lad knew that he was now brother-in-blood to the son of
Pango Dooni.

III. THE CODE OF THE HILLS

"You travel near to Mandakan!" said the lad. "Do you ride with a
thousand men?"

"For a thousand men there are ten thousand eyes to see; I travel alone
and safe," answered Tang-a-Dahit.

"To thrust your head in the tiger's jaw," said Cumner's Son. "Did you
ride to be in at the death of the men of your clan?"

"A man will ride for a face that he loves, even to the Dreadful Gates,"
answered Tang-a-Dahit. "But what is this of the men of my clan?"

Then the lad told him of those whose heads hung on the rear Palace wall,
where the Dakoon lay dying, and why he rode to Pango Dooni.

"It is fighting and fighting, naught but fighting," said Tang-a-Dahit
after a pause; "and there is no peace. It is fighting and fighting,
for honour, and glory, and houses and cattle, but naught for love, and
naught that there may be peace."

Cumner's Son turned round in his saddle as if to read the face of the
man, but it was too dark.

"And naught that there maybe peace." Those were the words of a hillsman
who had followed him furiously in the night ready to kill, who had
cloven the head of a man like a piece of soap, and had been riding even
into Mandakan where a price was set on his head.

For long they rode silently, and in that time Cumner's Son found new
thoughts; and these thoughts made him love the brown hillsman as he had
never loved any save his own father.

"When there is peace in Mandakan," said he at last, "when Boonda Broke
is snapped in two like a pencil, when Pango Dooni sits as Dakoon in the
Palace of Mandakan--"

"There is a maid in Mandakan," interrupted Tanga-Dahit, "and these two
years she has lain upon her bed, and she may not be moved, for the bones
of her body are as the soft stems of the lily, but her face is a perfect
face, and her tongue has the wisdom of God."

"You ride to her through the teeth of danger?"

"She may not come to me, and I must go to her," answered the hillsman.

There w