ene had shifted with a vengeance, and his first and sole impulse
was to laugh. It is possible that if the scarf of a brawny tribesman
had not been so tight across his chest he would have astonished his
captors with hysterical laughter. But the jolt as he was dragged up
hill, tied close to a horse's side, was unfavourable to merriment, and
raw despondency filled his soul. This was the end of his fine doings.
The prisoner of unknown bandits, hurried he knew not whence, a pretty
pass for an adventurer. This was the seal on his ineffectiveness. Shot
against a rock, held up to some sordid ransom, he was as impotent for
good or ill as if he had stayed at home. For a second he longed to pull
horse and captor with one wrench over the brink to the kindly gulf where
all was quiet.

The bitterest ill-humour possessed this meekest of men. Normally he
would have been afraid, for he was an imaginative being who feared
horrors and had little relish for them. But there is a certain perfect
bad temper which casteth out fear, and this held him in its grip. He
cursed the mountain solitude and he cursed the Bada-Mawidi with awful
directness. Then he chose silence as the easier part, and trudged like
a stolid criminal till, half in a daze of weariness and sleep, he found
that the cavalcade had halted.

The place was the edge of a little tableland where in a hollow among
rocks lay a collection of mud-walled huts. A fire, in spite of the damp
weather, blazed cheerfully in the midst of the clearing. There was
commotion in the huts, every door was opened, and evil-smelling people
poured forth with cries and questions. The leader of the newly arrived
party bowed himself before a short, square man whom we have met before,
and spoke something in his ear. Fazir Khan looked up sharply at Lewis,
then laughed, and spoke something to his men in his own tongue.

Lewis comprehended barely a few words of Chil, the Bada tongue, and he
knew little of the frontier speeches. But to his amazement the chief
addressed him in tolerable, if halting, English. It was not for nothing
that Fazir Khan had harried the Border and sojourned incognito in every
town in North India.

"Allah has given thee to us, my son," he said sweetly. "It is vain to
fight against God. I have heard of thee as the Englishman who would
know more than is good for man to know. You were at Forza to-day."

Lewis's temper was at its worst. "I was at Forza to-day, and I watched
your people ru