thered tight the cord to their nostrils, whisked the cart to the
roadside where it toppled over the bank for a fall of fifteen feet into
a ravine, carrying bullocks and driver with it.

The moonlight fell full upon the face of the horseman, its light making
still whiter the face of Captain Barlow.

And Bootea recognised him. It was the face that had been in her vision
night and day since the _nautch_.

"Save me, Sahib!" she cried; "these men are thieves; save me, Sahib!"

The hunting crop in Barlow's hand crashed upon the thick head of Hunsa
in ready answer to the appeal. And as the sahib threw himself from the
saddle the jamadar, with a snarl like a wounded tiger, dropped the girl
and, whirling, grappled with the Englishman.

Barlow was strong; few men in the force, certainly none in the
officers' mess, could put him on his back; and he was lithe, supple as
a leopard; and in combat cool, his mind working like the mind of a
chess player: but he realised that the arms about him were the arms of
a gorilla, the chest against which he was being crushed was the chest
of a trained wrestler; a smaller man would have heard his bones
cracking in that clutch.

He raised a knee and drove it into the groin of the jamadar; then in
the slight slackening of the holding arms as the Bagree shrank from the
blow, he struck at the bearded chin; it was the clean, trained
short-arm jab of a boxer.

But even as the gorilla wavered staggeringly under the blow, a soft
something slipped about Barlow's throat and tightened like the coils of
a python. And behind something was pressing him to his death. The
other Bagree springing to the assistance of Hunsa had looped his
_roomal_ about the Sahib's throat with the art of a thug.

Barlow's senses were going; his brain swam; in his fancy he had been
shot from a cliff and was hurtling through space in which there was no
air--his lungs had closed; in his brain a hammer was beating him into
unconsciousness.

Then suddenly the pressure on his throat ceased, it fell away; the air
rushed to the parched lungs. With a wrench his brain cleared, and he
went down; but now with power in his arms, the arms that still clung
about the dazed Hunsa, and he was on top.

Scarce aware of the action, out of a fighting instinct, he dragged from
its holster his heavy pistol, and beat with its butt the ugly head
beneath, beat it till it was still. Then he staggered to his feet and
looked wonderingly at the