ing workmanlike. If the Turk had not been a fat one I should not
be here. Luckily, I had chosen one whose weight made me grunt, and
because of his thickness the bayonet only pierced an inch or two of
my thigh.

I yelled and kicked the body off me. The trooper made as if to use
the steel again, thinking we were two Turks, and my pointing a
pistol at him only served to confirm the belief. But next minute the
lightning showed the true facts, and he came and sat beside me with
his back to the hail, grinning like an ape.

"That was a good thrust of mine!" he bellowed in my ear. "But for me
that Turk would have had your life!"

When I had cursed his mother's ancestors for a dozen generations in
some detail the truth dawned on him at last. I took his weapon away
from him while he bound a strip of cloth about my thigh, for I knew
the thought had come into his thick skull to finish me off and so
save explanation afterward. I would gladly have let him go with
nothing further said, for I knew the man's first intention had been
honest enough, but did not dare do that because he would certainly
suppose me to be meditating vengeance. So I flew into a great rage
with him, and drove him in front of me until we found a dead
mule--whether killed by hail or bullet I don't know--and he and I lay
between the mule's legs, snuggling under its belly, until the storm
should cease and I could take him before Ranjoor Singh.

I did not know where the gold was, nor where anything or anybody
was. I could see about three yards, except when the lightning
flashed; and then I could see only stricken plain, with dead animals
lying about, and fallen tents lumpy with the men who huddled
underneath, and here and there a live animal with his rump to the
hail and head between his forelegs.

When the storm ceased, suddenly, as all such mountain hail-storms
do, I ordered my trooper in front of me and went limping through the
darkness shouting for Ranjoor Singh, and I found him at last,
sitting on the rump of a dead donkey with the ten boxes of gold coin
beside him--quite little boxes, yet only two to a donkey load.

"I have the gold," he said. "What have you?"

"A stab," said I, "and the fool who gave it me!" And I showed my
leg, with the blood trickling down. "I had killed a Turk," said I,
"and this muddlehead with no discernment had the impudence to try to
finish the job. Behold the result!"

He was one great bruise from head to foot from hailstones