ust-living man,
horribly slashed. It was Moussa Isa Somali who improvised a stretcher
and lifted this poor fellow on to it and tended him with the greatest
solicitude and faithful care. Was he not Jones Sahib who at Duri gave
him the knife wherewith he cleansed his honour and avenged his insulted
People?

Of the picket, nine lay dead and one dying. Of the dead, one had his
lower jaw neatly and cleanly removed by a bullet. Two had bled to death.

"'Ullo, Guvner!" whispered Corporal Horace Faggit through parched
cracked lips. "We kep' 'em orf. We 'eld the bleedin' fort," and the last
effect of the departing mind upon the shot-torn, knife-slashed body was
manifested in a gasping, quavering wail of--

"'Owld the Fort fer Hi am comin'"
Jesus whispers still.
"'Owld the Fort fer Hi am comin,'"
--By Thy graice we will.

Each of these corpses Moussa Isa carried reverently down to the Prison
that they might be "buried darkly at dead of night" with the other
heroes, in softer ground without the walls--a curious funeral in which
loaded rifles and belted maxim played their silent part. Apart from the
honoured dead was buried the body of Private Augustus Grabble, shot
against the Prison wall by order of Colonel Ross-Ellison for cowardice
in the face of the enemy and desertion of his post. So was that of
Private Green, deserter also. After the uninterrupted ceremony, Moussa
Isa, in the guise of an ancient beggar, lame, decrepit, and bandaged
with foul rags, sought the city and the news of the bazaar.

Limping down the lane in which stood the tall silent house that his
master often visited, he saw three men emerge from the well-known low
doorway.

Two approached him while one departed in the opposite direction. One of
these two held the arm of the other.

"I must hear his voice again. I have not heard his voice again," urged
this one insistently to the other.

"Nay--but I have heard thine, thou Dog!" said Moussa Isa to himself, and
turning, followed.

In a neighbouring bazaar the man who seemed to lead the other left him
at the entrance to a mosque--a dark and greasy entry with a short flight
of stone steps.

As he set his foot upon the lowest of these, a hand fell upon the neck
of the man who had been led, and a voice hissed:--

"_Salaam! O Ibrahim the Weeper!_ Salaam! A '_Hubshi_' would speak with
thee...." and another hand joined the first, encircling his throat....

"Art thou dead, Dog?" snarled