ten thousand from a land where there is never peace, only truce.
In seven days. Salaam, heaven born!"

She returned his ironical gaze calmly over the shoulder of a trooper.

"Wait," she said. "I wish you to understand the enormity of your
crime."

"Crime?" with elevated eyebrows.

"Yes. You have abducted me."

"No. You came of your own free will."

"The white men of my race will not pause to argue over any such
subtlety. Marry you? I do not like your color."

A dull red settled under Umballa's skin.

"I merely wish to warn you," she went on, "that my blood will be upon
your head. And woe to you if it is. There are white men who will not
await the coming of the British Raj."

"Ah, yes; some brave hardy American; Bruce Sahib, for instance. Alas,
he is in the Straits Settlements! Seven days."

"I am not afraid to die."

"But there are many kinds of death," and with this sinister reflection
he stepped aside.

The multitude, seeing Kathlyn coming down from the dais, still
surrounded by her cordon of troopers, began reluctantly to disperse.
"Bread and the circus!"--the mobs will cry it down the ages; they will
always pause to witness bloodshed, from a safe distance, you may be
sure. There was a deal of rioting in the bazaars that night, and many
a measure of bhang and toddy kept the fires burning. Oriental politics
is like the winds of the equinox: it blows from all directions.

The natives were taxed upon every conceivable subject, not dissimilar
to the old days in Urdu, where a man paid so much for the privilege of
squeezing the man under him. Mutiny was afoot, rebellion, but it had
not yet found a head. The natives wanted a change, something to gossip
about during the hot lazy afternoons, over their hookas and coffee. To
them reform meant change only, not the alleviation of some of their
heavy burdens. The talk of freeing slaves was but talk; slaves were
lucrative investments; a man would be a fool to free them. An old man,
with a skin white like this new queen's and hair like spun wool,
dressed in a long black cloak and a broad brimmed hat, had started the
agitation of liberating the slaves. More than that, he carried no idol
of his God, never bathed in the ghats, or took flowers to the temples,
and seemed always silently communing with the simple iron cross
suspended from his neck. But he had died during the last visitation of
the plague.

They had wearied of their tolerant king, who