llahs and a Camel

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH Kaluja Dass, Khansaman

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH Within the Gates

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH The Coming of Bakht Khan

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH The Doctor's Divan

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH The Spoilers Spoiled

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH Asadullah

CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH Wolf and Jackal

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST Master and Servant

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND The Fight of Bakr-Id

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD Ordeal

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH Nikalsain

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH The Storming of Delhi

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH Eighty to One

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH Duty

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

The Raid

Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan, chief of the village of Shagpur, was making
his lonely way through the hills some three miles above his home. He
could see the walled village perched on a little tract of grassy land
just where the base of the hills met the sandy plain. It was two
thousand feet or more below him, and he could almost count the
flat-topped houses clustered beyond his father's tower, which, though
actually it rose to some height above them, dominating them, and
affording an outlook over miles and miles of the plain, yet appeared to
Ahmed, at his present altitude, merely a patch in the general level.

Between him and the village lay three miles of grey rugged hill country,
scarred with watercourses, and almost void of vegetation. A mile away,
indeed, there was a long stretch of woodland, lying like a great green
smudge upon the monotony of grey. It was a patch of irregular shape,
narrowing here, broadening there, filling a valley which bent round
towards the village. Ahmed was accustomed to shoot there occasionally,
but he preferred the more exciting and more dangerous sport of hunting
on the hills, where he might stalk his quarry from crag to crag, leaping
ravines, swarming up abrupt and precipitous cliffs, always in peril of a
fall that might break his limbs even if it did not crash the life out of
him. For Ahmed was of a daring disposition, fearless, undauntable, yet
possessed of a certain coolness of judgment by which he had hitherto
brought himself unscathed through sixteen years of adventurous boyhood.

He was a tall, slim, lissom fellow, with very black hair and a swarthy
skin, which set off the spotless white of his turban. He wore the loose
frock and baggy trousers of the country. Yet one observing him would
have marked certain diffe