rs, ran the prophecy; but ninety-nine
and a portion have yet run. Wait for the hour!"

Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, Ali Partab would pretend that
movement alone could save one or other of his horses from heat apoplexy.
He would mount, and ride at a walking pace through the streets that
seemed like a night view of a stricken battle-field, turn down by the
palace wall, and then canter to the schoolhouse, where the hag--wiser
than her mistress--would be sleeping in the open.

"Thou! Mother of a murrain! Toothless one! Is there no word yet?"

The hag would leer up through the heavy darkness--make certain that
he had no lance with him with which to prod her in the ribs--scratch
herself a time or two like a stray dog half awakened--and then leer
knowingly.

"Hast thou the gold mohurs?" she would demand.

"Am I a sieve?"

"Let my old eyes see them, sahib."

He would take out two gold coins and hold them out in such a way that
she could look at them without the opportunity to snatch.

"There is no word yet," she would answer, when her eyes had feasted on
them as long as his patience would allow.

"Have they no fear then?"

"None. Only madness!"

"See that they bite thee not! Keep thy wits with thee, and be ready to
bring me word in time, else--"

"Patience, sahib! Show me the coins again--one little look--again once!"

But Ali Partab would wheel and ride away, leaving her to mumble and
gibber in the road and curl again on to her blanket in the blackest
corner by the door.

Once, on an expedition of that kind, he encountered Duncan McClean
himself. The lean, tall Scotsman, gray-headed from the cares he had
taken on himself, a little bowed from heat and hopelessness, but showing
no least symptom of surrender in the kind, strong lines of a rugged
face, stood, eyes upward, in the moonlight. The moon, at least, looked
cool. It was at the full, like a disk of silver, and he seemed to drink
in the beams that bathed him.

"Does he worship it?" wondered Ali Partab, reining from an amble to a
walk and watching half-reverently. The followers of Mohammed are most
superstitious about the moon. The feeling that he had for this man of
peace who could so gaze up at it was something very like respect, and,
with the twenty-second sense that soldiers have, he knew, without a word
spoken or a deed seen done, that this would be a wielder of cold steel
to be reckoned should he ever slough the robes of peace and take it in