curved cimeter--had broken through with a dozen at his
back. He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of
the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the
overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.

"Mr. Cunningham! Take your troop, please, and find their chief! Hunt him
out, ride him down, and get him! Don't come back until you do!"

The real thing! The real red thing within a year! A lone
command--and that is the only thing a subaltern of spunk may pray
for!--eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the
opportunity to show their worth--lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no
commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight--as sure as God made
mountains, a fight at the other end! There are men here and there who
think that the day when they pass down a crowded aisle with Her is the
great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun. And there
are others. There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming
of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit
out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the
other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.

There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to
make the compass seem like a lie-begotten trick. There were
gorges, hewn when the Titans needed dirt to build the awful
Himalayas--shadow-darkened--sheer as the edge of Nemesis. Long-reaching,
pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them. The wind blew
through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din
which rides with armed men.

But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part
of them, they tracked and trailed--and viewed at last. Their shout gave
Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue,
and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small,
flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time. His
companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the
rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry--his was
the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan
fresh villainies. He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the
uselessness, and stood.

The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of
him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which
the man at bay could no more escape than