hen, through the open windows of the next carriage, there came
forth a voice of thunder--articulate, unparliamentary thunder: and Lenox,
with a touch of friendly authority, drew Honor farther away.

"That's old Buckstick," Bobby explained genially. "Giving it to his poor
devil of a bearer, because he wants to hit out at some one. They say in
the regiment that some fool of a palmist told him to beware of cholera;
and I believe the old chap's in a blue funk. Queer thing, funk. Put
that man on an unbroken horse, or in the thick of a hand-to-hand
scrimmage, and he wouldn't know the meaning of fear. Yet now . . ."

His dissertation was interrupted by the appearance at the window of
Colonel Stanham Buckley of the Punjab Infantry, who mopped a moist bald
head, and inquired picturesquely of a passing official when the blank
this blankety blank train was supposed to start. Then catching sight of
a woman's figure, he vanished, with a final incoherent explosion,
slamming up the window-shutter behind him.

How the devil, he asked himself furiously, should a sane man expect
to find an Englishwoman hanging about Lahore station on a murderous
night of July? The idea that she might be travelling to Dera never
entered his head. His own wife, after five years of Frontier
vicissitudes,--aggravated by debt, and the tyranny of 'little drinks at
mess,'--had developed pronounced views on the duties of motherhood.
These had led to a house in Surrey, which, for one reason or another, it
had never yet seemed feasible to give up: and Buckley had consoled
himself after the fashion of his kind, with hard drinking, hard riding,
and hard swearing,--the only form of Trinity recognised by a certain type
of man.

And as he opened his ice-box, and helped himself to a stiff 'nightcap'
before turning in, Desmond joined the group outside.

"Come on, you two," he said, grasping an arm of each, "Dogs and luggage,
and carriage all square. We shall be off in a minute. Only half an hour
behind time! See you again at Chichawutni, Nick. Don't lie too flat,
and get apoplexy. We can't afford to lose willing men!"

They met again, all six of them, on the Chichawutni platform, in a dry
hot dawn; for they were nearing the desolation of the Sindh Sagar desert,
where the monsoon is a negligible quantity. Lenox, who had neither slept
nor smoked all night, looked rather more ragged than usual in the clear
light; but otherwise seemed to be bearing the jou