It was an education to see her face change,
as she stood and eyed those women, first accepting the challenge,
because of her own indomitable spirit, then realizing that they could
not be browbeaten into bravery, as men often can be, but that they must
be yielded to if they were not to stampede from under her hand. She
stood there reading them as a two-gun man might read the posse that had
summoned him to surrender; and she deliberately chose surrender, with
all the future chances that entailed, rather than the certain, absolute
defeat that was the alternative. But she carried a high hand even while
surrendering.

"You are afraid, all you women?" she exclaimed with one of her golden
laughs. "Well--who shall blame you? This is too much to ask of you so
soon. We will let the Mahatma go and take his friends with him. You may
go!" she said, nodding regally to us three.

But that was not enough for some of them. The she-bear with her cubs in
Springtime is a mild creature compared to a woman whose ancient
prejudices have been interfered with, and a typhoon is more reasonable.
Half-a-dozen of them screamed that two of us were white men who had
trespassed within the purdah, and that we should be killed.

"Come!" urged the Mahatma, tugging at King and me. We went out of that
hall at a dead run with screams of "Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!"
shrilling behind us. And it may be that Yasmini conceded that point too,
or perhaps she was unable to prevent, for we heard swift footsteps
following, and I threw off that fifteen thousand dollar toga in order to
be able to run more swiftly.

The Mahatma seemed to know that palace as a rat knows the runs among the
tree-roots, and he took us down dark passages and stairs into the open
with a speed that, if it did not baffle pursuit, at any rate made it
easier for pursuers to pretend to lose us. Yasmini was no fool. She
probably called the pursuit off.

We emerged into the same courtyard, where the marble stairs descended to
the pool containing one great alligator. And we hurried from court to
court to the same cage where the panther pressed himself against the
bars, simultaneously showing fangs at King and me, and begging to have
his ears rubbed. The Mahatma opened the cage-door, again using no key
that I could detect, although it was a padlock that he unfastened and
shoved the brute to one side, holding him by the scruff of the neck
while King and I made swift tracks for the door at th