You!" she said in a bleak voice of desolation and fright. "Dear
heaven, that horrible Margot's confederate, the King of the Apaches!"

"Yes!" he rapped out. "You and that fellow Cleek came between us in one
promising game, but I'm hanged if you shall do it in this one! I want
this boy, and--I've got him. Now, you call off Cleek and tell him to
drop this case--to make no effort to follow us or to come between us and
the kid--or I'll slit your throat after I've done with his little
lordship here. Lanisterre!"--to the chauffeur--"Lanisterre, do you
hear?"

"_Oui, monsieur_."

"Give her her head--full speed--and get to the mill as fast as you can.
Margot will be with us in another two hours' time."

CHAPTER XXI

Through the ever-deepening dusk Cleek and Arjeeb Noosrut moved onward
together; and onward behind them moved, too, the same dilatory messenger
boy who had loitered about in the neighbourhood of the park, squandering
his halfpence now as then, leaving a small trail of winkle shells and
trotter bones to mark the record of his passage, and never seeming to
lose one iota of his appetite, eat as much and as often as he would.

The walk led down into the depths of Soho, that refuge of the foreign
element in London; but long before they halted at the narrow doorway of
a narrow house in a narrow side street--a street that seemed to have
gone to sleep in an atmosphere of gloom and smells--Cleek had adroitly
"pumped" Arjeeb Noosrut dry, and the riddle of the sacred son was a
riddle to him no longer. He was now only anxious to part from the man
and return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his
mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting
precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out
of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the
full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap
theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow
had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into
the murk and gloom of the ill-lit street, and was straining his eyes as
if in search for someone long expected.

"Dog of an infidel!" exclaimed Arjeeb Noosrut, speaking in Hindustani,
and spitting on the pavement as he caught sight of the man. "See,
well-beloved, he is of those 'others' of which I spoke when I first met
thee. There are many of them, but true believers none. They dwell in a