Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/125

 "Abbas Abad, the Alaman slave dealer—he that did this"—pointing impatiently at Aravang. "You fled to him. Why?"

"No, Iskander," she had made answer quietly, "I do not know of him. He offered me a horse. In the serai he called me by name"

It was a short, bitter expletive, wrung from the Arab. "Do not be so foolish again. You cannot escape. So," he went on almost to himself, "Abbas Abad knew that you were with the caravan. He must have others with him, since he dared lift hand against the caravan. For he has not forgotten our law—blood for blood, a blow for a blow"

At this he fell silent, gazing keenly about the mountain slopes. The aspect of the countryside had changed. The barren gorges and black torrents had given way to sparkling valleys where the early sunlight glimmered on white carpets of dew. Occasionally the yurts—around felt tents—of a nomad settlement were to be seen, where small, muffled girls astride huge oxen stared at them, and cattle, children, and dogs littered the lush grass in happy confusion.

Tranquil Kirghiz bargained with their driver for relays of horses. They threaded sunny gullies, crashing through willow clumps and shallow, pebbly freshets, following an invisible path that was not the least semblance of a road. The rock shrines had given way to tiny blue and red mosques.

Edith wondered whether they had crossed the roof of the world to the region behind the Himalayas, and decided they had. She had seen a corpulent Chinese mandarin—at least he resembled the pictures she had come across, of mandarins—joggling along behind a