Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/137

 coupled with the exaggerated respect paid the medicine chest had helped to carry off her niece. Iskander had seized her—daughter of Arthur Rand and an American citizen—as lightly as he would have pinioned a struggling bird, as callously as he had slain the two men in the Kashgar bazaar.

She looked into the faces of the three. Iskander and the stout chieftain were conversing, utterly oblivious of her. Only Mahmoud regarded her intently, much in the manner of a surgeon surveying the subject of an experimental operation. A surge of rebellion swept through her.

Another woman, less proud, might have congratulated herself on the temporary respite offered. But it was not in Edith's nature to be grateful for immunity or to forget a wrong done her. She was the daughter, young in years, of an aristocratic family, and her pride was still to be reckoned with.

The pride of the Rands was not easily dealt with.

"The skill of Mahmoud guarded the life of Dono-van Khan for the space that I was gone," Iskander was saying, "and now that my task is finished, yours is to begin."

The hands of the girl clenched at her side; her body quivered, and her flushed face became all at once quite pale.

"Do you think that I shall obey—you?"

Mahmoud looked up from his task, struck by the change in her voice. Iskander rose from the stone flags and took a silent stride toward her, snatching from her the yashmak and cloak, baring her set face and torn traveling dress. In front of her eyes he lifted the whip that he still retained.

"Aye, you will obey."