Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/183

  this thing for the Sayaks" he broke off. "After I started on this venture, I stopped at one of our advanced posts, an English station, for supplies and weapons. There I spent the night with a fine old chap. He was practically alone at the station. We fell to talking. First about the service, you know, and then about ourselves. He seemed to be lonely."

Donovan paused, with his habitual reluctance to explain anything about himself.

"This man was a friend of your mother. He had been often in your United States, and visited her home. Said the hospitality he received was a kind of landmark in his life. He—loved your mother and asked her to marry him. But he didn't win out. Another man, you know. It was a fair field and a good fight, he said."

Edith was intensely interested.

She understood now why Fraser-Carnie had befriended her, knowing that the old officer cherished the memory of her mother. It was clear that he and the adventurer—so she thought of her companion—had met at Gilghit.

"So Major Fraser-Carnie was your friend, too," she mused, and then added impulsively, "I feel sure he and my father will trace me to Kashgar, in time, and then they will come here" "Not without a guide from the Sayaks themselves. From the tower itself, down the ravine, Yakka Arik can't be seen. And then there are the guards."

Edith was immersed in her new thought.

"But you say that Iskander is master of the armed guards and that you have equal rank with him. Donovan Khan, surely this man in the temple who has authority, as you say, even over Mahmoud and