Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/22

 gar, the time of evening prayer for the Moslems who made up the greater part of Kashgar.

Apparently the white man made only one remark.

"Where is Jain Ali Beg?" he asked—referring to his servant.

The serai keeper swore afterward to the governor that the servant had run away, perhaps because he scented trouble in the air.

So the white man sat there, poisoned perhaps by the Moslems of the bazaar. So the governor said; but a Chinese official hates all Mussulmans. Then a curious thing happened.

Those in the serai heard the trample of the camels of a caravan outside, in the alley. They heard the bells of the camels. And the leader of the caravan, the man who holds the nose cord of the first animal in the line, was the one-eyed chap in sheepskins.

The caravan had come down the road from the hills. Nothing unusual in that, of course, because caravan transport is the only way of moving goods in Central Asia and a half dozen of 'em go through Kashgar every day. But this particular caravan didn't have any boxes or anything but a score of dark-skinned hillmen for riders.

It might have come in to the bazaar to load up—only it didn't. The caravan moved down out of the hills in the dust, to enter the bazaar. It stopped just for a moment outside the serai, and the riders took the white man away with them.

That was exactly what they did. Set him on a camel; then the whole string turned and went off with the one-eyed beggar in the lead. They had crossed the old bridge over the moat and disappeared into the dust before the bazaar knew what was happening.