Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/27

 listener laid down his cards entirely, with the game half finished, and began to tap upon the green surface of the table with blunt, powerful fingers.

"And Jain Ali Beg was glad to be arrested. He had been running away because he was very much afraid. Not of arrest, but of something in Kashgar. Perhaps, of the caravan. Picture the scene to yourself—a lonely hill station with the British officer standing at the door of his quarters talking to the fear-sick native.

"The next moment Jain Ali Beg was lying on the doorstep, knifed. And the murderer who had come up behind the house was my friend of the sheepskins—One-Eye, the personal conductor of the caravan. The queer chap actually took the pains to explain why he had killed Jain Ali Beg. He said:

"For the space of three moons I have followed in the tracks of this one'—he pointed to the body—'to give to a faithless servant the reward that he has stored up for himself.'

"Then One-Eye vanished around the bungalow and, by George, the native servants of the station refused to try to follow him! They said a curious thing. They said:

"'Sahib, when the lightning strikes, does any one follow?'

"And that," Whittaker concluded triumphantly, "that, my dear Miss Rand, was precisely what the natives of the Kashgar bazaar said when the caravan came and carried off your white man. Strange, what?"

"Are you sure," questioned a quiet voice beside them, "the man was really dead?"

Edith Rand observed that the card player had turned