Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/45

 Once when Fraser-Carnie's eye traveled to the box she fancied that he smiled.

"I have a duty to perform. Miss Rand," he observed. "A mutual acquaintance, Whittaker by name, a very talkative chap you know, has written me. His stories are quite a religion with him and he complains that you did not believe one of his yarns." He glanced quizzically from the attentive girl to her aunt. "About the man who was missing from Kashgar, and all that. It's quite true. There is his outfit, in that box."

He nodded at the bamboo chest on the window seat.

"Then, his name was Donovan Khan?" Edith asked.

"Quite so, to be sure. Donovan Khan."

Edith was interested. For the first time she felt the reality of the odd story Whittaker had told. At the Château she had hardly thought of it as true—until Monsey had chimed in. Monsey? She frowned.

And then she drew a startled breath. Whittaker had said that the native who had been leading the caravan at Kashgar, the one who had killed Jain Ali Beg, had been blind in one eye.

It had just occurred to Edith that the big native who visited the drawing-room that evening had not seen her until long after she had seen him. Then he had turned clear around to look at her. There had been a scar, running from his mouth to his eye—the eye that must be blind.

"Edith, my dear," her aunt was staring through her lorgnette, "you are not ill, are you?"

She shook her head, laughing. "Only excited, Auntie." Major Fraser-Carnie had said that the Kashmiris