Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/48

 "Kashmir is the garden," he murmured. "Up there it's rather a wilderness, I fear. The law of the white man no longer holds good. Since the War, the tribes are their own masters. What poet said, 'Fate has turned a leaf in the book you and I cannot read'?" He paused to light a cigarette and tossed the match away moodily. "Up yonder, somewhere, Donovan Khan dropped out of sight"

Edith was still gazing at the snow peaks. They fascinated her. There seemed to be no life in them. They loomed against the hard blue of the sky like bulwarks of Jotunheim. What was beyond them?

"I thought at first," Edith smiled whimsically at her own fancy, "that Edouard Monsey might be Donovan Khan. He was so interested in Mr. Whittaker's story. I just wondered, because I like to play at dreaming."

"Dream, by all means, dear child. After all, is it not the stuff our life is made of? Eh, what? Monsey, though, is scarcely the Khan." He eyed her appraisingly. "Curious thing, about a year ago Donovan Khan himself dropped in at my diggings up Gilghit way for the night. He claimed he was looking for some one at Sreenugg'r. I've seldom met a man I liked more. The politicos were furious when I didn't arrest him or some such thing."

"Why?" Edith was surprised. She felt very much out of touch with all that was happening in this place. It was so different from the world in which she had lived and moved.

"Why? Well, all of India would have thanked me for delivering Donovan Khan to the army. Five years ago, just when the War began, Donovan Khan took himself off from here, to go hunting, he said.