Page:Rajmohan's Wife.djvu/85

Rh "For Heaven's sake descend from my bosom," said Rajmohan, gasping for breath. The heavy burden of the bandit's body was pressing on his chest and at length became unsupportable even to his strength and iron frame. "Release me. I swear to you by my patron God it was not so. I swear to you by my mother I did not know it."

"How did your wife do it then?" enquired the bandit chief in the same tone as before.

With this question he alighted from the breast of the other, but kept a hold on his throat by a light grasp prepared to tighten at the least hostile movement from his prisoner.

"Could it not be" said Rajmohan, now breathing free, "that she had only counterfeited sleep when I saw her?"

"Ha! ha! you take me for a fool" said the sardar with a gurgling laugh, "I wanted to stand off from the wall, you made me come to the wall; why was that? Why, but for this treachery? You have betrayed us to Madhav Ghose; who can say you will [not] betray [us] to the police also, for that man will protect you? You must die or there is no safety for [us. You] gave us the slip very smartly or you would not live till now."

"And what?" exclaimed Rajmohan with a sudden vehemence, "what did you see when you came in? Was I not going to murder the very woman whom [you] say I employed as my agent? But for your interference [she] would have been a corpse now."

"Han" exclaimed the sardar in an altered