Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/264



His senses reeled as he pictured it all: the girl he loved—the rough Afghan charpadar who had kidnaped her—the …

No, no!

For a moment, subconsciously, as much out of pity and love for the girl as pity for himself, he tried to force the conviction on his mind that the reality could not be half as bad, as appalling, as dreadfully anguishing, as the fantastic terrors of his imagination. Later on, thinking of the experience, he would say that during that minute his heart was pierced with all the accumulated sufferings of humanity since first God and the Devil fought over the soul of Cain.

Jane—Jane Warburton—at the mercy of an Afghan charpadar, a lawless hillman who brooked no master except his own passion, his own greed, his own cruelty!

In the midst of all that eddying swirl of teeming, turbaned humanity who, sensing the tragedy, looked at him, some with sympathy, some with wonder, others, the majority, with frank curiosity, he felt utterly alone—racially alone, than which there is no worse loneliness in all the world.

A sharp pain tugged at his heart. His knees tottered. The low-dipping sun seemed to swing to and fro in a blazing brownish-yellow pendulum. A flood of red color with broad, interlacing veins floated before his eyes.

Again—and, being a strong man, physically, and unconsciously proud of the fact, he was ashamed even as he realized it—he came near to fainting; and then,