There would be an instant, eager restlessness, while Ali Partab would glance over to where the horses stood, and would wonder why the word that loosed him was so long in coming. The hadji would calm his listeners and tell them to get ready, but be still and await the sign.
"There were to be one hundred years, ran the prophecy; but ninety-nine and a portion have yet run. Wait for the hour!"
Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, Ali Partab would pretend that movement alone could save one or other of his horses from heat apoplexy. He would mount, and ride at a walking pace through the streets that seemed like a night view of a stricken battle-field, turn down by the palace wall, and then canter to the schoolhouse, where the hag--wiser than her mistress--would be sleeping in the open.
"Thou! Mother of a murrain! Toothless one! Is there no word yet?"
The hag would leer up through the heavy darkness--make certain that he had no lance with him with which to prod her in the ribs--scratch herself a time or two like a stray dog half awakened--and then leer knowingly.
"Hast thou the gold mohurs?" she would demand.
He would take out two gold coins and hold them out in such a way that she could look at them without the opportunity to snatch.
"There is no word yet," she would answer, when her eyes had feasted on them as long as his patience would allow.
"See that they bite thee not! Keep thy wits with thee, and be ready to bring me word in time, else--"
"Patience, sahib! Show me the coins again--one little look--again once!"
But Ali Partab would wheel and ride away, leaving her to mumble and gibber in the road and curl again on to her blanket in the blackest corner by the door.
Once, on an expedition of that kind, he encountered Duncan McClean himself. The lean, tall Scotsman, gray-headed from the cares he had taken on himself, a little bowed from heat and hopelessness, but showing no least symptom of surrender in the kind, strong lines of a rugged face, stood, eyes upward, in the moonlight. The moon, at least, looked cool. It was at the full, like a disk of silver, and he seemed to drink in the beams that bathed him.
"Does he worship it?" wondered Ali Partab, reining from an amble to a walk and watching half-reverently. The followers of Mohammed are most superstitious about the moon. The feeling that he had for this man of peace who could so gaze up at it was something very like respect, and, with the twenty-second sense that soldiers have, he knew, without a word spoken or a deed seen done, that this would be a wielder of cold steel to be reckoned should he ever slough the robes of peace and take it into his silvered head to fight. The Rajput, that respects decision above all other virtues, perhaps because it is the one that he most lacks, could sense firm, unshakable, quick-seized determination on the instant.