When he woke the hut was cleared.  The village slept late but he had slept later, for the sun was piercing the unglazed windows and making pattern-work on the earth floor.  He had slept soundly a sleep haunted with nightmares, and he was still dazed as he peered out into the square where men were passing.  He saw a sentry at the door of his hut, which reminded him of his condition.  All the long night he had been far away, fishing, it seemed to him, in a curious place which was Glenavelin, and yet was ever changing to a stranger glen.  It was moonlight, still, bright and warm on all the green hill shoulders.  He remembered that he caught nothing, but had been deliriously happy.  People seemed passing on the bank, Arthur and Wratislaw and Julia Heston, and all his boyhood’s companions.  He talked to them pleasantly, and all the while he was moving up the glen which lay so soft in the moonlight.  He remembered looking everywhere for Alice Wishart, but her face was wanting.  Then suddenly the place seemed to change.  The sleeping glen changed to a black sword-cut among rocks, his friends disappeared, and only George was left.  He remembered that George cried out something and pointed to the gorge, and he knew—­though how he knew it he could not tell—­that the lost Alice was somewhere there before him in the darkness and he must go towards her.  Then he had wakened shivering, for in that darkness there was terror as well as joy.

He went to the door, only to find himself turned back by the sheep-skin sentry, who half unsheathed for his benefit an ugly knife.  He found that his revolver, his sole weapon, had been taken while he slept.  Escape was impossible till his captors should return.

A day of burning sun had followed on the storm.  Out of doors in the scorching glare from the rock there seemed an extraordinary bustle.  It was like the preparations for a march, save that there seemed no method in the activity.  One man burnished a knife, a dozen were cleaning rifles, and all wore the evil-smelling finery with which the hillman decks his person for war.  Their long oiled hair was tied in a sort of rude knot, new and fuller turbans adorned the head, and on the feet were stout slippers of Bokhara make.  Lewis had keen eyesight, and he strove to read the marks on the boxes of cartridges which stood in a corner.  It was not the well-known Government mark which usually brands stolen ammunition.  The three crosses with the crescent above—­he had seen them before, but his memory failed him.  It might have been at Bardur in the inn; it might have been at home in the house of some great traveller.  At any rate the sight boded no good to himself or the border peace.  He thought of George waiting alone at Nazri, and then obediently warning the people at Khautmi.  By this time Andover would know he was missing, and men would be out on a very hopeless search.  At any rate he had done some good, for if the Badas meant marching they would find the garrisons prepared.