carry the weight that goes with friendliness.  He soon discovered what the feeling was toward Ranjoor Singh, and somehow or other he found out what the Turk was talking about.  After that he took the Turk’s cue (although he sincerely despised Turks) and began with hint and jest to propagate lust for loot in the men’s minds.  Partly, I think, he planned to enrich himself and buy his way to safety—­(although God knows in which direction he thought safety lay!).  Partly, I think, he hoped to bring us to destruction, and so perhaps offset his offense of having yielded to our threats, hoping in that way to rehabilitate himself.  So goes a lawyer to court, sure of a fee if his client wins, yet sure, too, of a fee if his client loses, enjoying profit and entertainment in any event.  Yet who shall blame Tugendheim?  Unlike a lawyer, he stood to take the consequences if both forks of the stick should fail.  I told Ranjoor Singh all that Tugendheim and the Turk were saying to the men, and his brow darkened, although he made no comment.  He did not trust me yet any more than he felt compelled to.

“Send Abraham to me,” he said at last.  So I went and sent Abraham, feeling jealous that the Syrian should hear what I might not.

Ranjoor Singh had been forcing the pace, and by the time I speak of now we had nearly crossed that desert, for a rim of hills was in front of us and all about.  It was not true desert, such as we have in our Punjab, but a great plain already showing promise of the spring, with the buds of countless flowers getting ready to burst open; when we lay at rest it amused us to pluck them and try to determine what they would look like when their time should come.  And besides flowers there were roots, remarkably good to eat, that the Syrians called “daughters of thunder,” saying that was the local name.  Tugendheim called them truffles.  A little water and that desert would be fertile farm-land, or I never saw corn grow!

Ranjoor Singh conversed with Abraham until we entered a defile between the hills; and that night we camped in a little valley with our outposts in a ring around us, Ranjoor Singh sitting by a bright fire half-way up the side of a slope where he could overlook us all and be alone.  We had seen mounted men two or three times that day, they mistaking us perhaps for Turkish troops, for they vanished after the first glimpse.  Nevertheless, we tethered our horses close in the valley bottom, and lay around them, ready for all contingencies.

I remember that night well, for it was the first since we started eastward in the least to resemble our Indian nights.  It made us feel homesick, and some of the men were crooning love-songs.  The stars swung low, looking as if a man could almost reach them, and the smoke of our fires hung sweet on the night air.  I was listening to Abraham’s tales about Turks—­tales to make a man bite his beard—­ when Ranjoor Singh called me in a voice that carried far without making much noise. (I have never known him to raise his voice so high or loud that it lost dignity.) “Hira Singh!” he called, and I answered “Ha, sahib!” and went clambering up the hill.