There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to make the compass seem like a lie-begotten trick.  There were gorges, hewn when the Titans needed dirt to build the awful Himalayas—­ shadow-darkened—­sheer as the edge of Nemesis.  Long-reaching, pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them.  The wind blew through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din which rides with armed men.

But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part of them, they tracked and trailed—­and viewed at last.  Their shout gave Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue, and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small, flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time.  His companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry—­his was the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan fresh villainies.  He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the uselessness, and stood.

The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which the man at bay could no more escape than a fire-ringed scorpion.

“Call on him to surrender!” ordered Cunningham.

A chevroned black-beard half a horse-length behind him translated the demand into stately Pashtu, and for answer the hill chieftain mounted his stolen horse and shook his tulwar.  He had pistols at his belt, but he did not draw them; across his shoulder swung a five-foot-long jezail, but he loosed it and flung it to the ground.

“Is there any here dare take me single-handed?” he demanded with a grin.

Of the eight-and-eighty, there were eighty-eight who dared; but there was an eighty-ninth, a lad of not yet twenty-two, whom Indian chivalry desired to honor.  The troop had heard but the troop had not yet seen.

“Ride in and take him!” ordered Cunningham and there was a thoroughly well acted make-believe of fear, while every eye watched “Cunnigan-bahadur,” and the horses, spurred and reined at once, pranced at their bits for just so long as a good man needs to make his mind up.  And Cunningham rode in.

He rode in as a Rajput rides, with a swoop and a swinging sabre and a silent, tight-lipped vow that he would prove himself.  Green though he was yet, he knew that the troop had found for him—­had rounded up for him—­had made him his opportunity; so he took it, right under their eyes, straight in the teeth of the stoutest tulwar man of the lower Himalayas.

He, too, had pistols at his belt, but there was no shot fired.  There was nothing but a spur-loosed rush and a shock—­a spark-lit, swirling, slashing, stamping, snorting melee—­a stallion and a mare up-ended—­two strips of lightning steel that slit the wind—­and a thud, as a lifeless border robber took the turf.