But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for "all she's got." And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across her rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.
But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and waited for somebody to open it.
The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons—yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!
The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture repair. The walls were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan's devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.
The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.
As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King's own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized hailed him good-humoredly.
"Salaam aleikoum!"
"And upon thee be peace!" King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the "Hills" are polite, whatever the other principles.
Rewa Gunga's face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it seemed to him that the smile said, "Here you are, my man, and aren't you in for it?" He more than half suspected he was intended to understand that. But the Rangar's conversation took another line.
