A little before midday they reached the Ajmere Gate, and the lumbering cart passed under it. At the farther side the driver stopped his oxen without orders, and Ranjoor Singh stepped out, looking quickly up and down the road. There were people about, but none whom he chose to favor with a second glance.

Close by the gate, almost under the shadow of it, and so drab and dirty as to be almost unnoticeable, there was a little cotton-tented booth, with a stock of lemonade and sweetmeats, that did interest him. He looked three times at it, and at the third look a Mohammedan wriggled out of it and walked away without a word.

"Come!" commanded Ranjoor Singh, and the German got out of the cart, looking not so very much unlike the poor Mohammedan who had gone away.

"Get in there!" The German slipped into the real owner's place. So far as appearances went, he was a very passable sweetmeat and lemonade seller, and Ranjoor Singh proved competent to guard against contingencies.

He picked a long stick out of the gutter and took his stand near by, frowning as he saw a carriage he suspected to be Yasmini's drive under the gate and come to a stand at the roadside, fifty or sixty yards away.

"If the officers should recognize me," he growled to the German, though seeming not to talk to him at all, "I should be arrested at once, and shot later. But the men will recognize me, and you shall see what you shall see!"

Three small boys came with a coin to spend, but Ranjoor Singh drove them away with his long stick; they argued shrilly from a distance, and one threw a stone at him, but finally they decided he was some new sort of plain-clothes "constabeel," and went away.

One after another, several natives came to make small purchases, but, not being boys any longer, a gruff word was enough to send them running. And then came the clatter of hoofs of the advance-guard, and the German looked up to see a fire in Ranjoor Singh's eyes that a caged tiger could not have outdone.

All this while the bullock-cart in which they had come remained in the middle of the road, its driver dozing dreamily on his seat and the bullocks perfectly content to chew the cud. At the sound of the hoofs behind him, the driver suddenly awoke and began to belabor and kick his animals; he seemed oblivious of another cart that came toward him, and of a third that hurried after him from underneath the gate.