“Nay, she never mentions him by name.” “Art thou a man of thy word?” King asked. “When it suits me.” “There was a promise regarding my reward.” “Name it, hakim! We will see.” “Go tell the mullah Muhammad Anim where I sit!” The fellow laughed. He considered himself tricked; one could read that plainly enough; for taking polite messages does not come within the Hills' elastic code of izzat, although carrying a challenge is another matter. Yet he felt grateful for the hakim's service and was ready to seize the first cheap means of squaring the indebtedness. “Keep my place!” he ordered, getting up. He growled it, as some men speak to dogs, because growling soothed his ruffled vanity. He helped himself noisily to snuff then and began to clear a passage, kicking out to right and left and laughing when his victims protested. Before he had traversed fifty yards he had made himself more enemies than most men dare aspire to in a lifetime, and he seemed well pleased with the fruit of his effort. The dance went on for fifteen minutes yet, but then--quite unexpectedly--all the arena guards together fired a volley at the roof, and the dance stopped as if every dancer had been hit. The spectators were set surging by the showers of stone splinters, that hurt whom they struck, and their snarl was like a wolf-pack's when a tiger interferes. But the guards thought it all a prodigious joke and the more the crowd swore the more they laughed. Panting--foaming at the mouth, some of them--the dancers ran to their seats and set the crowd surging again, leaving the arena empty of all but the guards. The man whose seat Ismail had taken came staggering, slippery with sweat, and squeezed himself where he belonged, forcing King into the Pathan's empty place. Ismail threw his arms round the man and patted him, calling him “mighty dancer,” “son of the wind,” “prince of prancers,” “prince of swordsmen,” “war-horse,” and a dozen more endearing epithets. The fellow lay back across Ismail's knees, breathless but well enough contented. And after a few more minutes the Orakzai Pathan came back, and King tried to make room for him to sit. “I bade thee keep my place!” he growled, towering over King and plucking at his knife-belt irresolutely. He made it clear without troubling to use words that any other man would have had to fight, and the hakim might think himself lucky. “Take my seat,” said King, struggling to get up. “Nay, nay--sit still, thou. I can kick room for myself. So! So! So!” There was an answering snarl of hate that seemed like a song to him, amid which he sat down. “The mullah Muhammad Anim answered he knows nothing of thee and cares less! He said--and he said it with vehemence--it is no more to him where a hakim sits than where the rats hide!” He watched King's face and seeing that, King allowed his facial muscles to express chagrin.