“Strength!” she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him, almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. “Courage! Simplicity! Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my mind is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no directness--no simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my sending from the gods! I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much, these many years! And now that you have come you want to hate me because you think I killed your brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know about your brother.”' Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are times when no proof is needed. “Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment. “Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men to steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear to you--I swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that I first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the Cavern of Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's head!” “Why bid me throw it to them, then?” he asked her, and he was aware of her scorn before the words had left his lips. She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as if she must study him all anew. She seemed to find it hard to believe that he really thought so in the commonplace. “What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in it--carrion!--compared to what shall be? Would you have known it was his head if you had thrown it to them when I ordered you?” He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian. “A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival,” says the East, out of world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the East itself. “Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!” she said with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. “At present we need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the right time. After that he will be in the way! You shall name his death--Earth's Drink--slow torture--fire! Will that content you?” “No,” he said, with a dry laugh. “What more can you ask?” “Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn't ask more. Let Bull-with-a-beard alone.”