Hafiz paused for a second to glare at the intruders, then raising one arm to heaven, with a loud invocation to Allah, he turned and spat on the cross beneath him with a gesture of the utmost abhorrence and contempt, and wheeling his horse half round, with a derisive farewell to his foes, he started off at full gallop. This outrageous insult to their faith and nation affected the three Englishmen variously. Captain Vaughan, who was of rather full habit, became absolutely purple with passion; Mr. Harvey relieved his feelings with several round oaths; Sir Reginald said nothing, but his lips tightened under his dark moustache in a way that was ominous enough. With a vicious dig of the spurs he forced his horse down the rugged sides of the nullah, up the opposite bank, and away across the plain in hot pursuit of the holy man. The two Yarkundis, urged to the very top of their speed, joined neck and neck in the chase for a short distance, but endurance, not pace, was their _forte_, and they soon ceased to answer to the repeated applications of their riders’ spurs and Annamullay canes, and began to lag behind the free-going Arab. “It’s no use, Fairfax,” shouted Captain Vaughan, pulling up; “you’ll never overtake him.” “I will!” he returned, looking back for a second. “I’ll catch him and kill him, if I follow him to Candahar.” His friends’ remonstrances were given to the winds; he had already distanced them by a hundred yards, and soon he and the far-receding fakir became mere specks in the distance, and rounding the spur of a hill, were completely lost to sight. The two officers waited impatiently for the sound of shots, but the silence that reigned around them remained unbroken, save for the distant cry of the jackal setting out on his nightly career, and seeming to say more distinctly than usual: “I smell dead white men, I smell dead white men.” The whistle of a kite sailing homewards was the only other sound that broke the dead surrounding stillness. The sun had set; ten minutes previously it had vanished below the horizon in the shape of a little red speck; gray twilight was rapidly spreading her mantle over hills and plains, and our two friends, finding they had completely lost sight of their hot-headed companion, reluctantly turned their ponies’ heads homewards, and retailed their adventure to their comrades round the camp-fire. These listened to it with many interruptions of surprise and dismay. “Fairfax was splendidly mounted; that Arab of his was one of the best horses out of Abdul Rahman’s stables, that’s some comfort,” remarked one. “Yes, he was evidently gaining on the Turcoman when we saw the last of him,” returned Mr. Harvey; “but, for all we know, Fairfax has galloped straight into the Afghan camp.” “I had no idea he was such a Quixotic fool,” growled a grizzly-headed colonel, angrily kicking the logs in front of him. “It would not surprise _me_ if we never saw him again.”