Presently the other resumed, in low, reminiscent tones: "I became the Khan’s fetish. So long as he had me he was sure of his luck. He thought himself safe. In the end, I think, he thought he could not die." "Well?" said Bethune, as the pause grew over long. "Well, that’s all. I was a fetish, very well looked after. Too well. God!" said the man, sitting up, a sudden passion on eye and lip, "I was kept prisoner, if you like. For five years, Raymond Bethune, I was chained to that old Khan’s carcase, night and day." "For five years," echoed Bethune, stupidly; "and what were you doing?" English did not answer till the silence seemed to have obliterated the question. Then he said slowly: "I was waiting." "Then?" "Then the old devil died—and I escaped. Oh, you don’t want me to spin you that yarn now! You can imagine it for yourself, if you ever imagine anything, you old dunderhead. There was blood spilt, if you care to know. I had waited a long time, you see." "But," objected the Major of Guides, after some minutes devoted to calculation, "that was three years ago." "Aye," laughed English, good-naturedly contemptuous, "but a man doesn’t walk off the Karakoram on to the English lines in a day, especially if he’s an Afghan captive. I had to take a little round through Turkestan, and back through Baluchistan—on foot, Raymond, every yard of the way—as a dervish." "Good Lord!" said Bethune. "I flatter myself I know more of the Karakorams and the Turkoman frontier than any white man yet. And I can speak the lingo of every tribe that calls Ali chief. Aye, and I know their tricks and customs, their very habit of thought. There was not a camp or hut where they did not take me for one of themselves. It was just a year after Yufzul’s death that I landed at Kurrachee." "Oh, Harry," cried his friend, impulsively, "why did you not come to me?" "Have I not told you already?" answered English, after one of his deep pauses. "I had things to find out first. Where is your canniness? If live men have to go slow, what about dead men? ... No—no." The bitter smile came back to his lips. "I lay low, and lived in the bazaar, as good a servant of the prophet as ever salaamed to the East; and then"—his voice changed—"oh, then—I got all the news I wanted!" Bethune dared not raise his eyes. "More than I wanted," added Harry English, with his bleak laugh. "You don’t need to be told why I remained a Pathan, do you?" When Bethune once more found courage to speak to his friend, it was because the stillness, pregnant with so much meaning, seemed intolerable. "Well?" he queried hoarsely. "Well, then," said Harry English, "I waited—again." ... And his comrade felt more than this he was never to know of the hardest moment of all the man’s hard life.