It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier. Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut. Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar. He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home. The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire. Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness. He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. He had shewn Terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent--the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl--looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate. "You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair. "I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves." "You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other. "Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back." "What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly. Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air. "It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at Simla; summer for three full months. It's summer at Sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the Palári and Darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards India, "goes because he must." "You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin. "I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man." "Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner. "Yes, sir. Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful about-----" "My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"