"Colonel Kirby sahib gave me this," he said simply. "Thanks. Shake hands, will you? I've been talking to a man to-night--to two men--if I ever did in my life! I shall go now and give this letter to somebody to deliver to Colonel Kirby, and I shall not see you again probably until all this is over. Please do what Yasmini directs until you hear from me or can see for yourself that your task is finished. Depend on me to remember my promise!" Ranjoor Singh saluted, military-wise, although he was not in uniform. The general answered his salute and left the room, to be met by a maid, who took the note and the ring from him. Five minutes later, with his rough disguise resumed, the general hunted about among the shadows of the neighboring streets until he had found his carriage. He recognized, but was not recognized by, the risaldar on the box-seat of Colonel Kirby's shay. Teeth of a wolf on a whitened bone, What do the splinters say? Scent of a sambur, up and gone, Where will he stand at bay? Sparks in the whirl of a hurrying wind. Who was it laid the light? Mischief, back of a woman's mind, Why do the thoughtless fight? CHAPTER XII Black smoke still billowed upward from the gutted House-of-the-Eight-Half-brothers, and although there were few stars visible, a watery moon looked out from between dark cloudracks and showed up the smoke above the Delhi roofs. Yasmini picked the right simile as usual. It looked as if the biggest genie ever dreamed of must be hurrying out of a fisherman's vase. "And who is the fisherman?" she laughed, for she is fond of that sort of question that sets those near her thinking and disguises the trend of her own thoughts as utterly as if she had not any. "The genie might be the spirit of war!" ventured a Baluchi, forgetting the one God of his Koran in a sententious effort to please Yasmini. She flashed a glance at him. "Or it might be the god of the Rekis," she suggested; and everybody chuckled, because Baluchis do not relish reference to their lax religious practise any more than they like to be called "desert people." This man was a Rind Baluch of the Marri Hills, and proud of it; but pride is not always an asset at Yasmini's. They--and the police would have dearly loved to know exactly who "they" were--stood clustered in Yasmini's great, deep window that overlooks her garden--the garden that can not be guessed at from the street. There was not one of them who could have explained how they came to assemble all on that side of the room; the movement had seemed to evolve out of the infinite calculation that everybody takes for granted, and Moslems particularly, since there seems nothing else to do about it.