EHIND him the Koh Haji-Lal, the "Mountains of the Red Pilgrim," closed like a ragged tide. In front of him the snowy peaks of the Gul Koh pointed to the skies in an abandon of frozen, lacy spires, while ten miles the other side Ghuzni dipped to the green of the valley with an avalanche of flat, white roof-tops, huddled close together beneath the chill of the Himalayas. The English doctor lived there, mixing his drugs and scolding his patients in the little house at the end of the perfume-sellers' bazar, in the shadow of the great bronze Mogul gun which both Afghans and Lohani Sikhs called the Zubba-zung.
Mortazu Khan thought of him as he came down the mountain-side, his rough sheepskin coat folded across the small of his back to give free play to his lungs; his short, hairy arms, sleeves rolled to the elbows, moving up and down like propeller-blades. He walked with the suspicious step of the hill-bred who reckons with inequalities of ground, lifting his rope-soled sandals gingerly over timberfalls and crumbling granite slides, putting on extra speed when he crossed a wide spread of rust-brown bracken that covered the summer hue of the slope like a scarf, again warily slowing as he forded a swift little stream bordered with scented wild peppermint and chini stalks and gray, spiky wormwood.
But straight through he kept up a steady clip, averaging well over five miles an hour, up-hill or down.
There was peace with the Suni Pathans who squatted on the upland pastures and so he had left his rifle at home, carrying only a broad-bladed dagger. He was glad of it, for a rifle meant weight, weight in the hills meant lack of speed, and speed was essential. All last night his wife had moaned terribly, and the village wise-woman, at the end of her remedies, had told him that he needed the English hakim's skill before the day was out if he wanted his wife to live: his wife, and the little son—he hoped it would be a son—whom she was bringing into the world with such anguish.
Three hours he figured to Ghuzni. Three back. Rather a little more, since the foreigner was not hill-bred. Thus he would safely reach his village before the sun had raced to the west; and by night his wife would hold another little son in her arms.
Of course there would be a wrangle with the hakim, Mortazu Khan thought—and smiled at the thought.
First was spoken the ceremonious Afghan greeting, cut short by the Englishman's impatient, "Why haven't you come sooner?" and his reply that his wife was a stout hill woman who had borne children before this; also that he had called in the wise-woman.
"What did she do?"
"She gave her fish sherbet to cool her blood. She put leeches on her chest. She wrote a Koran verse on a piece of paper, lit it, and held it smoking under Azeena's nose—"
And then the hakim's furious bellow: "Of all the damned—! Good God! man, let's hurry, or your wife 'll go out before we get there!"
At the end of the imagined scene Mortazu Khan's smile twisted to a lopsided frown. The doctor would be rightly angry. He should have gone to him yesterday. He should not have called in the wise-woman. He had given her five rupees— He shrugged his shoulders. To-morrow he would make her eat stick and force her to give back the money—
He increased his speed as he reached the edge of the slope where it flattened to a rock-studded plateau, with here and there little gentians peeping from granite splits and opening their stiff, azure stars. He bent and picked one to put in his turban for good luck, and as he straightened up again he smelled a familiar odor and saw two small, reddish eyes glaring at him from a clump of thorny wild acacia.
He stood quite still. Instinctively he fingered across his left shoulder for the rifle—which was not there. Then he walked on. At this time of the year the blue-gray, bristly haired mountain bears were not dangerous. They were busy filling their sagging bellies with prangus leaves and mulberries against the lean season. He would leave the bear alone, he decided, and the bear would leave him alone.
But when a moment later he heard the animal give tongue—a low, flat rumble growing steadily into a sustained roar, then stabbing out in a squeaky high note that sounded ridiculously inadequate, given the brute's size—Mortazu Khan, without looking over his shoulder, jumped sideways like a cat, cleared a heap of dry twigs, and made straight for a stout fir-tree that towered in lanky loneliness a dozen yards away. He reached it and jumped behind it. His hands gripped the rough, warty bark.