That evening he spent half an hour with a needle and thread, borrowed from old Fâtma, in sewing the blue envelope safely into his skin-coat. Then he sat once more stirring the old Mohammedan's blood with tales of fight and adventure till far on into the night. Yet the earliest blink of dawn found him creeping away from the still sleeping household, and his right arm bare of a massive gold bracelet he had worn for years. That he had left lying on the baby's pillow; for was not the child the son of his brother? Had not his father saved Marsden _sahib_ also? Ah! that score was not paid off yet. He still seemed to see the tall figure standing in the sunlight. Fool that he had been not to fire, instead of giving himself away at a mere word! Even now, though he knew that but for him Philip Marsden's bones would have been churning in a dreary dance of death at the bottom of some boiling pool in the Terwân torrent, he felt the bitterness of defeat. His very admiration, growing as it did with the other's display of pluck, added to his resentment. To take an order from a man when you had your finger on the trigger of your rifle! It was all very well to save a wounded comrade, to stand by him through thick and thin, but that did not show him, or convince yourself, that you cared as little for his menace as he had done for yours. Some day, yes, some day! he would stand up before Marsden _sahib_ and defy him. Then he could cry quits, and go home to his own people in peace.
Nevertheless, the news of his master's accident which met him on his return to Saudaghur sent him without an instant's pause to the factory where Philip still lay unconscious. And when he walked, at the dead of night, into the big bare room where Belle sat watching, his face softened at the sight of that dark head on the pillow. It softened still more when something of the past--Heaven knows what--seemed to come with him, rousing a low, quick voice from the bed. "Afzul, it is cold; put on more fuel. Do you not feel the cold? Afzul, Afzul!" For that something had carried Philip Marsden back to the smoky cave among the snows, although the windows stood wide open to let in the tardy coolness of the summer night.