more trade."

The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well
content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.

But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of
men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways. But
treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a
habit. There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to tell
as illustrative of the Chilti character.

"There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet close
to Kohara. His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a long
while he would not. He did not wish to marry. Finally, however, he fell
in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her home, to
his mother's delight. But the mother's delight lasted for just five days.
She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife replied, and
the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man, besides making
him an object of ridicule to his neighbours. One evening, in a fit of
passion, both women said they would stand it no longer. They ran out of
the house and up the hillside, but as there was only one path they ran
away together, quarrelling as they went. Then the young Chilti rose,
followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn hand and foot, laid them
side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut their throats.

"'Women talk too much,' he said, as he came back to a house unfamiliarly
quiet. 'One had really to put a stop to it.'"

Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while on
the alert. Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of