a matter concerning a dancing-girl, one of those beautiful fat Mekranis,
and, by reason of his hatred and envy and jealousy, my mother made
common cause with him, she also desiring my brother's death, in that her
husband loved this child of another woman, an alien, his first love,
better than he loved hers. But _I_ bore him no ill-will, Huzoor. I loved
him and admired his deeds.

"Many attempts they made, but though my mother was clever and Ibrahim
Mahmud and his father the Vizier were unscrupulous, my brother was in
the protection of the Prophet. Moreover he was much away from Mekran
Kot, being, like our father, a great traveller and soon irked by
whatever place he might be in. And, one time, he returned home, having
been to Germany on secret service (a thing he often did before he became
a Sahib) and to France and Africa on a little matter of rifles for
Afghanistan and the Border, and spoke to us of that very Somaliland to
which this very _pultan_, the 99th Baluch Light Infantry, went in 1908
(was it?), and how the English were losing prestige there and would have
to send troops or receive _boondah_[12] and the blackened face from him
they called the Mad Mullah. And yet another time he returned from India
bringing a Somali boy, a black-faced youth, but a good Mussulman, whom,
some time before, he had known and saved from death in Africa, and now
had most strangely encountered again. And this Somali lad--who was not a
_hubshi_, a Woolly One, not a Sidi[13] slave--saved my brother's life in
his turn. I said he was not a slave--but in a sense he was, for he asked
nothing better than to sit in the shadow of my brother throughout his
life; for he loved my brother as the Huzoors' dogs love their masters,
yea--he would rather have had blows from my brother than gold from
another. He it was who saved Mir Jan Rah-bin-Ras el-Isan from the
terrible death prepared for him by Ibrahim Mahmud. It was during this
visit to Mekran Kot that Mahmud Shahbaz, the Vizier, announced