But this day Barlow had been like a man throwing detectives off his
trail. Not one of his servants must suspect that he contemplated a
trip--no, not just that, for the Captain had intimated casually to the
butler that he would go soon to Satara.

Thus it had to be arranged secretly that he would ride from his
bungalow as Captain Barlow and leave the city as Ayub Alli, an Afghan.

Perhaps Barlow was over tired, that curious knotted condition of the
nerves through overstrain that rasps a man's mental fibre beyond the
narcotic of sleep, and yet holds him in a hectic state of half
unconsciousness. He counted camels--long strings of soured,
complaining beasts, short-legged, stout, shaggy desert-ships, such as
merchants of Kabul used to carry their dried fruits,--figs and dates
and pomegranates, and the wondrous flavoured Sirdar melon,--wending
across the Sind Desert of floating white sand to Rajasthan.

Once a male, tickled to frenzy by the caress of a female's velvet lips
upon his rump, with a hoarse bubbling scream, wheeled suddenly,
snapping the thin lead-cord that reached from the tail of the camel in
front to the button in his nostril, and charged the lady in an
exuberance of affection with a full broadside--thrust from his chest
that bowled her over, where she lay among the fragments of two huge
broken burnt-clay _gumlas_, that, filled with water, had been lashed to
her sides.

Barlow sat up at this startling tumult that was the outcome of his
slipping a little into slumber. He threw his head back on the pillow
with a smothered, "Damn!"