As the girl passed through the stenching, many-hued bazaar, the roar
would cease for a second and then rise again. Turbaned and pugreed--
Mohammedan and Hindoo--men of all grades of color, language, and
belief, but with only one theory on women, would stare first at the
pony that she rode, then at her, and then at the ancient grandmother
who trotted in her wake. Low jests would greet the grandmother, and
then the trading and the gambling would resume, together with the
under-thread of restlessness that was so evidently there and yet so
hard to lay a finger on.

The sun beat down pitilessly--brass--like the din of cymbals.
Beneath the sun helmet that sat so squarely and straightforwardly on
the tidy chestnut curls, her face was pale. She smiled as she guided
her pony in and out amid the roaring throng, and carefully refused to
see the scowls, her brave little shoulders seconded a pair of quiet,
brave gray eyes in showing an unconquerable courage to the world, and
her clean, neat cotton riding-habit gave the lie and the laugh in one
to poverty; but, as the crowd had its atmosphere of secret murmuring,
she had another of secret anxiety.

Neither had fear. She did not believe in it. She was there to help
her father fight inhuman wrong, and die, if need be, in the last ditch.
The crowd had none, for it had begun to realize that it was part a of
a two-hundred-million crowd, held down and compelled by less than a
hundred thousand aliens. And, least of all, had the man who followed
her at a little distance the slightest sense of fear. He was far more
conversant with it than she, but--unlike her, and far more than the
seething crowd--he knew the trend of events, and just what likelihood
there was of insult or injury to Rosemary McClean being avenged in a
generation.