few could have followed, she made her way to Jaimihr's palace--three
miles away from Howrah's--where a dozen sulky-looking sepoys lolled,
dismounted, by the wooden gate. There was neither sight nor sound of
mounted men, and the gate was shut; but in the middle of the roadway
there was smoking dung, and there was a suspicion of overacting about
the indifference of the guardians of the entrance.

There was no overacting, though, in what Joanna did. Nobody would have
dreamed that she was playing any kind of part, or interested in
anything at all except the coppers that she begged for. She squatted
in the roadway, ink-black and clear-cut in the now blazing sunlight,
alternately flattering them and pretending to a knowledge of
unguessed-at witchcraft.

She was there still at midday when they changed the guard. She was
there when night fell, still squatting in the roadway, still exchanging
repartee and hints at the supernatural with armed men who shuddered now
and then between their bursts of mockery. The sore, suffering dogs
that sniff through the night for worse eyesores than themselves
whimpered and watched her. The guard changed and the moon paled, but
she stayed on; and whatever her purpose, or whatever information she
obtained in fragments amid the raillery, she did not return to the
mission house.

It was not until Rosemary McClean returned and dismounted by the door
that she realized Joanna had not kept pace. Even then she thought
little of it; the old woman often lingered on the homeward way when
the chance of her being needed was remote. Two or three hours passed
before the suspicion rose that anything might have happened to Joanna,
and even then she might not have been remembered had not Duncan McClean