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Told in the East by Talbot Mundy
page 41 of 281 (14%)
end and side by mutineers who searched for them, and very nearly
stifled by the dust of decaying ages--there lay three women and a
child, with a jar of water close beside them and a sack of hastily
collected things to eat. They lay there in all but furnace-heat,
close-huddled in the darkness, and they shuddered and sobbed and
blessed Juggut Khan alternately. Below them the whispering echoes
sighed mysteriously through a maze of tunnels. Around them, and
around their sack of food, the rats scampered. Above them, where a
ten-ton stone trapdoor lay closed over their heads, black powder stood
in heaps and sacks and barrels. Closing the trapdoor had been easy.
One pushed it and it fell. Not all the mutineers in Jailpore nor
Juggut Khan nor any one could open it again without the secret.
And no man living knew the secret. The three women and the child
were safe from immediate intrusion!

Those three women and that child were not so exceptionally placed
for India, of that date. Two of the women had seen their husbands
slain that afternoon, before their eyes. They were mother and daughter
and grandson; and the fourth was an English nurse, red-cheeked still
from the kiss of English Channel breezes.

"If only Bill were here!" the nurse wailed. "I know he'd find a
way out. There wasn't never nothing nowhere that beat Bill. Bill
wouldn't ha' left us! Bill'd ha' took us out o' here, an' saved
our lives. Bill--snnff, snnff--Bill wouldn't ha'--snnff, snnff--
shoved us in a rat-hole and took hisself off!"

She had not yet lost her English point of view. She still believed
that the strong right arm of an English lover could play ducks and
drakes with Destiny. One-half of the world, at least, still swears
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