word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for "all she's got."
And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across
her rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help
him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.

But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over
a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented
wall and waited for somebody to open it.

The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu
temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it
there across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch
teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons--
yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead
to Khinjan!

The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture repair. The walls
were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India
had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but
Khinjan's devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.

The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated
from above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty
feet behind the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the
passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be
swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed
for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way
was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock.
High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge
from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced