At dawn his tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the green grass.

The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.
The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the half-awakened plotters of the night before.
There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill.

Long lances--devils' antennae--searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments.

In an hour, or less, there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again for a year or two to come.
But Khumel Khan was missing.

Khumel Khan, the tulwar man--he whose boast it was that he could hew through two men's necks at one whistling sweep of his notched, curved cimeter--had broken through with a dozen at his back.