This was a friend--one lone friend of her own sex amid all the waste of smouldering hate--some one surely to be wept over and made much of and caressed.
The poor old hag recovered consciousness with her head pillowed on a European lap, and Duncan McClean--no stickler for convention and no believer in a line too tightly drawn--saw fit to remonstrate as he laid the jar of water down beside them.
"Why," she answered, looking up at him, "father, I'd have kissed a dog that got lost and came back again like this!" They picked her up between them, after they had let her drink, and carried her between them to the long, low sitting-room, where she told them--after considerable make-believe of being more spent than she really was--after about a tenth "sip" at the brandy flask and when another had been laughingly refused--all about Ali Partab and what his orders to her were.
"I wonder what it all can mean ?" McClean sat back and tried to summarize his experiences of months and fit them into what Joanna said.
"What does that mean ?" asked his daughter, leaning forward.

She was staring at Joanna's forearm and from that to a dull-red patch on the woman's loin-cloth.

Joanna answered nothing.
"Are you wounded, Joanna?
Are you sure?
That's blood! Look here, father!" He agreed that it was blood.

It was dry and it came off her forearm in little flakes when he rubbed it.

But not a word could they coax out of Joanna to explain it, until Rosemary--drawing the old woman to her--espied the handle of her knife projecting by an inch above the waist-fold of her cloth.