Only madness!" "See that they bite thee not! Keep thy wits with thee, and be ready to bring me word in time, else--" "Patience, sahib! Show me the coins again--one little look--again once!" But Ali Partab would wheel and ride away, leaving her to mumble and gibber in the road and curl again on to her blanket in the blackest corner by the door.
Once, on an expedition of that kind, he encountered Duncan McClean himself.

The lean, tall Scotsman, gray-headed from the cares he had taken on himself, a little bowed from heat and hopelessness, but showing no least symptom of surrender in the kind, strong lines of a rugged face, stood, eyes upward, in the moonlight.

The moon, at least, looked cool.

It was at the full, like a disk of silver, and he seemed to drink in the beams that bathed him.
"Does he worship it ?" wondered Ali Partab, reining from an amble to a walk and watching half-reverently.

The followers of Mohammed are most superstitious about the moon.