Guns of the Gods | Page 5

people of
destiny, and India has prospered under them.
In among the English something after the fashion of grace notes in the
bars of music--enlivening, if sharp at times--come occasional
Americans, turning up in unexpected places for unusual reasons, and
remaining-- because it is no man's business to interfere with them.
Unlike the English, who approach all quarters through official doors
and never trespass without authority, the Americans have an
embarrassing way of choosing their own time and step, taking
officialdom, so to speak, in flank. It is to the credit of the English that
they overlook intrusion that they would punish fiercely if committed by
unauthorized folk from home.
So when the Blaines, husband and wife, came to Sialpore in Rajputana
without as much as one written introduction, nobody snubbed them.
And when, by dint of nothing less than nerve nor more than ability to

recognize their opportunity, they acquired the lease of the only vacant
covetable house nobody was very jealous, especially when the Blaines
proved hospitable.
It was a sweet little nest of a house with a cool stone roof, set in a
rather large garden of its own on the shoulder of the steep hill that
overlooks the city. A political dependent of Yasmini's father had built it
as a haven for his favorite paramour when jealousy in his seraglio had
made peace at home impossible. Being connected with the Treasury in
some way, and suitably dishonest, he had been able to make a luxurious
pleasaunce of it; and he had taste.
But when Yasmini's father died and his nephew Gungadhura succeeded
him as maharajah he made a clean sweep of the old pension and
employment list in order to enrich new friends, so the little nest on the
hill became deserted. Its owner went into exile in a neighboring state
and died there out of reach of the incoming politician who naturally
wanted to begin business by exposing the scandalous remissness of his
predecessor. The house was acquired on a falling market by a
money-lender, who eventually leased it to the Blaines on an eighty per
cent. basis-- a price that satisfied them entirely until they learned later
about local proportion.
The front veranda faced due east, raised above the garden by an
eight-foot wall, an ideal place for sleep because of the unfailing
morning breeze. The beds were set there side by side each evening, and
Mrs. Blaine-- a full ten years younger than her husband--formed a habit
of rising in the dark and standing in her night-dress, with bare feet on
the utmost edge of the top stone step, to watch for the miracle of
morning. She was fabulously pretty like that, with her hair blowing and
her young figure outlined through the linen; and she was sometimes
unobserved.
The garden wall, a hundred feet beyond, was of rock, two-and-a-half
men high, as they measure the unleapable in that distrustful land; but
the Blaines, hailing from a country where a neighbor's dog and
chickens have the run of twenty lawns, seldom took the trouble to lock
the little, arched, iron-studded door through which the former owner
had come and gone unobserved. The use of an open door is hardly
trespass under the law of any land; and dawn is an excellent time for
the impecunious who take thought of the lily how it grows in order to

outdo Solomon.
When a house changes hands in Rajputana there pass with it, as well as
the rats and cobras and the mongoose, those beggars who were wont to
plague the former owner. That is a custom so based on ancient logic
that the English, who appreciate conservatism, have not even tried to
alter it.
So when a cracked voice broke the early stillness out of shadow where
the garden wall shut off the nearer view, Theresa Blaine paid small
attention to it.
"Memsahib! Protectress of the poor!"
She continued watching the mystery of coming light. The ancient city's
domed and pointed roofs already glistened with pale gold, and a pearly
mist wreathed the crowded quarter of the merchants. Beyond that the
river, not more than fifty yards wide, flowed like molten sapphire
between unseen banks. As the pale stars died, thin rays of liquid silver
touched the surface of a lake to westward, seen through a rift between
purple hills. The green of irrigation beyond the river to eastward shone
like square-cut emeralds, and southward the desert took to itself all
imaginable hues at once.
"Colorado!" she said then. "And Arizona! And Southern California!
And something added that I can't just place!"
"Sin's added by the scow-load!" growled her husband from the farther
bed. "Come back, Tess, and put some clothes on!"
She turned her head to smile, but did not move away. Hearing the
man's voice,