and—but enough. I cannot dwell on this matter in detail. Sufficient to add that Mrs. Archer died, and Walla, at the age of eighteen, found herself adrift. What might have been her fate God alone knows, had she not one day run against her father in the bazaar!
To the girl it seemed amazing and it was so in very truth, for the distance between Mandalay and the Kuen-lun country is over a thousand miles. Yet this was a small part of the journey the old man had undertaken, travelling always on foot and alone. For years he had been a wanderer and for what? Simply that he might find his daughter, the child of his old age, and take her back with him to the mountain home where her mother lay in an untimely grave; with even that better than living mad, as she had lived from the hour her daughter disappeared.
This was all, except that Walla’s heart was tender and her joy at seeing her father great.
Together they started on the long journey back to the Kuen-lun, the old man still in his character of an itinerant trader, Walla as his companion. For safety she resumed the native dress—or rather undress, and swore by her father’s gods, whom I fancy she had never wholly forgotten, not to speak to any man by the way but to pass as a mute, for such in Siam and Cambodia are treated with peculiar respect.
The incident of our meeting had been brought about by an injudicious display by the old man of a handful of gold—his all.
Somehow the rough wood cutters gained the idea that he had more concealed and undertook to beat the poor girl until he should give it up. Luckily we saved her then and, as she told me afterward, she would have spoken but for fear that her father might be detained—the one thing they dreaded most.
After that they toiled on, moving steadily northward, braving a thousand perils before they reached Thibet. Furthermore we learned that the reason we had not encountered them on our road was because they had approached the mountains by way of a town to the west of Zhad-uan.
And yet, reader, if you could have seen Walla Benjow as I saw her that night in the guard house, in her Chinese dress with the dirty sheepskin wrapped about her, with her
