Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/70

and there had been his father's tales of hill customs. Dreams and tales! And now he had seen—

For a moment he felt oddly checked and baffled. He did not know what to say, and what bereft him of speech was not embarrassment, but this new fact of different customs and manners slowly awakening in his consciousness. Quite suddenly it seemed to him that his great yearning for the hills had grown out of a far deeper foundation than he had yet thought of; subconsciously he felt that this young girl was at the root of it, and, with the thought, with the gathering conviction of it, he opened wide his eyes and looked at her.

She was tall and lean, with black hair which fell in heavy braids over either shoulder, a low white forehead, the reddest of lips, and huge gray eyes set deep below boldly curved brows. She was not beautiful. But there was about her something best described as a deep, luminous vivacity—something like an open, clashing response to the free life, the wild life, the clean life—the hills. And she was his cousin?

He formed the last thought into a wondering question, and her reply held both confirmation and, somehow, the flavor of prophecy. "Yes," she said, "I am Kumar Jan, the daughter of Rahmet Ullah, chief of The Hoof of the Wild Goat—I am cousin to thee. Thus were our fathers cousins and our grandfathers and our grandfathers' fathers—cousin aye mating with cousin, according to the rules of the hills."

As he still stared at her, wide-eyed, unwinking, she asked him why he looked at her. "Am I then a dancing girl of the South or," she added, mockingly, "hast thou never seen a girl in all thy life?"

And when Yar Khan replied truthfully that he had