Talbot Mundy

“ Dost Mohammed! You don’t look in the least like Gopi Lall. You couldn’t make yourself look like him even if you plucked one eye out.”
“And sahib, would Gopi Lall—with a hue and cry behind—travel undisguised? His ugliness is a byword even where he is not known. Men know that he has but one eye and tangled hair that never knew the comb, and lips that are like sun-cracked pollution. Would he journey with his name and number on his face for all the world to see, as a trooper wears his crest?” ”

“ Whether hunting through the tangled thickets where thatched huts were hidden in tiny clearings, or scouring on a chance-encountered trail from village to hill village, they found evidence in plenty of the outlaw’s doings and of the terror he had established, but never a sign of Gopi Lall himself.
“Where is his woman?” demanded Dost Mohammed twenty times a day at least. And the answer was always the same—often in the same words:
“Huzoor, what woman dare refuse him?”
“Which woman loves him most?”
“None love him. All fear him!” ”

“ They made prisoners who led them along half hidden trails to where the outlaw once had been; and once thus guided they discovered underneath a waterfall a secret cave, where possibly his loot had once been hidden. There was one rupee there, fallen in a crack between the rocks; a trooper forced it out with his saber point. But there was neither other loot than that one coin there, nor track of Gopi Lall.
Once they fell in with a posse of police, who grinned at them and asked what they had done with the outlaw’s head. ”