Old Ugly-Face by Talbot Mundy

The storm turned up about an hour late. Soon the snow began drifting like waves on a wild sea. Sheep can't tackle that stuff. The overloaded yaks and ponies couldn't carry the sheep; so Andrew and the Tibetans had to do it, wherever the sheep couldn't follow the ponies through the drifts. They hadn't made more than two miles by noon. Then Bompo Tsering was for calling a halt. But there would be less snow on the wind-swept ledges, and the ledges wouldn't come, one had to go to them; so Andrew had his own way about carrying on for a couple more hours. But then suddenly Bompo Tsering, who was leading, said they were surrounded by dugpas. The column halted. Elsa rode her pony in the way of Bulah Singh's to prevent the Sikh from crowding forward. Andrew showed Bompo Tsering his automatic and the head-man agreed, as every Tibetan does, that an automatic pistol is excellent magic. But he said he had never seen a dead dugpa. He suggested that a bullet could go straight through a dugpa's heart without hurting him. Dugpas, he said, could make a lot of trouble by making the animals go lame, even if they didn't do worse things. He said the wise course was to bivouac and say plenty of prayers. He pulled the prayer wheel out of his bokkus and spun it furiously.

So Andrew showed him the aneroid in its neat leather case and said it was an infallible protection against all sorts of devils. He even told him the names of the master magicians who made it--showed him their names on the face of the dial--pronounced them for him. Bompo Tsering admitted that Negretti and Zambra sounded wonderful. But he stuck to his prayer wheel. He smiled courteously. And then he demonstrated beyond any doubt in his own mind that Andrew was a silly foreign devil who didn't know what he was talking about.