Old Ugly-Face by Talbot Mundy

Seven miles to go, to the village. Now Andrew and Elsa brought up the rear, riding side by side. The starving baggage ponies could be trusted to find the shortest way and needed no urging. They knew instinctively that food awaited them not far beyond the treeless yellow dunes in the distance. Bompo Tsering and the rest of the Tibetans, by another instinct, knew that danger from the rear had dissolved itself. So they, too, could be trusted. If Andrew had told them in words that Bulah Singh had lost his entire gang and all his provisions, they might not have believed. They would at least have doubted; since how could Andrew know what had happened? But they had read Andrew's thought--or believed they had. That was as convincing as if a skillful political liar had said it. It felt like their own knowledge. They were even inventing dreams, and telling one another, how the soul of the man from Koko Nor had beckoned through the fog and brought the Sikh's gang crashing down to death to keep him company in hell. Andrew's message, tied by Bompo Tsering to the good saint's thigh bone and re-enforced by Bompo Tsering's prayers, had made that necromancy possible. So Andrew's cap sported another invisible feather and Bompo Tsering, forgetting that Andrew knew at least some Tibetan and unaware that Andrew listened to him downwind, magnified its importance for his own reflected glory: "I always told you unbelieving, adulterous bastards that Gunnigun knows what he's doing! Wait and see! When we reach this village Gunnigun will know how to deal with the black magician!"

Andrew felt considerably less sure of that than Bompo Tsering did. His head was beginning to feel too much in the sky. His feet weren't on the ground, the way they had been while there were tangible things to be done. Falling back beside Elsa to think over the problem of Lung-gom-pa, he was silent for several minutes. Then, when he began to talk, he suddenly became expansive. He revealed a phase of himself that Elsa had never before seen. It scared her. She didn't know what to make of it. It might be a physical reaction from the exhausting march over the mountains. He sounded almost drunk. He said the exact opposite of things he always had insisted were too true to dispute. He said them aggressively. For instance: "You can't successfully oppose ideas with facts."