TOLD IN THE EAST
by Talbot Mundy
Published by Aeterna Classics 2018
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
HOOKUM HAI
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
FOR THE SALT HE HAD EATEN
Prologue
I.
II.
III.
“Sergeant!”
IV.
“Trot, march!
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
“Come, then!” said the High Priest.
X.
XI.
MACHASSAN AH
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
A Blood-red sun rested its huge disk upon a low mud wall that crested a rise to westward, and flattened at the bottom from its own weight apparently. A dozen dried-out false-acacia-trees shivered as the faintest puff in all the world of stifling wind moved through them; and a hundred thousand tiny squirrels kept up their aimless scampering in search of food that was not there.
A coppersmith was about the only living thing that seemed to care whether the sun went down or not. He seemed in a hurry to get a job done, and his reiterated “Bong-bong-bong!”—that had never ceased since sunrise, and had driven nearly mad the few humans who were there to hear it—quickened and grew louder. At last Brown came out of a square mud house, to see about the sunset.
He was nobody but plain Bill Brown—or Sergeant William Brown, to give him his full name and entitlements—and the price of him was two rupees per day.
He stared straight at the dull red disk of the sun, and spat with eloquence. Then he wiped the sweat from his forehead, and scratched a place where the prickly heat was bothering him. Next, he buttoned up his tunic, and brushed it down neatly and precisely. There was official business to be done, and a man did that with due formality, heat or no heat.
“Guard, turn out!” he ordered.
Twelve men filed out, one behind the other, from the hut that he had left. They seemed to feel the heat more than Brown did, as they fell in line before Brown's sword. There was no flag, and no flag-pole in that nameless health-resort, so the sword, without its scabbard, was doing duty, point downward in the ground, as a totem-pole of Empire. Brown had stuck it there, like Boanerges' boots, and there it stayed from sunrise until sunset, to be displaced by whoever dared to do it, at his peril.
They had no clock. They had nothing, except the uniforms and arms of the Honorable East India Company, as issued in this year of Our Lord, 1857—a cooking-pot or two, a kettle, a little money and a butcher-knife. Their supper bleated miserably some twenty yards away, tied to a tree, and a lean. Punjabi squatted near it in readiness to buy the skin. It was a big goat, but it was mangy, so he held only two annas in his hand. The other anna (in case that Brown should prove adamant) was twisted in the folds of his pugree, but he was prepared to perjure himself a dozen times, and take the names of all his female ancestors in vain, before he produced it.
The sun flattened a little more at the bottom, and began to move quickly, as it does in India—anxious apparently to get away from the day's ill deeds.
“Shoulder umms!” commanded Brown. “General salute! Present-umms!”
The red sun slid below the sky-line, and the night was on them, as though somebody had shut the lid. Brown stepped to the sword, jerked it out of the ground and returned it to his scabbard in three motions.
“Shoulder-umms! Order-umms! Dismiss!” The men filed back into the hut again, disconsolately, without swearing and without mirth. They had put the sun to bed with proper military decency. They would have seen humor—perhaps—or an excuse for blasphemy in the omission of such a detail, but it was much too hot to swear at the execution of it.
Besides, Brown was a strange individual who detested swearing, and it was a very useful thing, and wise, to humor him. He had a way of his own, and usually got it.
Brown posted a sentry at the hut-door, and another at the crossroads which he was to guard, then went round behind the but to bargain with the goatskin-merchant. But he stopped before he reached the tree.
“Boy!” he called, and a low-caste native servant came toward him at a run.
“Is that fakir there still?”
“Ha, sahib!”
“Ha? Can't you learn to say 'yes,' like a human being?”
“Yes, sahib!”
“All right. I'm going to have a talk with him. Kill the goat, and tell the Punjabi to wait, if he wants to buy the skin.”
“Ha, sahib!”
Brown spun round on his heel, and the servant wilted.
“Yes, sahib!” he corrected.
Brown left him then, with a nod that conveyed remission of cardinal sin, and a warning not to repeat the offence. As the native ran off to get the butcher-knife and sharpen it, it was noticeable that he wore a chastened look.
“Send Sidiki after me!” Brown shouted after him, and a minute later a nearly naked Beluchi struck a match and emerged from the darkness, with the light of a lantern gleaming on his skin. He followed like a snake, and only Brown's sharp, authority-conveying footfalls could be heard as he trudged sturdily—straight-backed, eyes straight in front of him—to where an age-old baobab loomed like a phantom in the night. He marched like a man in armor. Not even the terrific heat of a Central-Indian night could take the stiffening out of him.
The Beluchi ran ahead, just before they reached the tree. He stopped and held the lantern up to let its light fall on some object that was close against the tree-trunk. At a good ten-pace distance from the object Brown stopped and stared. The lamplight fell on two little dots that gleamed. Brown stepped two paces nearer. Two deadly, malicious human eyes blinked once, and then stared back at him.
“Does he never sleep?” asked Brown.
The Beluchi said something or other in a language that was full of harsh hard gutturals, and the owner of the eyes chuckled. His voice seemed to be coming from the tree itself, and there was nothing of him visible except the cruel keen eyes that had not blinked once since Brown drew nearer.
“Well?”
“Sahib, he does not answer.”
“Tell him I'm tired of his not answering. Tell him that if he can't learn to give a civil answer to a civilly put question I'll exercise my authority on him!”
The Beluchi translated, or pretended to. Brown was not sure which, for he was rewarded with nothing but another chuckle, which sounded like water gurgling down a drain.
“Does he still say nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing, sahib.”
Brown stepped up closer yet, and peered into the blackness, looking straight into the eyes that glared at him, and from them down at the body of the owner of them. The Beluchi shrank away.
“Have a care, sahib! It is dangerous! This very holy—most holy—most religious man!”
“Bring that lantern back.”
“He will curse you, sahib!”
“Do you hear me?”
The Beluchi came nearer again, trembling with fright. Brown snatched the lamp away from him, and pushed it forward toward the fakir, moving it up and down to get a view of the whole of him. There was nothing that he saw that would reassure or comfort or please a devil even. It was ultradevilish; both by design and accident—conceived and calculated ghastliness, peculiar to India. Brown shuddered as he looked, and it took more than the merely horrible to make him betray emotion.
“What god do you say he worships?”
“Sahib, I know not. I am a Mussulman. These Hindus worship many gods.”
The fakir chuckled again, and Brown held the lantern yet nearer to him to get a better view. The fakir's skin was not oily, and for all the blanket-heat it did not glisten, so his form was barely outlined against the blackness that was all but tangible behind him.
Brown spat again, as he drew away a step. He could contrive to express more disgust and more grim determination in that one rudimentary act than even a Stamboul Softa can.
“So he's holy, is he?”
“Very, very holy, sahib!”
Again the fakir chuckled, and again Brown held his breath and pushed the lantern closer to him.
“I believe the brute understands the Queen's English!”
“He understanding all things, sahib! He knowing all things what will happen! Mind, sahib! He may curse you!”
But Brown appeared indifferent to the danger that he ran. To the fakir's unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely, going over him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the toe-nails upward.
“Well,” he commented aloud, “if the army's got an opposite, here's it! I'd give a month's pay for the privilege of washing this brute, just as a beginning!”
The man's toe-nails—for he really was a man!—were at least two inches long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back on themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had ever done had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed upward, by a deliberately cultivated cramp.
His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were lean and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by the swarm of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting from him. His emaciated body—powdered and smeared with ashes and dust and worse—was perched bolt-up-right on a flat earth dais that had once on a time been the throne of a crossroads idol. One arm, his right one, hung by his side in an almost normal attitude, and his right fingers moved incessantly like a man's who is kneading clay. But his other arm was rigid—straight up in the air above his head; set, fixed, cramped, paralyzed in that position, with the fist clenched. And through the back of the closed fist the fakir's nails were growing.
But, worse than the horror of the arm was the creature's face, with the evidence of torture on it, and fiendish delight in torture for the torture's sake. His eyes were his only organs that really lived still, and they expressed the steely hate and cruelty, the mad fanaticism, the greedy self-love—self-immolating for the sake of self—that is the thoroughgoing fakir's stock in trade. And his lips were like the graven lips of a Hindu temple god, self-satisfied, self-worshiping, contemptuous and cruel. He chuckled again, as Brown finished his inspection.
“So that crittur's holy, is he? Well, tell him that I'm set here to watch these crossroads. Tell him I'm supposed to question every one who comes, and find out what his business is, and arrest him if he can't give a proper account of himself. Say he's been here three days now, and that that's long enough for any one to find his tongue in. Tell him if I don't get an answer from him here and now I'll put him in the clink!”
“But, sahib—”
“You tell him what I say, d'you hear?”
The Beluchi made haste to translate, trembling as he spoke, and wilting visibly when the baleful eyes of the fakir rested on him for a second. The fakir answered something in a guttural undertone.
“What does he say?”
“That he will curse you, sahib!”
“Sentry!” shouted Brown.
“Sir!” came the ready answer, and the sling-swivels of a rifle clicked as the man on guard at the crossroads shouldered it. There are some men who are called “sir” without any title to it, just as there are some sergeants who receive a colonel's share of deference when out on a non-commissioned officer's command. Bill Brown was one of them.
“Come here, will you!”
There came the sound of heavy footfalls, and a thud as a rifle-butt descended to the earth again. Brown moved the lamp, and its beams fell on a rifleman who stood close beside him at attention—like a jinnee formed suddenly from empty blackness.
“Arrest this fakir. Cram him in the clink.”
“Very good, sir!”
The sentry took one step forward, with his fixed bayonet at the “charge,” and the fakir sat still and eyed him.
“Oh, have a care, sahib!” wailed the Beluchi. “This is very holy man!”
“Silence!” ordered Brown. “Here. Hold the lamp.”
The bayonet-point pressed against the fakir's ribs, and he drew back an inch or two to get away from it. He was evidently able to feel pain when it was inflicted by any other than himself.
“Come on,” growled the sentry. “Forward. Quick march. If you don't want two inches in you!”
“Don't use the point!” commanded Brown. “You might do him an injury. Treat him to a sample of the butt!”
The sentry swung his rifle round with an under-handed motion that all riflemen used to practise in the short-range-rifle days. The fakir winced, and gabbled something in a hurry to the man who held the lamp.
“He says that he will speak, sahib!”
“Halt, then,” commanded Brown. “Order arms. Tell him to hurry up!”
The Beluchi translated, and the fakir answered him, in a voice that sounded hard and distant and emotionless.
“He says that he, too, is here to watch the crossroads, sahib! He says that he will curse you if you touch him!”
“Tell him to curse away!”
“He says not unless you touch him, sahib.”
“Prog him off his perch!” commanded Brown.
The rifle leaped up at the word, and its butt landed neatly on the fakir's ribs, sending him reeling backward off his balance, but not upsetting him completely. He recovered his poise with quite astonishing activity, and shuffled himself back again to the center of the dais. His eyes blazed with hate and indignation, and his breath came now in sharp gasps that sounded like escaping steam. He needed no further invitation to commence his cursing. It burst out with a rush, and paused for better effect, and burst out again in a torrent. The Beluchi hid his face between his hands.
“Now translate that!” commanded Brown, when the fakir stopped for lack of breath.
“Sahib, I dare not! Sahib—”
Brown took a threatening step toward him, and the Beluchi changed his mind. Brown's disciplining methods were a too recently encountered fact to be outdone by a fakir's promise of any kind of not-yet-met damnation.
“Sahib, he says that because your man has touched him, both you and your man shall lie within a week helpless upon an anthill, still living, while the ants run in and out among your wounds. He says that the ants shall eat your eyes, sahib, and that you shall cry for water, and there shall be no water within reach—only the sound of water just beyond you. He says that first you shall be beaten, both of you, until your backs and the soles of your feet run blood, in order that the ants may have an entrance!”
“Is he going to do all this?”
The Beluchi passed the question on, and the fakir tossed him an answer to it.
“He says, sahib, that the gods will see to it.”
“So the gods obey his orders, do they. Well, they've a queer sense of duty! What else does he prophesy?”
“About your soul, sahib, and the sentry's soul.”
“That's interesting! Translate!”
“He says, sahib, that for countless centuries you and your man shall inhabit the carcasses of snakes, to eat dirt and be trodden on and crushed, until you learn to have respect for very holy persons!”
“Is he going to have the ordering of that?”
“He says that the gods have already ordered it.”
“It won't make much difference, then, what I do now. If that's in store for me in any case, I may as well get my money's worth before the fun begins! Tell him that unless he can give me a satisfactory reason for being here I shall treat him to a little more rifle-butt, and something else afterward that he will like even less!”
“He says,” explained the Beluchi, after a moment's conversation with the fakir, “that he is here to see what the gods have prophesied. He says that India will presently be whelmed in blood!”
“Whose blood?”
“Yours and that of others. He says, did you not see the sunset?”
“What of the sunset?”
Brown looked about him and, save where the lantern cast a fitful light on the fakir and the sentry and the native servant, and threw into faint relief the shadowy, snake-like tendrils of the baobab, his eyes failed to pierce the gloom. The sunset was a memory. In that heavy, death-darkness silence it seemed almost as though there had never been a sun.
“'A blot of blood,' he says. He says the order has been given. He says that half of India shall run blood within a day, and the whole of it within a week!”
“Who gave the order?”
“He answers 'Hookum hai!'—which means 'It is an order!' Nothing more does the holy fakir say.”
“To the clink with him!” commanded Brown. “I'm tired of these Old Mother Shipton babblings. That's the third useless Hindu fanatic within a week who has talked about India being drenched in blood. Let him go in to the depot under guard, and do his prophesying there! Bring him along.”
The sentry's rifle-butt rose again and threatened business. The Beluchi gave a warning cry, and the fakir tumbled off his dais. Then, with the trembling Beluchi walking on ahead with the lantern, and Brown and the sentry urging from behind, the fakir jumped and squirmed and wabbled on his all but useless feet toward the guardroom. When they reached the tree where the goat had bleated, the Punjabi skin-buyer rose up, took one long look at the fakir and ran.
“Well, I'll be!” exclaimed the sentry.
“You'll be worse than that,” said Brown, “if you use that language anywhere where I'm about! I'll not have it, d'you hear? Get on ahead, and open the door of the clink!”
The sentry obeyed him, and a moment later the fakir was thrust into a four-square mud-walled room, and the door was locked on him.
“Back to your post,” commanded Brown. “And next time I hear you swearing, I'll treat you to a double-trick, my man! About turn. Quick march.”
The sentry trudged off without daring to answer him, and Brown took a good look at the fakir through the iron bars that protected the top half of the door. Then he went off to see about his supper, of newly slaughtered goat-chops and chupatties baked in ghee. His soul revolted at the thought of it, but it was his duty to eat it and set an example to the men; and duty was the only thing that mattered in Bill Brown's scheme of things.
“Maybe it's true,” he muttered, “and maybe it's all lies; there's no knowing. Maybe India's going to run blood, as these fakirs seem to think, and maybe it isn't. There'll be more blood shed than mine in that case! 'Hookum hai'—'It is orders,' heh? Well—there's more than one sort of 'Hookum hai!' I've got my orders too!”
He doubled the guard, when supper bad been eaten and the guardroom had been swept and the pots and kettle had been burnished until they shone. Then he tossed a chupatty to the imprisoned fakir, spat again from sheer disgust, lit his pipe and went and sat where he could hear the footbeats of the sentries.
“They can't help their religion,” he muttered. “The poor infidels don't know no better. And they've got a right to think what they please 'about me or the Company. But I've no patience with uncleanliness! That's wrong any way you look at it. That critter can't see straight for the dirt on him, nor think straight for that matter. He's a disgrace to humanity. Priest or fakir or whatever he is, if I live to see tomorrow's sun I'll hand him over to the guard and have him washed!”
Having formed that resolution, Brown dismissed all thoughts of the fakir. His memory went back to home—the clean white cottage on the Sussex Downs, and the clean white girl who once on a time had waited for him there. For the next few hours, until the guard was changed, the only signs or sounds of life were the glowing of Brown's pipe, the steady footfalls of the sentries and occasional creakings from the hell-hot guard-room, where sleepless soldiers tossed in prickly discomfort.
Bill Brown, with his twelve, had not been set to watch a lonely crossroad for the fun of it. One road was a well-made highway, and led from a walled city, where three thousand men sweated and thought of England, to another city, where five thousand armed natives drew England's pay, and wore English uniforms.
The other road was a snake-like trail, nearly as wide but not nearly so well kept. It twisted here and there amid countless swarming native villages, and was used almost exclusively by natives, whose rightful business was neither war nor peace nor the contriving of either of them. It had been a trade-road when history was being born, and the laden ox-carts creaked along it still, as they had always done and always will do until India awakes.
But there are few men in the world who attend to nothing but their rightful business, and there are even more in India than elsewhere who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among others. There are few fighting-men among that host. They are priests for the most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed and shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk roads, where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen marching in eight-hundred-man battalions. They prefer to dream along the byways, and set other people dreaming. They lead, when the crash comes, from behind.
Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled; and though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed to read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command, still, there were other men who found themselves groping, at least two years before the Mutiny of '57. They were groping for something intangible and noiseless and threatening which they felt was there in a darkness, but which one could not see.
Baines was one of them—Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at Bholat. His troops were in the center of a spider's web of roads that criss-crossed and drained a province. There were big trunk arteries, which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass of winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks. He could feel, if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising, and he was placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the right spot, should the knife be needed.
He was like a surgeon, though, who holds a lancet and can use it, but who lacks permission. The poison in India's system lay deep, and the fever was slow in showing itself. And meanwhile the men who had the ordering of things could see neither necessity nor excuse for so much as a parade of strength. They refused, point-blank and absolutely, to admit that there was, or, could be, any symptom of unrest.
He dared not make new posts for officers, for officers would grumble at enforced exile in the country districts, and the Government would get to hear of it, and countermand. But there were non-commissioned officers in plenty, and it was not difficult to choose the best of them—three men—and send them, with minute detachments, to three different points of vantage. Non-commissioned officers don't grumble, or if they do no one gets to hear of it, or minds. And they are just as good as officers at watching crossroads and reporting what they see and hear.
So where a little cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles from Bholat, Bill Brown—swordsman and sergeant and strictest of martinets, as well as sentimentalist—had been set to watch and listen and report.
There were many cleverer men in the non-commissioned ranks of Baine's command, many who knew more of the native languages, and who had more imagination. But there was none who knew better how to win the unqualified respect and the obedience of British and native alike, or who could be better counted on to obey an order, when it came, literally, promptly and in the teeth of anything.
Brown's theories on religion were a thing to marvel at, and walk singularly wide of, for he was a preacher with a pair of fists when thoroughly aroused. And his devotion to a girl in England whom no one in his regiment had ever seen, and of whom he did not even possess a likeness, was next door to being pitiable. His voice was like a raven's, with something rather less than a raven's sense of melody; he was very prone to sing, and his songs were mournful ones. He was not a social acquisition in any generally accepted sense, although his language was completely free from blasphemy or coarseness. His ideas were too cut and dried to make conversation even interesting. But his loyalty and his sense of duty were as adamant.
He had changed the double guard at the crossroads; and had posted two fresh men by the mud-walled guardroom door. He had lit his pipe for the dozenth time, and had let it go out again while he hummed a verse of a Covenanters' hymn. And he had just started up to wall over to the cell and make a cursory inspection of his prisoner, when his ears caught a distant sound that was different from any of the night sounds, though scarcely louder.
Prompt as a rifle in answer to the trigger, he threw himself down on all fours, and laid his ear to the ground. A second later, he was on his feet again.
“Guard!” he yelled. “Turn out!”
Cots squeaked and jumped, and there came a rush of hurrying feet. The eight men not on watch ran out in single file, still buttoning their uniforms, and lined up beside the two who watched the guardroom door.
“Stand easy!” commanded Brown. Then he marched off to the crossroads, finding his way in the blackness more by instinct and sense of direction than from any landmark, for even the road beneath his feet was barely visible.
“D'you mean to tell me that neither of you men can hear that sound?” he asked the sentries.
Both men listened intently, and presently one of them made out a very faint and distant noise, that did not seem to blend in with the other night-sounds.
“Might be a native drum?” he hazarded.
“No, 'tain't!” said the other. “I got it now. It's a horse galloping. Tired horse, by the sound of him, and coming this way. All right, Sergeant.”
“One of you go two hundred yards along the road, and form an advance-post, so to speak. Challenge him the minute he's within ear-shot, and shoot him if he won't halt. If he halts, pass him along to Number Two. Number Two, pass him along to the guardroom, where I'll deal with him! Which of you's Number One? Number One, then—forward—quick—march!”
The sentry trudged off in one direction, and Bill Brown in another. The sentry concealed itself behind a rock that flanked the road, and Brown spent the next few minutes in making the guard “port arms,” and carefully inspecting their weapons with the aid of a lantern. He had already inspected there once since supper, but he knew the effect that another inspection would be likely to produce. Nothing goes further toward making men careful and ready at the word than incessant and unexpected but quite quietly performed inspection of minutest details.
He produced the effect of setting the men on the qui vive without alarming them.
Suddenly, the farthest advanced sentry's challenge rang out.
“Frie-e-e-e-nd!” came the answer, in nasal, high-pitched wail, but the galloping continued.
“Halt, I tell you!” A breech-bolt clicked, and then another one. They were little sounds, but they were different, and the guard could hear them plainly. The galloping horse came on.
“Cra-a-a-a-ack!” went the sentry's rifle, and the flash of it spurted for an instant across the road, like a sheet of lightning. And, just as lightning might, it showed an instantaneous vision of a tired gray horse, foam-flecked and furiously ridden, pounding down the road head-on. The vision was blotted by the night again before any one could see who rode the horse, or what his weapons were—if any—or form a theory as to why he rode.
But the winging bullet did what the sentry's voice had failed to do. There came a clatter of spasmodic hoof-beats, an erratic shower of sparks, a curse in clean-lipped decent Urdu; a grunt, a struggle, more sparks again, and then a thud, followed by a devoutly worded prayer that Allah, the all-wise provider of just penalties, might blast the universe.
“Stop talkin'!” said the sentry, and a black-bearded Rajput rolled free, and looked up to find a bayonet-point within three inches of his eye.
“Poggul!” snarled the Mohammedan.
“Poggul's no password!” said the sentry. “Neither to my good-nature nor to nothing else. Put up your 'ands, and get on your feet, and march! Look alive, now! Call me a fool, would yer? Wait till the sergeant's through with yer, and see!”
The Rajput chose to consider a retort beneath his dignity. He rose, and took one quick look at the horse, which was still breathing.
“Your bayonet just there,” he said, “and press. So he will die quickly.”
The sentry placed his bayonet-point exactly where directed, and leaned his weight above it. The horse gave a little shudder, and lay still.
“Poggul!” said the Rajput once again. And this time the sentry looked and saw cold steel within three inches of his eye!
“Your rifle!” said the Rajput. “Hand it here!”
And, to save his eyesight, the sentry complied, while the Rajput's ivory-white teeth grinned at him pleasantly.
“Now, hands to your sides! Attention! March!” the Rajput ordered, and with his own bayonet at his back the sentry had to march, whether he wanted to or not, by the route that the other chose, toward the guardroom. The Rajput seemed to know by instinct where the second sentry stood although the man's shape was quite invisible against the night. He called out, “Friend!” again as he passed him, and the sentry hearing the first sentry's footsteps, imagined that the real situation was reversed.
So, out of a pall of blackness, to the accompanying sound of rifles being brought up to the shoulder, a British sentry—feeling and looking precisely like a fool—marched up to his own guardroom, with a man who should have been his prisoner in charge of him.
“Halt!” commanded Brown. “Who or what have you got there, Stanley?”
“Stanley is my prisoner at present!” said a voice that Brown vaguely recognized.
He stepped up closer, to make sure.
“What, you? Juggut Khan!”
“Aye, Brown sahib! Juggut Khan—with tidings, and a dead gray horse on which to bear them! If this fool could only use his bayonet as he can shoot, I think I would be dead too. His brains, though, are all behind his right eye. Tie him up, where no little child can come and make him prisoner!”
“Arrest that man!” commanded Brown, and two men detached themselves from the end of the guard, and stood him between them, behind the line.
“Here's his rifle!” smiled Juggut Khan, and Brown received it with an ill grace.
“How did you get past the other sentry?” he asked.
“Oh, easily! You English are only brave; you have no brains. Sometimes one part of the rule is broken, but the other never. You are not always brave!”
“I suppose you're angry because he killed your horse?”
“I am angry, Brown sahib, for greater happenings than that! The man conceivably was right, since I did not halt for him, and I suppose he had his orders. I am angry because the standard of rebellion is raised, and because of what it means to me!”
“Are you drunk, Juggut Khan?”
“Your honor is pleased to be humorous? No, I am not drunk. Nor have I eaten opium. I have eaten of the bread of bitterness this day, and drunk of the cup of gall. I have seen British officers—good, brave fools, some of whom I knew and loved—killed by the men they were supposed to lead. I have seen a barracks burning, and a city given over to be looted. I have seen white women—nay, sahib, steady!—I have seen them run before a howling mob, and I have seen certain of them shot by their own husbands!”
“Quietly!” ordered Brown. “Don't let the men hear!”
“One of them I slew myself, because her husband, who was wounded, sent me to her and bade me kill her. She died bravely. And certain others I have hidden where the mutineers are not likely to discover them at present. I ride now for succor—or, I rode, rather, until your expert marksman interfered with me! I now need another horse.”
“You mean that the native troops have mutinied?” “I mean rather more than that, sahib. Mohammedans and Hindus are as one, and the crowd is with them. This is probably the end of the powder-train, for, from what I heard shouted by the mutineers, almost the whole of India is in revolt already!”
“Why?”
“God knows, sahib! The reason given is that the cartridges supplied are greased with the blended fat of pigs and cows, thus defiling both Hindu and Mohammedan alike. But, if you ask me, the cause lies deeper. In the meantime, the rebels have looted Jailpore and burned their barracks, and within an hour or two they will start along this road for Bholat, which they have a mind to loot likewise. My advice to you is retire at once. Get me another horse from somewhere, that I may carry warning. Then follow me as fast as you and your men can move.”
“Bah!” said Brown. “They'll find General Baines to deal with them at Bholat.”
“Who knows yet how many in Bholat have not risen? Are you positive that the garrison there has not already been surrounded by rebels? I am not! I would not be at all surprised to learn that General Baines is so busy defending himself that he can not move in any direction. And—does your honor mean to hold this guardroom here against five thousand?”
“I mean to obey my orders!” answered Brown.
“And your orders are?”
“My orders!”
“Would they preclude the provision of another horse for me?”
“There's a village about a mile away, down over yonder, where I think you'll find a decent horse—along that road there.”
“And your honor's orders would possibly permit a certain payment for the horse?”
“Positively not!” said Brown.
“Then—'
“To seize a horse, for military use, under the spur of necessity, and after giving a receipt for it, would be in order.”
“So I am to spend the night wandering around the countryside, in a vain endeavor to—”
But Brown was doing mathematics in his head. Two men to guard prisoners, two on guard at the crossroads, two at the guardroom door—six from twelve left six, and six were not enough to rape a countryside.
“Guard!” he ordered. “Release that prisoner. Now, you Stanley, let this be a lesson to you, and remember that I only set you free because I'd have been short-handed otherwise. Number One! Stand guard between the clink and the guardroom door. Keep an eye on both. The remainder—form two-deep. Right turn! By the left, quick-march! Left wheel!... Now,” he said, turning to Juggut Khan, “if you'll come along I'll soon get a horse for you!”
The Rajput strode along beside him, and gave him some additional information as they went, Brown taking very good care all the time to keep out of earshot of the men and to speak to Juggut Khan in low tones. He learned, among other things, that Juggut Khan had lost every anna that he owned, and had only escaped with his life by dint of luck and swordship and most terrific riding.
“Are all of you Rajputs loyal?” asked Brown.
“I know not. I know that I myself shall stay loyal until the end!”
“Well—the end is not in doubt. There can only be one end!” commented Brown.
“Of a truth, sahib, I believe that you are right. There can only be one end. This night is not more black, this horizon is no shorter, than the outlook!”
“Then, you mean—”
“I mean, sahib, that this uprising is more serious than you—or any other Englishman—is likely to believe. I believe that the side I fight for will be the losing side.”
“And yet, you stay loyal?”
“Why not?”
“All the same, Juggut Khan—I'm not emotional, or a man of many words. I don't trust Indians as a rule! I—but—here—will you shake hands?”
“Certainly, sahib!” said the Rajput. “We be two men, you and I! Why should the one be loyal and the other not?”
“When this is over,” said Brown, “if it ends the way we want, and we're both alive, I'd like to call myself your friend!”
“I have always been your friend, sahib, and you mine, since the day when you bandaged up a boy and gave him your own drinking-water and carried him in to Bholat on your shoulder, twenty miles or more.”
“Oh, as for that—any other man would have done the same thing. That was nothing!”