A dozen steps from the ridge of the ravine O’Donnell drew rein, glimpsing turbans among the rocks, and called out a greeting in Pashtu. A deep bellowing voice answered him, and a vast figure heaved up into full view, followed by half a dozen lesser shapes.
“Allah be with thee!” roared the first man.
He was tall, broad, and powerful; his beard was stained with henna, and his eyes blazed like fires burning under gray ice. One massive fist gripped a rifle, the thumb of the other was hooked into the broad silken girdle which banded his capacious belly, as he tilted back on his heels and thrust his beard out truculently. That girdle likewise supported a broad tulwar and three or four knives.
“Mashallah!” roared this individual. “I had thought it was my own men who had taken the dogs in the rear, until I saw those fur caps. Ye are Turks from Shahrazar, no doubt?”
“Aye; I am Ali el Ghazi, a Kurd, brother-in-arms to Orkhan Bahadur. You are Ahmed Shah, lord of Khuruk?”
There was a hyenalike cackle of laughter from the lean, evil-eyed men who had followed the big man out of the gully.
“Ahmed Shah has been in hell these four days,” rumbled the giant. “I am Afzal Khan, whom men name the Butcher.”
O’Donnell sensed rather than heard a slight stir among the men behind him. Most of them understood Pashtu, and the deeds of Afzal Khan had found echo in the serais of Turkestan. The man was an outlaw, even in that lawless land, a savage plunderer whose wild road was lurid with the smoke and blood of slaughter.
“But that pass is the gateway to Khuruk,” said O’Donnell, slightly bewildered.
“Aye!” agreed Afzal Khan affably. “Four days ago I came down into the valley from the east and drove out the Khurukzai dogs. Ahmed Shah I slew with my own hands — so!”
A flicker of red akin to madness flamed up momentarily in his eyes as he smashed the butt of his rifle down on a dead tamarisk branch, shattering it from the trunk. It was as if the mere mention of murder roused the sleeping devil in him. Then his beard bristled in a fierce grin.
“The villages of Khuruk I burned,” he said calmly. “My men need no roofs between them and the sky. The village dogs — such as still lived — fled into the hills. This day I was hunting some from among the rocks, not deeming them wise enough to plant an ambush, when they cut me off from the pass, and the rest you know. I took refuge in the ravine. When I heard your firing I thought it was my own men.”
O’Donnell did not at once answer, but sat his horse, gazing inscrutably at the fierce, scarred countenance of the Afghan. A sidelong glance showed him the men from the tower straggling up — some seventy of them, a wild, dissolute band, ragged and hairy, with wolfish countenances and rifles in their hands. These rifles were, in most cases, inferior to those carried by his own men.
In a battle begun then and there, the advantage was still with the mounted Turkomans. Then another glance showed him more men swarming out of the pass — a hundred at least.
“The dogs come at last!” grunted Afzal Khan. “They have been gorging back in the valley. I would have been vulture bait if I had been forced to await their coming. Brother!” He strode forward to lay his hand on O’Donnell’s stirrup strap, while envy of and admiration for the magnificent Turkish stallion burned in his fierce eyes. “Brother, come with me to Khuruk! You have saved my life this day, and I would reward you fittingly.”
O’Donnell did not look at his Turkomans. He knew they were waiting for his orders and would obey him. He could draw his pistol and shoot Afzal Khan dead, and they could cut their way back across the plateau in the teeth of the volleys that were sure to rake their line of flight. Many would escape. But why escape? Afzal Khan had every reason to show them the face of a friend, and, besides, if he had killed Ahmed Shah, it was logical to suppose that he had the papers without which O’Donnell dared not return to Shahrazar.
“We will ride with you to Khuruk, Afzal Khan,” decided O’Donnell.
The Afghan combed his crimson beard with his fingers and boomed his gratification.
The ragged ruffians closed in about them as they rode toward the pass, a swarm of sheepskin coats and soiled turbans that hemmed in the clean-cut riders in their fur caps and girdled kaftans.
O’Donnell did not miss the envy in the glances cast at the rifles and cartridge belts and horses of the Turkomans. Orkhan Bahadur was generous with his men to the point of extravagance; he had sent them out with enough ammunition to fight a small war.
Afzal Khan strode by O’Donnell’s stirrup, booming his comments and apparently oblivious to everything except the sound of his own voice.
O’Donnell glanced from him to his followers. Afzal Khan was a Yusufzai, a pure-bred Afghan, but his men were a motley mob — Pathans, mostly, Orakzai, Ummer Khels, Sudozai, Afridis, Ghilzai — outcasts and nameless men from many tribes.
They went through the pass — a knife-cut gash between sheer rock walls, forty feet wide and three hundred yards long — and beyond the tower were a score of gaunt horses which Afzal Khan and some of his favored henchmen mounted. Then the chief gave pungent orders to his men; fifty of them climbed into the tower and resumed the ceaseless vigilance that is the price of life in the hills, and the rest followed him and his guests out of the pass and along the knife-edge trail that wound amid savage crags and jutting spurs.
Afzal Khan fell silent, and indeed there was scant opportunity for conversation, each man being occupied in keeping his horse or his own feet on the wavering path. The surrounding crags were so rugged and lofty that the strategic importance of the Pass of Akbar impressed itself still more strongly on O’Donnell.
Only through that pass could any body of men make their way safely. He felt uncomfortably like a man who sees a door shut behind him, blocking his escape, and he glanced furtively at Afzal Khan, riding with stirrups so short that he squatted like a huge toad in his saddle. The chief seemed preoccupied; he gnawed a wisp of his red beard and there was a blank stare in his eyes.
The sun was swinging low when they came to a second pass. This was not exactly a pass at all, in the usual sense. It was an opening in a cluster of rocky spurs that rose like fangs along the lip of a rim beyond which the land fell away in a long gradual sweep. Threading among these stony teeth, O’Donnell looked down into the valley of Khuruk.
It was not a deep valley, but it was flanked by cliffs that looked unscalable. It ran east and west, roughly, and they were entering it at the eastern end. At the western end it seemed to be blocked by a mass of crags.
There were no cultivated patches, or houses to be seen in the valley — only stretches of charred ground. Evidently the destruction of the Khurukzai villages had been thorough. In the midst of the valley stood a square stone inclosure, with a tower at one corner, such as are common in the hills, and serve as forts in times of strife.
Divining his thought, Afzal Khan pointed to this and said: “I struck like a thunderbolt. They had not time to take refuge in the sangar. Their watchmen on the heights were careless. We stole upon them and knifed them; then in the dawn we swept down on the villages. Nay, some escaped. We could not slay them all. They will keep coming back to harass me — as they have done this day — until I hunt them down and wipe them all out.”
O’Donnell had not mentioned the papers; to have done so would have been foolish; he could think of no way to question Afzal Khan without waking the Afghan’s suspicions; he must await his opportunity.
That opportunity came unexpectedly.
“Can you read Urdu?” asked Afzal Khan abruptly.
“Aye!” O’Donnell made no further comment but waited with concealed tenseness.
“I cannot; nor Pashtu, either, for that matter,” rumbled the Afghan. “There were papers on Ahmed Shah’s body, which I believe are written in Urdu.”
“I might be able to read them for you.”
O’Donnell tried to speak casually, but perhaps he was not able to keep his eagerness altogether out of his voice. Afzal Khan tugged his beard, gl
anced at him sidewise, and changed the subject. He spoke no more of the papers and made no move to show them to his guest. O’Donnell silently cursed his own impatience; but at least he had learned that the documents he sought were in the bandit’s possession, and that Afzal Khan was ignorant of their nature — if he was not lying.
At a growled order all but sixty of the chief’s men halted among the spurs overlooking the valley. The rest trailed after him.
“They watch for the Khurukzai dogs,” he explained. “There are trails by which a few men might get through the hills, avoiding the Pass of Akbar, and reach the head of the valley.”
“Is this the only entrance to Khuruk?”
“The only one that horses can travel. There are footpaths leading through the crags from the north and the south, but I have men posted there as well. One rifleman can hold any one of them forever. My forces are scattered about the valley. I am not to be taken by surprise as I took Ahmed Shah.”
The sun was sinking behind the western hills as they rode down the valley, tailed by the men on foot. All were strangely silent, as if oppressed by the silence of the plundered valley. Their destination evidently was the inclosure, which stood perhaps a mile from the head of the valley. The valley floor was unusually free of boulders and stones, except a broken ledge like a reef that ran across the valley several hundred yards east of the fortalice. Halfway between these rocks and the inclosure, Afzal Khan halted.
“Camp here!” he said abruptly, with a tone more of command than invitation. “My men and I occupy the sangar, and it is well to keep our wolves somewhat apart. There is a place where your horses can be stabled, where there is plenty of fodder stored.” He pointed out a stone-walled pen of considerable dimensions a few hundred yards away, near the southern cliffs. “Hungry wolves come down from the gorges and attack the horses.”
“We will camp beside the pen,” said O’Donnell, preferring to be closer to their mounts.
Afzal Khan showed a flash of irritation. “Do you wish to be shot in the dark for an enemy?” he growled. “Pitch your tents where I bid you. I have told my men at the pass where you will camp, and if any of them come down the valley in the dark, and hear men where no men are supposed to be, they will shoot first and investigate later. Beside, the Khurukzai dogs, if they creep upon the crags and see men sleeping beneath them, will roll down boulders and crush you like insects.”
This seemed reasonable enough, and O’Donnell had no wish to antagonize Afzal Khan. The Afghan’s attitude seemed a mixture of his natural domineering arrogance and an effort at geniality. This was what might be expected, considering both the man’s nature and his present obligation. O’Donnell believed that Afzal Khan begrudged the obligation, but recognized it.
“We have no tents,” answered the American. “We need none. We sleep in our cloaks.” And he ordered his men to dismount at the spot designated by the chief. They at once unsaddled and led their horses to the pen, where, as the Afghan had declared, there was an abundance of fodder.
O’Donnell told off five men to guard them. Not, he hastened to explain to the frowning chief, that they feared human thieves, but there were the wolves to be considered. Afzal Khan grunted and turned his own sorry steeds into the pen, growling in his beard at the contrast they made alongside the Turkish horses.
His men showed no disposition to fraternize with the Turkomans; they entered the inclosure and presently the smoke of cooking fires arose. O’Donnell’s own men set about preparing their scanty meal, and Afzal Khan came and stood over them, combing his crimson beard that the firelight turned to blood. The jeweled hilts of his knives gleamed in the glow, and his eyes burned red like the eyes of a hawk.
“Our fare is poor,” he said abruptly. “Those Khurukzai dogs burned their own huts and food stores when they fled before us. We are half starved. I can offer you no food, though you are my guests. But there is a well in the sangar, and I have sent some of my men to fetch some steers we have in a pen outside the valley. Tomorrow we shall all feast full, inshallah!”
O’Donnell murmured a polite response, but he was conscious of a vague uneasiness. Afzal Khan was acting in a most curious manner, even for a bandit who trampled all laws and customs of conventional conduct. He gave them orders one instant and almost apologized for them in the next.
The matter of designating the camp site sounded almost as if they were prisoners, yet he had made no attempt to disarm them. His men were sullen and silent, even for bandits. But he had no reason to be hostile toward his guests, and, even if he had, why had he brought them to Khuruk when he could have wiped them out up in the hills just as easily?
“Ali el Ghazi,” Afzal Khan suddenly repeated the name. “Wherefore Ghazi? What infidel didst thou slay to earn the name?”
“The Russian, Colonel Ivan Kurovitch.” O’Donnell spoke no lie there. As Ali el Ghazi, a Kurd, he was known as the slayer of Kurovitch; the duel had occurred in one of the myriad nameless skirmishes along the border.
Afzal Khan meditated this matter for a few minutes. The firelight cast part of his features in shadow, making his expression seem even more sinister than usual. He loomed in the firelit shadows like a somber monster weighing the doom of men. Then with a grunt he turned and strode away toward the sangar.
III
Night had fallen. Wind moaned among the crags. Cloud masses moved across the dark vault of the night, obscuring the stars which blinked here and there, were blotted out and then reappeared, like chill points of frosty silver. The Turkomans squatted silently about their tiny fires, casting furtive glances over their shoulders.
Men of the deserts, the brooding grimness of the dark mountains daunted them; the night pressing down in the bowl of the valley dwarfed them in its immensity. They shivered at the wailing of the wind, and peered fearfully into the darkness, where, according to their superstitions, the ghosts of murdered men roamed ghoulishly. They stared bleakly at O’Donnell, in the grip of fear and paralyzing fatalism.
The grimness and desolation of the night had its effect on the American. A foreboding of disaster oppressed him. There was something about Afzal Khan he could not fathom — something unpredictable.
The man had lived too long outside the bounds of ordinary humanity to be judged by the standards of common men. In his present state of mind the bandit chief assumed monstrous proportions, like an ogre out of a fable.
O’Donnell shook himself angrily. Afzal Khan was only a man, who would die if bitten by lead or steel, like any other man. As for treachery, what would be the motive? Yet the foreboding remained.
“Tomorrow we will feast,” he told his men. “Afzal Khan has said it.”
They stared at him somberly, with the instincts of the black forests and the haunted steppes in their eyes which gleamed wolfishly in the firelight.
“The dead feast not,” muttered one of them.
“What talk is this?” rebuked O’Donnell. “We are living men, not dead.”
“We have not eaten salt with Afzal Khan,” replied the Turkoman. “We camp here in the open, hemmed in by his slayers on either hand. Aie, we are already dead men. We are sheep led to the butcher.”
O’Donnell stared hard at his men, startled at their voicing the vague fears that troubled him. There was no accusation of his leadership in their voices. They merely spoke their beliefs in a detached way that belied the fear in their eyes. They believed they were to die, and he was beginning to believe they were right. The fires were dying down, and there was no more fuel to build them up. Some of the men wrapped themselves in their cloaks and lay down on the hard ground. Others remained sitting cross-legged on their saddle cloths, their heads bent on their breasts.
O’Donnell rose and walked toward the first outcropping of the rocks, where he turned and stared back at the inclosure. The fires had died down there to a glow. No sound came from the sullen walls. A mental picture formed itself in his mind, resultant from his visit to the redoubt for water.
It was a bare wall inclo
sing a square space. At the northwest corner rose a tower. At the southwest corner there was a well. Once a tower had protected the well, but now it was fallen into ruins, so that only a hint of it remained. There was nothing else in the inclosure except a small stone hut with a thatched roof. What was in the hut he had no way of knowing. Afzal Khan had remarked that he slept alone in the tower. The chief did not trust his own men too far.
What was Afzal Khan’s game? He was not dealing straight with O’Donnell; that was obvious. Some of his evasions and pretenses were transparent; the man was not as clever as one might suppose; he was more like a bull that wins by ferocious charges.
But why should he practice deception? What had he to gain? O’Donnell had smelled meat cooking in the fortalice. There was food in the valley, then, but for some reason the Afghan had denied it. The Turkomans knew that; to them it logically suggested but one thing — he would not share the salt with men he intended to murder. But again, why?
“Ohai, Ali el Ghazi!”
At that hiss out of the darkness, O’Donnell wheeled, his big pistol jumping into his hand, his skin prickling. He strained his eyes, but saw nothing; heard only the muttering of the night wind.
“Who is it?” he demanded guardedly. “Who calls?”
“A friend! Hold your fire!”
O’Donnell saw a more solid shadow detach itself from the rocks and move toward him. With his thumb pressing back the fanged hammer of his pistol, he shoved the muzzle against the man’s belly and leaned forward to glare into the hairy face in the dim, uncertain starlight. Even so the darkness was so thick the fellow’s features were only a blur.
“Do you not know me?” whispered the man, and by his accent O’Donnell knew him for a Waziri. “I am Yar Muhammad!”
“Yar Muhammad!” Instantly the gun went out of sight and O’Donnell’s hand fell on the other’s bull-like shoulder. “What do you in this den of thieves?”
El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Page 53