by Talbot Mundy
He heard of the tribesmen under Khumel Khan one evening. At dawn his tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the green grass. The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.
The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the half-awakened plotters of the night before.
There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill. Long lances — devils’ antennae — searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments. In an hour, or less, there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again for a year or two to come.
But Khumel Khan was missing. Khumel Khan, the tulwar man — he whose boast it was that he could hew through two men’s necks at one whistling sweep of his notched, curved cimeter — had broken through with a dozen at his back. He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.
“Mr. Cunningham! Take your troop, please, and find their chief! Hunt him out, ride him down, and get him! Don’t come back until you do!”
The real thing! The real red thing within a year! A lone command — and that is the only thing a subaltern of spunk may pray for! — eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the opportunity to show their worth — lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight — as sure as God made mountains, a fight at the other end! There are men here and there who think that the day when they pass down a crowded aisle with Her is the great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun. And there are others. There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.
There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to make the compass seem like a lie-begotten trick. There were gorges, hewn when the Titans needed dirt to build the awful Himalayas — shadow-darkened — sheer as the edge of Nemesis. Long-reaching, pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them. The wind blew through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din which rides with armed men.
But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part of them, they tracked and trailed — and viewed at last. Their shout gave Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue, and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small, flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time. His companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry — his was the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan fresh villainies. He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the uselessness, and stood.
The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which the man at bay could no more escape than a fire-ringed scorpion.
“Call on him to surrender!” ordered Cunningham.
A chevroned black-beard half a horse-length behind him translated the demand into stately Pashtu, and for answer the hill chieftain mounted his stolen horse and shook his tulwar. He had pistols at his belt, but he did not draw them; across his shoulder swung a five-foot-long jezail, but he loosed it and flung it to the ground.
“Is there any here dare take me single-handed?” he demanded with a grin.
Of the eight-and-eighty, there were eighty-eight who dared; but there was an eighty-ninth, a lad of not yet twenty-two, whom Indian chivalry desired to honor. The troop had heard but the troop had not yet seen.
“Ride in and take him!” ordered Cunningham and there was a thoroughly well acted make-believe of fear, while every eye watched “Cunnigan-bahadur,” and the horses, spurred and reined at once, pranced at their bits for just so long as a good man needs to make his mind up. And Cunningham rode in.
He rode in as a Rajput rides, with a swoop and a swinging sabre and a silent, tight-lipped vow that he would prove himself. Green though he was yet, he knew that the troop had found for him — had rounded up for him — had made him his opportunity; so he took it, right under their eyes, straight in the teeth of the stoutest tulwar man of the lower Himalayas.
He, too, had pistols at his belt, but there was no shot fired. There was nothing but a spur-loosed rush and a shock — a spark-lit, swirling, slashing, stamping, snorting melee — a stallion and a mare up-ended — two strips of lightning steel that slit the wind — and a thud, as a lifeless border robber took the turf.
There was silence then — the grim, good silence of Mohammedan approval — while a native officer closed up a sword-cut with his fingers and tore ten-yard strips from his own turban to bind the youngster’s head. They rode back without boast or noise and camped without advertisement. There was no demonstration made; only-a colonel said, “I like things done that way, quickly, without fuss,” and a brigadier remarked, “Hrrrumph! ‘Gratulate you, Mr. Cunningham!”
Later, when they camped again outside Peshawur, a reward of three thousand rupees that had been offered on the border outlaw’s head was paid to Cunningham in person — a very appreciable sum to a subaltern, whose pay is barely sufficient for his mess bills. So, although no public comment was made on the matter, it was considered “decent of him” to contribute the whole amount to a pension fund for the dependents of the regiment’s dead.
“You know, that’s your money,” said his Colonel. “You can keep every anna of it if you choose.”
“I suppose I needn’t be an officer unless I choose?” suggested Cunningham.
“I don’t know, youngster! I can’t guess what your troop would do if you tried to desert it!”
That was, of course, merely a diplomatic recognition of the fact that Cunningham had done his duty in making his men like him, and was not intended seriously. Nobody — not even the Brigadier — had any notion that the troop would very shortly have to dispense with its leader’s services whether it wanted to or not.
But it so happened that one troop at a time was requisitioned to be ornamental body-guard to such as were entitled to one in the frontier city; and the turn arrived when Cunningham was sent. None liked the duty. No soldier, and particularly no irregular, likes to consider himself a pipe-clayed ornament; but Cunningham would have “gone sick” had he had the least idea of what was in store for him.
It was bad enough to be obliged to act as body-guard to men who had jockeyed him away because they were jealous of him. The white scar that ran now like a chin-strap mark from the corner of his eye to the angle of his jaw would blaze red often at some deliberately thought-out, not fancied, insult from men who should have been too big to more than notice him. And that, again, was nothing to the climax.
Mahommed Gunga chose to polish up his silver spurs and ride in from his “estates” on a protracted visit to Peshawur, and with an escort that must have included half the zemindars on the countryside as well as his own small retinue. Glittering on his own account like a regiment of horse, and with all but a regiment clattering behind him, he chose the occasion to meet Cunningham when the youngster was fuming with impatience opposite the club veranda, waiting to escort a general.
On the veranda sat a dozen men who had been at considerable pains to put and keep the officer of the escort in his place. If the jingle and glitter of the approaching cavalcade had not been sufficient to attract their notice, th
ey could have stopped their cars and yet have been forced to hear the greeting.
“Aha! Salaam sahib! Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, bohut salaam! Thy father’s son! Sahib, I am much honored!”
The white scar blazed, but Mahommed Gunga affected not to notice the discomfort of his victim. Many more than a hundred sabred gentlemen pressed round to “do themselves the honor,” as they expressed it, of paying Cunningham a compliment. They rode up like knights in armor in the lists, and saluted like heralds bringing tribute and allegiance.
“Salaam, Chota-Cunnigan!”
“Salaam, sahib!”
“Bohut salaam, bahadur!”
The Generals, the High-Court judges, and Commissioners on the club veranda sat unhonored, while a boy of twenty-two received obeisance from men whose respect a king might envy. No Rajput ever lived who was not sure that his salute was worth more than tribute; he can be polite on all occasions, and what he thinks mere politeness would be considered overacting in the West, but his respect and his salute he keeps for his equals or his betters — and they must be men indeed.
The coterie of high officials sat indignation-bound for ten palpitating minutes, until the General remembered that it was his escort that was waiting for him. He had ordered it an hour too soon, for the express sweet purpose of keeping Cunningham waiting in the sun, but it dawned now on his apoplectic consciousness that his engagement was most urgent. He descended in a pompous hurry, mounted and demanded why — by all the gods of India — the escort was not lined up to receive him. A minute later, after a loudly administered reprimand that was meant as much for the swarm of Rajputs as for the indignant Cunningham, he rode off with the escort clattering behind him.
But on the club veranda, when the Rajputs with Mahommed Gunga had dispersed, the big wigs sat and talked the matter over very thoroughly.
“It’s no use blinking matters,” said the senior man present, using a huge handkerchief to wave the flies away from the polished dome which rose between two side wisps of gray hair. “They’re going to lionize him while he’s here, so we’d better move him on.”
“But where?”
“I’ve got it! There’s a letter in from Everton at Abu, saying he needs a man badly to go to Howrah and act resident there — says he hasn’t heard from the missionaries and isn’t satisfied — wants a man without too much authority to go there and keep an eye on things in general. Howrah’s a hell of a place from all accounts.”
“But that ‘ud be promotion!”
“Can’t be helped. No excuse for reducing him, so far as I’ve heard. The trouble is the cub has done too dashed well. We’ve got to promote him if we want to be rid of him.”
They talked it over for an hour, and at the end of it decided Cunningham should go to Howrah, provided a brigadier could be induced without too much argument to see reason.
“The Brigadier probably wants to keep him, and his Colonel will raise all the different kinds of Cain there are!” suggested the man who had begun the discussion.
“I’ve seen brigadiers before now reduced to a proper sense of their own unimportance!” remarked another man. And he was connected with the Treasury. He knew.
But a week later, when the papers were sent to the Brigadier for signature, he amazed everybody by consenting without the least objection. Nobody but he knew who his visitor had been the night before.
“How did you know about it, Mahommed Gunga?” he demanded, as the veteran sat and faced him over the tent candle, his one lean leg swaying up and down, as usual, above the other.
“Have club servants not got ears, sahib?”
“And you — ?”
“I, too, have ears — good ones!”
The Brigadier drummed his fingers on the table, hesitating. No officer, however high up in the service, likes to lose even a subaltern from his command when that subaltern is worth his salt.
“Let him go, sahib! You have seen how we Rangars honor him — you may guess what difference he might make in a crisis. Sign, sahib — let him go!”
“But — where do you come in? What have you had to do with this?”
“First, sahib, I tested him thoroughly. I found him good. Second, I told tales about him, making him out better than even he is. Third, I made sure that all those in authority at Peshawur should hate him. That would have been impossible if he had been a fool, or a weak man, or an incompetent; but any good man can be hated easily. Fourth, sahib, I sent, by the hand of a man of mine, a message to Everton-sahib at Abu reporting to him that it was not in Howrah as it should be, and warning him that a sahib should be sent there. I knew that he would listen to a hint from me, and I knew that he had no one in his office whom he could send. Then, sahib, I brought matters to a head by bringing every man of merit whom I could raise to salute him and make an outrageous exhibition of him. That is what I have done!”
“One would think you were scheming for a throne, Mahommed Gunga!”
“Nay, sahib, I am scheming for the peace of India! But there will be war first.”
“I know there will be war,” said the Brigadier. “I only wish I could make the other sahibs realize it.”
“Will you sign the paper, sahib?”
“Yes, I will sign the paper. But—”
“But what, sahib?”
“I’m not quite certain that I’m doing right.”
“Brigadier-sahib, when the hour comes — and that is soon — it will be time to answer that! There lie the papers.”
CHAPTER XIII
Even in darkness lime and sand
Will blend to make up mortar.
Two by two would equal four
Under a bucket of water.
NOW it may seem unimaginable that two Europeans could be cooped in Howrah, not under physical restraint, and yet not able to communicate with any one who could render them assistance. It was the case, though, and not by any means an isolated case. The policy of the British Government, once established in India, was and always has been not to occupy an inch of extra territory until compelled by circumstances.
The native states, then, while forbidden to contract alliances with one another or the world outside, and obliged by the letter of written treaties to observe certain fundamental laws imposed on them by the Anglo-Indian Government, were left at liberty to govern themselves. And it was largely the fact that they could and did keep secret what was going on within their borders that enabled the so-called Sepoy Rebellion to get such a smouldering foothold before it burst into a blaze. The sepoys were the tools of the men behind the movement; and the men behind were priests and others who were feeling nothing but their own ambition.
No man knows even now how long the fire rebellion had been burning underground before showed through the surface; but it is quite obvious that, in spite of the heroism shown by British and loyal native alike when the crash did come, the rebels must have won — and have won easily sheer weight of numbers — had they only used the amazing system solely for the broad, comprehensive purpose for which it was devised.
But the sense of power that its ramifications and extent gave birth to also whetted the desires individuals. Each man of any influence at all began to scheme to use the system for the furtherance of his individual ambition. Instead of bending all their energy and craft to the one great object of hurling an unloved conqueror back whence he came, each reigning prince strove to scheme himself head and shoulders above the rest; and each man who wanted to be prince began to plot harder than ever to be one.
So in Howrah the Maharajah’s brother, Jaimihr, with a large following and organization of his own, began to use the secret system of which he by right formed an integral part and to set wheels working within the wheels which in course of time should spew him up on the ledge which his brother now occupied. Long before the rebellion was ready he had all his preparations made and waited only for the general conflagration to strike for his own hand. And was so certain of success that he dared make plans as well for Rosemary McClean’s fate.
/> There is a blindness, too, quite unexplainable that comes over whole nations sometimes. It is almost like a plague in its mysterious arrival and departure. As before the French Revolution there were almost none of the ruling classes who could read the writing on the wall, so it was in India in the spring of ‘57. Men saw the signs and could not read their meaning. As in France, so in India, there were a few who understood, but they were scoffed at; the rest — the vast majority who held the reins of power — were blind.
Rosemary McClean discovered that her pony had gone lame, and was angry with the groom. The groom ran away, and she put that down to native senselessness. Duncan McClean sent one after another of the little native children to find him a man who would take a letter to Mount Abu. The children went and did not come back again, and he put that down to the devil, who would seem to have reclaimed them.
Both of them saw the watchers, posted at every vantage-point, insolently wakeful; both of them knew that Jaimihr had placed them there. But neither of them looked one inch deeper than the surface, nor supposed that their presence betokened anything but the prince’s unreachable ambition. Neither of them thought for an instant that the day could possibly have come when Britain would be unable to protect a woman of its own race, or when a native — however powerful — would dare to do more than threaten.