Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  King thought of the gold-hilted knife, that still rested under his shirt. He was tempted to show it to them and find out surely whose it was and what it meant. But wisdom and curiosity seldom mingle. He thought of Ismail— “Ursus, of Quo Vadis — dog, desperado, stalking-horse and Keeper of the Queen’s secrets.” It was not time yet to run risks with Ismail. The knife stayed where it was.

  “I shall start for the Hills at dawn,” he said slowly, and he watched their eyes gleam at the news. No caged tiger is as wretched as a prisoned Hillman. No freed bird wings more wildly for the open. No moth comes more foolishly back to the flame again. It was easy to take pity on them — probably not one of whom knew pity’s meaning.

  “Is there any among you who would care to come — ?”

  “Ah-h-h-h!”

  “ — at the price of strict obedience?”

  “Eh-h-h-h-h!”

  It seemed there was no word in Pashtu that could express their willingness.

  “We be very, very weary for our Hills!” explained the nearest man.

  “Aye!” King answered. “And ye all owe Ali!”

  “Uh-h-h-h-h!”

  But he knew better than to browbeat them on that account just then, for the men of the North are easier led than driven — up to a certain point. Yet it is no bad plan to remind them of the fundamentals to begin with.

  “Will ye obey me, and him?” he asked, laying his hand on Ismail’s shoulder, as much to let them see the bracelet again as for any other reason.

  “Aye! If we fail, Allah do more to us!”

  King laughed. “Ye shall leave this place as my prisoners. Here ye have no friends. Here ye must obey. But what when ye come to your ‘Hills’ at last? Can one man hold thirty men prisoners then? In the ‘Hills’ will ye still obey me?”

  They answered him in chorus. Every man of the thirty, and Ismail into the bargain, threw his right hand in the air.

  “Allah witness that we will obey!”

  “Ah-h-h!” said King. “I have heard Hillmen swear by Allah many a time! Many a time!”

  The answer to that was unexpected. Ismail knelt — seized his hand — and pressed the gold bracelet to his lips!

  In turn, every one of them filed by, knelt reverently and kissed the bracelet!

  “Saw ye ever a Hillman do that before?” asked Ismail. “They will obey thee! Have no fear!”

  “Kutch dar nahin hai!” King answered. “There is no such thing as fear!” and Ismail grinned at him, not knowing that King was feeling as Aladdin must have done.

  “I have heard you swear,” said King; “be ye true men!”

  “Ah-h-h!”

  “Have they belongings that ought to be collected first?” he asked, and Ismail laughed.

  “No more than the dead have! A shroud apiece! Ali gave them bitterness to eat and picked their teeth afterward for gleanings! They stand in what they own!”

  “Then, come!” ordered King, turning his back confidently on thirty savages whom Saunders, for instance, would have preferred to drive in front of him, after first seeing them handcuffed. But when he is not pressed for time neither pistols, nor yet handcuffs, are included in King’s method.

  “Each lock has a key, but some keys fit all locks,” says the Eastern proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and Saunders is still in Delhi.

  Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving stones, like night-birds waiting for a meal.

  “I want blankets for them — two good ones apiece — and food for a week’s journey!” he told the astonished Saunders; and he spoke so decidedly that the other man’s questions and argument died stillborn. “While you attend to that for me, I’ll be seeing his dibs and making explanations. You look full of news. What do you know?”

  “I’ve telephoned all the other stations, and my men swear Yasmini has not left Delhi by train!”

  King smiled at him.

  “If I leave by train d’you suppose she’ll hear of it?”

  “You bet! Bet your boots! Man alive — if she’s interested in you by so much,” — he measured off a fraction of his little finger end— “she knows your next two moves ahead, to say nothing of your past half-dozen! I crossed her bows once and thought I had her at a disadvantage. She laughed at me. On my honor, my spine tingles yet at the mere thought of it! You’ve never met her? Never heard her laugh? Never seen her eyes? You’ve a treat in store for you — and a mauvais quat’ d’heure! What’ll you bet me she doesn’t laugh you out of countenance the very first time you meet? Come now — what’ll you bet?”

  “Not in the habit,” King answered, glancing at his watch. “Will you see about their rations, please, and the blankets? Thanks!”

  They went then in opposite directions and the prisoners were left squatting under the eyes and bayonets of a very suspicious prison guard, who made no secret of being ready for all conceivable emergencies. One enthusiast drew the cartridge out of his breech-chamber and licked it at intervals of a minute or two, to the very great interest of the Hillmen, who memorized every detail that by any stretch of imagination might be expected to improve their own shooting when they should get home again.

  King found his way on foot through a maze of streets to a palace where he was admitted through one door after another by sentries who saluted when he had whispered to them. He ended by sitting on the end of the bed of a gray-headed man who owns three titles and whose word is law between the borders of a province. To him he talked as one schoolboy to a bigger one, because the gray-haired man had understanding, and hence sympathy.

  “I don’t envy you!” said he under the sheet. “There was an American here not long ago — most amusing man I ever talked to. He had the right expression. ‘I do not desiderate that pie!’ was his way of putting it. Good, don’t you think?”

  All the while he talked the older man was writing on a pad that he held propped by his knees beneath the bedclothes, holding the paper tight to keep it from fluttering in the breeze of a big electric fan.

  “There’s the release for your prisoners. Take it — and take them! Whatever possessed you to want such a gift?”

  “Orders, sir.”

  “Whose?”

  “His. He sent for me to Peshawur and gave me strict orders to work with, not against her. This was obvious.”

  “How obvious? It seems bewildering!”

  “Well, sir, — first place, she doesn’t want to seem to be connected with me. Otherwise she’d have been more in evidence. Second place, she has left Delhi — his telegram and Saunders’ men on oath notwithstanding — and she did not mean to leave those men. I imagine her best way to manage Hillmen is to keep promises, and they say she promised them. Third place, if those thirty men had been anything but her particular pet gang they’d either have been over the border or else in jail before now, — just like all the others. For some reason that I don’t pretend to understand, she promised ’em more than she has been able to perform. So I provide performance. She gets the credit for it. I get a pretty good personal following at least as far as up the Khyber! Q.E.D.,sir!”

  The man in bed nodded. “Not bad,” he said.

  “Didn’t she make some effort to get those men away from Ali’s?” King asked him. “I mean, didn’t she try to get them dry-nursed by the sirkar in some way?”

  “Yes. She did. But it was difficult. In the first place, there didn’t seem to be any particular hurry. They were eating Ali’s substance. The scoundrel had to feed them as long as he kept them there, and we wanted that. We forbade her to pay their debts to Ali, because he has too urgent need of money just now. He is being pressed on account of debts of his own, and the pressure is making him take risks. He has been begging for money from the German agents. We know who they are, and we expect to make a big haul within a few hours now.”

  “Hope I didn’t spoil things by butting in, sir.”

  “No. Thi
s is different. She wanted them arrested and locked up at a moment when the jails were all crowded. And then she wanted us to put ’em into trucks and railroad ’em up North out of harm’s way as she put it, and we happened to be too busy. The railway staff was overworked. Now things are getting straightened out. I felt it keenly not being able to oblige her, but she asked too much at the wrong moment! I would have done it if I could out of gratitude; it was she who tipped off for us most of the really dangerous men, and it was not her fault a few of them escaped. But we’ve all been working both tides under, King. Take me; this is my first night in bed in three, and here I am awake! No — nothing personal — glad to see you, but please understand. And I’m a leisured dilettante compared to most of the others. She must have known our fix. She shouldn’t have asked.”

  King smiled. “Perfectly good opportunity for me, sir!” he said cheerfully.

  “So you seem to think. But look out for that woman, King — she’s dangerous. She’s got the brains of Asia coupled with Western energy! I think she’s on our side, and I know he believes it; but watch her!”

  “Ham dekta hai!” King grinned. But the older man continued to look as if he pitied him.

  “If you get through alive, come and tell me about it afterward. Now, mind you do! I’m awfully interested, but as for envying you—”

  “Envy!” King almost squealed. He made the bed-springs rattle as he jumped. “I wouldn’t swap jobs with General French, sir!”

  “Nor with me, I suppose!”

  “Nor with you, sir.

  “Good-by, then. Good-by, King, my boy. Good-by, Athelstan. Your brother’s up the Khyber, isn’t he? Give him my regards. Good-by!”

  Long before dawn the thirty prisoners and Ismail squatted in a little herd on the up-platform of a railway station, shepherded by King, who smoked a cheroot some twenty paces away, sitting on an unmarked chest of medicines. He seemed absorbed in a book on surgery that he had borrowed from a chance-met acquaintance in the go-down where he drew the medical supplies. Ismail sat on the one trunk that had been fetched from the other station and nursed the new hand-bag on his knees, picking everlastingly at the lock and wondering audibly what the bag contained to an accompaniment of low-growled sympathy.

  “I am his servant — for she said so — and he said so. As the custom is he gave me the key of the great bag — on which I sit — as he said himself, for safe-keeping. Then why — why in Allah’s name — am I not to have the key of this bag too? Of this little bag that holds so little and is so light?”

  “It might be money in it?” hazarded one of the herd.

  “Nay, for that it is too light.”

  “Paper money!” suggested another man. “Hundies, with printing on the face that sahibs accept instead of gold.”

  “Nay, I know where his money is,” said Ismail. “He has but little with him.”

  “A razor would slit the leather easily,” suggested another man. “Then with a hand inserted carefully through the slit, so as not to widen it more than needful, a man could soon discover the contents. And later, the bag might be dropped or pushed violently against some sharp thing, to explain the cut.”

  Ismail shook his head.

  “Why? What could he do to thee?”

  “It is because I know not what he would do to me that I will do nothing!” answered Ismail. “He is not at all like other sahibs I have had dealings with. This man does unexpected things. This man is not mad, he has a devil. I have it in my heart to love this man. But such talk is foolishness. We are all her men!”

  “Aye! We are her men!” came the chorus, so that King looked up and watched them over the open book.

  At dawn, when the train pulled out, the thirty prisoners sat safely locked in third-class compartments. King lay lazily on the cushions of a first-class carriage in the rear, utterly absorbed in the principles of antiseptic dressing, as if that had anything to do with Prussians and the Khyber Pass; and Ismail attended to the careful packing of soda water bottles in the ice-box on the floor.

  “Shall I open the little bag, sahib?” he asked.

  King shook his head.

  Ismail shook the bag.

  “The sound is as of things of much importance all disordered,” he said sagely. “It might be well to rearrange.”

  “Put it over there!” King ordered. “Set it down!”

  Ismail obeyed and King laid his book down to light another of his black cheroots. The theme of antiseptics ceased to exercise its charm over him. He peeled off his tunic, changed his shirt and lay back in sweet contentment. Headed for the “Hills,” who would not be contented, who had been born in their very shadow? — in their shadow, of a line of Britons who have all been buried there!

  “The day after to-morrow I’ll see snow!” he promised himself. And Ismail, grinning with yellow teeth through a gap in his wayward beard, understood and sympathized.

  Forward in the third-class carriages the prisoners hugged themselves and crooned as they met old landmarks and recognized the changing scenery. There was a new cleaner tang in the hot wind that spoke of the “Hills” and home!

  Delhi had drawn them as Monte Carlo attracts the gamblers of all Europe. But Delhi had spewed them out again, and oh! how exquisite the promise of the “Hills” was, and the thunder of the train that hurried — the bumping wheels that sang Himahlayas — Himahlyas! — the air that blew in on them unscented — the reawakened memory — the heart’s desire for the cold and the snow and the cruelty — the dark nights and the shrieking storms and the savagery of the Land of the Knife ahead!

  The journey to Peshawur, that ought to have been wearisome because they were everlastingly shunted into sidings to make way for roaring south-bound troop trains and kept waiting at every wayside station because the trains ahead of them were blocked three deep, was no less than a jubilee progress!

  Not a packed-in regiment went by that was not howled at by King’s prisoners as if they were blood-brothers of every man in it. Many an officer whom King knew waved to him from a passing train.

  “Meet you in Berlin!” was a favorite greeting. And after that they would shout to him for news and be gone before King could answer.

  Many a man, at stations where the sidings were all full and nothing less than miracles seemed able to release the wedged-in trains, came and paced up and down a platform side by side with King. From them he received opinions, but no sympathy to speak of.

  “Got to stay in India? Hard lines!” Then the conversation would be bluntly changed, for in the height of one’s enthusiasm it is not decent to hurt another fellow’s feelings. Simple, simple as a little child is the clean-clipped British officer. “Look at that babu, now. Don’t you think he’s a marvel? Don’t you think the Indian babu’s a marvel? Sixty a month is more than the beggar gets, and there he goes, doing two jobs and straightening out tangled trains into the bargain! Isn’t he a wonder, King?”

  “India’s a wonderful country,” King would answer, that being one of his stock remarks. And to his credit be it written that he never laughed at one of them. He let them think they were more fortunate than he, with manlier, bloodier work to do.

  Peshawur, when they reached it at last, looked dusty and bleak in the comfortless light of Northern dawn. But the prisoners crowed and crooned it a greeting, and there was not much grumbling when King refused to unlock their compartment doors. Having waited thus long, they could endure a few more hours in patience, now that they could see and smell their “Hills” at last.

  And there was the general again, not in a dog-cart this time, but furiously driven in a motor-car, roaring and clattering into the station less than two minutes after the train arrived. He was out of the car, for all his age and weight, before it had come to a stand. He took one steady look at King and then at the prisoners before he returned King’s salute.

  “Good!” he said. And then, as if that were not enough: “Excellent! Don’t let ’em out, though, to chew the rag with people on the platform. Keep ’em in
!”

  “They’re locked in, sir.”

  “Excellent! Come and walk up and down with me.”

  Chapter V

  Death roosts in the Khyber while he preens his wings!

  — Native Proverb

  “Seen her?” asked the general, with his hands behind him.

  “No,” said King, looking sharply sidewise at him and walking stride for stride. His hands were behind him, too, and one of them covered the gold bracelet on his other wrist.

  The general looked equally sharply sidewise.

  “Nor’ve I,” he said. “She called me up over the phone yesterday to ask for facilities for her man Rewa Gunga, and he was in here later. He’s waiting for you at the foot of the Pass — camped near the fort at Jamrud with your bandobast all ready. She’s on ahead — wouldn’t wait.”

  King listened in silence, and his prisoners, watching him through the barred compartment windows, formed new and golden opinions of him, for it is common knowledge in the “Hills” that when a burra sahib speaks to a chota sahib, the chota sahib ought to say, “Yes, sir, oh, yes!” at very short intervals. Therefore King could not be a chota sahib after all. So much the better. The “Hills” ever loved to deal with men in authority, just as they ever despised underlings.

  “What made you go back for the prisoners?” the general asked. “Who gave you that cue?”

  “It’s a safe rule never to do what the other man expects, sir, and Rewa Gunga expected me to travel by his train.”

  “Was that your only reason?”

  “No, sir. I had general reasons. None of ’em specific. Where natives have a finger in the pie there’s always something left undone at the last minute.”