by Talbot Mundy
The Waziri women came up the ravine at last, loaded like pack-animals with cooking-pots, fuel, the scant supplies and the scanter remaining ammunition. The Waziris had gone to the border on plunder bent, expecting to replenish their stocks at the expense of Punjab villages and British outposts. Now they were parlous short of everything except ambition, and the women, heaving their packs over the wall, began at once to strip whatever the men had not yet taken from the dead. Such Pathans as yet had life in them received short shrift, and there were mutilations not to be described. Then one by one they threw the corpses down into the ravine and after that the widows of Waziri dead began their wailing, keening to the night like hopeless ghouls.
Then sudden silence. Something was about to happen...none knew what...save Kangra Khan, who had the call on opportunity ...and King, perhaps. There were King, and possibly fifty Waziris, still to be accounted for. Our folk within the sangarbegan, as if instinctively, to seek the shelter of the wall, like jackals, surprised by the dawn, slinking off to their lairs. Here and there a woman stayed crying by her dead mate, but except for those within sixty seconds the enclosure seemed utterly deserted, the silence broken only by click-click-click as men opened their magazines to make sure, and snapped them into place again.
Then the storm broke, Himalaya fashion, and the wind came with it, as if even the elements had taken sides against us. All the wreaths of white mist that had floated like foam among the crags were whipped and whirled into one hurrying cloud, and out of that came spurts of flame as Kangra Khan’s men started to woo vengeance in the name of Allah. Their yells out-dinned the rifle-fire. The range was short. They had crept under cover of the mist to a position on the nearest overlooking crag, not much more than a hundred yards away. Naturally, they supposed we had manned the tower. A hundred bullets rattled against the masonry, and I ducked in through the door, shoving Joan Angela in front of me, as another fusillade splintered the dry wood of the platform at the stairhead.
Our men did not answer yet. They seemed cowed by the suddenness of the attack. The wind shrieked, as it only can in those infernal hills, bearing the din of the firing and imprecation down toward us, making answering yells useless; and that is a worse handicap in savage warfare than odds of two to one. It is not enough to know that Allah is on your side; you must be able to assert the fact and to make the other fellow listen, whether he will or no. Curses must reach his ears to have effect. Taunts must prove to him your own contempt for danger, or the danger grows as real as he intends it shall be. Yells are as deadly as bullets, estimated by result.
I peered through the slits in the wall, but could see nothing except spurts of flame and hurrying white mist. But suddenly there came an answering din, whose source I could not see. Somewhere on the far side of Kangra Khan’s men King was turning a flanking fire on their position. The stutter of Kangra Khan’s riflemen ceased and began again as some of them turned their attention to the unexpected enemy. It was obvious that if we hurried we could save the night. But you have to preach, and teach, and stir before you can change dumb disgruntlement into an assault against wind and mist and high-perched riflemen.
“Will you stay here?” I asked Joan Angela.
“Why?” she demanded; and I cursed all women under my breath.
“Will you hide down that well at the first sign of danger?”
“No!” she said candidly.
I did not argue. I swept her up into my arms and carried her, protesting violently, down the rickety ladder into the well-shaft, and stood her on a platform near the bottom. It was pitch-dark down here. You could only see a faint square patch of dimness up above, pricked out with a pattern of abnormally bright stars. You could hardly hear the din of fighting down there, although it began to sound as if our men were coming into action.
“How dare you, Jeff! I’ll not forgive you for this!” she said angrily.
“We’ll discuss forgiveness afterwards,” I answered. “Will you stay down here, or must I tie you to the ladder?”
Hot temper and haste are bad medicine in the dark where there isn’t room to move without contact, nor any chance to see, nor time to explain. She misunderstood; or it may be her nerves were over-strained. At any rate, she struck me in the face with her open hand.
“Get up that ladder and leave me here, Jeff Ramsden!” she said more bitterly than I had ever heard her speak. And I grew dumb with the anger that any fellow feels when a good woman elects to accuse him of the dirtiest kind of villainy.
We have all been cads and cowards in our day, but there are lots of us who have proved and earned the right to be trusted to any length with any woman anywhere. Such men need no telling what that slap in the face with an open hand meant to me in that predicament. I did not answer. I went up the ladder hand-over-hand, simmering indignation like a bear driven out of his den. She called to me out of the well, but I did not listen.
“Jeff!” I heard, booming up hollow behind me; but I paid no attention. I stepped out on the platform, in a mood to welcome bullets as a concrete insult that a man could fight back at. I was mad, that minute. Nothing mattered...neither night nor morning, nor the mist, nor odds, nor the outcome...least of all Joan Angela’s opinion of me. I had had enough of that. I turned my back on it, and her, and went down the steps in running jumps, six steps at a time, sprawled headlong at the bottom over loose stones fallen from the roof, got to my feet in a greater rage than ever, grabbed a rifle from a man who lurked in the lee of the wall and struck him half unconscious when he protested...then vaulted to the wall and shook the rifle in full moonlight, with my feet in blown mist and my body bathed in silver light above it.
“Allaho Akbar!” I roared; and I can bellow like a bull when the mood is on me.
I daresay, seen through the mist-film from below, I looked encouraging to those crouching Waziris; but I don’t know why I was not shot to pieces by the storm of bullets that greeted me from Kangra Khan’s position. I stood there unscathed. Rage may be an armour after all. I saw Grim, and then Narayan Singh, scrambling to the wall to follow my example...heard the yelling and din of King’s riflemen, and next the roar of our men beginning at last to work themselves into a frenzy with the battle-cry.
“Allaho Akbar! Allaho Akbar!”
Over the wall I went, brandishing the rifle; and over they came in my wake...not pausing...not firing...swept forward by the impulse that had surged in me and carried me on like a crazy unreasoning bull in an arena. If I had a thought at all it was to hack my way as far as possible from where Joan Angela and her opinions were. I wished never to see her again, and least of all to suffer explanation and apology. Death did not cross my mind. I was not wooing martyrdom. Anger was the all-embracing force that moved me, and it lent my feet wings, heavy and slow as they are as a rule.
No Waziri — not even Grim or Narayan Singh, who are fleet of foot — passed me on that crazy charge from our sangar wall to the ledge where Kangra Khan had deployed his men. We plunged into darkness, and had no breath to yell with, so the roar to Allah ceased. Maybe Kangra Khan misunderstood the silence beyond our breastwork. Perhaps he and his men believed our first yells, if they as much as heard them upwind, were an effort of despair, that died away. They kept a steady fire pouring on the wall, and, we not pausing to reply from the darkness beneath the hurrying mist, they had no means of divining what we were up to.
So we were up there and among them before they guessed we were coming, and that night’s second shambles was staged on a ledge, with a sheer fall of fifty feet for whoever set a foot wrong or was forced over backwards in hand-to-hand fight.
I don’t remember using the rifle as it should be used, although when it was all over I found the magazine was empty. Perhaps the fellow I snatched it from had emptied it and not reloaded. Maybe I fired instinctively and forgot it as a man forgets the breath he drew. I do know I clubbed the thing and fought Berserker fashion all along the ledge, driving Kangra Khan’s Pathans along in front of me, myself untouched, not even
in danger as I remember it. They quailed in front of the flailing rifle-butt, and I wake up now at night sometimes in a hot sweat, from dreaming of their bearded faces as they fell in front of me and toppled off the cliff. Some fell before I struck them, stepping backward to avoid the blow.
I don’t know what Grim and Narayan Singh or our Waziris did. That was a one-man fight as far as I was conscious of it...a delirium of anger. I’m not proud of it, although they tell me the Waziris have composed a song about that fury of mine. I may say I was hardly in it. It was passion — all the brute, hereditary instincts using my strength. I don’t remember how I got there, but I found myself at last sitting heaving for breath on a rock at the end of the ledge, with the blood-beastly rifle over my knees, wondering stupidly why the magazine was empty.
Grim came and told me that our Waziris were scattered in all directions in pursuit of Kangra Khan’s men, and that he hoped they would find their way back before daylight. Then King came, and stood looking at me, with his back to the moon. I think he understood, for he said nothing — nothing personal that is. He turned and talked to Grim.
“All right so far,” he said. “Kangra Khan has likely had enough. But the tribes will gather now to hound the Waziris harder than ever. They’ll argue they’re tired and running out of ammunition. Tomorrow, or the next day at latest, will see us surrounded again. Where’s Miss Leich?”
Grim did not know. He asked me. I knew, or thought I knew, but that slap in the face was as fresh in my memory as if it had happened that instant. He had to ask me twice before I answered.
“The last I saw of her, she was in that tower,” I said, jerking my thumb in the direction of the sangar. Doubtless they thought my surliness was due to the reaction after fighting. They walked away along the ledge, and presently found Narayan Singh, and sent him to keep an eye on me, while they started off for the sangar, keeping an eye on each other for fear of Pathan knives lurking in the mist. Narayan Singh came and sat down on the rock beside me, and he and I are such old friends that there was no need to speak unless either of us felt disposed. We were silent for perhaps five minutes, he pulling a rag through a rifle he had picked up somewhere. Presently he took the rifle off my knees, pitched it over the cliff, and replaced it with the one he had cleaned.
“That is better,” he said quietly.
I did not answer. I was hardly more than conscious of his presence. Such process as was going on in my mind was hardly to be dignified with the name of thought, but I was dimly aware of contentment that he should be there; and because he was not of my race I preferred him just then to either King or Grim. I felt he might be less inclined, and less able than they, to interpret my state of mind and draw conclusions. But I was entirely wrong.
“Sahib,” he said presently, running the fingers of his right hand upward through his beard, “all women are the devil. Of two, the more beautiful is the worse; and of three, the youngest.”
“What the hell do you know about women?” I asked.
“This: that a man’s own error is reflected in their faces; his goodness or his badness, his strength or his weakness in their hearts. A man sees himself in a woman, and the more he loves her the worse the vision shocks him. So he goes off and acts like the madman that he naturally is...even as an ape making faces at himself in a stolen looking-glass.”
“You’re polite!” said I.
“I am the sahib’s friend. I am a man who has seen much...including my own heart in a woman’s...at which I look no longer...having no delight in it.”
I was about to answer (hotly, it may be) when we both heard someone scrambling breathlessly up the track. In a minute Grim came stumbling over stones along the ledge.
“Miss Leich!” he said. “Where is she?”
“In the tower,” I answered, aware of an uncomfortable premonition.
“No,” Grim said, “she isn’t there.”
“She’s down on the platform at the bottom of the shaft,” said I.
“No, she’s not,” he answered. “We’ve looked everywhere. She’s gone! No trace!”
CHAPTER 5. “A most wise, excellent Sahiba!”
THERE were rifle-shots, stray for the most part, but now and then in ragged volleys, among the crags around us as our Waziris pursued and snipped the retreating Pathans. There was not even a guard over the supplies within the sangar wall, and even the women had taken the trail in the mist to pounce on wounded and strip the dead. The sangar was empty of all except King, as Grim, Narayan Singh, and I arrived breathless. King was sitting on the bottom step outside the sangar tower.
“She’s gone!” he said, not getting up. “Have you shouted?” I asked.
“Shout all you want to in this wind!” he answered. “Unless she’s lost her head and run away down-wind toward the border you couldn’t make her hear ten yards away. And if she’s run off in a panic she’ll be either miles away, or dead, or a prisoner. Shout, though, if it suits you!”
“She never was in a panic in her life,” I said. And I would have said more, but Narayan Singh interrupted — a thing he rarely, almost never, did. His usual method is to wait until everybody else has had his say, and then after a pause to say extremely little.
“We might at least try down-wind, sahibs,” he broke in. “So, we would be on our way home. If we find her, we can make tracks for the border, lying up by day.”
“You fellows go,” King answered. “I’ve a pledge to keep. I promised these Waziris, if they’d help me tonight, I’d stand by them until they reach their own villages.”
“Damn!” muttered Grim. “I’ll stay with you, of course,” he added.
Narayan Singh waited for orders, and I said nothing. Mixed emotion makes me speechless as a rule, and the notion of describing exactly what had happened in the well had left me — as I think Narayan Singh intended. We were all in the deep of discouragement. Narayan Singh was plucking at his beard irresolutely.
“Sahibs!” he exclaimed suddenly, stepping up to windward of us to spare noise, “is it not best that Jeff sahib and I should undertake this task?”
King eyed me and nodded. Grim was silent. I knew he hated to be left out of any difficult or dangerous employment, but his loyalty to King was paramount, and it was obvious that two would be better than one on either venture. None, except possibly Narayan Singh, had any confidence in the outcome.
“Let’s go,” I said. “So long, you fellows.”
I remember we did not shake hands.
So Narayan Singh and I set forth with the wind at our backs and climbed the sangar wall, dropping down on to the track along the side of the ravine that we had rushed with such enthusiasm but a short while back. The lower end was now no longer in the moonlight, and out of the solid-looking blackness down there the only sound that came was the cry of jackals, long since attracted to the feast of slain. I don’t know to which of us it occurred first that three jackals had come slinking the wrong way...toward us...out of darkness into moonlight...uphill...without apparent reason. Nothing in Nature happens undesignedly. We both came to a standstill. The Sikh’s ears are sharper than mine, and he heard something that caused his fingers to clench tight on the barrel of his rifle. (He had left his sword with King, as likely to get in the way, and probably more useful to King now in any case, if only as a symbol of authority.)
There was nowhere to hide in the moonlight, and it was not easy to go forward silently among that loose shale, but that was the only course open, so we picked our way carefully, pausing to listen at intervals. In spite of our care, the noise we made scared away a pack of jackals that were nosing something just within the dark zone; they scampered away whimpering. Then we heard low voices, and another sound. Narayan Singh sprang forward and I after him. But when we reached the corner where the tracks forked on either hand of the Gibraltar rock there was nobody there.
Nobody — and nothing, I thought, except a jackal lurking near us, and an owl that swooped and swooped again, afraid of us, but bent on an investigation. Su
ddenly the jackal threw caution to the winds and scurried by within a yard of me, seized something in the darkness under the cliff, and scampered away with it. I swung a blow at him as he went by, missed, but could see that he had something in his mouth.
So I stooped in the shadow and groped. Narayan Singh did the same. Each of us found something. I picked up a leather legging-mate to the one the jackal had pounced on. The Sikh produced Joan Angela’s cloth riding-hat. Beyond question both articles were hers. There was even a strand of her brown hair caught in the hat-band; it glistened like gold when I stepped back into the moonlight to examine it. But there was no blood on the hat nor on the legging, and I could feel none on the stone where the things had lain. We did not dare strike matches.
“She is not dead,” said Narayan Singh.
“They’ve stripped her and chucked the body over the cliff,” said I. “We’d better climb down there and drive the jackals off.”
“Nay,” he said. “If they had stripped her they would have carried off the garments. And since some were left, then why not all? She is alive and not far away. She herself has removed these for reasons. Notice, sahib, they were not thrown away at haphazard, but lay side by side, as a soldier, or a lady, would have left them. And they lay on a prominent stone where whoever passed would see them in daylight. Yet she was unseen when she laid them there, or whoever saw would have taken them surely. She is alive, and did this purposely.”