by Talbot Mundy
Thereafter Charley Sutherland assumed responsibility, and, being beyond reach of his superiors, did fairly well. He kicked a private of the line, which is strictly against the regulations, but as man to man, conveys enlightenment; and he let the only train go through, as per orders. But orders had said nothing about passengers, and although judge Wilmshurst and his wife said a very great deal, they ceased from being passengers and became occupants of a fort on wheels — the right wing of Charley Sutherland’s defenses.
When he heard the wire go down he sent a sergeant and six men to bring in as much of it as could be “snaffled” without loss of life. The sergeant was a Lancashire man who had poached in Yorkshire and could fight either end up. The raiders abandoned their half-coiled wire and the sergeant’s men dragged it in uncoiled — enough to make a breast-high fence of five strands between the station office and the Wilmshursts’ car, with connecting strands so woven as to make a rather efficient net of it.
So far, good. There was more wire in the other direction and the sergeant’s party sallied forth again. This time, having to do the tearing-down themselves, they did not bring in so much of it; but it was enough for a three-stranded entanglement on the other side, and meanwhile Sutherland had superintended the dismantling of the platform roof, and then ten-foot sheets of corrugated iron raised two-deep lengthwise and with sand and gravel packed between them made a bullet-proof and fairly efficient means of communication between the right and left wing. More iron sheets and sand around the car wheels completed the arrangement, and Charley, scratching the back of his head like an architect considering new plans, sat down on the edge of the platform deliberating what to do next. It was then that Judge Wilmshurst so far thawed as to call to him. Not by name, of course. Nothing so human as that.
“Have you any food?” he asked.
“The men have scant rations for one meal in their haversacks.”
“How long do you expect to hold this post against an enemy?”
“Hadn’t thought of that, sir. Hold it as long as we can.”
“Have you ammunition?”
“Some.”
“How many rounds?”
“That’s a military secret,” answered Sutherland, drying up. Wilmshurst smiled broadly.
“Would you mind listening to me a moment? I’m Grosset Wilmshurst — High Court judge — perhaps you never heard of me? My business here is to hold an inquiry into complaints laid by the Moplah headmen against the local administration. They knew I was coming. Now, if you’ll send word to the nearest headman that I’m here, I think you’ll find there’ll be no trouble.”
Sutherland looked actually shocked, and it takes a very great deal to shock a youngster of his profession. He had known the Moplahs more or less for six months, and the conceit of a man who supposed that his mere arrival from afar could cause trouble to cease in that neighborhood was breath-taking. Dead and burned babus he could face, but...
“Have you any idea what it means when the Moplahs are out?” he demanded. “Perhaps you think—”
“Tut-tut, my dear boy, try it.”
“You know they’ve killed the station-master and his family, cut the wires, torn up the track behind you, and fired on my men?”
“I should have been here sooner. The minute they know I am here to inquire into their grievances they will calm down. Send word to them.”
The judge’s butler-like countenance was so self-assured that Sutherland was almost half-convinced. If he had been ten years older the judge’s self- assertion might have appeared less absurd, but the judgment of youth is much more critical than Solomon’s.
“If I had a man to spare, perhaps,” he said dryly.
The judge’s head retired through the window, but his defeat enraged Mrs. Wilmshurst to the blazing point. Fresh from her bath she confronted the limp, perspiring judge and demanded to know whether he supposed she had married him in order to be snubbed by a two-penny subaltern of infantry.
“Have you no manhood?” she demanded, and proceeded to display her own by stepping down on to the track to force the issue.
“What is this nonsense?” she demanded. “How dare you imprison a lady in this abominable way! You heard my husband. Send at once for the Moplah’s headmen!”
“No need. Get back in!” commanded Sutherland, and shouted to his men to duck, pushing Mrs. Wilmshurst toward the door at the same time so violently that she collapsed on to the step, providing just sufficient clearance for a bullet, which clipped the brim of her panama hat.
Two more bullets plunked through Sutherland’s helmet, half a dozen smashed the glass in the car windows, and one good answering volley under the sergeant’s direction caused a temporary halt in the proceedings. Mrs. Wilmshurst climbed in and crouched on the floor.
“What does this mean?” asked her husband, head through the window again.
It was obvious what it meant. Sutherland read off the symptoms as one with vision reading to the blind.
“They’ve moppled your train, that’s what! Scoughed everybody, or I’m a Hindu! Wonder we didn’t hear the shooting — must have been some — no-train crew wasn’t armed, that’s right; they may have ditched the whole shebang and used knives! Anyhow, they’ve looted everything. I can see lamps, an oil-can, shovel, flags, some third-class carriage doors — give ’em another one, sergeant, they’re gathering again!”
The volley tore across the barricade before the judge could get a word in, and the Moplahs, who had been swarming around the bend three hundred yards away, scampered for cover.
“There! That will do! That’s enough, I tell you! Have you killed anybody? Let me manage this.”
The judge was no longer ridiculous, even if not yet sublime. Sublimity, warts, and a butler’s nose are not congruous; but he knew what he thought he could do, and proceeded to try it, tying his handkerchief to a walking-stick and waving it from the carriage window.
“Good God! You mean surrender?” Sutherland made a jump at the stick but missed.
“Certainly not! You leave this to me. Let me talk to them!”
“Be careful! Oh, be careful!” came the voice of Rachel Wilmshurst, but the judge ignored her absolutely.
The Moplahs had swarmed through the fringe of trees bordering on the line and already had Sutherland’s scratch defenses threatened on two sides. They established that fact beyond argument by means of a scattering cross-fire, which ceased, however, when the judge had waved his white flag for about a minute. Ironically enough the Moplah leaders answered with the colored flags they had looted from the train, and presently, when it was clear that there would be no more shooting for the present, three white-turbaned, long-haired fellows in a kind of khaki uniform, armed with modern rifles and swords slung from the shoulder by a black belt, emerged from the trees and took their stand a little nervously by the ashes where the babu’s zenana had been.
The judge with his flag in his hand walked forward to meet them, and Sutherland accompanied him after cautioning his men.
“Shoot at the first sign of treachery!” he ordered. “This is no surrender, I promise you that. Merely a palaver. If anything should happen to the judge and me, use your ammunition sparingly and fall back on the railway carriage. Protect the lady at all costs.”
He had to run to catch the judge, who was marching like a man in a procession best foot foremost with the flag over his shoulder.
“Can you mopple their lingo?” asked Sutherland.
“No. No, my lad. I’ll speak English to them. Key-language of the world — of the universe for aught we know to the contrary! Keep behind me, and don’t try to interfere.”
There is something in cocksureness after all. It was the key-language. All three of the Moplahs knew English, he with the green flag in the middle almost perfectly.
“You surr-ender?” he asked, making a dactyl of the word.
“No,” said the judge. “I have come to tell who I am.”
The Moplahs bowed — a shade ironically. One can a
fford to be polite when the outcome is inevitable; and as the agony was to be all on one side there was no harm in prolonging it.
“I am Grosset Wilmshurst, sahib.”
The statement was received with blank incomprehension. The Moplahs glanced at one another for a cue, and someone shouted to them from the trees behind. The judge put on speed to explain.
“I am the High Court judge who was sent for from the Bombay Presidency to hold impartial inquiry into the Moplahs’ grievances.”
“Ah! Oh! Ah!”
That evidently did convey a meaning. The Moplah headmen looked in one another’s eyes again and knew themselves unanimous.
“That is good. Then you are a prisoner,” said the tall man in the middle.
“Stuff and nonsense! I came to inquire into your grievances. Do you treat a guest that way? Have you no sense of honor?”
The man in the middle began to translate that to the other two, who had only half-understood it, and the judge took advantage of that to turn on Sutherland.
“Leave this to me, d’you hear me? This is a case for the civil authorities. Go back there and tell my wife to keep out of sight. As long as they don’t see her—”
But it was already too late. They both saw Rachel Wilmshurst stepping down from the car. The three headmen saw. Every Moplah in the fringe of trees had seen. There were shrill comments from the covert, not all of them unintelligible.
“I demand protection for my wife and myself,” said the judge; and that, although he did not know it, was a thoroughly strategic attitude to take, for if Moslem law insists on one thing it is that the stranger demanding protection must receive it.
Needless to say, it does not always work, and the Moslem does not live who is not a quibbler over technicalities.
“That shall be seen,” said the man in the midst. “You demand for yourself and your wife? You are High Court judge? Judge what name? Williamsshirse. Bohut atcha. You know bohut atcha? Bombay language. Very well. We take you and your wife. As for these others, it is too late to make demands for them. Besides, they are military. They kill — we kill — bloodfare regular business. Of course, you understand.”
There followed one of those revolting arguments that leave all concerned dissatisfied. The judge and Sutherland asked time for consultation and were granted fifteen minutes by the headman’s silver watch. They walked back toward the station arguing, the judge trying to overbear Sutherland and the subaltern falling back on sheer obstinacy.
“I tell you I will!”
“You shall not, sir!”
“You young ass!”
“Maybe. But you shall not while I have a man left to prevent you!”
The judge believed that he and his wife would be perfectly safe in the hands of the Moplahs. Furthermore, that the Moplahs would let the soldiers alone if they could gain two important hostages, and the loot from the first- class railway carriage, without a fight.
Sutherland, with a youngster’s views, might perhaps have been persuaded to let the judge go. The judge was his senior and of the male sex. But bluntly and truthfully he swore that he and his men would die before any Moplah came within bayonet length of Mrs. Wilmshurst. He disliked her already cordially, and for sufficient reason; hoped never to see her again, and told the judge so to his face.
“But I’d like to be able to look my own men and my mother in the eye. What’s more, I will! By God I will! She stays. That’s all about it!”
The judge made the incredible mistake then of appealing to Sutherland’s men over their officer’s head. He stood with his back to the station building and spoke as if he were on the bench lecturing a row of lawyers.
“Now you men must know what the origin of this disturbance was. Your officer has told me how you came to be here. He has said nothing about your conduct in the village where you were supposed to attend a funeral, so I am left to draw my own conclusions. These Moplahs are a proud people, who bitterly resent such indignities as soldiers of an alien race can thoughtlessly subject them to; and they no more enjoy having their harems interfered with by aliens than you would enjoy having, let us say, your mothers carried off by Moplahs. However, the harm is done, and must be remedied. I am the only person who can do that. I am here on an investigation of Moplah complaints. I intend to report that in my opinion at least this one disturbance was due to our soldiers — to yourselves in particular — possibly others, too, but this disturbance certainly. Now I am going to order your officer to deliver my wife and me to those people as hostages in evidence of good faith—”
Sutherland saw fit to interrupt, and, since he did not care to dispute with the judge before his men, turned on the men, and barked them back to their posts.
“The next man who leaves his post without my order will be ‘for it,’” he announced.
They had no particular reason for fearing the judge. Besides, he had warts and a butler’s face, and they had heard his wife scold him unrebuked. Sutherland they knew. The regulations they knew. The sergeant they knew particularly well, and the sergeant feared no fifty-year-old civilian, whatever he might think of foes in shining armor. Each man proceeded to the post assigned to him, and squinted along his rifle because that was the obvious thing to do.
Brother Moplah, peering from the fringe of the woods, could not see what took place under the shelter of the station building, but did see the men return and line the ridiculous defenses. He naturally misinterpreted. Wishing to believe that all British officials were rogues and liars, and with his hereditary instincts almost out of control in any case, he translated suspicion into certainty.
Probably no chief gave the order. It was spontaneous combustion, as it were, the spirit of pirate ancestors taking charge and unquestionably blaming the breach of faith on the British. From three directions at once the ragged, independent firing poured out from the trees, and Sutherland stopped one of the first bullets with his shoulder.
Thereafter Judge Wilmshurst conceded there was no peace, and stepped down in favor of the military, obeying without argument. Sutherland ordered him back into the railway carriage with his wife, where the two lay obediently on the floor, the judge on the side whence the bullets were coming and she pouring into his ear in fitful detail her opinion of him for having brought her among such savages, and for having failed on top of that so signally in trying to assert his authority.
There was no peace anywhere; nor much hope, with only twenty men, and the rails torn up to prevent relief from coming. There were a corporal and three men on their bellies under the carriage, peeping out between the iron sheets that surrounded their lair like a petticoat; but four men were not enough when the Moplahs crossed the line lower down and proceeded to surround the whole inclosure. As Sutherland, with an arm swinging limp, dragged more men from the barricade and drove them into the carriage to fire from the open windows someone on the Moplah side had enough military genius to take advantage of the momentary confusion. They rushed the station building, gained the cover of the wall, and thereafter had the outcome in their own hand. It was merely a question of how many casualties, and were they willing to pay the price?
The Moplah will pay any price when his blood is up. They surged around the station building from both sides and jumped at the telegraph-wire entanglements, encouraging Tommy Atkins, age sixteen, enormously by the sight of writhing arms and legs and bodies like bloody scarecrows hung face-forward grinning across the wire.
As long as the ammunition lasted, and with the harvest in full view fifty feet away, there was no chance whatever of storming that nest of youngsters. Nobody misses much at fifty yards from behind a breastwork when life depends minute by minute on aiming straight.
But the ammunition did not last. At the end of fifteen minutes even the steadiest men had only two or three rounds left; and Sutherland knew that when it came to bayonets his boys would stand no chance again Moplah swordsmen. Stunned for the moment by the extent of their losses the Moplahs took cover, and Sutherland seized the chance to red
uce his line of defense. There was nothing else for it. He had to abandon the station building, behind which the Moplahs were already gathering again for a final rush; abandon the sheet-iron barricades; abandon all except the railway carriage, underneath which he stowed his seven wounded, not reckoning himself. His kind never does reckon himself a casualty until unconsciousness supervenes and they carry him off on a stretcher.
Inside the carriage, kneeling on the seats that ran parallel with the windows, they waited, and tried not to damage Mrs. Wilmshurst with the heels of ammunition boots. Sutherland ordered a count of cartridges, each man calling out the number still remaining; but before that was half done the Moplahs resumed the attack, leaping the undefended barricades and charging at the carriage from all four sides simultaneously.
“Each man save one cartridge for close quarters!” ordered Sutherland.
He had eyes for nothing but his own men and the enemy, and did not see the handkerchief on a stick thrust through the window at his back and waved violently. All he knew for the moment, and wondered at, was that the Moplahs halted and ceased firing — halted with their prey by the throat, as it were — an unimaginable thing. But he was not dead or dreaming; he knew that because his shoulder hurt so. They did halt, and their chiefs came forward to parley again. He turned to look through the other window — and saw the white flag!
“Oh, my God! You rotter!”
The judge has not forgotten, nor will forget that last comment of Sutherland’s until his dying day. The next moment a bullet fired from the rear by a Moplah who knew nothing of white flags drilled Sutherland through the temples, and it was too late to say anything in his own defense. The judge lifted the boy’s body off his complaining wife and gave her his handkerchief.