by Talbot Mundy
But Ommony demurred. Better than most Englishmen he knew the Moslem mind, which is, however, not to say infallible.
“Hardly, after that request to be excused an interview. He’d think it an impertinence. I thought you had his wrists tied; how did he write that letter?”
Tregurtha explained how the Hindu had been allowed to stand for nearly twenty minutes on the iron step under the grating at one end of the box-car.
“A sleight-of-hand adept, I suppose. Slipped paper and pen through the bars, although I watched him and did not see. He stood speaking, wanted to hear his voice, too, for identification purposes.” Suggestion works subtly. “He looked to me like one of those native doctors who travel around the country combining quackery and politics.”
“I always wondered who treated my dogs that time,” said Ommony, with eyes half-closed, remembering. “Mahommed Babar was working for me in those days, and on the spot. He didn’t care to touch the dogs himself. Some Moslems don’t, you know. Religion. He told me afterward he found a Hindu, who considered himself free from caste and understood dogs, but he never did say what the Hindu’s name was. Well, that explains why the dogs didn’t go for his throat when he threw the letter in my lap.”
“What about publicity?” Tregurtha asked. “‘Pon my soul, I’d like to oblige the fellow, but in my position—”
“This Hindu Ram Ghose has very likely started the ball rolling already. But, of course, official confirmation of the rumor—”
“I daren’t do that,” said Tregurtha.
“Have you any orders to give me?” Ommony asked him.
“Not a damned one! Technically, I suppose — no, I doubt if even technically I command your tongue. I could seize your correspondence if I cared to, but—”
“No orders, eh?” said Ommony.
“Not a damned one!”
“Any use for Lal Rai?”
“My God, no! He’s Prothero’s pimp. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge- pole!”
“He may—”
“Lie on the line and let the train run over him! I hope he will!”
“May I have a compartment alone with him for an hour or two?”
Tregurtha nodded, motioned toward an empty compartment with his thumb, and walked away toward the nearest telegraph pole, where a signaler crouching on his knees was behaving like a terrier at a rat-hole, the difference being that sound instead of smell was exciting him.
“Connection’s better now, sir! Got them!” he called out.
Ommony and all three dogs, pushed, pulled and generally mothered by a non- com and six privates, piled into the empty compartment, and, at Ommony’s request, Lal Rai was shoved in along the floor the way they slid a casualty into an ambulance. There was no need for any armed guard; Diana did that part perfectly. At Ommony’s invitation, seconded by music from between Diana’s teeth, Lal Rai arose and assumed a squatting posture in the middle of the forward seat under the solitary lamp. Diana bared her teeth at him and they shone in the lamp’s unpleasant, yellow rays. It was not yet time for Lal Rai to recover from the agony of fear; he knew from experience how those teeth felt when they closed on sinewy flesh.
“You hold-um! Me good feller!” he objected.
“Do what I say then,” said Ommony.
Then the train started. It was too late for Lal Rai to jump out or yell for help, even if either course would have done him the least good.
“Peer-r-r-other-o-o my master — Dekta sahib—” he began.
But Ommony silenced him with a gesture, reinforced by the castanet rattle of Diana’s teeth and an under-growl from the other two dogs.
“Listen!” commanded Ommony. “You may have your choice between going to prison for about ten years for attempting to murder me, or obeying me implicitly.”
“You telling me, I do!” he answered, his eye on Diana.
There were elements of greatness to him. He was terse. But Ommony also went straight to the point.
“Do you know the newspaper correspondents?”
Lal Rai nodded. Well he knew them, regular as well as surreptitious. There were men employed around headquarters, who corresponded secretly, whenever they could glean facts, for as many as a dozen native papers each. Had he not been employed by Prothero to fool them by disseminating false news? He, Lal Rai, had access to the ear of every newspaper in India!
“I will write concerning the capture of Mahommed Babar,” said Ommony. “It will not be signed. You may say you had it from a British officer. Show the account to every correspondent you can find within two hours of this train’s arrival at headquarters. After that — you understand me, after that, not before — you will deliver a letter from me to Colonel Prothero.”
Lal Rai nodded. It looked safe and easy. He saw no objection. But Ommony added the final, super-subtle touch.
“The newspaper correspondents will spread the news. My letter to your master will tell him how to take advantage of the news. But unless the news is spread first my letter will be of no use to him. You understand?”
He did. “Me do-um,” he answered, nodding.
CHAPTER 14. “You exceeded your authority!”
The train came whistling in between the hills at dusk, and was met by Macaulay waiting side-by-side with a secretary. It had entered Macaulay’s consciousness, in the way conclusions do when a man has nursed his own ambition long enough and with sufficient disregard of the other fellow’s, that now if ever should the blow be struck that should change his lot from one of merely departmental drudge, as he described himself, to that of a power in the land. The divinely appointed minute, the stroke of destiny, that so many men before and after Napoleon have sought and missed!
So he brought the secretary with him to be witness that he left to Tregurtha no loophole. He was minded that Tregurtha should be sacrificed to the gods of his own destiny. The secretary was a gentleman from Bengal, with spectacles and a monumental stomach, who did not adore the military and most of all despised Tregurtha, who had once called him a “bellyful of objections,” which was rude but accurate. With such a witness in his favor and the cards all stacked, Macaulay knew he had Tregurtha beaten before the play began. He intended that Tregurtha should have plucked a chestnut from the fire for him, and go not only unrewarded but discredited for his pains. And all this without especial malice, but because according to the creed Macaulay favored no man can attain to eminence without treading on another’s upturned face. He supposed the universe was designed that way by its Artificer.
So, feeling en rapport, as it were, with Destiny, he smiled beneficently while he waited for the train. He had a flower in his buttonhole, and knew he looked handsome — no exaggeration, that. In a florid, well-dressed, rather too neat way he vaguely resembled one of those good-looking guides who board the boats at Naples to steer tourists into harm’s way.
And he smiled as the train rolled in; smiled as Tregurtha stepped to the platform, smiled, with extended hand, as Tregertha failed in an effort not to see him quite so soon. Tregurtha had to shake hands and be patronized.
“I’m glad you’re alive and well, at any rate,” he said suggestively.
“What d’ye mean?” Tregurtha answered, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck with a bandana handkerchief. It only needed that earth-to-earthy touch to break the thin veneer of Macaulay’s manner.
“Why, I understand, Tregurtha, you exceeded your authority! Conducted a foray! After receipt of a letter from me. I said in the letter — I have a copy of it — that in the opinion of the Commission no such enterprise should be attempted on any pretext!”
“You’ve got it all balled up,” Tregurtha answered, and was going to say more, but Macaulay interrupted him.
“I understand it was you who got all balled up! How many men did you lose on this unwarranted raid?”
“I will report that in writing.”
Tregurtha was growing about as stiff as an Airedale terrier making the acquaintance of a cur from foreign parts. He particularly
did not approve of that kind of conversation in front of the Bengali, who was smiling like a courtezan and fanning himself with a palm-leaf.
“I understand you brought the notorious Mahommed Babar back with you?”
Tregurtha nodded.
“And I suppose your men have been as indiscreet as usual?”
“Am I expected to care what you suppose?” Tregurtha demanded. “My men have had no opportunity to speak with anyone.”
“Mn-n! Well, you have shown small regard for the Commission’s rulings! Be good enough to order your officers to keep silent. The men must be quarantined on suspicion of smallpox to keep them quiet; I will see the P.M.O. about that. The prisoner is to be handed over to a special guard responsible to me.”
Tregurtha was too amazed to speak. His impulse was to kick the smirking babu and roast Macaulay for an impudent fool in front of all his men. When injury was added to the insult and a guard composed of uniformed police was marched on to the platform to take charge of the prisoner, he knew himself incapable of speaking without losing self-control. Macaulay produced a document signed by himself as the Commission’s duly appointed executive member and witnessed by the fat man from Bengal, requiring Tregurtha to deliver the prisoner Mahommed Babar into custody. And almost before the station lamps were lighted the special guard of twelve policemen marched away with the prisoner in their midst.
Ommony, supported between two soldiers and followed by his dogs, limped up. Macaulay, who knew him quite well, raised his eyebrows, frowned, and stared point blank, as at an upstart who might presume to claim acquaintance. However, Ommony came straight up to him.
“Where can I sleep?” he demanded.
“I should say the prison would be the logical place, Mr. Ommony,” Macaulay answered with his choicest sneer.
“I’ll provide him with quarters. The man’s a gentleman!” Tregurtha snapped before Ommony could get a word in.
“Oh, very well. Your definition, however, remains to be confirmed!” Macaulay sneered. “My own conviction is that people guilty of treason should be hanged, as high as Haman — as Mahommed Babar will be!”
Ommony set the example of turning his back; Tregurtha might have otherwise let loose the vials of his wrath. Macaulay chose that moment to play his extra trump — the one he carried up his sleeve.
“As friend to friend, Tregurtha,” he said with apparent candor, resuming his social smile, “I advise you to apply for long leave. I believe it would be granted. I will use my influence. Otherwise—”
“I might stay here, I suppose, and punch your head! Is that the trouble?” Tregurtha retorted through a swollen and indignant throat.
The words seemed to force their own passage out through strangling muscles. Suddenly he turned his back as rudely and deliberately as he knew how to contrive, and strode down the platform to the sweeter, simpler atmosphere of Thomas Atkins faced with news of quarantine.
“Yes!” he roared at them, words flowing free at last. “You’re quarantined! You’ve got the smallpox, you blighters, every mother’s son of you! You’ve caught it by behaving like gallant men and you’ll be cured when that’s convenient to your betters! Not a word now! ‘Ten-shunn!”
He marched them away, they mystified and he increasingly aware of the enormity, the characteristic blind and impudent enormity of the mistake that Macaulay had made. The idiot proposed to break him, Tregurtha, for disobedience, keep the affair as quiet as possible, and make some political use of the prisoner for his own ambitious ends. But it did not make him feel any better to know that he could show up Macaulay as a blundering ass. It was not within his scheme of things to break anyone in purse, pride, prospects, or reputation. He was not vindictive. The only man he cared to hit hard was his country’s enemy, and only him as long as he persisted in the enmity.
Knowing he had done no wrong he had never lost confidence — only his temper. He recovered his temper on the march uphill, lending the pony they had brought to the station for him to Ommony, who needed it, and regaining judgment as the exercise set the blood to coursing naturally through his veins.
But there was nothing else to regain. No satisfaction. That fool Macaulay would compel him in self-defense to prove that he raided Peria Vur and captured Mahommed Babar before orders not to do so ever reached him. Macaulay’s smug advice to him to apply for long leave meant that he was in the way. Good! He would stay there! Moreover, having pledged himself to see Mahommed Babar shot, not hanged, he would be obliged to face Macaulay over that issue too. It looked on the whole rotten for Macaulay, who was possibly all right in his way if you only understood him. He, Tregurtha, was a stubborn fellow, rather inclined to believe that stubbornness is sin but given over to it. He would hit back — have to — unavoidable. What was worse, he would wait and let Macaulay overreach himself, emulating Stonewall Jackson, as he always had done even before he studied strategy and tactics with a crammer. Macaulay’s subsequent progress would be all downhill, and he, Tregurtha, was entirely sorry for him. But not in a sparing mood. Stubborn. Dogged-does-it.
He sent Ommony to the mess tent and marched his men into the quarantine inclosure, where he explained to them that the quarantine was no more than a precaution against loose tongues. Knowing that that explanation would only impel them to find ingenious ways of making public all they knew. He went to the length of saying the mistrust of them was none of his contriving, and that personally he would simply have put each man on his honor not to tell — which was true, as they knew perfectly.
“So I’ll ask you to oblige me by holding your tongues,” he said at the close of his remarks. And that naturally settled it. They would talk.
But it all took time. It was four hours after the train arrived before Tregurtha reached his own square tent and sat down to let his servant pull his boots off.
Meanwhile, about an hour before, say three hours after the arrival of the train, there had come seeking Prothero in his much more comfortably furnished wooden hut no other than Lal Rai, bearing a letter.
“So it’s you!” said Prothero. “Well, I’ll be damned! Where ha’ you been?”
He opened the letter — then whistled — then again gave vent to the bromidic prophecy about his future state.
“When did he give you this? Train’s been in a dickens of a time. Where ha’ you been?”
He did not wait for an answer but read again:
My Dear Prothero,
Speaking for myself, whatever difference may have existed between us was adjusted by the steps taken by me to that end recently. That incident is closed and will continue so if will or act of mine have anything to do with it. With the idea of resuming satisfactory relations, am sending you the following information, which as Chief of Intelligence I believe you will be able to employ to the advantage of those most concerned, yourself included. You are under no obligation to refer to me as the source of your information.
Correspondents of newspapers — I don’t know how many or which, but including the news services — have been informed of Tregurtha’s brilliant exploit in capturing Mahommed Babar with the loss of so few men. Tregurtha, with characteristic frankness, has said that information supplied by you was what sent him off on his daring raid into the jungle. As I understand it, the newspapers have been told that you undertook the task of scouting alone, and that you returned with priceless information after adventures in the rebel stronghold.
Details were given to the newspapers without the knowledge of Tregurtha, and, in fact, in face of his strict orders to the men to say nothing.
For your special benefit the following precis of the situation is appended:
If Mahommed Babar’s capture could be kept secret, Tregurtha, and you, might be deprived of the credit. There would be continued fighting, due to the fact that disaffected persons from the North would continue gathering to serve under a leader whom they would still believe to be at large. That would discredit the Intelligence, and so yourself.
If the news of the capture of
Mahommed Babar, on the other hand, were to receive official confirmation and widest publicity, you and Tregurtha would receive full credit unavoidably. Further bloodshed would be prevented. Those who may have advocated the reverse policy would be discredited.
Bitter resentment, consequently trouble, would be sure to follow the hanging of Mahommed Babar; who, if to be executed, should be shot. This last point is very important. Considering Mahommed Babar’s fine record in preventing excesses by his followers, it ought to be easy to oppose the views and expose the unsportsman-like motives of any who seek to have him executed with indignity.
Subject to observance of the above stipulation in regard to treatment of Mahommed Babar, you may count on my support in obtaining full official recognition of Tregurtha’s achievement. It should not be necessary to refer to the manner of your departure from Peria Vur other than to say that I assisted you to escape.
Yours faithfully, Cotswold Ommony
Prothero glanced for a second suspiciously at Lal Rai, realized that his rascally factotum would perish rather than be party to a trick on his master, and chuckled. The whole thing looked to him as obvious as twice two.
He had always said Ommony was a decent enough chap. Evidently he had brains enough, too, to know he must lose in any long-drawn vendetta with the rather well-known “Dekta” Prothero.
“Mn-mn! Handsome does, eh? The amende honorable! Not so bad at that, friend Ommony! Well — we’ll kick Macaulay in the face first; his number’s up. Trig must be applauded. He wins. Lucky! I wonder what it is that makes a simpleton like Trig have all the luck — a one-track mind! A single-barreled gun who goes off whenever anybody pulls the trigger! Consistency must be the secret of it.”
He began pulling off the bandages from his face and hands, and ordered a servant to prepare a tub for him. Having taken good care of himself and obeyed the doctor, he felt well enough to rise unswathed to the emergency. So he washed off all the ointment and got into uniform, strapping on his holster and a .45 Webley from force of habit.