by Talbot Mundy
Her anger checked him. Over his face there crossed the same look Ommony had noticed. Habits — loyal ones peculiarly — die hard, but again the thought occurred to him that worse than that might happen. Safe she then would be beyond all doubt; and he, without her to protect, without her to impose conditions on him, could accomplish more. He knew himself for no physical coward. He would dare —
“What did you say to that?” she demanded.
“Really, Elsa—”
“You agreed?”
“I did not. But I want you to agree. I think—”
It was scorn now. She could school herself to batten down her anger; but contempt, associating him with the proposal, was too strong for her and him. He could not argue against it.
Her unfairness struck the ground from under him. More than ever he was sure she would be better in a safe place in the diwan’s custody; and she, too well able to read his thoughts, answered them instantly.
“Look!” she said, gesturing toward the throng who did her bidding, as much as to say the city would obey her if she were left to her own devices.
He swept the suggestion aside schoolmaster-fashion, irritably, with one hand.
“Listen, Elsa!” he stammered. “I went to the Residency. No admittance. Gould is sick or something. Couldn’t get word to him, not even a note or a verbal message. So I went to the palace — shouldered past the guards — saw the Maharajah—”
“That nonentity!”
“I demanded instant satisfaction, and he left the room! At least I have lodged my protest before witnesses. Ommony was there, and the diwan—”
“What business had Mr. Ommony?”
“Listen, Elsa! Ommony is quite right. He said—”
He stopped because she was not listening. She had that uningratiating gift of switching all attention suddenly from whoever was addressing her to something or someone else. Not only did she not intend to listen, she actually did not hear.
She had seen Diana, Ommony’s great staghound, lawlessly at large and nosing curiously in among the trash the elephants had made. Diana, once commanded to make friends and good-dog-fashion as sure of Ommony’s discretion in such matters as she was unwilling to remain indoors.
“Please pitch the tent,” she said suddenly, and without another word walked off to coax the dog.
Craig let her go, and stayed to do her bidding. He knew the uselessness of argument. In that mood she was capable of snubbing him for days on end, and the only remedy he had ever discovered was patient endurance; which, he consoled himself, was laid on him by his religion and his chosen path.
He hoped they would come and arrest her, never doubting they would treat her respectfully. The diwan was a gentle pagan likelier to yield his own life rather than offer indignity to a woman or any foreigner. Craig hoped it might happen while his back was turned, for that would absolve him of a hand in it.
Once under arrest by order of the diwan she could not reasonably expect him to drag her back to danger. Expect it she probably would, but not reasonably. Reason would be on his side. It would uphold him afterward.
She had said, “Please pitch the tent.” He went about pitching it methodically, with the intricate precision he had used in building up the mission, measuring the pegs so many feet apart and gradually getting order out of chaos with a quiet, determined way he had of setting the example. He never realized, nor could, that nine tenths of the work was his while they who should have learned looked on.
And Elsa, stroking Diana’s head, fingering the dog’s ear as she had noticed Ommony did, picked her way disgustedly over the debris of the ruined wall into a deserted street; oblivious of direction and of every other thought except that life was all dry thorns in a weary wilderness.
She was the victim — she, who might have been the wife of a U.S. Senator! She thought she would have made a President of that man, if only he had not resented her efforts to guide him.
She had tried to make a famous man of Craig; she had forced her own broad thoughts into his narrow mold, accepting dogma that was all dry dust to her and weary routine. All hypocrisy to her and balm to him — laboring with converts she knew well were unconverted; all to the end that Craig might be a great one in the world, and she his proprietor. And now this!
Ashes and agony and gray remorse! Craig didn’t understand. He could not. He cared only for the sticks and straw of trampled buildings — that and her physical safety.
No doubt he would sooner or later gather his scattered converts back, when the casteless crowd they once disowned had forbidden them right of reversion to their old religion. He was capable of putting them to work and rebuilding, replanting, rewhite-washing, like an ant, no better than an ant. A one-track mind, she reflected bitterly, leading from nonentity to nothing else!
That kind of thought acts like the blinkers on a horse. She walked forward, seeing nothing but the ground before her feet, her right hand on the staghound’s shoulder. Diana guided her. Diana’s nose, forever ascertaining news by sniffing moistly at the tainted wind and reading smells as men read books, became aware of faint iodoform and followed the direction of it up a little lane between old trees; by a picket fence, through an open gate into a fenced inclosure where a few huts leaned untidily. There Diana’s eyes recognized something familiar. She trotted forward, leaving Elsa standing; and Elsa turned her head to look back down the lane.
She stepped into the shadow of the gateway instantly. She was just in time to avoid recognition by that self-same Hindu officer who had come to the mission that first morning to greet Ommony and superintend the removal of his luggage.
He was there on horseback with six troopers and a two-horse carriage — looking about him impatiently. Intuition argued he had come for her, and anger rose in a crimson wave to her temples.
He should look in vain! At least he should look in vain as long as possible! Determination to escape, to hide, perhaps to run away from Craig — was not quite definite; but she knew that officer’s capacity for insolence, and one emotion was so heaped on another that reason hardly governed her.
A longing to hit back — to cause trouble and to give offense — surged in her. She stepped forward into the inclosure to annoy the officer, and she remembered that she might perhaps give Ommony some twinges of anxiety by keeping his beloved dog from running home to him.
The dog was sniffing at a pallet on which a man lay in the shade of palm- leaf eaves. Whether dead or only ill, that man provided her with excuse for trespass. If he should happen to be a high-caste man, who inevitably must repel any foreigner offering to touch him, she would none the less have done her duty in offering him aid; and it was very unlikely that a high-caste Hindu would be found in that place, or, if so, that he would submit to attentions from a dog.
She hurried forward, feeling relieved to have something definite to occupy her mind, stooped over the pallet, and cried out with astonishment.
“You! John Ishmittee! You were supposed to be dead! How did you come here?”
Diana had completed her investigation. Having no more interest, she moved away and stood in the midst of the inclosure, looking for new attractions. John Ishmitte began a rambling account of his adventures, interspersed with a few words of kitchen-English. But it was obvious at the end of the first few sentences that either he was out of his head or all his information of the elephant disaster was at second-hand. He was interrupted by Diana’s battle-cry — no bark, but a growl like thunder in the hills — a noise that of dark nights made strangers’ blood run cold; then instantly on top of it the worrying snap and snarl of action.
“Diana! Here! Here!”
But Diana was engaged. Eleven men — and Elsa knew them! — were attempting what not twice their number could have done without a net; to capture Ommony’s white-fanged bodyguard and drag her away into a hut.
Two men were down with blood gushing out of gashed wounds. A third was by the throat, and the rest were in one another’s way, all struggling for a hold of tail
or legs. Boatmen all, none sober, and the lot the same men who had pulled the long sweeps of the Maharajah’s barge that had brought Ommony.
“Here! Diana! Good dog! Here!”
As well cry to the clouds far overhead! And another man was down, making mud from the flow of a torn artery. But Elsa had the courage of her sex and race, that is as cold iron in some sorts of emergency. Running with mission- pattern skirts uplifted, she waded in and, seizing the hound’s collar, thrust her forearm into the blood-red jaws. The fangs closed on it like a vice and forced a scream from her; but even in that summit of brute rage the hound knew an official friend and let the arm go, snapping to right and left and straining at the collar to reach the enemy again.
Elsa felt her grip on the collar yielding. It would have been easier to hold a horse. She flung herself on her knees and took the dog’s throat in her right hand, throttling and gasping orders: “Down, Diana! Down, you hear me? Lie down!”
The hound obeyed, still growling like the rumble of a subway, and the drunken boatmen drew off in a semicircle, muttering their comments in a jargon not expounded in the missionaries’ grammar-books.
Then down-lane there came the noise of trotting horses, clank of a saber on stirrup-iron and heavy carriage-wheels. Elsa turned her head with a gesture of nervous fear and cried aloud to the one sole creature there she had a claim on:
“John! John Ishmittee! Hide me somewhere! Those are the Maharajah’s men!”
John Ishmittee, raising himself on the pallet, said something in the boatman jargon. The men Diana had torn and bitten dragged themselves away. The other five grinned, beckoned, pointed to a door in the wall behind the end hut. They urged her to make haste. Elsa — no whit afraid of them — consented.
But she did not dare let the dog go. Diana would have run home. The Maharajah’s officer would see the dog and draw conclusions — guess that his quarry might be where the dog had come from. She gripped the collar with trembling fingers and dragged Diana with her.
The great hound came at first unwillingly. Then, throwing up her head, she uttered on long, penetrating howl, more desolate than a wolf’s in winter, and obeyed with no more protest.
Ommony, up on a tower, where he stood to watch that no indignity should go with the arrest, heard the howl, watched through a single spy-glass, whistled to himself and gave instructions to the dog-boy, who was squatting on the tiles beside him.
“Trees!” he said to himself then, chuckling; “yes, by Jiminy, we’ll now grow trees!”
CHAPTER 6. “The priests did this.”
The crises of the world, that take so long a-brewing, are mismanaged or disposed of in the course of minutes. Any fool could sense the danger after Sarajevo, or can tell, when a strike has been declared, that trouble and loss will come of it; but it is given to few to recognize the half-hour in which the tide of evil may be taken at the flood and turned, cross-currents and all, into constructive use. Those are mostly men without ambition, who become great doctors, lawyers, statesmen, or, as in at any rate one instance, foresters.
Ommony came down the steps of an ancient tower built for watching water- lanes when piracy was open and a gentleman’s pursuit. His stride was positive — the thirty-inch, deliberate march of Rome’s centurions who conquered by the strength of an idea.
He was afraid, and yet his fear was only lest his own ability should fall short of attainment. He had seen. He understood. Remained to hold the thread of the solution through inevitable darkness, and to follow it to the outcome. He forgot himself. The outcome was to be new forests and — the necessary way toward that — peace between factions.
The dog-boy had gone ahead, and he had trained him as a good commander trains his staff, or as the Church trains zealots. So he could afford to pause in front of John Ishmittee and give that pawn of Destiny no inkling that a people’s fate might possibly depend on him. He smiled and spoke leisurely, as if asking questions for his own amusement, providing no excuse for lies.
“Why, hello! How did you come here?”
“The sahib gave me money. I was tired of that bed in the mission. I paid the boatmen to bring me here.”
“What have you to do with boatmen?”
“Sahib, I was of their religion once. And they have been saying that the sahib’s big dog is a god in the form of an animal. The priests are angry with them, and the priests said there will be a punishment unless they seize the dog and drown him where the carcass can never be found.
“So they came to me, knowing the sahib was friendly with the missionaries, asking me to assist them in the matter. And I paid them to carry me hither — hoping thus to do your honor a service by dissuading them,” he added by way of establishing his own pellucid innocence.
“You are a snake in the grass and an ingrate,” answered Ommony.
“Nay, sahib!”
Ommony’s alert, observing eyes, that appeared to watch nothing but the convert’s face, were at work conveying information to a brain that was absorbed by only one objective. He detected cautious movement.
“You are a thief!”
“On my honor, sahib—”
“Let me look beneath that blanket! Quick now! Pull it back! No argument!”
It was a check-book, that only a fool would steal. He likely thought he could forge checks on Craig that a bank would cash. Ommony picked the book up, smudged a little ink on the inside of the cover with his fountain-pen and passed it back.
“Put your thumb-prints there — both of them!” He took the check- book back and pocketed it.
“Jail?” he asked. “You want to go to jail?”
“Nay, sahib!”
“Who came this way just now? Who went out that way?”
“Memsahib Craig.”
“Did she wish to be seen?”
“Nay, not to be seen. She begged me to hide her. The boatmen—”
“Silence then for silence!” Ommony said sternly. “Whoever asks, say nothing! You understand?”
The convert did not understand, except that Ommony held evidence that could convict him. Having tasted jail, then hospital, no bird was more in love than he with re-won freedom. Ommony tapped his pocket meaningly.
“Tell a soul you have seen Memsahib Craig, and I’ll say where I found this check-book! Moreover, I will prosecute you for trying to steal my dog! In addition I will tell the priests that you told me about their secret instructions to the boatmen—”
“Nay, sahib! Nay, not that! Not that of all things! I am dumb! See, sahib, I will tear my tongue out rather! Only if your honor will not tell the priests.”
Eyes rolled piteously, and the dusky face turned ashen.
“Silence for silence!” said Ommony sternly, and passed along, out behind the end hut, closing the gate behind him and fastening it with a stick thrust through the iron padlock-rings.
He had not far to go. The dog-boy squatted in the dust beneath a window latticed across with iron. The building was an old one set in a bit of a garden with trees on either hand and with its back against a high wall, over which the roofs of houses rose in intricate confusion. The dog-boy looked up once and nodded, then went on working the dust into patterns with his fingers.
Ommony rapped on the dry teak door very quietly twice. After a minute’s pause the door opened gingerly about six inches, and a drunken boatman’s questioning face appeared. Ommony sent the man staggering and strode in, kicking the door shut again behind him.
For a moment in the inside gloom he was in danger. A cloth was drawn on a string across the only window, and his eyes were set for the outer glare.
The man who had staggered backward drew a boatman’s knife, as good for gutting humans as for caught fish. A thing with a lanyard on it and a heavy handle that makes weight behind the iron blade. Ommony ducked from instinct, and the knife struck humming in the dry wood just behind him. He pulled it out and curled the lanyard on his wrist.
Then another drunkard recognized him and said three words in the boatman jargon that
brought the knife-thrower down on his knees in abject supplication, lying with a drunkard’s swift, absurd inventiveness.
“Heaven-born, the lanyard slipped through these fingers, which are sweating! It was the purpose to throw the knife into a corner, lest the heaven-born should hurt himself when about to strike me in evident anger!”
“Silence!” commanded Ommony in their tongue in a gruff, low voice, not meant to carry.
But it did, and it was recognized. A short bark and a low whine announced that Diana, near at hand, had recognized her master. Ommony clucked — that quieted the dog — and looked about him. There were only seven boatmen. Two wore bandages of soft white cloth that might have been the substance of a petticoat, a lot too well applied to have been done by their oar-awkward fingers. They were afraid — self-conscious — guilty of they knew not what exactly — in confusion because they did not yet know what was to be charged against them. Ommony’s face was an enigma. Even with fumes of longshore arrack in their heads they knew enough to wait and see.
Ommony heard the dog’s low whimper again, and then a woman’s voice without fear instructing somebody — knew beyond any question that the dog would howl a warning to him if there was instant danger — and opened the door at his back. He beckoned the boatmen out into the sunlight, waiting until the last had slunk by. Then he shut the door and, glancing once quickly to right and left, led them into the evil-smelling shade of thick-boled trees, in a corner with the house on one side and the high wall behind. There no passer- by could have seen them.
“What does she do?” he demanded.
“Sahib, she has torn her garment to bind up woundings the dog did. She is well. None has harmed her. She begged us to—”
He cut that short with a gesture. He who is wise is careful not to learn too much. Nor does he ask to be informed of what he knows. He asserts what he knows when questions would invite evasion.