Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Come, if you’re coming. I’m going on in.”

  Duncannon strode up ancient steps that rang as if built of silver.

  “Stop, sahib! Stop!” The babu almost screamed at him. “Krishna! Has nobody told you, you must not wear boots!”

  Duncannon went on into echoing black gloom. There were no lamps visible, but a sooty smell greeted his nostrils along with the reek of rank butter. The darkness was blacker than death, and he could hear the ticking of his watch, the singing of his own pulse in his ears. Then something struck his cheek. He ducked and tasted salt blood in the corner of his mouth. Something clattered on a stone floor over to his left.

  A man can think of a thousand things in half a second when death leaps at him from the dark. Had Deborah been killed? Was it lawful to kill trespassers in Indian temples? What had struck him? Where was Chullunder Ghose? Had the babu gone suddenly mad and tried to murder him?

  He crouched low and waited. To shoot at nothing in the dark would only show an adversary where he was. Besides, he might hit Deborah. He heard the babu’s bare feet thumping on the stone steps and presently saw his bulk in silhouette against the slightly lighter darkness in the entrance. He wanted to warn him — but how, without warning the enemy?

  At last he drew his pistol, held it at arm’s length and fired. Chullunder Ghose vanished like a big balloon snatched by the wind. A knife, hurled at the pistol flash, so nearly struck him that he could feel the wind it made. The knife went clattering along the stone floor and he fired in the direction he supposed it came from. He thought he heard somebody gasp, but he was not sure. A second later he heard footsteps — spurred boots retreating over stone flags so he fired again, but the flash of the pistol showed him nothing and he did not dare yet to use the electric flashlight that he had in his jacket pocket.

  Presently he heard the babu’s breathing and the sound of something heavy shuffling along the floor. Then the babu’s voice, whispering:

  “Squeeze hit! Forward, sahib! Scoot for home plate! Attaboy! Very holy Gnani must be absent on vacation or would have interfered already! Whom have you killed, and how many?”

  “None, worse luck!”

  “My aunt! Some people don’t know what luck is!” The babu’s teeth were chattering “Human life being least valuable known commodity, destruction of same is visited with heavy penalty, since we are ruled by penny Solomons. Lo, let us commit more sacrilege! Lead on into Holy of Holies — straight ahead!”

  They went forward on hands and knees, ready to drop flat at the slightest sound.

  “Properly abject manner of approaching shrine of deity!” the babu whispered. “Same can be adduced as evidence at trial — disproves criminal motives absolutely!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Say not so. Speech is comforting. Use flashlight, sahib. This babu is intuitionist.”

  Duncannon switched the light on, pointing straight ahead, expecting to see the great image of the god that he vaguely recalled from his previous visit. But the pale rays shone on nothing but a heap of broken masonry. The babu whistled. Then he chuckled. Then, forgetting fear, he laughed.

  “Krishna! Very holy Gnani has deserted roost! Image of deity fallen on face and broken — signifying help yourself! Sacrilege no longer possible! Roof will fall next! Look, they have destroyed the pillars! Very inconvenient if roof should fall on us! Home plate forward, sahib, first turn to the right! I vote we hurry!”

  Duncannon turned the light in all directions. It revealed great heaps of wreckage.

  “Demolitionists skedaddelled just when we came!” said the babu. “But I think they thought the roof was falling. Verb. sap. — very!”

  In the space at the rear, where the image of the god had stood, there yawned a dark hole and Duncannon led toward it, pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left. The hole turned out to be a tunnel, sloping steeply downward, very narrow, and so low he had to stoop to enter. At the end of twenty feet or so there was a level platform from which smooth steps led downward to the right into the temple crypt. There began to be a filthy, stifling smell of tigers.

  To the left, in a corner opposite the steps, the wall was broken, leaving a gap about three feet wide that seemed to have once been filled with fitted stones and then cemented. The stones had been thrust inward and in front of the gap, all smashed to pieces, lay the image of a god. Duncannon turned the light on it. The god’s face in a circle of stone flames painted red, grinned at his. There was a broken hand that held a torch.

  “Red Flame of Erinpura!” said the babu.

  Duncannon scrambled over the broken masonry and stepped through the break in the wall, gasped, and came out again. There was no air in there. His hands felt filthy where he had touched the masonry inside. He peered in, using the flashlight, but there was only utter blackness and a smell that made him sick. Fumes came through the opening, blending with the tiger-stench. The heat was almost insupportable. Putting his handkerchief over his mouth and holding the pistol between his knees he peered in again, looking to see whether the floor were safe to venture on. The flashlight gleamed on a silvery spur, then on another.

  “Deborah!” he exclaimed.

  He drew a long breath, held it and jumped in.

  He came out dragging a body, limp, in long riding-boots, whose spurs caught the broken masonry — some one whose silk shirt tore under his grip and whose weight was that of a young woman. In his hurry he dropped the flashlight and it broke.

  “Where are matches?” asked the babu.

  “No, you idiot! That’s naphtha! Can’t you smell it?”

  He picked up the body. He was sure now it was Deborah, and he handled it gently.

  “Go ahead. Help me find the way out.”

  It seemed to take an hour to find the way up to the temple floor. He was afraid to trip for fear of injuring his burden, and his head was reeling from the effect of fumes that he had breathed into his lungs. The babu, panic-stricken, did not wait for him but blundered up the steps and yelled each time his shins struck broken masonry.

  The body in his arms was lifeless, but when he reached the temple floor he did not dare to set it down; he must reach fresh air before his own brain yielded to the fumes of naphtha which seemed to be coming up in volume from the tunnel behind him. He could dimly see the temple door; he made for it, staggering amid the débris of the broken images.

  He knew he was bleeding badly where a knife had struck his face, and he knew, too, he was very nearly, “all in.” But the air felt cool from the temple entrance, reviving him a little. He made the last few yards in a sort of waking dream and staggered up against the babu on the platform at the temple door, trying to fill his lungs with fresh air. The babu took the burden from his arms and dropped it roughly on the stone.

  He knew then he was dreaming, for he heard a merry voice he recognized and thought he saw Deborah standing in front of him. The babu struck matches, breaking half a dozen in his haste, kneeling over the body he had dropped so cavalierly.

  Deborah’s voice said —

  “Hello, John Duncannon — so you beat me to it!”

  Said the babu, striking a seventh match:

  “Left arm broken by a bullet — circumstantial, very — we should look out to establish alibi!”

  “Did you find the stuff, John?” Deborah asked.

  No doubt it was her voice, her shape. But John Duncannon lay on the flags at the temple door, face upward, clawing at the stone-work with his fingers, trying to persuade himself he was not dead and in another world. Had he not held Deborah’s lifeless body in his arms? Had he not seen, heard, shuddered at the dropping of that body on the flagstones? Was it her soul that he saw, that was speaking to him? If so, must he not also be dead? And was the business of death as easy as all that?

  But if so, why did his head ache, and why was there blood on his face, that kept on streaming past the corner of his mouth?

  A flashlight blazed into his eyes. It blinded him. Then Deborah’s voice again.
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br />   “John, you’re hurt! What happened?

  He knew what he wanted to say, but he seemed to have lost control of speech. On the contrary the babu seemed to have no notion what to say, but had voluminous ability to say it; he began to pour forth floods of explanation:

  “Missy sahib, this babu has alibi, same being best possible legal proof of innocence, accepted by all courts of justice everywhere, absolutely. Injury to John Duncannon sahib cannot be laid at door of this well-meaning individual, who am speechless with consternation. Love’s young dream is superstitious and exacting, to say nothing of contemptuous, but beware of false reasoning! I did not do it! Can prove by my own personal affidavit, sworn in any language, that I was several yards away when accident happened. I do not even know what took place, it having been all dark in there. I neither—”

  Deborah interrupted:

  “Hold his head up. No — leave him. Let me. Out of my way.”

  Duncannon felt his shoulders being lifted, and then felt his head rest in somebody’s lap. Somebody else switched on the flashlight again and he looked up into Deborah’s face.

  “I thought you were dead!” he mumbled awkwardly.

  “Well, I’m not!” she answered. “But you’re not far from it.” Her fingers began staunching the flow of blood from his cheek. “Bring me water, somebody. If you turn out to be really badly hurt, John, I will have that babu punished. I made him promise — I even offered to pay him — to keep you out of harm’s way!”

  A flood of mixed emotions surged over John Duncannon’s brain. Why hadn’t he thought of paying somebody to keep watch over Deborah? And why should she have paid the babu? Did he mean so much to her? His head refused the overload of thought-waves and almost welcomed the unconsiousness that supervened.

  For a while after that he knew nothing except that he was carried by legs and shoulders and deposited on something soft.

  When he began to recover his senses at last there were voices, a lantern and a man beside the lantern who, he knew at once, was Galloway. Galloway stood with legs well apart and an express rifle under his arm; Mrs. Bisbee and Chullunder Ghose were alternately answering his questions. It was pitch-dark and Duncannon could still smell naphtha; his head ached worse than ever, but it still lay in Deborah’s lap, which was not in the least disagreeable, although it hurt abominably when she dabbed at a wound on his face with a wet cloth. He tried to move his head.

  “Lie still!” she commanded. It was a possessive tone of voice, but what she said next had a different inflection: “John, I wouldn’t have had this happen for all the oil in Asia!”

  Galloway came nearer, peered at him and turned to Mrs. Bisbee:

  “Mischief!” he remarked. “There’ll be a lot of explaining needed, Mrs. Bisbee! Who wrecked the temple?”

  “The Gnani did, or else the Gnani’s men,” she answered.

  “How did you know so much?” he retorted.

  “By making friends instead of enemies, O Lord of Arbitrariness! The Gnani told me.”

  “Told you he had done it?”

  “No, but that he intended to do it. He said the roof would soon fall in any event, and nobody really owns the place any longer, so that if he should go away — and he has gone! — the place will become the Government’s and any one may have the oil who has the Government’s permission. He prefers that the oil should be exploited, because he thinks that will be good for India.”

  “H-r-r-umph!” remarked Galloway. “That doesn’t explain Rundhia Singh. I followed him all the way from Tonkaipur. Where is he?”

  “He was just now dead,” remarked Chullunder Ghose. “He lay there — out at home plate. Otherwise he would have owned the oil, having been first to discover same. But he was quite dead when Duncannon sahib picked him out of tigerish den of naphtha. Rumor — lying jade, who tells truth only when it can’t be proved — suggests he was counting on oil to make himself more powerful than—”

  “Chup!” commanded Galloway.

  “The only way to silence rumor is to tell the truth,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “Out with it! What do you know? Otherwise I will tell what I know, to whom it may concern, and when I see fit.”

  It might have been that Galloway had secrets, known to Mrs. Bisbee, which he did not care to have revealed. At any rate he spoke, promptly, abruptly:

  “I have evidence that would have hanged him. He poisoned Major Rindervale, and now his father, that fine old rajah. There are no heirs.”

  “So Tonkaipur falls to the Central Government,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “I believe the Gnani foresaw something of the kind.”

  “At any rate, if there’s oil here the Central Government controls it,” remarked Galloway.

  “That means Dad controls it. That means me!” remarked Deborah, bending lower to discover whether John Duncannon were conscious or not. He kept still. “If it weren’t that John’s for Turner Sons and Company,” she went on, “and they’re a set of small-town pikers trying to horn in to a man’s game, I’d step aside and let John have it.”

  The babu giggled.

  “Search his pockets, Missy sahib. Turner Sons and Company have tendered resignation. Look for telegram in pocket — right-hand shirt pock—”

  There was sudden silence, and Galloway raised his rifle, making sure the springs were cocked. He was staring in the direction of the river-bed, but there were no sounds heard by anybody else that could explain his sudden tenseness. When he spoke it was harshly, with a distinct pause between each word:

  “Prince dead, was he? What became of him?”

  He was listening for sounds from the river-bed, not for an answer to his question, and none spoke. After a minute he strode toward the temple steps and stooped there, feeling for blood with his forefinger.

  “You say the body lay here? Was there fighting?” he demanded.

  “I should say not!” said the babu. “John Duncannon sahib most heroically rescued him from filthy dungeon where the oil is. Heroism being blind, he may have mistaken sex of rescuee, but—”

  Silence again, unaccountable, and all eyes turned toward the river-bed. Then suddenly a loud, explosive coughing sound, followed by a terrific snarl.

  “Bagh!” exclaimed the babu, and a man who was holding the lantern dropped it.

  Galloway started running toward a low elevation that would give him a view of the reeds in the river bottom, or at any rate of the darkness where the reeds lay. There was a half-moon now — it was after midnight; the dry river-bed was bathed in a wan mystery that looked like flowing water. Galloway stood still, grew rigid, aimed and fired.

  There came another snarl and a terrific crashing near the edge of a clump of reeds. Galloway fired again. Then silence. Galloway walked slowly toward the river-bed after he had reloaded his rifle.

  It was two or three minutes before he called back, and his voice sounded excited:

  “It’s Prince Rundhia Singh! Tiger killed him — tore his arm off!”

  “Too bad! Too bad!” Chullunder Ghose remarked sotto voce. “Circumstantial evidence is all gone now! Bullet made in U.S.A. United States, lodged in prince’s arm but chewed by tiger. Tiger should have been rewarded! Fortune, what an unfair jade thou art! Missy sahib, this babu has forfeited rupees a thousand, since John Duncannon sahib has been injured and, moreover, I foresee a worse disaster. Tell me: Does preliminary step to disillusion wipe out obligations of enraptured male?”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Deborah.

  “He means to be impudent,” said Mrs. Bisbee.

  “Oh no, I don’t. This babu’s disapproval of matrimony is purely abstract and impersonal, in spite of personal experience of same. The concrete problem is: Duncannon sahib promised this babu rupees thirty thousand if we got there first. We didn’t; we got here second. Does a dead prince count? And are the intoxicating fumes of love so overwhelming that the philosophic friendship of a poor babu may be forgotten?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Deborah.

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nbsp; “About thirty thousand rupees,” said the babu meekly.

  “If Mr. Duncannon promised you that amount, then you’ll get it, I don’t doubt,” said Deborah.

  “As two rupees are better than one, so are two promises,” remarked the babu.

  “Very well. I’ll remind him.”

  The babu sighed enormously, perhaps to hide some other symptom of emotion. Galloway came striding through the dark and stood still, looking down at Deborah with John Duncannon’s head reposing on her lap.

  “Strange,” he said. “You said there wasn’t any fighting. The tiger had torn off the prince’s right arm, but we found the arm, and my man found a bullet in it.”

  “Doubtless your honor’s bullet!” said the babu. “Your honor will remember that you fired twice.”

  “And the blood on the temple steps,” said Galloway.

  “John Duncannon sahib’s!” said the babu. “He fell there, and he lay there.”

  “And I have the bullet,” remarked Galloway.

  “Bad luck — very!” said the babu.

  “What do you mean by bad luck?” Galloway snapped back. “D’you mean — ?”

  “I mean, sahib, that all philosophers, all holy men, all fortune tellers, and all ancient writings are agreed that it is very bad luck to preserve a bullet found in carcass of defeated enemy! If I had found it, I would throw it to the winds!”

  “Oh, you would, would you?”

  “That would be my first thought,” said the babu blandly.

  Galloway stood still a minute, thinking. Presently he took the lantern from the man who followed him and noticed that Deborah’s fingers were moving in and out of John Duncannon’s hair.

  “Well, I won’t spoil your young life,” he said and turned and threw something as far away into the night as he could throw. Then he faced Deborah again and looked down at his right hand.

  “Hullo!” he remarked. “It’s gone. I must have dropped it on the way up!”

  “Thanks!” said Deborah. “I’m glad, aren’t you? I mean, I’m glad that John could shoot straight.”