by Talbot Mundy
“You’re a killer yourself,” Tom answered.
“You can’t prove it! But you can buy me. I will stay bought. Give me the breaks, and I will show you how to get what you want in Tibet. I will show you how to get ahead of Dowlah. I haven’t told you all I know. We professional spies should be as members of one brotherhood.”
“Good-by,” said Tom. “Good luck to you. Short rations as far as Sikkim, Su-li Wing. After that you’ll be able to eat your fill. If you take my advice, you’ll talk small when you get to India.”
He offered to shake hands. She refused. He returned with a genial grin the salute of the men from Naini Kol, then rode away at the head of his Tibetans. He was uncertain why they followed without protest. But after a mile or two the headman explained:
“Tum-Glain, in some other incarnation you must have done something to entitle you to wisdom in this one. In another life you ought to be entitled to some mercy, for your mercy to us now. We feared that for a punishment you might dismiss us and take some of those Indians instead. Then the soldiers from Kalimpong would have killed us, should they catch them, as is likely, because that woman is a bad-luck bringer.”
“You think, then, that the Tibetan authorities may send out a patrol from Kalimpong?”
“Why not?”
“Along this road?”
“No. The soldiers are afraid of the evil spirits hereabouts, so their officers wouldn’t be able to lead them along this road. But they will block the road. Why shouldn’t they?”
“Do you think the Tibetan troops will oppose the Holy Lobsang Pun Rinpoche?”
“A million blessings on His Sacredness, they might! There is no knowing how wicked or how stupid soldiers can be. But His Blessed Holiness would make a magic, I think, and get by them unseen. If he wishes to come this way, he will do it.”
Tom made the most of the Tibetans’ changed mood. He accomplished marvels of marching, changing the loads frequently from one pony to another. But Dowlah’s speed was next thing to a miracle. Two days and two nights at his heels, but not a sight of him. Tom’s mood was merciless to man and beast, himself included, but instead of causing mutiny it stirred the Tibetans’ superstition in his favor. Whenever he called a halt, to let them boil their slimy salted tea, in some cave or lee of a rock, or beside black and white water that welled amid treeless wastes of moraine and snow, their remarks revealed less curiosity than guarded approval. It was the same when they huddled together at night, in the tent.
“Tum-Glain, tell us how is it that you, a foreigner, who hadn’t the advantage of being born in this blessed beautiful land, nevertheless are so good to be with? You speak our speech so that it sounds comical, although we understand you, and you understand us. Which is it? Were you one of us in a former life? Were you reborn into some miserable foreign country for your former sins? Or are you a foreigner, too good for your own wretched country, being made ready, be cause of merit, to be reborn, at the proper time, in this blessed land? If so, better die soon, sooner to be reborn!”
One more day, speed dwindling, and then food for the famished ponies! A load of barley on the snow, beside a dead horse. Ravens had arrived, but no vultures. The horse’s carcass was hardly cold. The Tibetans apologized for cutting off meat for themselves. They admitted they were robbing birds and wolves. It wasn’t decent food. Nevertheless, it wasn’t so indecent as if they themselves had killed the animal. Hungry men mayn’t be choosers. They were pious about it. They said their prayers for the soul of the sinner that had been incarnated in the horse because of sins in former lives. They wished him a better incarnation next time. They ate the meat raw, ravenously, throwing stones at the ravens because they are birds of very bad omen for the liberated soul whose dead carcass they insult with their beaks. They shouted aloud for the vultures to come and drive the ravens away.
Tom studied the trail, protecting his eyes from the wind with his gloved hand. It would be dark in less than two hours. The dead horse lay exactly at the summit of a narrow pass between high mountains that were part of the jumble of summits that hide Everest from almost every direction. From where he stood, a crag-flanked, bouldered gorge led downward, so nearly straight between the flanks of mountains that he could see the black-purple shadow of a valley, perhaps twenty miles away, five thousand feet below him. Darker seams in that shadow might even be tamarisk scrub. It looked like comfortable country, as one reckons comfort in Tibet. Fuel. Less wind. Altitude where breathing would be no effort, where three or four hours’ deep sleep would really rest man and beast.
But the ponies couldn’t possibly do twenty more miles. It might take them another day to reach that valley. They needed eight hours’ rest, and another meal, before attempting the boulder-strewn descent. It would be a sheer impossibility in darkness. It would be many hours before the moon would rise over the peaks, and then not long before it would pass behind other peaks, so there would be no night march in any event. He looked for a good place to bivouac, wishing he had field-glasses.
Presently, on the right-hand side of the descending trail, about four or five miles away, and two hundred feet above it, he saw what looked, in the sunset shadow, like the mouth of a cave. If he could have only afforded the time, it would be a good place to await the morning sun. A good place any how. It seemed accessible. There would be room in there for the ponies, and no need to pitch the tent. He pointed it out to the Tibetans and led the way.
For a while he lost sight of it, because the track led down ward, a thousand feet in half a mile, between broken cliffs where the loaded ponies had to be manhandled over the slippery rock. Then he saw it again, through a saw-tooth gap — halted — beckoned the headman:
“Can you see any one in that cave?”
“Bandits! Let us turn back!”
“How many can you see?”
“One.”
“I also. Man or woman?”
“I can’t tell. It is some one sitting by a fire of sticks, not a dung-fire. That means horses, or else porters, and that means danger for us. There are no prayer flags hereabouts. This is a country where the holy lamas haven’t driven away the devils. So whoever is here is a dugpa, who obeys devils, or else they obey him, which would be even worse. Let us turn back quickly, while there is time.”
Tom led forward, doing two men’s share of the exhausting work of holding up ponies over rock worn smooth by ice and wind. Here and there a hoof-mark was discernible. In one place, on a pocket of frozen snow, there were at least twenty hoof-marks. But no sign of Elsa.
At last the ponies stood heaving, with trembling legs, while he studied the mouth of an ascending, winding track that led through a break in the rock wall on the right hand, toward the cave on the mountain-side. From where he stood he couldn’t see the cave, but it was a well-worn causeway that led to it. Some of it was artificial, laid with flat stones set edgewise. There were traces of yak-dung in the crevices, left by the men who had gathered the stuff for fuel. There was quite a lot of yak-dung farther down the trail toward the dark valley, and some of that was recent.
The Tibetans refused to go a step farther. They declared they would wait for the moon and then turn back, unless some one should come from that cave, meanwhile, and kill them all. They were panic-stubborn.
“Tum-Glain, if we die at dugpas’ hands, without a holy lama to protect us, devils will pursue our souls through outer darkness. No, not another footstep forward! Go on alone, if you are as brave as all that.”
Tom glanced at the pony that carried the load that held the money-bag. That pony — it was his own, the strongest — might perhaps have had enough strength to retreat uphill. Tom laughed at the headman.
“What would you do with money in the next world?”
Then he filled his lungs and shouted:
“Hullo-hullo-hullo! Koi hai! Koi hai!”
The shout went clamoring from crag to crag. It seemed endless. It was like a thousand hollow voices of the devils of the night, that came hurrying out of the valley. The
Tibetans laid their foreheads on the rock between flattened hands. The headman moaned the sacred “Om mane padme hum!” The others, a word behind him, moaned it louder, until they caught up with him, all chanting faster and faster. It sounded like “Three Blind Mice.”
Tom cocked the Mauser and waited, gripping the butt with his ungloved hand inside his overcoat. He was dog-tired. He leaned in the icy shadow of a huge boulder in the middle of the track, flexing his muscles to keep them from growing numb.
It seemed ten minutes, but the shadow wasn’t ten minutes deeper, before footsteps clamored on the causeway. Echoes magnified them into a prodigious noise that resembled the clatter of small stones falling from the higher ledges. Who ever was coming made no secret of it. But Tom stayed in the dark where he was, making sure of his footing. He made sure of his grip on the Mauser. The Tibetans ceased chanting and lay as still as dead men.
It seemed ten more minutes before a man came and stood in the gap, in the last of the reflected sunset, staring. He was wearing snow-spectacles, with his head in a hood, above wind-proof, fur-lined clothing. He stared at the Tibetans — at the ponies — pulled off his spectacles to peer into the deepening shadows —
Tom spoke, quite quietly:
“Dowlah, put your hands up! Put them high over your head!”
“Oh, it’s you, is it? I thought — I mean, I hoped they had buried you in Darjeeling.”
“I won’t repeat the warning.”
Dowlah put his hands up. “Curse you, are you an immortal? Where’s that Chinese woman? You must have passed her.”
“Keep your hands up!”
Tom told the headman to go and search him. Comforted by the Mauser, the headman obeyed.
Dowlah had no weapon.
CHAPTER 31. “I was in trouble some years ago.”
“You see, I had to sleep,” said Dowlah. “Hee-hee! I’ve had a good sleep. You haven’t had. What are you going to do about that Mauser? Shoot me, or strike a bargain?”
They sat facing each other, across a wood-fire near the mouth of the cave, their faces glowing but their backs protected with heavy sheepskin from the icy wind. No moon yet. Pitch dark. The Tibetans had refused to enter the cave. They said it belonged to dugpas; it was occupied by home less souls, too wicked to have bodies. They were afraid, too, of Dowlah. But Tom had prevailed on them to lead the foundered ponies, and to climb with the loads, to a wide ledge below and beyond the cave. There they had pitched the tent and 1 ad a fire of their own, amid leaping shadows.
The cave contained plenty of fuel, tied in yak-load bundles. Tom had cooked tea and a meal for himself and Dowlah. No lantern. Firelight was sufficient.
Tom was sleepy. Dowlah knew it. Tom had shaved recently and his tired face looked at least civilized, but Dowlah’s tangle of black whiskers was a scandalous mess, through which his eyes gleamed with fire-lit malice. The dilettante, amateur scientist’s pose had vanished, but he hadn’t lost his giggle. If he was feeling beaten or afraid, he didn’t show it.
Tom forced the issue. “My Tibetans,” he said, “are out of gas. Four flats to a man. They won’t go another yard for ward. In the morning I’m going to take the two best ponies and go on alone.”
“To your death,” said Dowlah.
“You may go with my Tibetans,” Tom answered. “Over take your own men. They’re a bit ashamed of having let you make a monkey of yourself. They’ll take you safe back to India. The British will probably let you go and live in Monte Carlo on a pension, like the other rotten rajahs, who aren’t worth hanging. They’re not bad sorts, the British. True, you’re a bloody murderer, and they’ll soon know it. You’re a double-triple-crosser, and they already know that. But they’ve plenty of sense. They’re not likely to make a public scandal, if you accept banishment and hold your tongue.”
“My dear man, what an imbecile you are,” said Dowlah. “You’re a poor spy and a worse psychologist. Do you mistake me for a man who will accept humiliation? Are you going to use that Mauser?”
“I don’t have to,” Tom answered. “I need sleep. I’m going to fix you first. What has happened?”
“Produce a drink and I’ll tell you.”
“I don’t use liquor. There’s plenty of tea. Help yourself. I won’t ask any question twice. How did Elsa put one over on you?”
Dowlah grinned. “You strong, silent, tough, abstemious, big blundering brutes never fail to fall for little women, do you! You may as well be disillusioned now as later. I will tell you the truth about your sweet-innocent Elsa Burbage. Smart little devil! I told her you’re dead, as I supposed you were. A man said he had killed you. She didn’t care a damn. Not a damn, Mr. Lowly Lothario Grayne. Mr. Mute Mephistopheles Grayne and your miniature Marguerite! She began to play her own hand from that minute.”
He paused, watching Tom’s eyes in the firelight. His own eyes were contemptuous, but cunningly alert. He continued:
“I confess she put one over on me, as you call it. She saw me get rid of Su-li Wing, and I don’t doubt that gave her this idea. Clever little hypocrite! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Pretended to be sorry for Su-li Wing. Needed clothing like the devil, but wouldn’t even look at the other woman’s luggage. Su-li Wing fooled Pavlov, but she hadn’t guts enough to kill him, and she hadn’t brains enough to fool me. All Su-li Wing ever wanted was Thö-pa-ga. He is all that anybody needs, to get control of the Thunder Dragon Gate. Elsa Burbage has him by the heartstrings.”
He paused again, but Tom’s eyes told him nothing. He continued:
“It was one of those crises, Grayne, that occur in the midst of all well-laid intrigues. The unpredictable. My men had become a liability — a dangerous nuisance. Carefully-chosen men, nevertheless mutinous. So I armed some of the Böns with their weapons and told them to go home. They’re sure to fall foul of Tibetan troops from Kalimpong or some where, and be wiped out. Serve them right, the ingrates!”
Tom put some wood on the fire.
“Of course,” said Dowlah, “I realized at once, in Delhi, that Elsa Burbage was merely using you for her own ends. She hadn’t been in my house twenty minutes before she was measuring me with her eyes for a—”
Tom interrupted: “Cut that, Dowlah, if you need your front teeth.”
Dowlah chuckled. “Grayne, accept your natural role of victim of a pretty little woman’s cunning! She is quite capable of taking care of herself. The Bön magician’s men — more than half of them devil-dancers — regard Thö-pa-ga as the incarnation of a god. She is the god’s handmaiden. His daffadowndilly. His joy. Thanks to her companionship — and whatever else — Thö-pa-ga has recovered his spirits. They share the same tent.”
“To protect her from you?” Tom suggested.
“Oh, I hadn’t a chance. Not a chance. Don’t be jealous. The Böns gave her credit for preserving Thö-pa-ga’s life, so she very soon had the Böns eating out of her hand. Even that treacherous dog Noropa grovels to her. It was he who gave her one of my men’s pistols. She had the impudence to threaten me with it. Tee-hee! Imagine being held up, at my age, by a ninety-pound girl with a Mauser! I don’t believe she knows how to pull the trigger.”
“She can hit an egg with a service repeater at thirty feet five times out of six,” said Tom.
“Oh, can she? Well, the Böns were a bit difficult. You see, I had shot their leaders. I had to do that. It wouldn’t have been safe to get rid of my own men while those two rascals were alive. Without leaders, and with Thö-pa-ga and Elsa Burbage on my side, the Böns should have been easy to manage, but I underestimated her spunk and cunning. I expected she would regard me as a rescuer. Instead, she jockeyed me into the position of having to look to her for protection. She can talk Tibetan, confound her! I can’t. I had to depend on her influence with Thö-pa-ga to keep the Böns from killing me. I had to pipe down, as they say in the Navy. The only tactical error that she made was preserving my life. I can’t imagine why she did it.”
“How did you travel so fast?” Tom asked him.
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br /> “Oh, the Böns had caches of provisions and fresh remounts. Good ponies. We rode like the devil. One brute burst his heart at the top of a hill.”
“That’s how I found you.”
“Lucky blunderer! Grayne, you were riding to certain death.”
“Talk sense,” said Tom. “Your number’s up, Dowlah. You know it.”
“Grayne, if you had half the intuition of a dog, you would know without being told, that I have burned my bridges. No retreat possible. And I’m not the man to be beaten by a situation like this. There’s Noropa, a half-boiled mystic who believes the gods will love him if he swaps horses often enough. By flattering him and telling him a few facts more or less embellished, I contrived to undermine egregious Elsa’s position. She will find she has no secrets, but lots of opposition when she gets to Djaring-dzong. Because of promises that I made to Noropa, he is quite sure to bring or send a rescue-party. According to my calculation, they should be here by noon to-morrow.”
“Does Noropa trust you? Or you him?”
“No. But he has seen my credentials.”
“The forged letter that you stole from the man you murdered?”
“Who says it’s forged? Who’s to prove it, you infatuated ass? It’s from the Tashi Lama himself.”
“Bunk.”
“Hah! I haven’t it on me. It’s well hidden. If you should shoot me, you couldn’t find it. If I had known of its existence a year ago I would have got hold of it in time to avoid all this mess. I have known for more than a year that I would have to bolt sooner or later. Abdul Mirza, damn him, betrayed me a day too soon. But no matter. I got away, through Nepal. That route fooled them.”
“You rewarded Su-li Wing for it, didn’t you!”
“Blackmailing bitch!” Dowlah spat into the fire. “When we reached this place, I did lose a trick, I admit. There was another gang of Bön monks waiting for us, down below there on the trail, with a herd of yaks. Murderous-looking swine. They put most of our loads on the yaks and sent the ponies along unloaded, downhill. Some of them wanted to kill me. Elsa prompted Thö-pa-ga, and he objected. Some one challenged his identity, so they stripped him naked behind a screen of blankets, to look for his birth-marks. He has ’em. They bowed down and worshipped. He’ll be a wonder, under proper control. He had to do a lot of talking to protect me, but he did it. Elsa Burbage asked me to go up to this cave, where I’d be safe while Thö-pa-ga orated. I had no suspicion of what the little sorceress intended. I got some of the Tibetans to carry up a few of my personal loads and light a fire. I made tea, and I opened a bottle of prunes. I declare she had doped them. I remember noticing that the cap wasn’t screwed on the bottle tightly. When I awoke, it was morning. I had been disarmed. There was no one in sight.”