Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  But, since every rule has its exceptions, there were some among the native servants, who remained ostensibly loyal to their masters, who would better have been shot or hanged at the first suggestion of an outbreak. For naturally a man who is trusted wrongly is far more dangerous than one who is held in suspicion. But it never was the slightest use endeavoring to persuade an average English officer that his own man could be anything but loyal. He may be a thief and a liar and a proved-up rogue in every other way; but as for fearing to let him sleep about the house, or fearing to let him cook his master’s food, or fearing to let him carry firearms — well! Perhaps, it is conceit, or maybe just ordinary foolishness. It is not fear!

  So, in a country where the art of poisoning has baffled analysts since analysts have been invented, and where blood-hungry fanatic priests, both Hindu and Mohammedan, were preaching and promising the reward of highest heaven to all who could kill an Englishman or die in the attempt, a native cook whose antecedents were obscured in mystery cooked dinner for a British general, and marched with his column to perform the same service while the general tried to trounce the cook’s friends and relatives!

  But General Baines felt perfectly at ease about his food. He never gave a thought to it, but ate what was brought to him, sitting his horse most likely, and chewing something as he rode among the men, and saw that they filled their bellies properly. He had made up his mind to march on Harumpore, and to take over the five-hundred-strong contingent there. Then he could swoop down on any of a dozen other points, in any one of which a blow would tell.

  He was handicapped by knowing almost too much. He had watched so long, and had suspected for so long that some sort of rebellion was brewing that, now that it had come, his brain was busy with the tail-ends of a hundred scraps of plans. He was so busy wondering what might be happening to all the other men subordinate to him, who would have to be acting on their own initiative, that his own plans lacked something of directness. But there was no lack of decision, and no time was lost. The men marched, and marched their swiftest, in the dust-laden Indian heat. And he marched with them, in among them, and ate what the cook brought him, without a thought but for the best interests of the government he served.

  So they buried General Baines some eighty-and-twenty miles from Harumpore, and shot the cook. And, according to the easy Indian theology, the cook was wafted off to paradise, while General Baines betook himself to hell, or was betaken. But the column, three thousand perspiring Britons strong, continued marching, loaded down with haversacks and ammunition and resolve.

  It was met, long before the jackals had dug down to General Baines’ remains, by the advance-guard of Colonel Kendrick’s column, which was coming out of Harumpore because things were not brisk enough in that place to keep it busy. Kendrick himself was riding with the cavalry detachment that led the way southward.

  “Who’s in command now?” he asked, for they had told him of General Baines’ death by poison.

  “I am,” said a gray-haired officer who rode up at that moment.

  “I’m your senior, sir, by two years,” answered Kendrick.

  “Then you command, sir.”

  “Very good. Enough time’s been wasted. The column can wait here until my main body reaches us. Then we’ll march at once on Jailpore. This idea of leaving Jailpore to its fate is nonsense! The rebels are in strength there, and they have perpetrated an abominable outrage. There we will punish them, or else we’ll all die in the attempt! If we have to raze Jailpore to the ground, and put every man in it to the sword before we find the four Europeans supposed to be left alive there, our duty is none the less obvious! Here comes my column. Tell the men to be ready to march in ten minutes.”

  He turned his horse, to look through the dust at the approaching column, but the man who had been superseded touched him on the sleeve.

  “What’s that? Better have a rest? Tired out, you say? Oh! Form them all up in hollow square, then, and I’ll say a few words to them. There are other ways of reviving a leg-weary column than by letting it lie down.”

  Ten minutes later a dull roar rose up through a steel-shot dust-cloud, and three thousand helmets whirled upward, flashing in the sun. Three thousand weary men had given him his answer! There was no kind of handle to it; no reserve — nothing but generous and unconditional allegiance unto hunger, thirst, pain, weariness, disease or death. It takes a real commander to draw that kind of answer from a tired-out column, but it is a kind of answer, too, that makes commanders! It is not mere talk, on either side. It means that by some sixth sense a strong man and his men have discovered something that is good in each other.

  XI.

  “You’ve made good time, friend Juggut Khan!” said Brown, advancing to meet him where the men and the fakir and the interpreter would not be able to Overhear.

  “Sahib, I killed one horse — the horse you looted for me — and I brought away two from Bholat. One of them carried me more than fifty miles, and then I changed to this one, leaving the other on the road. I have orders for you, sahib.”

  “Hand ’em over then,” said Brown. “Orders first, and talk afterward, when there’s time!”

  The Rajput drew out a sealed envelope, and passed it to him. Brown tore it open, and read the message, scowling at the half-sheet of paper as though it were a death-sentence.

  “Where’s the general?”

  “With his column-twenty or thirty miles away to the northward by now!”

  “And he’s left me, with this handful, in the lurch?”

  “Nay, sahib! As I understood the orders, he has left you with a very honorable mission to fulfil!”

  Brown stared hard at the half-sheet of notepaper again. Reading was not his longest suit by any means, and at that he infinitely preferred to wrestle with printed characters.

  “Have you read it, Juggut Khan?” he asked.

  “Nay, sahib. I can speak English, but not read it.”

  “Then we’re near to being in the same boat, we two!” said Brown with a grin. “I’ll have another try! It looks like a good-by message to me — here’s the word ‘good-by’ written at the end above his signature.”

  “There were other matters, sahib. There was an order. I can not read, but I know what is in the message.”

  “Well?”

  “You, and your twelve—”

  “Nine!” corrected Brown.

  “Three dead?”

  Brown nodded.

  “Your nine, then, sahib, and you and I are to proceed immediately to Jailpore, and to gain an entrance if we can, rescue those whom I concealed there and bring them to Harumpore, or to the northward of Harumpore, wherever we can find the column.”

  “Eleven men are to attempt that?”

  Brown was studying out the letter word by word, and discovering to his amazement that its purport was exactly what Juggut Khan pretended.

  “If there are no more than eleven of us, then yes, eleven! And, sahib, since you seem to hold at least an island here where a man may lie down unmolested, I propose to sleep for an hour or two, before proceeding. I have had no sleep since I left Jailpore.”

  “Nothing of the sort!” said Brown. “If we’re to march on Jailpore, off we go at once! You can sleep on the road, my son! It’s time we paid a visit to that village, I’m thinking. Those treacherous brutes need a lesson. I’d have been down there before, only I wanted to be in full view of the road in case anybody came looking for me from Bholat. We’ll need a wagon for the fakir. You can sleep in it too.”

  “Sleep with a fakir? I? Allah! I am a Rajput, sahib! A sergeant of the Rajput Horse, retired!”

  “I wouldn’t want to sleep with him myself!” admitted Brown. “Come and look at him. You can smell him from here, but the sight of him’s the real thing!”

  The Rajput swaggered up beside Brown, after loosening his horse’s girths and lifting the saddle for a moment.

  “He’s not the only one that needs a drink!” said Brown. “We’re all dry as brick-dust h
ere, except the fakir!”

  “He must wait a while before he drinks. Show me the fakir. Why, Brown sahib, know you what you have there?”

  “The father of all the smells, and all the dirt and all the evil eyes and evil tongues in Asia!” Brown hazarded.

  “More than that, sahib! That is the nameless fakir — him whom they know as HE! Has there been no attempt made to rescue him?”

  “They rescued him once, and murdered three of my men to get him. When they tried again, I put a halter round his neck and he and I arranged a sort of temporary compromise.”

  “And the terms of it?”

  “Oh, he’s supposed to have performed a miracle. He made us unslip the halter, and fall down flat, and he’s supposed to be keeping us by him, by a sort of spell, so’s to give us something extra-special in the line of ghastly deaths at his own convenience. That way, I was able to wait for news from Bholat — see?”

  “You could have captured no more important prisoner than that, sahib, let me tell you! They believe him to be almost a god; so nearly one that the gods themselves obey his orders now and then! It was he, and no other, that told the men of Jailpore that he would make them impervious to bullets. If we have him, sahib, we have the key to Jailpore!”

  “We, have certainly got him,” said Brown. “You can see him, and you can smell him. I’ll order one of the men to prick him with a bayonet, if you want to hear him, too! I wouldn’t feel him, if I were you!”

  “He must come, too, to Jailpore!”

  “Of course he comes!”

  “Then, sahib, let us move away from here to where there is water. There let us rest until sundown, and then march, in the cool of the evening. It will be better so. And of a truth I must sleep, or else drop dead from weariness.”

  “Does that message put you in command?” asked Brown, a trifle truculently.

  “No, sahib! But it orders you to listen to my advice whenever possible.”

  “That means that you are under my orders?”

  “That letter does not say so, sahib!”

  “Very well, are you, or are you not?”

  “We are supposed to act in concert, sahib.”

  “It doesn’t say so in the letter! Yes, or no? Are you going to obey orders, or aren’t you? In other words, are you coming with me, or do you stay behind?”

  “I come with you, sahib!”

  “Then you obey my orders!”

  “But the letter says—”

  “That I’m to take your advice whenever possible! I don’t need advice just at the moment, thanks! I’ve got orders here to march, and I’m off at once! You can please yourself whether you come with me or not, but if you come you come on my terms.”

  “I go with you, sahib.”

  “Under my orders?”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  “All right, Juggut Khan. Here’s my hand on it. Now, we’ll swoop down on that village, and take the fakir with us, with a halter round his neck for the sake of argument. We’ll get two bullock-carts down there, and we’ll stick him in one of them, with Sidiki the interpreter tied to him. Sidiki won’t like it, but he’s only a Beluchi anyway! You get in the other, and get all the sleep you can. You and I’ll take turns sleeping all the way to Jailpore, so’s to be fresh, both of us, and fit for anything by the time that we get there!”

  “I am ready, sahib.”

  “You two men who carried old Stinkijink before, pick him up again!” shouted Brown. “Let him feel the bayonet if he makes a noise, but carry him gently as though you loved him. The rest— ‘Tshun! Form two-deep — on the center — close order, march. Ri’ dress. Eyes front. Ri’ turn. By the left — quick march.”

  The Rajput strode beside Brown, wondering wearily whether it was worth his while to offer him advice or not, and keeping his tired eyes ever moving in the direction of the distant huts.

  “They have rifles, sahib?” he queried.

  “Lots of ’em! Three that they took from my men, among others.”

  “It would not be well to march into a trap at this stage.”

  “As well now as later.” “True, sahib! And my time has not come yet; I know it. Else had I died of weariness, as my horse did.”

  Brown kept rigidly to that point of view in everything he did, from that time on until he reached Jailpore. He believed himself to be engaged on a forlorn hope that was so close to being an absolute impossibility as to be almost the same thing. He had no doubt whatever in his own mind but that his own death, and the death of those with him, was a matter now of hours, or possibly of minutes. His one resolute determination was to die, and make the others die, in a manner befitting their oath of service. He had orders, and he would pass them on according to his interpretation of them. He would obey his orders, and they theirs, and the rest was no business of his or anybody’s.

  They put the fakir in a hut; where Juggut Khan — too weary for foraging — stood guard over him. When a crowd collected round the hut, and Juggut Khan applied the butt of a lighted cigarette to the tender skin between the fakir’s shoulder-blades, the anxious fakir-worshipers were told that all was well. They were to let the white soldiers take two wagons, or three even, if they wanted them. They were to return to their houses at once, and hide, lest the devils who would shortly overwhelm the white men should make mistakes and include them, too, in the whelming. He, the fakir, intended to take the white men for a little journey along the road toward Jailpore, where the devils who would deal with them would have no opportunity to make mistakes. And, since the natives knew that Jailpore was a rebel stronghold, and that ten white men and a native would have no chance to do the slightest damage there, they chose to believe the fakir and to obey him.

  Hindus have as stubborn and unalterable a habit of obeying and believing their priests — when the fancy suits them — as white men of other religions have.

  If the fakir had told them through the doorway of the hut that he intended going with the white men in the direction of Bholat, they would most surely have prevented him. But it suited them very well indeed to have the white men killed elsewhere. It was not likely, but there might be a column on its way from Bholat now; and if that column came, and found the bones of British soldiers as well as a burned-out guard-house, vengeance would be dire and prompt. Between where they were and Jailpore, the white men could not possibly escape. And at Jailpore, if not sooner, they must surely die. So they believed the fakir, and retired to the seclusion of their houses.

  It was wonderful, of course, but no more wonderful than a thousand other happenings in ‘57. All laws of probability and general average were upset that year, when sixty thousand men held down an armed continent. Even stranger things were happening than that two bullock-carts should dawdle through a rebel-seething district in the direction of a plundered, blood-soaked rebel stronghold; stranger even than that on the foremost bullock-cart a lean and louse-infested fakir should be squatting, guarded by British soldiers, who marched on either hand; or that a Rajput, who could trace his birth from a thousand-year-long line of royal chieftains, should be sleeping in the bullock-cart behind, followed closely by a black charger with a British saddle on its back, which ate corn from the tail-board of the wagon; stranger things, even, than that a British sergeant should be marching last of all, with his stern eyes roving a little wildly but his jaw set firm and his tread as rigid and authoritative and abrupt as though he were marching to inspect accouterments.

  In more than a dozen places, about a dozen men were holding a fort against an army. They were using every wile and trick and dodge that ingenuity or inspiration could provide them with, and they were mostly contriving to hold out. But there were none who did anything more daring or more unusual than to march to the attack of a city, with a hostile fakir in the van, and nothing else but their eleven selves and their rifles to assist them. There is a tremendous difference between defending when you have to, and attacking when you might retire.

  XII.

  There were many more caus
es than one that worked together to make possible the entry of Brown and his little force into Jailpore. They were brave men; they were more than brave and they held the ace of trumps, as Brown had stated, in the person of the fakir known as “He.” But luck favored them as well, and but for luck they must have perished half a dozen times.

  They marched the whole of the first afternoon, and met no one. They only overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be the advance-guard of a larger force. The very idiocy of marching eleven strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their favor. Nobody could believe that there were no more than eleven of them. Even the English could not be such lunatics!

  That night, they rested for a while, and then went on again. During the day following they lay in a hollow between some trees and rested, and slept by turns. They suffered agonies from the heat, and not a little from hunger, and once or twice they were hard put to it to stop the Rajput’s charger from neighing when a native pony passed along the nearby road. But night came again, and with it the screen of darkness for their strange, almost defenseless caravan. Once or twice the fakir tried to shout an alarm to passing villagers, but the quick and energetic application of a cleaning-rod by Brown stopped him always in the nick of time, and they came within sight of the battlements of Jailpore without an accident.

  Then, though, their problem became really serious, and it was a series of circumstances altogether out of their control and not connected with them that made their entry possible. The mutineers in Jailpore had learned that Kendrick sahib was coming down on them from the north by forced marches with thirty-five hundred men or more. They were putting the place into a state of siege, and getting ready by all means in their power to oppose him.

  Little attention was being paid to small parties of arrivals from no man knew or cared where. And, in a final effort to find the four who were the lure that was bringing Kendrick down on them, the city was once more being turned upside down and inside out, and men were even being tortured who were thought to know of hiding-places.