by Talbot Mundy
The bodies slid and rolled down the rounded roof, and fell with a thud against the battlements, or else went rolling down the circular causeway that led to the street below.
Brown seemed to be garnering ideas from watching them. He gazed down at the noisy tumult of the city, watching for a while the efforts of an ill-directed crowd to put out a fire that blazed in a distant quarter of the bazaar.
There seemed to him something strangely preconcerted about much of the hurrying to and fro below him. It struck him as being far too orderly to be the mere boiling of a loot-crazed mob.
His prisoners gave the secret to him. They were leaning against the parapet on the other side — the side closest to the city-wall, and farthest from the top of the causeway — and they were chattering together excitedly in undertones. Brown walked round to where they stood, and stared where they stared. Just as they had done, he recognized what lay below him.
It was faintly outlined in the blackness, picked out here and there by lanterns, and still too far away for most civilians to name it until the sun rose and showed its detail. But Brown, the soldier, knew on the instant, and so did his men.
Suddenly and unexpectedly and sweetly, like a voice in the night that spoke of hope and strength and the rebirth of order out of chaos, a bugle gave tongue from where the lanterns swung in straight-kept lines.
“Oh, Juggut Khan! Oh, Juggut Khan!”
Bill Brown’s voice boomed through the opening in the dome, and spread down the walls of the powder-magazine as though in the inside of a speaking-trumpet.
“Brown sahib?”
“The army has got here from the north! It has come down here from Harumpore! It’s outside the walls now, lying on its arms, and evidently waiting to attack at daylight!”
“I, too, have news, Brown sahib! All four are living! All four lie here on the floor of the magazine, and they recover rapidly. They are all but strong enough to stand.”
“Good! Then come up here, Juggut Khan!”
That winding pathway up the inside of the dome took longer to negotiate than an ordinary stairway would have done, but presently the Rajput leaned against the parapet and panted beside Brown.
“D’you see them? There they are! Now, look on this side! D’you see the preparations going on? D’you realize what the next thing’s going to be? They’ll come for powder for the guns, so’s to have it all ready for the gun-crews when the fun begins at dawn! Listen! Here they are already!”
A thundering had started on the great teak door below — a thundering that echoed through the dome like the reverberations of an earthquake. It was punctuated by the screams of women. The prisoners changed their attitude, and eyed Brown and the Rajput with an air of truculence again.
“They’ll be up this causeway in a minute, sahib! Listen. There! They’ve seen the dead bodies that you tossed over. Better it had been to keep them up here for a while.”
“Never mind! We can hold this causeway until morning! Men! Take close order. Line up at the causeway-entrance. Kneel. Prepare for volley-firing. Now, let ’em come!”
“I am for making an immediate escape, sahib!”
“Go ahead!” said Brown, almost dreamily.
He seemed to be thinking hard on some other subject as he spoke.
“Sahib, one of the women there — she who is maid to the other two — asked me where Bill Brown might be! She swore to me that she had recognized his voice when the trapdoor opened up above her. Are you not Bill Brown?”
“Yes, I’m William Brown!”
“Her name, she says, is Emmett!”
“You don’t surprise me, Juggut Khan! I thought I had recognized her voice. It seemed strangely familiar. Well — here come the rebels up the causeway. See? They’re at the bottom now with lanterns! Ready, men!”
There came the answering click of breech-bolts, and a little rustling as each man eased his position, and laid his elbow on his knee.
“Can you find your way out through the way we came, Juggut Khan?”
“Of course I can!”
“Are all the women on the floor?”
“Three women and the child.”
“Can you close the trap-door again?”
“Surely! It is only opening it that is difficult.”
“Then close it before you go. I’ve got a reason! Send one of my men up here with a lantern — one of those that are burning in the magazine. I want to signal.”
“Very well, sahib!”
“Then take the women, with four of my men to help them walk, and get out as quickly as you can by the way we all came in. Wait for the rest of my men when you reach the opening in the outer wall, and when they reach you allot two men to carry each woman, and run — the whole lot of you — for the army over yonder. One of the women will object. She will want to see me first. Use force, if necessary!”
“Are you, then, not coming, sahib?”
“I have another plan. Here they come! Hurry now, be off with the women! Volley-firing — ready — present!”
Pattering footsteps sounded on the causeway, and a little crowd of nearly doubled figures came up it at a run.
“Fire!”
The volley took the rebels absolutely by surprise, and no man could miss his mark at that short range. Five of the rebels fell back headlong, and the rest, who followed up the causeway, turned on their heels and ran.
“‘Bout turn!” Brown shouted suddenly. “Use the steel, men! Use the steel!”
His own sword was flashing, and lunging as he spoke, and he had already checked a sudden rush by the prisoners.
They had thought the moment favorable for joining in the scrimmage from the rear.
“All right! That’ll do them! I’ll attend to ’em now!”
A man came running up with the lantern Brown had asked for, and Brown took it and began waving it above his head.
“They must have heard that volley!” he muttered to himself. “Ah! There’s the answer!”
A red light began to dance over in the British camp, moving up and down and sidewise in sudden little jerks. Brown read the jerks, as he could never have read writing, and a moment later he answered them.
“Now, down below, the lot of you! Give me your rifle, you. I’ll need it.”
“Not coming, sir.”
“Not yet. There’s something else yet, and I can do it best. Besides, some one has got to guard the causeway still. There might be a rush again at any minute. Listen now. Obey Juggut Khan implicitly as soon as you get down. His orders are my orders. Understand? Very well, then. And you without a weapon, your job is to shut the door that you leave the magazine by tight from the outside — d’you understand me? Call up when you’re all through the door, and then shut it tight!”
“But, how’ll you get out, sir?”
“That’s my business. One minute, though. Here they come again. Get ready to fire another volley!”
The mutineers made another and a more determined rush up the causeway, coming up it more than twenty strong, and at the double. Brown let one volley loose in the midst of them, then led his men at the charge down on them and drove them over the edge of the causeway by dint of sheer impact and cold steel. Not one of them reached the ground alive, and in the darkness it must have been impossible for the mutineers below to divine how many were the granary’s defenders.
“That’ll keep ’em quiet for a while, I’ll wager! Now, quick, you men! Get down below, and follow Juggut Khan, and don’t forget to shut the door tight on you. These prisoners here are going to follow you — they may as well go down with you for that matter. No! that won’t do. They could open the door below, couldn’t they? They’ll have to stay up here. Got any rope? Then bind them, somebody. Bind their hands and feet. Now, off with you!”
Brown spent the next few minutes signaling with the lantern, and reading answering flashes that zig-zagged in the velvet blackness of the British lines. Then, as a voice boomed up through the granary, “All’s well, sir! I’m just about to shut
the door!” he fixed his eyes on the fakir, and laughed at him.
“You and I are going to turn in our accounts of how we’ve worked out this ‘Hookum hai’ business, my friend!” he told him. “You’ve given orders, and I’ve obeyed orders! We’ve both accounted for a death or two, and we’ve both accepted responsibility. We’re going to know in less than five minutes from now which of us two was justified. There’s one thing I know, though, without asking. There’s one person, and she a woman, who’ll weep for me. Will anybody weep for you, I wonder?”
A lantern waved wildly from the British camp, and Brown seized his own lantern and signaled an answer.
“See that? That’s to say, you glassy-eyed horror you, that our mutual friend Juggut Khan has been seen emerging like a rat from a hole in the wall. I’ll give him and his party one more minute to get clear. Then there’s going to be a holocaust, my friend!”
He cocked his rifle, and examined the breech-bolt and the foresight carefully. The fakir shuddered, evidently thinking that the charge was intended for himself.
“No! It won’t be that way. I know a better! I’m taking a leaf from your book and doing harm by wholesale!”
Brown leaned down into the opening of the dome, and brought the rifle to his shoulder. There was a chorus of yells from the prisoners, and a noise like a wounded horse’s scream from the fakir. The rest were bound, but the fakir rose and writhed toward him on his heels, with his sound arm stretched up in an attitude of despair beside the withered one.
A chorus of bugles burst out from the British camp, and a volley ripped through the blackness.
“All right! Here goes!” said Brown. And he aimed down into the shadowy powder-magazine, and pulled the trigger.
Ten minutes later, an army three thousand and five hundred strong marched in through the gap made in the outer wall by a granary that had spread itself through — and not over — what was in its way. There were seventeen tons of powder that responded to the invitation of Brown’s bullet.
XIV.
Explosions are among the few things — or the many things, whichever way you like to look at it! — that science can not undertake to harness or account for. When a gun blows up, or a powder-magazine, the shock kills whom it kills, as when a shell bursts in a dense-packed firing-line. You can not kill any man before his time comes, even if a thousand tons of solid masonry combine with you to whelm him, and go hurtling through the air with him to absolutely obvious destruction.
The fakir’s time had come, and the prisoners’ time had come. But Sergeant William Brown’s had not.
They found him, blackened by powder, and with every stitch of clothing blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond. There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton of broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof that he had come belched out of a holocaust. The men who came on him had given their officer the slip, and were bent on a private looting-expedition of their own. But by the time that they had dragged him from the water, and he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe himself, their thoughts of plunder had departed from them. Brown had a way of quite monopolizing people’s thoughts!
There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all through the morning and the afternoon that followed. He held them together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered and compelled them through the hell-tumult of the ghastliest thing there is beneath the dome of heaven — house-to-house fighting in an Eastern city. And at the end of it, when the bugles blew at last “Cease fire,” and many of the men were marched away by companies to put out the conflagrations that were blazing here and there, he led them outside the city-wall, stood them at ease in their own line and saluted their commanding-officer.
“Twenty men of yours, sir. Present and correct.”
“Which twenty?”
“Of Mr. Blair’s half-company.”
“Where’s Mr. Blair?”
“Dunno, sir!”
“Since when have you had charge of them?”
“Since they broke into the city yesterday, sir.”
“And you haven’t lost a man?”
“Had lots of luck, sir!”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Sergeant Brown, sir.”
“Of the Rifles?”
“Of the Rifles, sir.”
“Were you the man who signaled to us from the magazine and blew it up and made the breach in the wall for us to enter by?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you alive, or dead? Man or ghost?”
“I’m pretty much alive, sir, thank you!”
“D’you realize that you made the taking of Jailpore possible? That but for you we’d have been trying still to storm the walls without artillery?”
“I had the chance, sir, and I only did what any other man would ha’ done under like circumstances.”
“Go and tell that to the Horse Marines — or, rather, tell it to Colonel Kendrick! Go and report to him at once. Possibly he’ll see it through your eyes!”
So Brown marched off to report himself, and he found Colonel Kendrick nursing a badly wounded arm before a torn and mud-stained tent.
“Who are you?” said the colonel, as Brown saluted him.
“I’m Sergeant Brown, sir.”
“Not Bill Brown of the Rifles?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You lie! He was blown up on the roof of the powder-magazine! I suppose every man who’s gone mad from the heat will be saying that he’s Brown!”
“I’m Brown, sir! I had written orders from General Baines to enter Jailpore and rescue three women and a child.”
“Where are your orders?”
“Lost ’em, sir, in the explosion.”
“For a madman, you’re a circumstantial liar! What happened to the women?”
The colonel sat back, and smothered an exclamation of agony as the nerves in his injured arm tortured him afresh. He had asked a question which should settle once and for all this man’s pretentions, and he waited for the answer with an air of certainty. It was on his lips to call the guard to take the lunatic away.
“Juggut Khan, the Rajput, took them, with nine of my men, and brought them in to your camp last night, sir. I naturally haven’t seen them since.”
“Will the women know you?”
“One of them will, sir.”
“Which one?”
“Jane Emmett, sir.”
“Well, we’ll see!”
The colonel called an orderly, and sent the orderly running for Jane Emmett. A minute later two strong arms were thrown round Bill Brown from behind, and he was all but carried off his feet.
“Oh, Bill — Bill — Bill! I knew you’d be all right! Turn round, Bill! Look at me!”
She was clinging to him in such a manner that he could not turn, but he managed to pry her hands loose, and to draw her round in front of him.
“I knew, Bill! I felt sure you’d come! And I recognized your voice the minute that the trapdoor opened and I heard it! I did, Bill! I knew you in a minute! I didn’t worry then! I knew you wouldn’t come and talk to me as long as there was any duty to be done. I just waited! They said you were killed in the explosion, but I knew you weren’t! I knew it! I did! I knew it!”
“Face me, please!” said Colonel Kendrick. “Now, Jane Emmett, is that man Sergeant William Brown, of the Rifles?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is he the man who entered Jailpore with nine men and a Rajput, and came to your assistance?”
“Yes, sir! He’s the same man who spoke in the powder-magazine;”
“Do you confirm that?” he asked Brown.
“Under favor, sir, my men must be somewhere, if they’re not all killed. They’ll recognize me. And there’s the other lot I led all last night and all today. They’ll tell you where they found me!”
“Never mind! I’ve decided I believe you! D’you realize that you’re something of a marvel?”
“No, sir — except that I’ve had marvelous luck!”
“Well, I shall take great pleasure in mentioning your name in despatches. It will go direct, at first hand, to Her Majesty the Queen! There are few men, let me tell you, Sergeant Brown, who would dare what you dared in the first place. But, more than that, there are even fewer men who would leave a sweetheart in some one else’s care while they blew up a powder-magazine with themselves on top of it, in order to make a breach for the army to come in by! My right hand’s out of action unfortunately — you’ll have to shake my left!”
The colonel rose, held his uninjured hand out and Brown shook it, since he was ordered to.
“I consider it an honor and a privilege to have shaken hands with you, Sergeant Brown!” said Colonel Kendrick.
“Thank you, sir!” said Brown, taking one step back, and then saluting. “May I join my regiment, sir?”
He joined his regiment, when he had helped to sort out the bleeding remnants of it from among the by-ways and back alleys of Jailpore. And the chaplain married him and Jane Emmett out of hand. He sent her off at once with her former mistress to the coast, and marched off with his regiment to Delphi. And at Delphi his name was once more mentioned in despatches.
When the Mutiny was over, and the country had settled down again to peace and reincarnation of a nation had begun, Brown found himself hoisted to a civil appointment that was greater and more highly paid than anything his modest soul had ever dreamed of.
He never understood the reason for it, although he did his fighting-best consistently to fill the job; and he never understood why Queen Victoria should have taken the trouble to write a letter to him in which she thanked him personally, nor why they should have singled out for praise and special notice a fellow who had merely done his duty.
Perhaps that was the reason why he was such a conspicuous success in civil life. They still talk of how Bill Brown, with Jane his wife and Juggut Khan the Rajput to advise him, was Resident Political Adviser to a Maharajah, and of how the Maharajah loathed him, and looked sidewise at him — but obeyed. That, though, is not a war-story. It is a story of the saving of a war, and shall go on record, some day, beneath a title of its own.