by Harold Lamb
And Ethel? Gerald went hot, then cold. Alone, the two men might have made a fight of it. Now that was impossible. If she and her husband were to be saved it must be done another way.
“Let the woman and Kent Sahib go unharmed,” offered Gerald, “and let thy vengeance be upon me. I will remain. I am the friend of the man. Thou art a bazaar-bom thief and a murderer.”
Jehan Khan laughed deep in his throat. “A brave man thou, but a fool. The beauty of the woman holds thee—not I. I have seen it.”
“Then,” cried the Daktar Sahib, “why didst thou summon me here?”
A direct question, that, and useless.
“Perhaps, Sahib, to witness what is to come to pass this day.”
“And that?”
From below the tower came the low voices of men at prayer. Gerald heard the Allah-Akbar chant that is the dawn prayer of the Moslems.
“God is great,” echoed Jehan Khan sententiously and that was all he would say. Gerald went to the door of the guest room.
Ethel came to the door and closed it behind her. She had heard his step.
“My husband is asleep,” she said. “But I could not sleep. What did Jehan Khan say?”
Instinct told her that Gerald was not assured of their safety. He put aside her question by leading her to an embrasure in the tower wall overlooking the gorge. Sunlight flooded in on her, and the rarefied air brought a flush to her cheeks. The never-ceasing wind whipped strands of brown hair about her forehead.
“Oh!” she cried, her eyes resting on the splendor of crimson and blue. Their hands touched and Gerald’s fingers closed on hers. She looked up at him swiftly.
Gerald’s boyish face was alight, its mask of gravity gone. His eyes clung to hers, saw her cheeks whiten, and read the love that Ethel had hidden from him.
He could feel the pulse in her fingers that answered his own. He checked the whispered words that sprang to his lips and looked away. She must have known that he loved her. She did not withdraw her fingers.
Gerald had only to keep silence, do nothing, say nothing to Kent and the man would be slain, without a breath of blame to him. But that could not be.
Kent, unable to save himself, must be saved by Gerald. The Daktar Sahib had already decided that, and how it was to be done. He would have to risk his life in the other’s stead. A life for a life, was the Moslems’ toll.
But the knowledge that Ethel cared for him quickened every fibre in him, and the Tower became a paradise, soon to be lost, but a paradise of the gods.
* * * *
“You see, the beggar could pot you on the return journey from a dozen places. He might even wait until we’re out of the gorge, where he has an outlook over the spot where Ethel’s horse fell lame, you know. Evidently he counts on me as a kind of witness on his behalf that no harm came to you at the Tower. And the business of the money payment as a make-weight was to provide evidence that he didn’t intend to murder you. You see the crafty old chap even had me sign the chit, so that he could collect payment afterward.”
They were seated on a tangle of rocks and thorn bushes, overlooking the pasture where Jehan Khan’s followers were selecting horses for their departure. Gerald was finishing a cigarette with relish, but Kent’s cigar was cold in his fingers.
The bluster had gone from the political agent. Although it was fairly cold in the garden of the Tower, his face and hands were damp with sweat. Gerald’s account of what the Pathan had told had shattered Kent’s optimism.
He knew what it meant when a Pathan took up the pursuit of blood. Jehan Khan was squatted a score of paces away, apparently oblivious of them but actually intent on the fear that had transfigured Kent’s face.
The hand of the political agent stole toward his revolver and then dropped to his side. From the corner of his eye he had seen a rifle muzzle raised from behind a boulder.
There would never be a chance to draw his weapon. Gerald had noticed his action.
“It won’t do,” he pointed out, “on Ethel’s account. You’ll take care of her—eh—after you and she get free?”
It was as much of an appeal as he could bring himself to make to Kent. The man at his side nodded. Ethel was then looking at the ponies. He could hear her singing, under her breath, actually singing. Of course Gerald had said nothing to her about the danger, but it annoyed Kent that she seemed so light-hearted.
Why, even then, the confounded Pathan was plotting his death. He did not see why Gerald had deliberately delayed their departure until late afternoon, almost evening. True, the other had explained that darkness would cover their flight. But—the delay was torment. Neither of them could guess what form Jehan Khan’s vengeance was to take.
The natives, too, had gathered on rising ground overlooking the trail down which they must ride. They were sitting in the rear of the Tower, where a steep grassy slope led down from the pasture to the Panjkora path at the edge of the cliff, the path that disappeared around the bend behind which was the shrine.
“They’re coming to look at me. What is the devil thinking of?” he cried.
“We can’t tell.” Gerald shook his head. “We’ll act first.”
The cigar dropped from Kent’s quivering fingers. He had seen for the first time the eyes of Jehan Khan, stripped of the mask of good-humor, and they were like the blind eyes of the old Pathan he had killed.
And with that glance Kent’s nerve forsook him. There was no outward sign of this, except an involuntary quivering of the lips, and the silence that held him.
But Jehan Khan, who missed nothing, saw Kent’s eyes wander uncontrollably over the hillside and the precipice seeking vainly some way of escape from the hidden menace that would threaten him before nightfall. It was already the hour of sunset.
“Time,” observed Gerald, tossing away the cigarette. Edith was safely mounted on a pony. “Remember, Kent, when I make a move, ride for it. Take Ethel’s rein and be sure that she goes around the turn ahead of you, because there will be no passing each other on the trail and you have the revolver. The sentries on the rocks have come down into the crowd.”
He rose, drawing the other man with him, and moved toward Jehan Khan.
“Once around the bend,” his whisper continued, “you’ll be safe.”
But Kent’s stare was glassy. In his mind he could see the face of the old man who had fallen from the cliff.
He moved mechanically to the horses, and with a sudden, jerky motion, took the rein of a docile pony that Jehan Khan himself brought forward. The Pathan’s followers stood aloof on the hillside, well back from the slope that led down to the trail at the cliff’s edge.
“Looks like a cricket match, eh?” Gerald observed to Ethel who was watching him with strained interest, a frown on her smooth brow. “Or rather, I should say, the crowd at a Derby—”
He had drawn near to Jehan Khan, when Kent, without warning, made his spring into the saddle of the waiting pony. The political agent clapped heels to the flanks of the startled animal. Jerking its head around, the man urged it into an uneven trot down the slope away from them.
Kent had given way to panic.
But Gerald, at the instant the other acted, proceeded to carry out his part of the plan they had agreed upon. A quick thrust of his foot sent the rifle upon which Jehan Khan had been leaning out of reach. Gerald’s left arm passed between the Pathan’s elbow and body.
Jehan Khan was held firmly, his back to Gerald. And the right hand of the Daktar Sahib plucked the revolver from the other’s girdle, thrusting its muzzle under the Pathan’s shoulder-blade over the heart.
“Stand where you are,” Gerald cried in Turki, at the staring natives, “and do not lift a weapon, or Jehan Khan dies.” Over his shoulder he added in English, “Ride for it, Kent. Let Ethel—For God’s sake, Ethel, ride!”
For the first time he perceived that the other had fled without thought of the woman. And that Ethel had not moved. He could hear the hoof-beat of Kent’s horse receding down the slope.
/> “Do not move,” he said grimly to Jehan Khan, and to Ethel, “The way is clear, now. I’ll hold the Pathan hostage for a while, you know. Follow your husband.”
Ethel, however, did not stir. It was not that she was bewildered or afraid. She was an expert horsewoman, and the way, as Gerald said, was open for a space. The Pathans, taken by surprise and temporarily leaderless, would be some time in cutting off the retreat down the cliff trail.
They could not shoot Gerald; he was too close to their chief. If they came nearer, Jehan Khan would be shot. The Pathan, in fact, was strangely quiet as if listening for something he had not as yet heard.
“I’m going to stay right here,” said Ethel suddenly, a little break in her voice.
Gerald groaned under his breath. He had taken pains not to have her know the danger that threatened Kent. It had never entered his thoughts that Kent would leave her, or that she would not obey orders to seek safety with her husband; that she would choose, instead, to share Gerald’s fate.
He had not taken into account the heart of the woman.
And then they both were voiceless. A scream had cut into the silence of the ravine, a scream that came from the bend of the trail around which Kent had vanished alone.
Ethel put her hand to her throat to stifle a cry. They could no longer hear the hoofs of Kent’s pony.
Twisting around, and drawing Jehan Kahn with him, Gerald strained his eyes on a patch of the path that was visible beyond the shrine. The shrine itself and the turn of the trail were hidden from view. Minutes passed, and Kent did not appear on the patch of the cliff path.
The twilight of the hills was deepening rapidly into night. Silence held the watchers by the Tower. Gerald knew at last that Kent would not appear again to them. The man had cried out when he was abreast of the shrine.
Had his horse been startled by something at the shrine? Had Kent’s fear overmastered him? Had the spirit of the dead Pathan confronted horse and rider? Gerald’s thoughts were wildly futile.
“Sahib,” the voice of Jehan Khan came to him, “thou art a brave man, but a fool. The thing that I foretold has come to pass and now there is no danger for thee or the mem-sahib.”
It was not his speech or the gathering darkness that made Gerald release him. Ethel Kent had swayed in the saddle in a faint. Gerald caught her as she was falling, and faced the Pathans with the drawn, revolver. But Jehan Khan continued passive as before.
* * * *
During the hours of early night Gerald rode down to the cantonments, a mute, frightened woman clinging to the comfort of his arms. The Pathans guided him as far as the end of the gorge. He saw no trace of Kent.
When Ethel had been left at her bungalow in the care of the women of the station, Gerald changed to a fresh horse and collected a party of white men to return to the Panjkora. Kent, he learned, had not been seen in Dalgai.
Kent’s body lay, as nearly as Gerald could determine, directly under the Tower and the shrine of Jehan Khan. Beside the body was the pony, crushed by the fall to the rocks.
The night was far spent, and Gerald was swaying on his horse from weariness when they found what they sought on the rocks at the bottom of the gorge by the edge of the mountain torrent.
“How did it happen?” Gerald was asked.
He shook his head, inspecting by the light of a lantern the two forms that bore no sign of a bullet or any injury other than the fall. Kent’s face was set, ghastly. Gerald covered it with a blanket and gazed long at the pony’s head. He bent close to search the curiously pallid eyes of the beast that Jehan Khan had brought for Kent to ride.
He had seen such eyes in horses before. But this one was dead, and there was no proof of the thought that had come to him.
“The Pathan gave Kent this pony to ride,” he said wearily, “this blind pony. It must have trotted over the cliff at the first turn.”
Gerald knew that it had been murder, but when he pointed this out to the authorities at Rawal Pindi, they knew and he knew that there was no way of proving in the white man’s court that it had not been an accident.
In fact, the Pathan tendered his note at Dalgai, and it was paid. The only thing that the white men could do, they did. When the note had been honored they informed Jehan Khan that his Tower would be taken from him.
The Lord of the World laughed, and a year later when, divested of his stronghold, he was wandering through the hills he was ambushed and shot down by his tribal foes.
But by then Gerald was on leave in America, to seek out the home of Ethel Kent who had returned to her own country, and who was waiting for his coming.
THE HOUSE OF THE STRONGEST (1921)
He was Ermecin, the strong man. But that had not always been his name.
When he was a boy, he had raced with the other Buriat youths—and a Mongol horse race is no brief gallop along leveled land. And when he did not win, which was seldom, the Ermecin-to-be took from the winning youth by force the horse that was victor in the race.
In so doing the boy anticipated the practice of shrewd Chinese tao-tai (governors).
Yet when Ermecin lived, two hundred years ago, the sinister authority of the Chinese, the “men of the hat and girdle” had not spread over the upper Mongolian plain where the fertile edge of the Gobi touches the green slopes of the Syansk.
This was the land of the free Buriats. They were hunters and herders, these Tatars, and the stranger was welcome within their tents. The youths wrestled and fought and vied with bow and arrow.
Ermecin was the strongest of the youths. Somewhere among his fathers had been a Chukchee, of the fisherfolk from the North. And in Ermecin appeared the flat, high shoulders, the massive, swinging arms and the small quick eyes of this ancestor.
Among the Buriat men was a batyr, a proved warrior. He had fought in the wars of Muscovy. Once in an inn during a horse festival, he drew his sword on Ermecin. The boy, now nearly at his full growth, twisted the weapon from the warrior and broke the man’s neck with his hands.
The sword Ermecin kept. It was a heavy affair, a foot broad at the head. Its hilt had space for two hands. But the Buriat youth could swing it, whistling about his head, with one hand.
With the bow he was more deadly, for that was his natural weapon. He could keep a bowstring of reindeer gut twanging in the air like a minstrel’s fiddle-string, while he buried a half-dozen shafts in the splintering trunk of a sapling.
After Ermecin had killed the batyr, men looked at him before they spoke. They began to chuckle when he threw visiting wrestlers crashing to the earth in the bouts at the horse festival.
It was noticeable that when Ermecin returned one day afoot to the yurts of the Buriats where the camp was clustered by the clear water of Ubsa Nor, no one laughed at him. Now a Mongol likes to make fun of a comrade, and to walk back, horseless from a hunting venture, is a predicament that invites fun-making.
Ermecin had gone after bear in the Syansk gullies among the peaks to the North. His closest friend had accompanied him.
One of the small savage bears had attacked the other Buriat, frightening the lad’s horse, which threw him to earth. The bear had killed the hunter and made off. When Ermecin reached the spot, he cut the throat of his own horse without hesitation.
This was so the spirit of the horse could accompany the soul of his friend on the long journey through the sky where walking would be weary work. Ermecin hunted out rabbits and an antelope, hanging up their flesh as offerings to the spirits who flocked out of the sky to the spot where the soul of a man went from the body.
Concerning all this Ermecin said nothing. He was little given to words anyway; but the gossips of the yurta invested him with a stain of blood, because the two had gone hunting together and only one returned.
Over this Ermecin brooded. When there came to Ubsa Nor a caravan of Torgot brigands and many horses were stolen, he led the enraged Buriats in the battle that followed.
From it he gained many horses. Those who had seen him, his long mustaches
flying in the wind, his shoulders hunched and his sword hacking through flesh, did not raise a voice against his possession of the bulk of the spoil taken from the slain enemies.
“He is Ermecin,” they said, “the strong man. He is the strongest of us all. Hereafter what he wills to take he will take.”
* * * *
There was but one soul in the land between the Syansk and the Gobi that would not feel fear at the anger of Ermecin. And that was Cherla.
She had sprung from a line of chiefs and at one time a Manchu noble had been among her ancestors. Her back was straight as a horse’s leg, her long hair dark as a horse’s mane. She walked with pride among the Buriats, for she had been told that she was of the white-boned folk—the leaders of men. While Ermecin and the mass of the other Buriat hunters were, she believed, black-boned men, commoners.
Cherla had a smile like the flash of sunlight on a running brook. When her eyes softened, they were dark flowers. When she ran to gather in her father’s cattle, the strength of her young body and its grace enchanted the eyes of men who watched her—and many did.
So was Cherla running, or rather skipping one noon where the beat of the sun was softened by a grove of ash. Ermecin saw her and whirled his horse across her path. When she halted, eyes flashing, he laid one hand beneath her chin.
He could feel the pulse beat in the round throat under his fingers. The girl’s eyes burned into his, unafraid. Twice she struck him in the face but he did not move or speak.
That night Ermecin drove up to her father’s yurt a herd of horses. The horses he gave to Cherla’s father; the girl herself he took from the ring of her frightened sisters.
There had been no consulting of the match-makeress, no ceremony of the gifts of the night. Only one herder of Ermecin’s rode before them and stuck into the right-hand wall of his master’s tent the white-adorned arrow, and placed before the yurt itself the trunk of a young birch as a symbol of the fruit of the marriage.
But Ermecin had sent out couriers that afternoon and the Buriats gathered when be prepared a great feast of slaughtered sheep and horses, of richly brewed kumiss. Long into the night they ate and drank, and the father and brothers of Cherla were among the most drunk.