“I’ll show you, Bill.”
In the angle of the wall was a great pile of boulders and stones which had been collected into this corner when the ground was cleared.
“There was a fort here a long time ago,” said the boy, “with a hidden way down to the water. It was all covered up by these stones, and I don’t think anyone now knows of it except me. I found it out by chance.” He showed Bill Holder a gap in the pile of stones.
“I keep that slab over there across the entrance.”
“Coo!” said Bill, staring down into the mouth of the passage. “It’s as black as your ‘at, isn’t it?”
“It winds about a bit and is pretty well choked up,” the Tokoti boy agreed, “but it’s all right if you know the way.”
“Let’s go down,” said Bill. He, too, gazed about. Here was a real secret. In all the adventure books there were hidden passages that you kept to yourself and escaped by when Mohicans were after you to tie you to trees and push burning slivers of wood, dipped in oil to make them burn better, into your flesh and take your scalp off you in the end. What Bill Holder didn’t know of Fenimore Cooper wasn’t worth knowing.
“I tell you wot, Shuggy.” It had come from Sugar-and-Milk to “Shuggy” now. “There’s an electric torch on the winder-sill of that room and the room’s empty.”
Bill edged from tree to tree in the enclosure until he reached the house. Weren’t there Mohicans everywhere? Wasn’t there a message brought in by a friendly redskin that the Cherokees were on the warpath too? By jingo, Bill had got to watch his step this morning! He felt his scalp loose upon his head. He snatched the torch from the window-sill and ran doubled up back to Shuja-ul-Mulk.
“I’ve pinched it,” he said in a whisper. “Wait a sec!”
He took off his coat and hung it over the wall and rolled up his sleeves.
“You’re not going to fight me, Bill, again, are you?” said the Khan’s son with a smile.
“Not on yer life,” said Bill. “Haven’t we smoked the caloomet o’ peace together in your wigwam? Didn’t I give you a pull at my fire-water? Take the torch, Shuggy, and lead the way.”
The two boys climbed down into the darkness of the passage, Shuja-ul-Mulk silent as a wraith, Bill Holder setting the stones rattling under his heavy boots. Here and there the roof had fallen in, almost blocking the passage, but Shuja-ul-Mulk found his way round each obstacle and lighted Bill behind him.
“Fancy findin’ yer way all by yerself down ’ere! You’re a rum ‘un, Shuggy. I’d ‘a bin scared out of my life,” said Bill.
“Sh!” replied Shuggy. “We’re nearly down”; and beyond the next bend in the path, the daylight showed — a slit of daylight like the morning between your bedroom curtains.
They squeezed through a crack in the rock and came out into a small cavern. In front of them the river tumbled, blindingly bright. Between the river and the cavern the footway passed.
“Coo!” said Bill Holder. “The crack’s in the corner, ain’t it? Yus, no one on the path’d spot there was a way up.”
They climbed back to the garden again and replaced the slab over the entrance, piling the edges round with little stones so that it looked as if it had been flung on to the heap amongst the other boulders. Bill put on his coat and the two boys went back into the open space, and the drum was again between them.
“This is our last lesson, Shuggy.”
The last clauses in the proposed treaty between the Khan of Tokot and the Indian Government were being temporarily drafted in the living-room on the first floor, where the Khan and the Wasir Dadu sat with Carruthers. Wasir Dadu pleaded for a fat subsidy. The Indian Government could not contemplate such an arrangement, said Carruthers. It would protect Tokot against the attacks of Umra Beg from Kafiristan or any other outside chieftain who might cast a covetous eye upon this rich valley. But no subsidies; and above all no interference in the internal affairs of the Tokot State. Carruthers was insistent upon that provision. The more he knew of the undercurrents of greed and jealousy and hatred which threatened to undermine its stability, the more he insisted that the Indian Government must stand aloof from them. Carruthers had his sympathies, which had been greatly quickened during his months of residence. But he had his orders too.
“Tokot must govern Tokot,” he said firmly. “We offer protection for your borders, and we look to you in return for the gradual extinction of those practices, such as selling your subjects into slavery, which are repugnant to the English idea.”
“It shall all be engraved upon copper?” said the Khan nervously, for the hundredth time.
“It shall all be engraved upon copper,” Carruthers returned, “even though the price of the copper means my extermination.”
Thus he spoke in the upper room whilst Bill Holder in the garden desolately explained that the last touches in the fine art of beating a drum must be acquired by Sugar-and-Milk without the help of a preceptor.
“But I am better than I was?” Sugar-and-Milk eagerly enquired.
“Shuggy, you do the greatest credit to your instructor,” said Bill. He continued on a note of remorse: “I think as I ought to tell you, Shuggy — us bein’ friends of long standin’ — that I lied to you. It wasn’t the Prime Minister who giv’ me that there drum, and it wasn’t giv’ to me in Westminister Abbey neither.”
“No?” said Shuggy. “But, Bill, he ought to have.” And he added sympathetically, “I expect he didn’t know you as I do.”
“Well, that may be,” said Bill. “There’s a lot of dirty dogs hangin’ round Prime Ministers and wantin’ a bit. Anyway, it was a great hulkin’ bandmaster who giv’ me that drum, and he didn’t use them noble words as I spoke to you.”
“No, Bill?”
“No. He just said, contemptuous like, ‘ ’Ere’s yer drum, yer lousy little bastard, and if yer lets it get wet’ ” — Bill nodded solemnly, “that’s when he mentioned that he’d wallop the trousers off o’ me.”
“But he didn’t, Bill,” urged Sugar-and-Milk, aghast lest such an ignominy should have befallen his friend.
“No,” cried Bill, throwing out his chest. “I should think ’e jolly well” — he suddenly looked round in real alarm and dropped his voice— “no, ’e didn’t.”
Sugar-and-Milk, greatly relieved, took up the drum-sticks. “Bill,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. We won’t have a lesson to-day.”
Bill said, “Won’t we?”
“No. We’ll fix up a private signal between you and me.”
“On the drum?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Coo!” said Bill. “So if the Mohicans are after you with their scalpin’-knives in their ‘ands, you beat yer drum and I rush to the rescue.”
“Yes, and if you’re tied to a tree with bits of burning wood — —”
“Steeped in oil,” interrupted Bill, who knew his Fenimore Cooper.
“Yes, steeped in oil, blazing in your flesh, I’ll come to you.”
There were many dangers waiting round the corner for Sugar-and-Milk, in which neither Mohicans nor Cherokees had any hand, but the two boys were away in the distant lands of imagined adventure. There were forests here about them more vast than the forests of Fenimore Cooper’s America; there were enemies as silent in their movements as braves and more treacherous and more bloodthirsty. But in their cloaks of brown hair-cloth and their turbans, they were much less picturesque, and less considered.
“Yes,” said Bill. “Let’s see!”
He took the drum-sticks from Shuja-ul-Mulk.
“We’ll begin with two distinct taps, so!”
“Yes, and we’ll follow that with a real roll,” said Shuggy.
He took the drum-sticks away from Bill and executed the roll with an efficiency which no fairy drummer had ever equalled.
“That’s fine!” cried Bill, and now he snatched the drum-sticks from Shuja-ul-Mulk. “Then we’ll do a couple o’ short, sharp taps, like this. See?”
“And we’l
l follow it with two more just the same,” said Shuja-ul-Mulk, and in his turn he took possession of the drum-sticks and struck twice and sharply. “And that’ll be all.”
“Yus,” said Bill Holder, “but” — and his excitement fell away into melancholy— “there’s a catch in it. Gor’ blimey, if there isn’t a catch in everything!”
“What’s the catch, Bill?” Shuggy asked anxiously.
“Why, Shuggy, you ain’t got a drum.”
Shuggy was silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward:
“But I know where there is a drum.”
“Ah, but can you get hold on it?”
Said Shuggy, with the effort of a man making a daring promise, “Bill, I can.”
“Well, then,” said Bill, “let’s see that we’ve got it orl right. You go first.”
Carruthers had come to the end of his conferences and discussions. He had said all that he had got to say, promised all that he had to promise, and had received the assurances which he had any right to expect. A permanent agency would be established, the Principality, such as it was, would be maintained by the forces of India against external aggression. Meanwhile Tokot must govern Tokot. He said good-bye to the Khan and descended the stairs and came round the house at the moment when Bill Holder wanted to make sure that his private signal with his friend would be as unmistakable to either of them as the reveillé of a trumpet.
“You go first, Shuggy,” said Bill, and Shuggy tapped out his two sharp notes, set the long roll of sound reverberating over the garden and finished up with a neat double rat-tat like the knocks of an impatient postman upon a door without a letter-box.
“Oke,” said Bill the drummer-boy.
Carruthers five minutes before had just said good-bye, with many flourishes and excellent phrases, to the Khan Sher Afzul-ul-Mulk and, hearing the roll of the drum in the garden, bethought him that he had a word to say to the Khan’s son. He came round the corner of the house just in time to hear the boy tap out the signal. And he stood unnoticed in the background whilst Bill Holder took the drum-sticks in his turn and beat out the same . . . what was it, Carruthers carelessly wondered? A call? A summons? Something of the kind. Carruthers smiled as he watched the tremendous earnestness and concentration with which the two boys repeated this — what? — this message? — yes, this message, to make sure that they had got it exactly right. The picture remained pleasantly in his mind, and with it an echo of the call or summons or message, whichever it was. So that when, in the course of a little time, he heard it again, he knew it for what it was, and had good reason to thank his stars that he had wandered round the house instead of going back to his room and writing up his report to the Governor of the North-West Province.
“That’s all, then,” said Bill, standing up.
“Shakeapaw,” said Sugar-and-Milk.
Carruthers stepped forward. Bill duly saluted and moved off to the house with the drum. Sugar-and-Milk bowed gravely.
“As a performer on the drum,” said Carruthers, “you have greatly improved since I heard you beating one on the day of our arrival at Tokot.”
“Your Excellency heard me on the day of your arrival?” the Khan’s son asked.
His face had become a mask, but not a mask stamped with a particular emotion. It was vacant of all expression. Even the boy’s eyes were as the eyes of the dead.
“On the afternoon of the day we arrived,” Carruthers specified.
Shuja-ul-Mulk said nothing in reply, and no hint of comprehension altered his face or gleamed in his eyes.
“I’ll put it in another way,” said Carruthers. “The fairy drummer on the top of the tower has improved exactly to the same degree.”
Shuja-ul-Mulk bowed again.
“Your Excellency knows that foolish beliefs can be wisely used,” he said.
“If all the fools believe in them,” said Carruthers.
Shuja-ul-Mulk shook his head gently.
“No one of our people dares look towards the tower when the drum is beaten.”
“Are you sure?” asked Carruthers.
The boy reflected with a frowning face.
“Not even the Wasir Dadu?” Carruthers suggested.
And now there came into the boy’s impassive face a look of real trouble, and anxiety stared out from his eyes.
“I thank Your Excellency for the warning,” he said.
But the warning came too late.
For a month after the mission had departed, the boy climbed on a dark night over the wall into the garden of the Mission House, which was now shut up in the charge of a caretaker. He removed the slab from the mouth of the water-way, being careful to make no noise. He crept down to the cavern at the river’s edge. The sound of a voice preaching reached his ears. Cautiously he crept out of the cavern and drew his cloak down over his face. He drew nearer to the voice preaching. He could hear some words now. A few steps more and he could make out a great throng of people squatting upon the ground and one man standing up, his figure outlined against the gleam of the river. The boy crept behind a boulder and heard the Mullah’s fiery voice calling aloud for murder and rebellion.
“The sceptre falls from a weak hand. Let a strong one grasp it as it falls. Nizam shall be your king. He is strong, he is young. Umra Beg of Kafiristan will quail before him. And let no one cry that whilst the Yudeni drum beats on the roof of the tower, Sher Afzul and Sher Afzul’s son are protected by God. Who is it beats the drum on the roof of the tower but the Khan’s son? Let the Wasir Dadu bear witness!”
And above the voice of the preacher, a rough cry like the bellow of an animal broke from the mouth of Dadu:
“It is so. I dared to look.”
“Shall we be made fools of by a boy?” the Mullah thundered. “A sacrilegious boy who laughs at us in his sleeve — at us men? And who taught him to laugh at us? The English tutors at Ajmere.”
Murmurs of agreement rose into growls of anger. Excitement grew. The Mullah raved and cursed and promised, whipping up his audience to a frenzy. There would be plunder for everyone when Nizam was king. He would lead his army against Umra Beg and possess his lands and sell his men and his women into slavery.
“But if Sher Afzul’s son reigns in Tokot, what then? You must bide in your borders, spiritless and poor. For he will have fixed the shackles of the English on your legs.”
Shuja-ul-Mulk crept back undetected to his cavern. He would have had short shrift, as he knew very well, had he been seen. He hurried back to the Fort. His father was away with his hawks and his dogs at one of the upper villages, and Nizam his brother was with him. Shuja-ul-Mulk could do nothing that night. He could do nothing the next day but send a messenger at his utmost speed praying his father to return. But the messenger got no farther than half-way when he received news which sent him flying back. Towards evening Wafadar carried the news to Shuja-ul-Mulk. Sher Afzul had been shot deliberately by one of Nizam’s servants.
“It is the signal,” said Wafadar. “The valley is up. This night your Highness must go.”
The boy sought out his mother in the women’s quarters. When the morning broke and the men of Tokot surged against the gates of the Fort with old matchlocks and new rifles, Shuja-ul-Mulk with his mother and Wafadar had disappeared. Nizam ruled over Tokot.
5
THE GOVERNMENT OF India, however, thought it unnecessary to communicate these facts to Bill Holder the drummer-boy. Indeed, they were not sufficiently unusual to cause a stir anywhere. It was said that the shot which killed Sher Afzul was fired by accident, and undoubtedly people have been shot by accident at partridge-shoots in England. The policy of the Government was not to be deflected on grounds as debatable and inconclusive as these. It was intended to make Tokot a centre of influence in the little countries of the Hindu Khush.
“They live in fear, every one of them,” said Sir Arthur Brooke, “and fear makes men cruel. I want neither lion nor lamb beyond the passes, but good neighbours. We shall see in a little while how Nizam is disposed.
Let us not hurry!”
He spoke thus to Captain Carruthers, and he added:
“It is the intention of the Government, which is well pleased with your work, Captain Carruthers, that you should be the first Resident Agent in Tokot.”
Captain Carruthers took the news home to his wife, who was thrilled by it.
“We shall be on our own,” she said.
She was too clever to open up a discussion as to whether or no the Resident’s wife would be a suitable member of the Resident’s staff. Other wives had lived with their husbands in outlandish corners of the world. She meant to be one of those wives, and the surest way to become one was to assume from the beginning that she was one. Carruthers shifted about in his chair uneasily.
“After a little time, no doubt, Marjorie . . . when one saw how things were working out. . . . Let us not hurry,” he said, catching at a phrase of the Governor.
“No doubt we shall have reasonable notice,” said Marjorie.
This conversation took place at the close of the year, when the Middlesex Regiment was making some route-marches. On the afternoon of one of these days it tramped back from Ali Musjid at the foot of the Khyber Pass, and with its band playing and its drums beating marched at attention through the Peshawur bazaar. It passed through an oblong open space with shops and tall houses at the side and booths in the middle. But for the clear passage-way the space was thronged with people, whilst others squatted in the dust — a potter with his clay, a carpenter with a primitive lathe. At the head of the battalion marched the four drummers, with Bill Holder on the right. The music which was being played came to its end, and then for a little while the battalion marched to a single tap of a drum — Bill Holder’s drum. The drum-major, Bill noticed, was twirling his staff a few paces in front of the drums, and flung it high up into the air. He was exactly level with a tiny bridge which crossed a little runnel of rushing water. As he caught it, Bill Holder heard upon his right hand, from somewhere in the crowd, two measured taps on a drum, then a long roll, then two sharp rat-tats, like an impatient postman’s knocking on a closed door. Bill’s heart gave a great jump. It was perhaps the first time that Bill was made aware that he had a heart. Shuggy was here — in Peshawur! And in some sort of trouble. Bill couldn’t look. The battalion was marching at attention, eyes to the front. But as he raised his drumstick in marking the time, he gave it a little flick to the right. Shuggy would know that he had heard the signal and recognised it.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 689