He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its walls. So he began to parley.
What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys. Afzul Singh guessed what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with Mrs. Chantry. He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.
"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."
Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and, on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.
Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed, provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game which was going his own way.
So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been unable to keep under control.
Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and announcing that he was for the present the British representative in Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.
The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and smiled with child-like craftiness. He admired the daring which had flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of his kind.
Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar. Mir Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of the Fort were shut and barred behind it. Afzul Singh had been already entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.
When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were the two senior native officers.
"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot in the doorway.
"The news?" enquired Terrington.
"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.
Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension. He had forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's tragedy.
"Oh, certainly," he said.
The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford partly as an office, partly as a store. Bales and boxes still filled two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed from the Residency with ostentation. One dark window in the further wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.
He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner. Dore, nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect and impassive beside the table. Clones came in to requisition some stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.
"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said Terrington.
The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.
She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have watched the polo that afternoon. Her face looked listless and white and faded above it like a broken flower. Her eyes sought Terrington's in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.
"May I come in?" she said.
"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her; but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled fragments of her own lost little home. Walcot sat down on a box beside her. A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm. He had been for years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had not felt at her husband's death. She hid the little broken body in the hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with sobs. It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.
Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen. He made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might have been the most ordinary in the world.
"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans. Some of us may not come through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled with my mistakes. So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm not with you at the finish. We leave Sar to-night."
Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.
"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.
"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the Palári upon Rashát," said Terrington quietly.
"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've been at for the last month were your idea."
"They were," said Terrington.
"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.
"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position. I've only so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be defended."
"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since! What's been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"
"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your intentions from the enemy."
"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.
"Yes," said Terrington. "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from Sampur."
"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.
Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.
"I have another point of view," he said.
"And what's that?" snapped the other.
"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.
Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at his carping note.
"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish eagerness for a stand-up fight.
"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be a near thing. I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would mean a horrible waste of life. There are only a few hundred of us to be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who came to save us. These little sieges are often very costly things."
"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones suggested.
"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."
"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to carry them out."
"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being told what its intentions were. Consequently one rather seems to be here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly making them all wrong. But that's their fault for not having sent a better man."
"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered," Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which even the natives won't cross at this time of year."
"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.
Walcot's face curdled with anger.
"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he exclaimed.
"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.
Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes. Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged; the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and then the thrill of the relief—she took the relief for granted—the sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a British army. And the coming home after such an experience; the woman of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from the Queen.
All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree. She looked at him with despairing hate. She thought of the reckless sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated him the more. She felt sure that she could never live through the snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories. The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.
And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly had given everything into his hand!
What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle, and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir." Now they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.
In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more forcible than soldierly. He was seething with wrath at Terrington's treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.
"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable to shake Terrington's resolve.
"By the Palári," said the other.
"The Palári!" cried Walcot derisively. "Why, it's the worst pass on this side of the Pamir. May I ask why you've chosen it?"
"Have you been through the Palári or Darai?" Terrington enquired.
"No."
"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington quietly. "The Palári is the only one which we've a chance of reaching without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at Rashát, is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."
His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then Walcot blurted out:
"Is this a council of war?"
"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."
Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his shoulders.
"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.
Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably attentive, throughout the discussion.
"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain nodded.
Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.
He handed the paper to Walcot.
"Will you sign it?" he said.
The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such treatment:
"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said, taking up the pen.
Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying man. Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely. He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing in his last moments but the safety of the force.
"You'll have to watch those Bakót chaps," he murmured, "there's no fight in 'em." And again with more difficulty. "Those beggars 'll cut you off at the Sorágh Gul; get round by the Bewal road. You'll have to smash 'em there." His mind was evidently away with the retreating troops. His grip tightened on Terrington's hand. "If only I could go along with you, old man. Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first hurdle."
He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last beats of his heart.
Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room. The sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power of feeling.
In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning over the litter of the Residency rooms.
Terrington had left the porterage of the reserve ammunition to Walcot's arrangement, and had been expecting his report for half an hour. Walcot had, however, considered the packing of Mrs. Chantry's boxes of more importance.
The expression of Terrington's opinion on his preference was a good deal tempered by Mrs. Chantry's presence; but even so was caustic enough to burn itself into Walcot's memory.
As he left the hall without a word, Rose Chantry lifted an Afghan poshteen from the heap beside her.
"Did you send me this?" she asked.
It was lined with astrachan, and exquisitely embroidered, and was the most valuable of Terrington's few possessions.
"Yes," he said, "it was the only warm thing I could get for you. You will want everything you can wear, and you can put that on over a good deal. There are some boots to come."
She did not know that he had sent her the thing of which he had most need himself, and his giving had about it no air of gallantry; but the proof that he had thought of her at a moment when he had to think of everything touched her far more than had Walcot's voluble commiseration.
She held out her hand to him and tried to speak, but her throat closed and her lips trembled.
He took her hand in both of his.
"Poor, poor thing!" he said.
Gholam Muhammed entered with the long lamb-lined boots at that moment and laid them with a salaam in front of her.
They had been made for Terrington and were long enough to reach to a man's knee, and Rose, whose every breath at the moment compromised with a sob, thrust out her pretty foot beside them with unconscious coquetry.
"Oh, that's all right," said Terrington, smiling; "they'll go over the others. You'll not find them a bit too big."
He lifted one, with its tassels and showy crimson calf, and, taking her wrist as if she had been a child, thrust her hand down through the woolly lining which almost filled the top.
The loose sleeve slid back to her elbow against the leather edge, and as she looked into his face with a surprised compliance, something in the softness of the curling silken warmth against her skin touched her suddenly beyond her power of control. She snatched her arm away from him, and, flinging herself upon the heap of curtains and cushions, burst into tears.
Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her. He knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and the instinct helped him with a woman's tears. He stood watching her sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the forcing of the Sorágh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to Rashát, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to face an attack from three sides at once. He tried to compel his memory to yield some details of the position which he might turn to account, for his own field-sketches only supplied features which would be useful to the enemy.
The sinking of Rose Chantry's sobs brought his mind back to the dim hall. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.
"What was it, child?" he said.
She raised her head from the crimson silk, leaning towards him against his hand, and mopping her eyes with the ghost of a handkerchief.
"It was the fur," she sobbed; "it felt so soft."
The explanation explained nothing to Terrington—a woman never seemed so unreasonable to him as when she gave her reasons—but its incomprehensibility absolved him from attempted consolation.
"Well," he smiled, "you mustn't cry again till you're across the border. Hukm hai!"
She looked up at him, leaning still against his hand.
"I'm afraid of your orders," she said shyly.
"Well, there's another," he went on with his paternal air; "you must wear everything warm you've got and pack only what you can put on later."
"I've nothing warm," she said with half a sob.
"Oh, come!" he rallied her; "then I'll have to send round the men who are padding your doolie to pad you too! How about that shooting suit of yours?"
His remembrance of it pleased her far more than her possession.
"It's not very warm," she murmured.
"Well, it's a good deal warmer than these flimsy things," he said, lifting the laces that lay round her neck; "and we'll turn a feather quilt into a petticoat for you, cut you a boa out of the mess-room bearskin, and put the poshteen on top of all. Mind, you'll have to parade in full marching order, or we'll leave you behind for Mir Khan to take care of."
An orderly entering with a chit at that moment made an end to the boyish talk that was meant to put fresh heart into her, and Terrington, after a glance at the scrap of paper, left her at once with a smile and a nod and an instant's tightening of his fingers upon her shoulder.
At sunset he read the sentences of the burial service over the trench beside the Residency in which the bodies of the three Englishmen were laid. The dusk was spreading under the autumn twilight, while the pale spaces of eternal snow beyond Rashát were veiled with rose in the clear heaven above the purple ramparts of the valley and the flames of the pyres on which the dead Hindus were burned blazed in clear spires of light through the increasing gloom.
Rose Chantry stood next to Terrington, in a shooting costume of golden-brown tweed, with a leather hunting-belt, a broad band of leather about the short skirt, brown leather boots that laced half way to the knee, and a brown tam-o'-shanter pinned tight upon her curls. She hardly knew what he was reading as she looked across the miles of evening to the tinted snows, and heard the crackle of the funeral fires on either side of her. Life had been suddenly changed altogether into something hard and glaring and stale and ugly like a ball-room opened to the dawn, and she felt to be growing hard and plain and matter of fact to match it.
The melancholy volleys were fired above the grave, the level flash of orange light splitting the darkness like the sweep of a sword, for Terrington, well aware that he was watched, would omit nothing which might by its absence suggest a desire for concealment. While the ostentation of the funeral was distracting the attention of Mir Khan's spies, all the outward openings in the walls were being closed, so that when the funeral party returned to the Fort the arrangements for immediate departure could be pushed forward with continued speed and in complete concealment. The twinkle of lanterns everywhere made the labyrinth of the old mud walls look as if invaded by a flight of fire-flies. In ordered lines across the courtyard the bearers squatted, brown and impassive, beside their burdens; line after line, hour after hour, filing forth from the dark doorways of the Fort, till half the space between its walls was full. The other half was covered with accoutrements and bristled with piled arms. In the stables the Lancers were removing every needless detail from their equipment, and a wisp of rag was twisted round any piece of metal from which a sound might be shaken. In the long gully between the stable and the Fort stood strings of mules with a few zabus, snorting and shuffling under the loads that were being heaped upon their backs.
An hour after midnight the gate of the courtyard was thrown open, and a dark stream of horsemen poured silently out and turned north-east towards the river. They had left their lances broken behind them, but took every ounce of food that they could carry and three hundred rounds a man. Hard on the dust of their hoofs followed the Sikhs and Bakót levies under Dore; the Sikhs, long and lithe, fine marchers and good fighters all of them; the Bakót men short and square, very doubtful shooters and untried in fight, but hard hill-men, at home in the snow, and equal to almost any labour. After them came the long lines of mules out of the gully snorting and shaking their packs and harness, and kicking up more dust than the horsemen. Rose Chantry's doolie followed in rear of these. It had been padded for her with quilts of Armak wool and lined with camel's hair curtains fastened down to keep out the wind, and carried a mattress of feathers, a span in depth, to save her from the joltings of the road. Terrington had literally sketched its construction with one hand while he wrote a despatch with the other, and had himself gone down to the yard to explain away the carpenter's difficulties. But he shook his head at the boxes in which Rose had packed what she considered "absolutely necessary."
"No good!" he said. "Even if we got them to the Palári, we'd have to leave them in the snow."
"How many bearers have I?" Rose demanded.
He looked down at her smiling.
"Four for the doolie and a mule for your baggage," he said; "about what's allowed for half a company. And there's a tent for you on the mule already."
"I can have some one else's tent," she exclaimed crossly.
"No one elsehasa tent," he said with the same dry smile.
She turned from him petulantly.
"You can leave them all behind if you like; I don't care!"
Yet she repacked submissively—with the help of the khansamah, whom Terrington sent to the assistance of her pride—what she most needed in the space allowed her; with a new dull kindling of anger against the man who could compel her so easily to obey. But the eager preparations in the darkness subdued her with the sense of an impending fate, the silent streaming forth of the little force into the night towards the day of battle and the awful snows, and she was gratefully reassured when Terrington suddenly appeared beside her as the doolie drew up, and helped her in with a comforting pressure of the hand.
"Sleep if you can," he said; "we're perfectly safe for the next twelve hours."
His own beloved Guides brought up the rear, and he rode last with them out of the Fort.
For the next day and night danger only could threaten from direct pursuit, and so his place was for the present with the rear-guard.
The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.
Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him. The valley of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the Punjab; and the Palári, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western border of Cashmir.
The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question, since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers always against him.
The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous defiles. Consequently it was by the Palári, the most arduous of all the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to retire.
To Rashát, which Gale was holding at the foot of the Palári, there were two roads from Sar. One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur till the Sorágh Gul was reached. There the shorter road from Sar joined it, and the two rose together to the snows. Terrington was forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at Sorágh Gul in a position almost impregnable barring his advance upon Rashát. There, if wedged between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he would be forced to starve or to surrender.
The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he could not squander them against odds in the open. If compelled to fight his way across the Sorágh Gul not many of that six hundred would find shelter in Rashát. By craft alone could he hope to reach the Palári with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir Khan would have to be greatly daring. Greatly daring it was. He divided his force into three parts. The first, composed entirely of the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the Sorágh Gul. Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start, it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could arrive by the shorter road through Bewal. Sending on a summons to Rashát for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on Rashát, fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul. It was Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul, would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into Rashát.
To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force, consisting of the Sikhs and Bakót levies in charge of the transport, were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least twelve hours after he had reached it.
Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.
It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its safety. In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be prepared for it. It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's power. If it failed of that the force was doomed. Yet, if it should fail, what else would have succeeded?
Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust, the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.
When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the ground. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land unknown to her. The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones. The river bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky, on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation than the cliffs themselves. A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.
The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the clear vapour that streamed from every stone. A little green tent was pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water, and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of dreamless sleep. They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly few in that wilderness of space.
As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.
She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on the floor.
She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman about the place.
So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.
She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.
"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily. "Gholam is getting us something to eat as soon as you're ready."
Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.
"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.
"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."
He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the coarseness and defilement of war.
He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.
Rose Chantry noticed—she was learning to notice—that Terrington had not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground, and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed too—but that needed no learning—how the searching hard-browed look of the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after thirty hours of unceasing strain.
Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility always endued him with double strength.
Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.
Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning, caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.
He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table, and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and back again to her trim figure.
"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles away?"
"I am," he nodded.
"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a battle!"
"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.
She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.
"And is there going to be a battle?"
"Not to-day," he said.
"To-morrow?"
"Probably."
"And shall we all be killed?"
"It's not impossible," he said gravely.
She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at him over its edge.
"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.
He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down with a sigh of content.
"Iwasso thirsty. Isn't it grilling? Why did you make me wear these clothes? I can't see much sign of the snows. Isn't this tinned milk horrid? What's become of all the men? You don't seem to have kept many to look after me! Will you have an egg?"
"Please," said Terrington to her last question.
"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.
"It was," he said.
"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.
"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after to-morrow."
"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.
"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use for water."
"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.
"You'll be able to when you've crossed the Palári," said Terrington quietly.
She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the back of it, and leant her chin upon them both. She watched Terrington so for a few seconds while he finished his egg. Then she asked:
"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"
"He's commanding the advance-guard."
"Miles and miles away?"
"I hope so by now," he said.
"Ishegoing to fight to-day?"
"No."
"To-morrow? When we all do?"
"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.
"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"
"No," said Terrington; "rather safer. He'll have a line of retreat."
"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me with him?"
Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk above his mug.
"Pure selfishness," he said. "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me before the battles."
"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.
"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he said.
"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.
"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.
"Yes! You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking after his men."
Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook her head.
"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.
"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.
She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt of the head.
"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.
"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.
"Yes," she nodded. "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"
"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."
She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip tightened on the back of the chair.
"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking. You think we're just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us. You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see things, and seem to like things that one hates. You suppose, because we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being anything else."
"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."
He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of another man's secret. He knew nothing about women, nor how little they counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could be considered an excusing cause.
So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a voice uncontrollably unsteady.
"Oh, I know what you think of me!"
Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued less precariously:
"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"
"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against her."
"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved reproach that Terrington repented his levity. "Mayn't a woman learn something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a fool?"
"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a man."
She turned about towards him gratefully.
"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for anything, after what I did in Sar?"
"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily. He finished his tea, and smiled at her with a new friendliness across the table. "Look here," he said, "I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time. Will you?"
She nodded.
"But you want more than an hour."
"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it." He looked at his wrist. "That'll be on the stroke of three. You've got a watch?"
She held hers to her ear.
"It's stopped," she said.
He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.
"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.
"Oh, no!" she said.
He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.
"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."
"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.
He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it, got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.
"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.
He took it from her with another smile.
"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."
But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude.
Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection.
The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of disappearance, nothing beyond.
Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.
Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with determination than from drowsiness.
Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.
At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his consciousness.
He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the stony valley towards the bridge.
Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her heart which no man before had ever brought there.
An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.
Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner. The doolie was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.
Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the darkness. Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the stony blackness and the stars. It was the light of the snows.
A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.
As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside her, the poshteen in his hand.
"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as though she were a child.
"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.
She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its protective care. He made her feel so completely in his charge that, had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.
He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.
The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood which had come back to her. She sat listening to his talk with the smiling happy-serious air of youth. And they ate together of the stew with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its bones. And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease, leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.
Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself. The approach of action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.
Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most delightful she had ever spent. She was tasting for the first time what it meant to feel.
The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them, and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their shoulders.
In the darkness was the unknown morrow, and death, and the blood and horror of battle; and in the firelight just the man and herself; the man who was showing her a new unknown kind of manliness, and herself with all her married days and ways forgot, listening like a girl to her first discovery in heroes.
"Time to turn in," said Terrington, as he came back out of the darkness on parting from Hussain. "We start at two; and no one can say when we sleep again, so do all you know. I'll see if your doolie is ready."
She turned out one little hand to the flame with a shiver.
"Oh, I can't leave the fire," she said. "Mayn't I sleep here?"
He looked at her with the air of considering her request as a reasonable proposition.
"I don't see why you shouldn't," he said; "I'll fetch your blankets."
He fetched the mattress as well, and the boots he had given her, which he happened to find inside the doolie.
"You must wear these," he said, "if you sleep out."
She took them from him with a sigh of submission, sat down upon the mattress and prepared to pull them on.
"Don't put your hand into them," he said warningly.
She opened her eyes in question.
"It may make you cry," he smiled.
She repaid his memory with a glance of pleased surprise, and shook her head softly.
"Not now!" she said.
She held up the boot towards him, and thrust her arm down into its depths.
"So warm," she purred.
She covered her shyness in pulling them on before him with the pretence that they were much too tight.
Terrington smiled at her efforts.
"I'm afraid you'll grow out of them very soon," he said.
Then he tucked her in under the blankets and wrapping himself in his cloak lay down beside her. She risked the comfort in which he had arranged her to stretch out a small white hand to him to say good-night; and he held it long enough to express to her the subtle newness and nearness in their common knowledge that such a night might mean.
Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and his voice spoke in her ear. She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under hers. The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone. The bearers moved off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst men. The night was still of an impenetrable black and she could see nothing between her curtains, but she heard in the silence the shuffle of feet, and the grunted "Huh!" of the Bakót men as they fell in half awake and hitched up their accoutrements.
Then with a whisper the jampanis moved on, and to the swinging to and fro of the doolie she fell asleep.
Rose woke to a sense of excitement which pierced her sleep.
"Tell him they're right down here in front of us," she heard Dore's voice in a hard whisper. "And take that doolie back," he added angrily.
The doolie spun round, but before it was gone a hundred yards Rose stopped the bearers.
The morning was gray, cold, and very still, just after dawn. A white wet mist had come down upon the hills, and hung from cliff to cliff like a ceiling cloth across the valley. Ahead, laid out behind boulders of blue grey stone, she could see the yellowish attenuated line of Dore's Sikhs spread like a fan on either side of the road.
A runner, naked but for his loin-cloth, and throwing up the dust from the soles of his feet, went by towards the front, coming back somewhat less hurriedly ten minutes later.
There was no further sound nor sign of life for half an hour, and then Terrington with an orderly came in view round the bend of the road riding slowly. He stopped with a smile of wonder where Rose was sitting on a stone before her doolie at the side of the road.
"However did you get here?" he asked.
"Mr. Dore sent me back," she pouted.
"Sent youback!" he echoed. "I should think he did."
She came up to his horse's shoulder, and with a "Good morning," offered him her hand.
"Is it going to be a fight?" she asked as he took it.
"It is," he answered, "and you're in front of the firing line. You must wait here till I return to you."
She stood back demurely with her hands behind her, and he rode on with some injunction to her sentry which she did not understand.
He was met, she saw, by Dore near the line of skirmishers, and in obedience to some command the section on either side of the road turned outwards and began to creep up the steep sides of the valley, taking cover, when they halted, so effectively that not a man was to be seen.
Just as the last of them had disappeared a rifle rang out, faintly, far ahead.
Rose, who had not taken her eyes from Terrington, stiffened at the sound, and stood tensely listening with an ear towards it.
She had to wait a full five minutes till the shot was repeated, but hard upon that followed the soft rattle of a fusillade. Though it sounded vague and dull as the patter of rain on water, she knew it at once for what it was, and started forward eagerly towards it along the road.
The sentry, mindful of Terrington's injunction, tried to stop her, but she ordered him to stand aside with such imperious authority that he gave way, and Rose went on towards the spot where Terrington was posted above the road with his glasses raised. He was so absorbed in the scene they gave him that he did not hear Mrs. Chantry's approach, and was only aware of her presence beside him when he turned to search for the Sikhs upon the hill.
He lowered his glasses sharply and faced her with a frown.
"I told you to wait for me," he said reprovingly.
"I know," she murmured, "but I couldn't. I'm no good at waiting." Then, as this information brought no softening to his eyes, she added defiantly: "I don't see why you should treat me as a child. I don't intend to be kept out of danger."
"There's no danger here to keep you out of," said Terrington, "except the danger of your being seen." His eyes took in her troubled face and his manner changed suddenly to a reasoning gentleness. "You see the fight's right away over there, beyond the Gul. Mir Khan's pushing Walcot back on Rashát, and we hope he thinks he's got us all. We're hiding here, in case he sends any one to look for us along the road to Sar, and the game would be up if he spotted us."
He helped her up on to a stone which gave her a view over the low ridge in front of them, and handed her his glasses. Then, as she did not know how to use them, he turned her round to him, and fitted them to her eyes, and standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders, shifted the lens till they suited her sight.
The mists had lifted, and she could see without assistance the entrance to the double-headed valley where the gorge which brought the road from Bewal joined that from Sar. Beyond their junction was the famous Gul, showing as a dark cleft across the valley, and, again beyond that the hills closed in about a defile more forbidding than that through which they had come.
Here and there across the throat of it, like tufts of bog cotton, burst little white puffs of smoke, where Walcot's men were holding back Mir Khan's reconnaissance. The force they covered was so well concealed that even the glass revealed no sign of it, but the Khan's advance could be traced in specks and streaks of whitish yellow climbing out of the Gul, which Walcot had made but a feint of defending, and creeping dispersedly towards the puffs of smoke.
Down the valley towards Bewal the Khan's main body could be made out. Dark masses of men divided by varying spaces and mingling in the distance with driven flocks and herds. The dull morning glimmer of steel wavered over it like the light upon a spider's web.
Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road, which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.
As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.
She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's advance with an unaltered countenance.
"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of them: they'll eat us up."
He put a hand under each of her elbows and lifted her down from the stone.
"Well!" he said smiling, "we're going to play the dickens with their digestion."
They walked down to the road where Dore was standing with Terrington's mare.
"You need send back word of nothing," said Terrington, "we overlook your position. Keep your men where they are, no matter what force may pass you, and don't fire a shot till you get the signal."
This laying of a line of fire across the neck of the defile had been Terrington's last piece of daring, to cover the chance of Mir Khan's detaching a force to search the Sar road strong enough to pen the British troops in the defile and prevent their issuing to fall upon the flank of the men engaging Walcot beyond the Gul.
Terrington realized the possibility of such a move on seeing the size of the force which the Khan had so unexpectedly collected, and added at once this risk the more to the many he was taking in order to make the enemy's defeat sufficiently disastrous to deter him for a few hours from pursuit.
He nodded a farewell to Dore, lifted Rose into the saddle, and walked back beside her.
She leant forward to pat the mare's neck and get a side view of his face.
"Are you awfully excited?" she asked shyly.
His thoughtful eyes came round to her.
"Awfully!" he said, smiling.
He signed to the doolie to follow them, and led the way back along the road, which rose slowly for about a mile. There was nowhere any sign of life, and the fight and the scene behind them seemed suddenly to have passed out of being.
They went a little way in silence, and then Rose Chantry said gravely:
"Captain Terrington, do youreallythink we shall beat them?"
He put a hand on the saddle behind her.
"Are you afraid, child?" he asked.
She nodded pensively.
"I can't help it," she broke out with a sort of petulance; "I do so love being alive: and I've had so little of it; only just the last few years."
He looked up into her face, with its gay air of beauty softened and sobered by the thought of death.
"Yes," he said, "I understand."
She searched his expression doubtfully.
"Only forme?" she questioned.
"Oh,I'mnot a lovely woman," he smiled.
"Who told you thatIwas?" she asked him.
"Ah! I've found it out for myself," he sighed.
"Have you?" she said without conviction. "And aren'tyouafraid to die?"
"A man has to be afraid of other things more," he told her quietly.
A sharp turn of the road brought them suddenly into the Dogra's camp. Though no fires were burning the men were round their cooking-pots finishing a meal; food and sleep in Terrington's conception going half way always towards winning a fight.
He lifted Rose out of the saddle, asked her if she were equal to a climb, and together they clambered up the ridge of shale on the north of the valley at the head of which Hussain Shah had his post of observation.
The track was steep and the stones slippery, so that for most of the way Rose's hand was in his, and when they came to a spot where the shale slope was half afloat in water he stooped, with the remark that he must carry her, and lifted her on his arm; setting her feet down, an instant later, upon a rock, in order to seat her for greater ease upon his shoulder.
She sat erect, with one hand under his chin, rejoicing in the air of mastery that never thought to ask her leave, and in his strength which was more severely tried than she suspected by the shifting stone and slush.
Hussain's post overlooked the ridge where Dore was lying, and commanded a view of the valley towards Bewal; but the eastern trend of the road hid Walcot's doings beyond the Gul.
Hussain at once began an elaborate explanation in Pukhtu, Terrington nodding his head and following the indications of the other's hands, but Rose could not tell by any outward sign how the recital affected him. He turned to her when it ended, and told her they were going higher for a wider view. She pleaded to go with him, but he merely shook his head, smiling at the chaos of rocks above them, over which a goat only could go in safety.
Rose sat herself down in a corner of the sangar opposite the three signallers, and watched Terrington and Hussain haul themselves up the scarp, taking cover as warily as though they were stalking sambur, yet never hesitating nor halting for an instant, the Risaldar a length in front, and Terrington swinging hand and foot after him in absolute accord.
They disappeared behind a buttress, and Rose fell to watching the signallers, two bronzed and splendid sepoys and a havildar of the Guides, whose blue and white flag slapped ceaselessly in the air.
Far away upon a spur above the road by which they had come she could make out the flutter of an answering signal, and, while she tried to follow it, suddenly a star of light winked like a sunlit window on the hill-side far down the defile.
It stirred the little group like the fall of a shell. The havildar thrust his paper and pencil on the unoccupied sepoy, hoisted the heliograph over his shoulder, and scrambled out of the sangar with his head turning as he went for a glimpse of the unexpected sun. He had his tripod settled, and an answering shaft of light was flying from his mirror down the valley before the flag had ceased its flapping behind him, but not before the nearer station had also found the sunlight and set a second star in the gray sameness of the hills. The flag fell, the click of the mirror took up the speech of its shaken folds, and dazzling lances of sunlight flung from ten miles away began tilting with the lashes of Rose Chantry's eyes. She was so absorbed by the strangeness of their silent language, that she was startled to find that Terrington had dropped alone and unnoticed from the rocks above her, and was scribbling a message which he handed as he finished it to the havildar.
He stood watching intently the answering flashes, twice prompting the reader when he was at fault. Rose, conscious of a certain still determination which had come into his manner, went over and stood beside him.
"Has anything happened?" she asked, as the answer to his order sparkled in the air.
He wrote a second message before replying; then he put his hand in her arm and walked her back to the sangar.
"Yes," he said; "Mir Khan is proving himself to be a good soldier. He's going to take no risks."
"Are you taking any?" she asked.
"Oh, yes!" he smiled; "I'm taking them all. That's the worst of being the weaker side."
He stopped, and looked out again over the Bewal valley, where the enemy's forces could be seen dividing in the form of a Y, one arm leading towards the Sorágh Gul and the other towards the entrance of the Sar defile, where Dore was lying.
"He's coming this way?" she suggested.
"Yes," he assented, "he's coming this way—half of him. He's either found out our little game, or he's going to make sure we're not playing it. So we've got to fight him here."
"Is that worse for us?" she enquired anxiously.
He nodded.
"And who's over there?" she asked, with a tilt of her head towards the distant hills.
"Subadar Afzul Singh and the Guides," he said; "but thanks to Mir Khan, they can move up now, which is a point to us. And now we must go down to lunch."
It was all so evidently the playing of a game to him, though the stakes were life and death, that she was infected for the moment by his incentive to the forgetfulness of her own fears, and asked eagerly of Afzul's march as they went down the hill together.
Terrington expected the Guides in three hours, and though he had no fear of being unable to hold out until they joined him, it was a question if he could delay his counter attack so long without rendering Dore's position too precarious. Everything would depend on the pace at which the enemy advanced and the force employed for his first attack.
When they came again to the water, Terrington knelt down without a word, and Rose seated herself with a laugh upon his shoulder.
But he did not set her down when the wet space was crossed, but carried her on to the little green tent which Gholam had pitched above the road, laughing to her protests that it was one of the disadvantages of being so light that people would insist on carrying her.
The signal which had dropped from the ridge had set all the camp in motion.
Men were building sangars; boxes of ammunition were being unloaded from mules and carried up the hill; all signs of a camp had disappeared and the transport was slowly toiling back by the way it had come.