When a man knows what is out against him, and from which direction he may look to meet death, he only needs to be a very ordinary man to make at least a gallant showing. Gallery or no gallery to watch, given responsibility and trained men under hire, not one man in a thousand will fail to face death with dignity.
But Brown knew practically nothing, and understood still less, of what was happening. He had Juggut Khan's word for it that Jailpore was in flames, and that all save four of its European population had been killed. He believed that to be a probably exaggerated statement of affairs, but he did not blink the fact that he might expect to be overwhelmed almost without notice, and at any minute. That was a fact which he accepted, for the sake of argument and as a working-basis on which to build a plan of some kind—His orders were to hold that post, and he would hold it until relieved by General Baines or death. But there are several ways of holding a hot coal besides the rather obvious one of sitting on it.
It would have been a fine chance to be theatrical, had play-acting been in his line. Many and many a full-blown general has risen to authority and fame by means of absolutely useless gallery-play. He believed that he would presently be relieved by General Baines, who he felt sure would march at once on Jailpore; and had he chosen to he could have addressed the men, have set them to throwing up defenses and have made a nice theatrical redoubt that he could have held quite easily with the help of nine men for a day or two. And since the really worthwhile things go often unrewarded, but the gallery-plays never, nobody would have blamed him had he chosen some such course as that.
But Brown's idea of holding down a place was to make that place a thorn in the side of the enemy. And since he did not know who was the enemy, or where he was, nor why he was an enemy, nor when he would attack, he proposed to find out these things for himself preparatory to making the said enemy as uncomfortable as his meager resources would permit, when eked out by an honest “dogged-does-it” brain.
He buried the three men whom Fate had seemed to value at the price of a fakir's freedom. And, being a religious man, to whom religion was a fact and the rest of the universe a theory, he was able to say a full funeral service over them from memory. He said it at the grave-end, with a lantern in his hand and one man facing him across the grave—as the English used to drink when the Danes had landed, each watching for the glint of steel beyond the other's shoulder.
And, four on each side of the trench that they had dug, the remainder knelt and faced the night each way—partly from enforced piety, and partly because eight men back to back, with their bayonets outward and their butts against their knees, are an awkward proposition for an enemy. They mumbled the responses because Brown made them do it, and they kept their eyes skinned because the night seemed full of other eyes, and sounds.
“And now, you men,” said Brown, changing his voice to suit the nature of his task, “you can get your sleep by fours. I don't care which four of you goes to sleep first, but there are only two watches of us left, and there are about four hours left to sleep in, by my reckoning. That's two hours' sleep for each man. And we'll keep clear of the guardroom. As I understand my orders, the important point's the cross-roads. I'm supposed to halt every one who comes, and to ask him his business. And that'd be impossible to do from the guardroom here. Let this be a lesson to you men, now. In interpretin' orders, when a point's in doubt, always look for the meaning of the orders rather than the letter of them, obeying the letter only when the meaning and the letter are the same thing. The letter of our orders says the guardroom. The meaning's clear. We're here to guard the cross-roads. We take the meaning, and let the letter hang!
“Besides! The way it seems to me, if there's any more trouble cooking in this neighborhood, it's going to cook pretty fast, and it's going to boil around that guardroom; and if we're not in the guardroom, why, that's point number one for us! Leave the guardroom lantern lighted, and bring out nothing but your cartridge-pouches and the box of ammunition. Leave everything else where it lies. Quick, now.”
They obeyed him on the run, afraid to be out of his sight for a moment even, trusting him as little children trust a nurse, and ready to do anything so long as he would only keep them up and doing, and not make them stay by the scene of the murders. Brown knew their state of mind as accurately as he knew the range of their service rifles, and he knew just how he could best keep panic from them. He knew too, if not what was best to do, at least what he intended doing, and he knew how he could best get them in a state to do it.
Behind his own mind lay all the while a sense of loneliness and hopelessness. He did not entertain the thought of failure to hold the crossroads, and he was so certain that General Baines would come with his division that he could almost see the advance-guard trotting toward him down the trunk road. But there is no accounting for a soldier's moods, and something told him—something deep down inside him that he could neither name nor understand—that he was out now on the adventure of a lifetime, and that the heart-cord which had held him tight to England all these years had been cut. He felt gloomy and dispirited, but not a man of the nine who followed him had the slightest inkling of it.
He halted them outside the guardroom, and bullydamned two of them because some unimportant part of their accouterments was missing; and he “'Tshuned” them, and stood them at ease, and “'Tshuned” them again, until he had them jumping at the word. Then he marched them two abreast in and out among the huts in search of any sign of native servants. They found no sign of any one at all. Though in that black darkness it would have been quite possible for half a hundred men to lie undetected. Brown decided that the camp was empty. He thought it probable that any one concealed there would have tried his luck on somebody at least, at close range as he passed.
So he marched them back to the guard-room once again, and sent two of them in to drag out the shivering Beluchi, who had taken cover underneath a cot and refused to come out until he was dragged out by the leg. The native's terror served to pull the men together quite a little, for Tommy Atkins always does and always did behave himself with pride when what he is pleased to consider his inferiors are anywhere about. They showed that unfortunate Beluchi how white men marched into the darkness—best foot foremost; without halt or hesitation, when ghosts or murderers or unseen marksmen were close at hand.
The Beluchi let himself be dragged, trembling, between two of them. It was he who first saw something move, or heard some one breathe. For he was absolutely on edge, and had nothing to attend to but his own fear. The others had to keep both eyes and ears lifting, to please Brown the exacting. The Beluchi struggled and held back, almost breaking loose, and actually tearing his loin-cloth.
“Sahib!” he whispered hoarsely. “Sahib!”
“What is it?” demanded Brown, scarcely waiting for an answer, though. Something told him what it was that moved, and his own skin felt goose-fleshy from neck to heel.
“The fakir, sahib!”
There was a murmur through the ranks, a sibilant indrawing of the breath.
“Did I hear anybody swear?” asked Brown.
Nobody answered him. All nine men stood stock-still, leaning on their rifles, their heads craned forward and their eyes strained in the direction of the gloomy baobab.
“Form single rank!” commanded Brown.
There was no response. They stood there fixed like a row of chickens staring at a snake!
“Form single rank!”
He leaped at them, and broke the first rule of the service—as a man may when he is man enough, and the alternative would be black shame.
His fist was a hard one and heavy, and they felt the weight of it.
“Form single rank! Take one pace open order! Extend! Now, forward—by the right! Right dress, there!”
He marched in front of them, and they followed him for very shame, now that he had broken their paralysis.
“Halt! Port-arms! Charge bayonets!”
He was peering at something in the dark, something that chuckled and smelled horrible, and sat unusually still for anything that lived.
“Numbers One, Two, Three—left wheel—forward! Halt! Numbers Seven, Eight, Nine—right wheel—forward! Halt!”
They were standing now on three sides of a square. The fourth side was the trunk of the baobab. Between them and the trunk, the streaming tendrils swayed and swung, bats flitted and something still invisible sat still and chuckled.
“One pace forward—march!”
They could see now. The fakir sat and stared at them and grinned. Brown raised the lamp and let its rays fall on him. The light glinted off his eyes, and off the only other part of him that shone—the long, curved, ghastly fingernails that had grown through the palm of his upstretched hand.
“How did you get here?” demanded Brown, not afraid to speak, for fear that fright would take possession of himself as well as of his men, but quite well aware that the fakir would not answer him. Then he remembered the Beluchi.
“Ask him, you! Ask him how he came here.”
The Beluchi found his tongue, and stammered out a question. The fakir chuckled, and following his chuckle let a guttural remark escape him.
“He says, sahib, that he flew!”
“Ask him, could he fly with nine fixed bayonets in him!”
There was a little laughter from the men at that sally. It takes very little in the way of humor to dispel a sense of the uncanny or mysterious.
“He answers, sahib, that you have seen what comes of striking him. He asks how many dead there be.”
“Does he want me to hold him answerable for those men's lives?”
“He says he cares not, sahib! He says that he has promised what shall befall you, sahib, before a day is past—you and one other!”
“Ask him, where is the Punjabi skin-buyer?”
The fakir chuckled at that question, and let out suddenly a long, low, hollow-sounding howl, like a she-wolf's just at sundown. He was answered by another howl from near the guardroom, and every soldier faced about as though a wasp had stung him.
“Front!” commanded Brown. “Now, one of you, about turn! Keep watch that way! Is that the Punjabi?—ask him.”
“He says 'Yes!' sahib. He and others!”
“Very well. Now tell him that unless he obeys my orders on the jump, word for word as I give them, I'll hang him as high as Haman by that withered arm of his, and have him beaten on the toenails with a cleaning-rod before I fill him so full of bayonet-holes that the vultures'll take him for a sponge! Say I'm a man of my word, and don't exaggerate.”
The Beluchi translated.
“He says you dare not, sahib!”
“Advise him to talk sense.”
“He says, sahib, 'You have had one lesson!”'
“Now it's my turn to give him one. Men! We'll have to give up that sleep I talked about. This limping dummy of a fakir thinks he's got us frightened, and we've got to teach him different. There's some reason why we're not being attacked as yet. There's something fishy going on, and this swab's at the bottom of it! We want him, too, on a charge of murder, or instigating murder, and the guardroom's the best place for him. To the guardroom with him. He'll do for a hostage anyhow. And where he is, I've a notion that the control of this treachery won't be far away! Grab him below the arms and by the legs. One of you hold a bayonet-point against his ribs. The rest, face each way on guard. Now—all together, forward to the guardroom—march!”
The fakir howled. Ululating howls replied from the surrounding night, and once a red light showed for a second and disappeared in front of them. Then the fakir howled again.
“Look, sahib! See! The guardroom!”
It was the Beluchi who saw it first—the one who was most afraid of things in general and the least afraid of Sergeant Brown. A little flame had started in the thatch.
“Halt!” ordered Brown. “Two of you hold the fakir! The remainder—volley-firing—kneeling—point-blank-range. Ready—as you were—independent firing—ready! Now, wait till you see 'em in the firelight, then blaze away all you like!”
His last words were cut off short by the sound of rifle-fire. Each rifle in turn barked out, and three rifles answered from the night.
“Let that fakir feel a bayonet-point, somebody!”
The fakir cursed between his teeth, in proof of prompt obedience by one of the men who held him.
“Tell him to order his crowd to cease fire!”
The Beluchi translated, and the fakir howled again. The flames leaped through the thatch, and in a minute more the countryside was lit for half a mile or more by the glare of the burning guardroom.
The flames betrayed more than a hundred turbaned men, who hugged the shadows.
“Keep that bayonet-point against his ribs. See? That comes o' moving instead o' sitting still! If we'd shut ourselves in the guardroom there, we'd have been merrily roasting in there now! We stole a march on them. Beauty here was sitting on his throne to see the fun. Didn't expect us. Thought we'd be all hiding under the beds, like Sidiki here! Goes to prove the worst thing that a soldier can do is to sit still when there's trouble. We're better off than ever. We're free and they won't dare do much to us as long as we've got Sacred-Smells-and-Stinks in charge. Form up round him, men, and keep your eyes skinned till morning!”
Of course, discussing matters in the light of history, with full and intimate knowledge of everything that had a bearing on the Mutiny, there are plenty of club-armchair critics who maintain that England could not do otherwise than win in '57. They always do say that afterward of the side that won the day.
But then, with history yet to make, things looked very different, and nobody pretended that there was any certainty of anything except a victory for the mutineers. All that either side recognized as likely to reverse conditions was the notorious ability that a beaten and cornered British army has for upsetting certainties. So the rebels had more than a little argument as to what steps should be taken next, once the initial butchery and loot had taken place.
For instance, in Jailpore
More than a hundred fakirs and wandering priests and mendicants had sent in word that the province from end to end was ready, and that the British slept. But there were those in Jailpore who distrusted fakirs and religious votaries of every kind. They believed them fully capable of rousing the countryside, of working on the religious feelings of the unsophisticated rustics and setting them to murdering and plundering right and left. But they doubted their ability to judge of the army's sleepiness. These doubters were the older men, who had had experience of England's craft in war. They knew of the ability of some at least of England's generals to match guile against guile, and back up guile with swift, unexpected hammer-strokes.
There were men who claimed that what had happened in Jailpore would be repeated in Bholat and elsewhere. There was no need, these maintained, to march and join hands with other rebels. Each unit was sufficient to itself. Each city would be a British funeral pyre. Why march?
Some said, “The general at Bholat will learn of the massacre, and will learn too, that not quite all were killed. He will come hotfoot to find the four we could not find. For these British are as cobras; slay the he cobra and the she one comes to seek revenge. Slay the she one and beware! Her husband will track thee down, and strike thee. They are not ordinary folk!”
There were other factions that maintained that General Baines was strong enough, with his three thousand, to hold Bholat, unless the men of Jailpore marched, to join hands with the Bholatis—who were surely in revolt by this time. There were others who declared that he would leave Bholat and Jailpore to their fates without any doubt at all, and would march to join hands with the nearest contingent, at Harumpore.
The bolder spirits of this latter faction were for setting off at once to prevent this combination. For a little while their arguments almost prevailed.
But another faction yet, and an even more numerous one, insisted it were best to wait for news from other centers.
Why march, they argued, why strike, why run unnecessary risks, before they knew what was happening elsewhere?
“Surely,” these argued, “the English will hear that four here are still unaccounted for. Some attempt will be made to find and rescue them. But if we find and slay them, and send their heads to Bholat, then will the English know that they are indeed dead. Then there will be no attempt at rescue, and we shall hold Jailpore unmolested as headquarters.”
That piece of logic won the day for a while, and parties were made up to explore the place, and search in every nook and cranny for the three women. and a child who surely had not passed out through any of the gates, and who were therefore just as surely in the city. A reward was offered by the committee of rebel-leaders and, although nobody believed that the reward would actually be paid, the opportunities for looting privately while searching were so great that the search was thorough.
It failed, though, for the very simple reason that nobody suspected that the huge stone trap-door in the floor of the powder-magazine had ever been opened, or ever could be opened. The magazine had been a white man's watch. White men had kept guard over it for more than a hundred years, and the natives had forgotten that a maze of tunnels and caverns lay beneath it.
So, while bayonet-points and swords were pushed into crevices, while smoke was sent down passages and tunnels and great, loose-limbed, slobbering hounds were led on the leash and cast to find a trail, the three women and the child lay still beneath the piled-up powder, and doled out water, and biscuit in siege-time measures. They lay in pitch-darkness, in a vault where not even a sound could reach them, except the whispered echo of their own voices and the scampering of the rats. They were growing nearly blind, and nearly crazed, with the darkness and the silence and the fear.
Every second they expected to see daylight through the cracks above, as rebels levered up the door, or to hear feet and voices coming through the vaults below, for doubtless the vaults led somewhere. But for their fear of snakes and rats and unknown horrors, they would have tried to find a way through the vaults themselves. But as each movement that they made, and each word that they spoke, sent echoes reverberating through the gloom, they lay still and shuddered.
Once they heard footsteps on the stone flags overhead. But the footsteps went away again, and then all was still. Soon they lost all count of time. They were only aware of heat and discomfort and fear and utter weariness.
One woman and an infant wept. One woman prayed aloud incessantly. The third woman—the menial, the worst educated and least enlightened of the three, according to the others' notion of it—stubbornly refused to admit that there was not some human means of rescue.
“If Bill were here,” she kept on grumbling, “Bill'd find a way!”
And in the darkness that surrounded her she felt that she could see Bill's face, as she remembered it—red-cheeked and clean-shaven—six years or more ago.
The blazing roof of the guardroom lit up even the crossroads for a while, and Brown and his men could see that for the present there was a good wide open space between them and the enemy. The firelight showed a tree not far from the crossroads, and since anything is cover to men who are surrounded and outnumbered, they made for that tree with one accord, and without a word from Brown.
“We've all the luck,” said Brown. “There's not a detachment of any other army in the world would walk straight on to a find like this!”
He held up one frayed end of a manila rope, that was wound around the tree-trunk. Some tethered ox had rendered them that service.
“Fifty feet of good manila, and a fakir that needs hanging! Anybody see the connection?”
There was a chorus of ready laughter, and the two men who had the unenviable task of carrying the fakir picked him up and tossed him to the tree-trunk. The roof of the guardhouse was blazing fiercely, and now they had fired the other roofs. The fakir, the tree and the little bunch of men who held him prisoner were as plainly visible as though it had been daytime. A bullet pinged past Brown's ear, and buried itself in the tree-trunk with a thud.
“Let him feel that bayonet again!” said Brown.
A rifleman obeyed, and the fakir howled aloud. An answering howl from somewhere beyond the dancing shadows told that the fakir had been understood.
“And now,” said Brown, paraphrasing the well-remembered wording of the drill-book, in another effort to get his men to laughing again, “when hanging a fakir by numbers—at the word one, place the noose smartly round the fakir's neck. At the word two, the right-hand man takes the bight of the rope in the hollow of his left hand, and climbs the tree, waiting on the first branch suitable for the last sound of the word three. At the last sound of the word three, he slips the rope smartly over the bough of the tree and descends smartly to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet and coming to attention. At the word four, the remainder seize the loose end of the rope, being careful to hold it in such a way that the fakir has a chance to breathe. And at the last sound of the word five, you haul all together, lifting the fakir off the ground, and keeping him so until ordered to release. Now—one!”
He had tied a noose while he was speaking, and the fakir had watched him with eyes that blazed with hate. A soldier seized the noose, and slipped it over the fakir's head.
“Two!”
The tree was an easy one to climb. “Two” and “three” were the work of not more than a minute.
“Four!” commanded Brown, and the rope drew tight across the bough. The fakir had to strain his chin upward in order to draw his breath.
“Steady, now!”
The men were lined out in single file, each with his two hands on the rope. Not half of them were really needed to lift such a wizened load as the fakir, but Brown was doing nothing without thought, and wasting not an effort. He wanted each man to be occupied, and even amused. He wanted the audience, whom he could not see, but who he knew were all around him in the shadows, to get a full view of what was happening. They might not have seen so clearly, had he allowed one-half of the men to be lookers-on.
“Steady!” he repeated. “Be sure and let him breathe, until I give the word.” Then he seized the cowering Beluchi by the neck, and dragged him up close beside the fakir. “Translate, you!” he ordered. “To the crowd out yonder first. Shout to 'em, and be careful to make no mistakes.”
“Speak, then, sahib! What shall I say?”
“Say this. This most sacred person here is our prisoner. He will die the moment any one attempts to rescue him.”
The Beluchi translated, and repeated word for word.
“I will now talk with him, and he himself will talk with you, and thus we will come to an arrangement!”'
There was a commotion in the shadows, and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty men appeared, keeping at a safe distance still, but evidently anxious to get nearer.
“Now talk to the fakir, and not so loudly! Ask him 'Are you a sacred person?' Ask him softly, now!”
“He says 'Yes,' sahib, 'I am sacred!”'
“Do you want to die?”
“All men must die!”
The answer made an opening for an interminable discussion, of the kind that fakirs and their kindred love. But Brown was not bent just then on dissertation. He changed his tactics.
“Do you want to die, a little slowly, before all those obedient worshipers of yours, and in such a way that they will see and understand that you can not help yourself, and therefore are a fraud?”
The Beluchi repeated the question in the guttural tongue that apparently the fakir best understood. In the fitful light cast by the burning roofs, it was evident that the fakir had been touched in the one weak spot of his armor.
There can scarcely be more than one reason why a man should torture himself and starve himself and maim and desecrate and horribly defile himself. At first sight, the reason sounds improbable, but consideration will confirm it. It is vanity, of an iron-bound kind, that makes the wandering fakir.
“Ask him again!” said Brown.
But again the fakir did not answer.
“Tell him that I'm going to let him save his face, provided he saves mine. Explain that I, too, have men who think I am something more than human!”
The Beluchi interpreted, and Brown thought that the fakir's eyes gleamed with something rather more than their ordinary baleful light. It might have been the dancing flames that lit them, but Brown thought he saw the dawn of reason.
“Say that if I let my men kill him, my men will believe me superhuman, and his men will know that he is only a man with a withered arm! But tell him this: He's got the best chance he ever had to perform a miracle, and have the whole of this province believe in him forevermore.”
Again the fakir's eyes took on a keener than usual glare, as he listened to the Beluchi. He did not nod, though, and he made no other sign, beyond the involuntary evidence of understanding that his eyes betrayed.
“His men can see that noose round his neck, tell him. And his men know me, more or less, and British methods anyhow. They believe now, they're sure, they're positive that his neck's got about as much chance of escaping from that noose as a blind cow has of running from a tiger. Now then! Tell him this. Let him come the heavy fakir all he likes. Tell him to tell his gang that he's going to give an order. Let him tell them that when he says 'Hookum hai!' my men'll loose his neck straight away, and fall down flat. Only, first of all he's got to tell them that he needs us for the present. Let him say that he's got an extra-special awful death in store for us by and by, and that he's going to keep us by him until he's ready to work the miracle. Meantime, nobody's to touch us, or come near us, except to bring him and us food!”
The fakir listened, and said nothing. At a sign from Brown the rope tightened just a little. The fakir raised his chin.
“And tell him that, if he doesn't do what I say, and exactly what I say, and do it now, he's got just so long to live as it takes a man to choke his soul out!”
The fakir answered nothing.
“Just ever such a wee bit tighter, men!”
The fakir lost his balance, and had to scramble to his feet and stand there swaying on his heels, clutching at the rope above him with his one uninjured hand, and sawing upward with his head for air. There came a murmur from the shadows, and a dozen breech-bolts clicked. There seemed no disposition to lie idle while the holiest thing in a temple-ridden province dangled in mid-air.
“In case of a rush,” said Brown quietly, “all but two of you let go! The remainder seize your rifles and fire independently. The two men on the rope, haul taut, and make fast to the tree-trunk. This tree's as good a place to die as anywhere, but he dies first! Understand?”
The fakir rolled his eyes, and tried to make some sort of signal with his free arm.
“Just a wee shade tighter!” ordered Brown. “I'm not sure, but I think he's seeing reason!”
The fakir gurgled. No one but a native, and he a wise one, could have recognized a meaning in the guttural gasp that he let escape him.
“He says 'All right! sahib!'” translated the Beluchi.
“Good!” said Brown. “Ease away on the rope; men! And now! You all heard what I told him. If he says 'Hookum hai!' you all let go the rope, and fall flat. But keep hold of your rifles!”
The fakir's voice, rose in a high-pitched, nasal wail, and from the darkness all around them there came an answering murmur that was like the whispering of wind through trees. By the sound, there must have been a crowd of more than a hundred there, and either the crowd was sneaking around them to surround them at close quarters, or else the crowd was growing.
“Keep awake, men!” cautioned Brown.
“Aye, aye, sir! All awake, sir!”
“Listen, now! And if he says one word except what I told him he might say, tip me the wink at once.”
Brown swung the Beluchi out in front of him where he could hear the fakir better.
“I'll hang you, remember, after I've hanged him, if anything goes wrong!”
“He is saying, sahib, exactly what you said.”
“He'd better! Listen now! Listen carefully! Look out for tricks!”
The fakir paused a second from his high-pitched monologue, and a murmur from the darkness answered him.
“Stand by to haul tight, you men!”
“All ready, sir!”
The rope tightened just a little—just sufficiently to keep the fakir cognizant of its position. The fakir howled out a sort of singsong dirge, which plainly had imperatives in every line of it. At each short pause for breath he added something in an undertone that made the Beluchi strain his ears.
“He says, sahib, that they understand. He says, 'Now is the time!' He says now he will order 'Hookum hai!' He says, 'Are you ready?' He says, sahib,—he says it, sahib,—not I—he says, 'Thou art a fool to stare thus! Thou and thy men are fools! Stare, instead, as men who are bewitched!'”
“Try to look like boiled owls, to oblige his Highness, men!” said Brown. “Now, that's better; watch for the word! Easy on the rope a little!”
The men did their best to pose for the part of semimesmerized victims of a superhuman power. The flame from the burning roofs was dying down already, for the thatch burned fast, and the glowing gloom was deep enough to hide indifferent acting. With their lives at stake, though, men act better than they might at other times.
The fakir spun round on his heels and, clutching with his whole hand at the rope, began to execute a sort of dance—a weird, fantastic, horrible affair of quivering limbs and rolling eyeballs, topped by a withered arm that pointed upward, and a tortured fingernail-pierced fist that nodded on a dried-out-wrist-joint.
“Hookum hai!” he screamed suddenly, waving his sound hand upward, and bringing it down suddenly with a jerk, as though by sheer force he was blasting them.
“Down with you!” ordered Brown, and all except Brown and the Beluchi tumbled over backward.
“Keep hold of your rifles!” ordered Brown.
The fakir's wailing continued for a while. With his own hand he took the noose from his neck and, now that the flames had died away to nothing but spasmodic spurts above a dull red underglow, there was no one in the watching ring who could see Brown's sword-point. Only Brown and the fakir knew that it was scratching at the skin between the fakir's shoulder-blades.
“It is done!” said the fakir presently. “Now take me back to my dais again!” And the Beluchi translated.
“I'd like to hear their trigger-springs released,” suggested Brown. “This has all been a shade too slick for me. I've got my doubts yet about it's being done. Tell him to order them to uncock their rifles, so that I can hear them do it.”
“He says that they are gone already!” translated the Beluchi.
“Tell him I don't believe it!” answered Brown, whose eyes were straining to pierce the darkness, which was blacker than the pit again by now.
The fakir raised his voice into a howl—a long, low, ululating howl like that he had uttered when they found him on his dais. From the distance, beyond the range of rifles, came a hundred answering howls. The fakir waited, and a minute later a hundred howls were raised again, this time from an even greater distance.
Then he spoke.
“He says that they are gone,” translated the Beluchi. “He says he will go back to his dais again.”
“'Tshun!” ordered Brown. “Now, men, just because we've saved our skins so far is no reason why we should neglect precautions. We're going to put this imitation angel back on his throne again, so the same two carry him that brought him here. There's no sense in giving two more men the itch, and all the other ailments the brute suffers from! Form up round him, the rest. Take open order—say two paces—and go slow. Feel your way with your fixed bayonet, and don't take a step in the dark until you're sure where it will lead you. Forward-march! One of you bring that rope along.”
The weird procession crawled and crept and sidled back to where it had started from not so long before—jumping at every sound, and at every shadow that showed deeper than the coal-black night around them. It took them fifteen minutes to recross a hundred yards. But when they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown's command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the rifles in his charge.
They were scarcely visible to him or one another in the blackness, but he sensed the change in them, and changed his own tune to fit the changed condition.
His voice had nothing in it but the abrupt military explosion when he gave his orders now—no argument, no underlying sympathy. He was no longer herding a flock of frightened children. He was ordering trained, grown men, and he knew it and they knew it. The orders ripped out, like the crack of a drover's whip.
“Fall in, now, properly! 'Tshun! Right dress! To two paces—open order—from the center—extend! Now, then! Left and right wings—last three at each end forward—right wheel—halt. That's it. 'Bout face. Now each man keep two eyes lifting till the morning. If anything shows up, or any of you hear a sound, shoot first and challenge afterward!”
They were standing so when the pale sun greeted them, in hollow square, with their backs toward the fakir, who was squatting, staring straight in front of him, on his dais, with his back turned to the tree and his withered arm still pointing up to heaven like a dead man's calling to the gods for vengeance.
A little later, Brown made each alternate man lie down and get what sleep he could just where he was, with a comrade standing over him. He himself slept so for a little while. But one of the men heard something move among the hanging tendrils of the baobab, investigated with his bayonet-point, and managed to transfix a twelve-foot python. After that there was, not so much desire for sleep. The fakir either slept with his eyes open or else dispensed with sleep. No one seemed able to determine which.
When the day grew hotter, and the utterly remorseless Indian sun bore down on them, and on the aching desolation of the plain and the burnt-out guardhouse, the fakir still sat unblinking, gazing straight out in front of him, with eyes that hated but did nothing else. He seemed to have no time nor thought nor care for anything but hate and the expression of it.
At noon, three little children came to him, and brought him water in a small brass bowl, and cooked-up vegetables wrapped in some kind of leaf. Brown let him have theirs, and bribed the frightened children to go and bring water for the men and himself. He gave them the unheard-of wealth of one rupee between them, and they went off with it—and did not come back.
Meanwhile the fakir had drunk his water, and had poured out what was left. He had also eaten what the children had brought him, and suddenly, from vacant, implacable hatred, he woke up and began to be amused.
“Ha-ha!” he laughed at them. “Ho-ho!” And then he launched out with a string of eloquence that Brown called on the Beluchi to translate.
“Who said there would be thirst, and the sound of water! Is there a thirst? Who spoke of an anthill and of hungry ants and raw red openings in the flesh for the little ants to run in and out more easily?”
The Beluchi translated faithfully, and the men all listened.
“Tell him to hold his tongue!” growled Brown at last.
“Ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho!” laughed the fakir. “The heat grows great, and the tongues grow dry, and none bring water! Ho-ho! But I told them that I needed these for a deadlier death than any they devised! Ho-ho-ho-ho! Look at the little crows, how they wait in the branches! Ha-ha-ha-ha! See how the kites come! Where are the vultures? Wait! What speck sails in the sky there? Even the vultures come! Ho-ho-ho-ho!”
“I hear a horse, sir!” said one of the men who watched.
“I heard it more than a minute ago,” said Brown.
The fakir stopped his mockery, and even he listened.
“Ask him,” said Brown, “where are the men who set fire to the guardroom?”
“He says they are in the village, waiting till he sends for them!” said the Beluchi.
“Keep an eye lifting, you men,” ordered Brown. “This'll be a messenger from Bholat, ten to one. Mind they don't ambush him! Watch every way at once, and shoot at anything that moves!”
“Clippety-clippety-clippety-cloppety—”
The sound of a galloping horse grew nearer; a horse hard-ridden, that was none the less sure-footed still, and going strong in spite of sun and heat. Suddenly a foam-flecked black mare swung round a bend between two banks, and the sun shone on a polished saber-hilt. A turbaned Rajput rose in his stirrups, gazed left and right and then in front of him—from the burned-out guardhouse to the baobab—drew rein to a walk and waved his hand.
“By all that's good and great and wonderful,” said Brown aloud, “if here's not Juggut Khan again!”