by Talbot Mundy
“You mean perjury?”
“I mean that Captain Norwood can be cleared of the charge of bribery,” the Maharanee answered. “However, Rundhia made a condition.”
“Oh? Yes?”
“Life is so involved,” said the Maharanee. “Lynn dear, everything is conditional on something else. For instance, His Highness my husband rules Kadur on condition that he rules not too unwisely. We eat on condition that people pay their taxes.”
“Maharanee dear! Tell me. Don’t prepare me for it. I can take it without our pretending it’s something else.”
“Very well,” said the Maharanee. “Let us be quite frank with each other. Rundhia loves you.”
“So says Rundhia.”
“And I love you.”
“I can believe that,” Lynn answered. “Why else should you be so kind? I haven’t influence or money.”
“You have personality,” the Maharanee answered. “You have imagination and spirit. You can redeem Rundhia. So that when the day comes that he shall be Maharajah of Kadur, he will be a great man. Rundhia will do anything for you — anything. Your influence will persuade him to do good things, of that I am sure. Even now, having known you only one day, for your sake he is willing to save Captain Norwood. But he makes conditions.”
“Can’t he tell them to me?”
“He has gone in search of that creature Gulbaz. Rundhia has taken it for granted that you will accept the conditions, since he has accepted, as a command, your wish that he should help Captain Norwood.”
“Am I in a trap?” Lynn asked suddenly.
“Darling! You have asked of Rundhia that he shall risk losing perhaps (there is no knowing) but perhaps, the undivided title to a diamond mine that has been a source of revenue for many centuries. That is what covering up Captain Norwood’s act of treachery may mean.”
Lynn almost lost her temper. She retorted: “I was treacherous. So was Rundhia. I don’t believe Captain Norwood has been! I won’t believe it until they prove it.”
The Maharanee returned to her subject: “Rundhia insists that you mustn’t tell Captain Norwood whose influence it was that saved him. He demands — and I think that is fair, isn’t it? — Rundhia can’t afford to be compromised — he demands that if Captain Norwood should characteristically force his way into your presence, you will not answer Norwood’s questions.”
“But I have asked Captain Norwood to come and see me.”
The Maharanee’s sympathy looked genuine. Lynn didn’t doubt it:
“Lynn dear, Rundhia thinks that Captain Norwood probably believes you told about the diamonds because you knew that Captain Norwood was embarrassed by your having seen them, and you wished to punish him for remarks he had made, in the garden, last night. Rundhia thinks that perhaps Captain Norwood won’t answer your letter.”
Lynn was silent for a long time, thinking. The Maharanee watched her, reading, on Lynn’s face, the course of the struggle between pride, humiliation, anger — and some other, western emotion that not even Lynn could have put into words. It was too simple. Too elementary. It escaped analysis. At last Lynn spoke:
“I promise. I won’t tell Captain Norwood that Rundhia is helping him. But will Rundhia do it?”
“For you he will do anything,” the Maharanee answered.
Chapter Twenty-three
NORWOOD sat in his tent and checked Stoddart’s survey figures, found a couple of mistakes, corrected them, admonished Stoddart and gave the sergeant instructions for the following day. Stoddart asked for leave to visit the bazaar.
“No. I want you to keep your eye on the camp. There are plenty of thieves in this neighborhood. Besides, I am rather expecting a visit from certain Brahmins. It will be a rather confidential sort of visit. They are likely to come quietly, after dark. It wouldn’t do to mistake them for thieves. So keep your eyes open. I will instruct the sentries, of course, but I want you, Stoddart, to keep very wide awake. The minute O’Leary shows up, send him to me.”
Norwood smoked after that, for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then, three times, with his hands behind him, he paced the distance between his tent and the horse-line. He noticed that O’Leary had taken a horse without permission, but decided to say nothing about it. If O’Leary had asked, he would have let him take a horse, but not that good one.
After the third of his pacings to and fro, he sat at the table in his tent and wrote a letter to Lynn Harding, tore it up, and made several more attempts. He tore up the last one, gathered all the scraps of paper into one heap, carried them to a cook-fire and burned the lot. Since the cook looked displeased at having had his fire interfered with, Norwood inspected the pots and pans and fined the cook two rupees, the fine to be remitted contingent on thirty days’ good behaviour.
He returned to his tent, scraped out a pipe, wrote another letter to Lynn Harding and tore up that one. It was getting on toward dark. The Kadur River was a splurge of crimson. He heard the hoof-beats of O’Leary’s horse at about the hour when he had first seen Lynn Harding in the Maharanee’s carriage. Norwood’s servant came and lighted the lamp in the tent.
O’Leary approached the horse-line through the trees and the scrub, from a direction chosen to prevent Norwood from seeing which horse he had taken. He turned the horse over to a sais and walked to Norwood’s tent with an air of nonchalance and a slouch in his gait. Norwood knocked the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. It was only when O’Leary had no news worth telling that he tried to look smart. When he looked as unimportant as most people believed him to be, he was absolutely certainly primed with red-hot news. By the time O’Leary reached the tent, Norwood was in an easy camp-chair, cutting the pages of a new book and smoking as if there were nothing on earth to be troubled about.
“That lamp ain’t fit to read by,” said O’Leary. “You’ll ruin your eyes. The only kind o’ engineer that can look after himself has a couple o’ fingers missing, along o’ having learned what engineering is! Let me turn it out. I’ll fix it later.”
“Come in. Sit down.”
O’Leary blew out the lamp. Then he sat. It was not yet night outside, but it was too dark in the tent for them to see each other’s faces.
“Meaning you!” said O’Leary. “I could have picked you off against that lamplight from a hundred yards away, aye, and no one know who done it.”
“Talk,” said Norwood. —
“I’m dry o’ talking. I’ve a throat like a baker’s oven.”
“You shall have a drink presently.”
“Said the devil to the sinner! That Bengali doctor’s sore at someone. He’s scared. He’s roiled. He’s up to mischief. Like all them Bengalis, he’s a mixture of too many different kinds of education. He’s as full of spite as a scalded cat. He has imagination like the toothache. What he needs is an umbrella, to keep worry off with.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“Did he! — Time to post the sentries?”
“Stoddart is doing it now. Can’t you hear him?”
“Yeh, but I know Stoddart.”
“Stoddart has his orders. I will go the rounds presently. What did the Bengali doctor tell you? Come on now, out with it.”
“The way I managed him was this,” said O’Leary. “I was looking in on Mrs. Harding, cracking on I’d come to fix the plumbing, on account o’ my hearing her raising hell. She was doing a better job of that than you or I could. I understand she’s a widow. I don’t blame her husband for taking a chance on the nex’ world. She has her things pretty near packed, in about a lorry-load o’ trunks on the verandah. She was cussing out the servants until the doctor turned up, and then she turned her guns on him. She demanded her bill, and he remarked she didn’t owe him nothing. So I knew right then, there was a cockroach in somebody’s butter. I stuck around, umbrageous.
“What she said to that Bengali doctor, mind you, I wouldn’t say to a thief. He was trying to persuade her to take some physic for her stomach. And she wouldn’t. He said it ‘ud make her stomach easy, a
nd she’d be fit to travel. He offered to swallow some of it himself, to prove it was harmless. But she said he could swallow the bottle, for all o’ her. He said he was trying to speed the parting guest, and she said she didn’t need no speedin’. She said she was getting the hell out o’ there ( only she didn’t use no bad language, I mean, not what a priest ‘ud call bad). She said she couldn’t get out fast enough to suit her.
“But that Bengali stuck to it. I never seen a man stand up to such a scorching and keep on taking it. Me listening, mind you, but them not seeing me. Oftener than not folks lie to each other, specially strangers, without much meaning to it. I refereed that both o’ them was telling the truth. I gave it a draw. So there’s something wrong somewhere. There weren’t nothing for me to do but stop the fight.
“So I showed up, suitable respectful cracking on I hadn’t heard nothing. And I said I was Captain Norwood’s private servant and had the Captain left his pipe on the verandah when he called this afternoon? You should have heard that female talk, and what she said about you! She said she wouldn’t put it past you to have smoked your pipe on her verandah, but if you had done it she’d have kicked the stinking thing into the bushes. Long and short o’ it, she don’t like you. And she accused me o’ your having sent me to her to make another attempt to use her as a go-between. She said she didn’t believe one dam-thing that the Bengali doctor had told her, except that Captain Norwood was a crook what took bribes; and that the sooner me and the Bengali got out o’ her sight, the better she’d like it. She pitched a hundred-rupee note at him for his fee, and he let it lie there. Him and me—”
Norwood interrupted: “What became of the hundred rupees?”
“The priest shall have what’s coming to him,” said O’Leary. “Let me tell this story straight on end, afore I get too thirsty to remember. I followed the Bengali. I overtook him where it was quiet, and no shrubbery where folks could scratch their noses poking into other people’s business. I spoke reproachful.
“I asked him: ‘Doctor sahib, did you tell that woman what she said you told her about Captain Norwood?’ He came back at me with: ‘Are you genuinely Captain Norwood’s servant?’ And I said if I’m not genuine, there’s less than sixteen annas to a rupee. And when he’d thought a bit he answered: ‘Yes, I told her. I repeated rumor. I should not have done it.’ He acted nervous. And after a minute, he pulled out five rupees and gave ’em to me. I looked noncommittal, so he gave me five more. Then he said to me: ‘Will you be seeing Captain Norwood? How soon? Tell him, but don’t say who told you, that his life is in danger — tonight! Warn him that his enemies have heard about that bribe, and they will try to kill him. Let him look to himself.’
“So, of course, I played up. I acted ugly. Him being a Bengali, I imputed motives — plenty of ’em — anything that came into my head, until I think he told the truth. You can’t ever be sure a Bengali is telling the truth, if he’s talking to you. You have to listen in on ’em to get truth you’re sure of. But I think he gave his real reason. I wouldn’t bet on it, but it’s worth repeating.”
Norwood knocked out his pipe: “What was it?”
“He don’t care a damn about you. But he’s scared stiff o’ what might happen if they killed a British officer in Kadur. I figured out the meaning o’ that, quicker than you’d take a snapshot. He’s up to something crafty. No knowing what. But he figures he can get away with it all right if nothing happens, like the killing of a British officer, that would bring a British investigation on the scene.”
Norwood refilled his pipe: “So you think the priests intend to murder me?”
“Hell, no.”
“Neither do I.”
“If they did intend to,” said O’Leary, “that Bengali doctor wouldn’t know about it.”
“Well,” said Norwood, “you’ve done nicely.
You have a hundred and ten rupees for an hour’s work.”
“Not me. I’m proud. I gave him back his ten rupees. He’s nothing but a babu doctor.”
Norwood found the whiskey bottle in the dark. He poured a stiff drink and locked up the bottle, gave the drink to O’Leary, and walked off on his rounds to instruct the sentries.
O’Leary waited for him outside the tent. He looked as nervous as the shadow of a tree that quivers in the evening wind. Twice he started to overtake Norwood, but thought better of it. At last when Norwood returned, he hesitated, and if Norwood hadn’t faced him he might not have spoken.
“Still here?” said Norwood. “What’s on your mind?”
“There’s a man I’m scared of.”
“Oh? Who is he?”
“He’s an old acquaintance o’ yours.”
“I asked: who is he?”
“A man name o’ Gulbaz.”
“Oh, is that devil in Kadur? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I was afraid you’d go after him.” Norwood smiled. O’Leary grinned. “What I do,” said Norwood, “and what I don’t do are none of your business.”
“Yes, they are! Gulbaz ‘ud kill you. Then what? He swore to get you, on account o’ that Poona business, when you caught him stealing from the secret files.”
“Yes, I remember he was angry.”
“You shouldn’t have let him off. I warned you then. You sail you’d a good reason.”
“It still is a good reason.”
“It was a crazy reason.”
“Remember your manners.”
“I haven’t any — not when you go chancing getting bumped off by a badmash that ‘ud skin his mother for the price o’ leather. You said you’d catch him later doing something important.”
“Did I say that?”
“You did. I’ll forget it if you will. There’s nothing doing this time.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t say where he is nor what he’s up to. You leave him to me!”
Norwood chuckled: “You propose to yourself to steal my thunder, do you!”
“So help me God, I wouldn’t steal nothing from you, and you know it.”
“Not even whiskey.”
“Please, sir, Captain Norwood, you listen to me. You listen to your Uncle Moses, just once. You’re quality, you are. You’re too valuable to be risked against a swine like Gulbaz. He’s dirt. He’s fit for nothing but a knife in the back and to hell with him. He’s my job. You leave him to me.” Norwood chuckled again: “Moses, your friend Gulbaz—”
“My friend?”
“ — is the apple of my eye. I won’t have him hurt. Not a hair of his head.”
“How about his belly? I can kick like a battery mule.”
“You’re not to touch him. Gulbaz is mine, saith the rule of the game. I need him. As soon as this little business in Kadur is finished, we’ve a survey to run, eight hundred miles from here, where there’s a dark little game going on. And your friend Gulbaz is the bell-wether—”
“He’s a pig and a snake and a son of a—”
“Never mind what he is. It’s what he shall do that matters. He shall decoy his friends—”
Moses laughed: “That swine hasn’t any friends.”
“He has three bosom friends and a gang of eleven all told. He shall decoy them all into one net.”
“Says you,” observed Moses.
“Don’t be theatrical. You may go and talk to Gulbaz if you want to, but you’re not to touch him. If you get yourself killed, I’ll pay that priest of yours to say no masses for you. You shall stay in hell forever.”
“Mayn’t I have just one crack at him? I could make him a hospital job, where you’d know where he is and—”
“I have given you a definite order that you’re not to touch him.”
“Yes, but suppose he takes a crack at me?”
“In that case, you’re to run away.”
“Stoddart can’t run. He’s too fat. I’d like to borrow Stoddart.”
“What for?”
“I’ll need him.”
“I said: what for?”
“For a witness. If I don’t have a witness, there’ll be nothing Gulbaz won’t do or won’t swear to.”
“How long do you expect to be gone?”
“About twenty minutes. Maybe less. It don’t take long to get Gulbaz’ goat.”
“I can’t afford to lose Stoddart.”
“I’ll bring that big baby back as safe as if he rode a bathchair.”
“Very well, I will tell Stoddart to go with you.”
“And see here, sir—”
“Well? What’s on your mind now?”
“Just this once, may I talk to you man to man?”
“That’s what you’re paid to do.”
“And say straight what I mean? No pulling punches?”
“If you’ll remember your manners, I’ll listen. What is it, Moses?”
“Well, seeing as how you’ve asked for it, I’ll tell you. Woman trouble is the worst kind o’ trouble. Woman danger is the worst kind o’ danger. There ain’t no sense in it, nor no dividends. Lay off women.”
“You mean you’ve heard some gossip about me and women? Are you such a fool that you listen to that kind of stuff? What’s come over you? You know better than that.”
“Wisht I didn’t. One woman, and she a young ‘un, is a hundred times dangerouser than a hundred women. You can raise hell with a hundred women and get away with it. But tackle one, and she’s got you. You’re in the bag. You take my advice and—”
Norwood shut him up with a sudden gesture: “Dismiss. Tell Sergeant Stoddart to come here.”
Chapter Twenty-four
IT had been an army lorry once, but it had fallen on evil days and was now a contractor’s truck, so it looked suitably unofficial. The Indian driver had been commandeered by Moses and for one rupee eight annas in lawful money had agreed to go anywhere, lawful or not. Inside, beneath the rotting and ragged canvas cover, Moses sat on the floor facing Sergeant Stoddart.
“You’re a fathead,” said Moses. “You don’t know what it’s all about and you never will know.”
Stoddart lighted his pipe. His face by the light of the match looked tolerant and noncommittal. He moved the match to get a better look at Moses. Moses grinned and reached for Stoddart’s tobacco.
