by Talbot Mundy
Both of the guards lay dead. They lay quite neatly, side by side, without a sign about them to show that they had met with violence. Brown rolled one body over, though, and then the cause of death became more obvious. A stream of blood welled out of the man’s back, from between the shoulder-blades — warm blood, that had not even started to coagulate.
“They’ve been dead about three minutes!” commented Brown, rising, and wiping his hands in the road-dust to get the blood off them. “Pick ’em up. Carefully, now! Frog-march ’em, face-downwards. That’s better! Now, forward. Quick, march!”
The procession advanced toward the guardhouse in grim silence, and once again there was no challenge when there should have been. The lamp was still burning in the guardroom, for they could see it plainly as they drew nearer, but there was no noise of a sentry’s footfalls, or hoarse “Halt!” and “Who comes there?”
Nor was there any sign yet of the man whom Brown had left to guard both “clink” and guardroom. Brown let them take their dead comrades into the guardroom first, then set two fresh guards at the door, and covered up the bodies with a sheet before commencing to investigate.
He started off toward the cell where he had imprisoned the fakir. He went by himself, and no one volunteered to go with him.
He had gone five yards when the second explanation met his eyes. This time there was no need to stoop down, nor to turn any body over. The sentry whom he had left to guard both cell and guardroom stood bolt upright, with his mouth and his eyes wide open; skewered to the wall of the guardhouse by an iron spike, which pierced his chest.
“A lamp and four men here!” ordered Brown, without waiting to let the horror of the sight sink in. “Take that poor chap down, and lay him in the guardroom beside the others. How? How should I know? Pull it out, or break it off — I don’t care which; don’t leave him there, that’s all.”
He walked on toward the cell-door, while they labored, and fingered gingerly around the spike, which must have been driven through the sentry’s chest with a hammer.
“I thought as much!” he muttered. And, though he had not thought as much, he might have done so. “I knew that a man who could maim his own body in that way was capable of any crime in the calendar!”
The door of the cell stood open, and there was no sign of any fakir, or of any one who might have helped him go — nothing but an empty cell, with the haunting smell of the fakir still abiding in it.
Bill Brown spat, and closed the cell-door.
“I’m thinking that Juggut Khan told nothing but the truth,” he muttered. “Things look right, don’t they, if that’s so! Obey, Obey! I’d have liked to see England just once again — I would indeed. If I could only see her just once. If I’d a letter from her, or her picture. This is a rotten, rat-in-a-hole, lonely, uncreditable way to die! I wish Juggut Khan were here. I’d have somebody to help me keep my good courage up in that case.”
The lock on the cell-door was broken, so he only closed it, then started back toward the guardroom.
“Three rifles, and three ammunition pouches gone!” he muttered. “That’s three weapons they’ve got, in any case. A hornet’s nest’d be better stopping in than this place.”
He overtook the men who were carrying in the nail-killed sentry, and he saw that their faces were drawn and white. So were those of the other men, who were clustered in the guardroom door.
“What next, Sergeant? Hadn’t we better be quick? Why not burn the place? That’d do instead o’ buryin’ the dead ones, and it’d give us a light to get away by. Might serve as a beacon, too. Might fetch assistance!”
It was evident that panic had set in.
“Fall in!” commanded Brown, and his straight back took on a curve that meant straightness to the nth power.
“‘Tshun! Ri’ — dress! Eyes — front!”
He glared at them for just about one minute before he spoke, and during that minute each man there realized that what was coming would be quite irrevocable.
“I’m sergeant here. My orders are to hold this post until relieved. Therefore — and I hope there’s no man here holds any other notion; I hope it for his own sake! — until we are relieved, we’re going to hold it! Moreover, this command is going to be a real command, from now on. It’s going to buck up. I’m going to put some ginger in it. There are three dead men here to be avenged, and I’m going to avenge ’em, or make you do it! And if any man imagines he’s going to help himself by feeling afraid, let me assure him that the only thing he needs to fear is me! I’ve a right to command men — I know how — I intend to do it. And if I’ve got to make men first out of whey-faced cowards, why, I’m game to do it, and this is just where I begin! Now! Anybody got a word to say?”
There was grim silence.
“Good! I’ll assume, then, until I’m contradicted, that you’re all brave men. Into the guardroom with you!”
“Sahib! Sahib!” said a voice beside him.
“Well? What?”
It was the Beluchi interpreter who had carried the lamp for him that evening when he arrested the fakir.
“Run, sahib! It is time to run away!”
“Go on, then! Why don’t you run?”
“I am afraid, sahib.”
“Of what?”
“Of the men who slew the soldiers. Sahib! Remember what the fakir said. You will be pegged out on an anthill, sahib, when you have been beaten. Run, while there is yet time!”
“Did you see them kill my men?”
“Nay, sahib!”
“How was that?”
“I ran away and hid, sahib.”
“How many were there?”
“Very many. The Punjabi skin-buyer brought them.”
“He did, did he? Very well! Did he go off with the fakir?”
“I think he did. I did not see.”
“Well, we’ll suppose he did, then. And when the day breaks; we’ll suppose that we can find him, and we’ll go in search of him, and I wouldn’t like to be that Punjabi when I do find him! Get into the guard-room, and wait in there until I give you leave to stir.”
IV.
An Indian city that has yet to have its mysterie’s laid bare and banished by electric light is a stage deliberately set for massacre. The bazaars run criss-crosswise; any way at all save parallel, and anyhow but straight. Between them lies always a maze of passages, and alleys, deep sided, narrow, overhung by trellised windows and loopholed walls and guarded stairways.
For every square inch where the sun can shine there are a hundred where a man could hide unseen. Through century piled on suspicious century, no designer, no architect, no builder has neglected to provide a means of secret ingress, and still more secret egress, to each new house. And the newest house is built on secret passages that hid conspirators against the kings of men who lived before the oldest house was thought of.
After the Mutiny of ‘57 came broader roads — so that a cannon might be trained along them.
But in ‘57, Jailpore was a nest of winding alley-ways and blind bat and rat holes, where weird smells and strange unlisted poisons and prophecies were born. In its midst, tight-packed in a roaring babel-din of many-colored markets, stood a stone-walled palace, built once by a Hindu king to commemorate a victory over Moslems, added to by a Moslem Nizam, to celebrate his conquest of the Hindus and added to once again by the Honorable East India Company, to make a suitable barracks for its native troops.
From the rat-infested slums, from the hot shadows and the mazy back-bazaars, from temples, store-houses, shops, and from the sin-steeped underworld, there screamed and surged and swept the many-graded, many-minded polyglot rebellion-spume. A quarter of a million underdogs had turned against their masters. A hundred factions and as many more religions, all had one common end in view — to loot. All were agreed on one thing — that the first stage of the game must be to turn Jailpore and, after Jailpore, India, into a charnel-house.
Around and around the burning palace the mob screamed and swept unc
ontrolled. Moslem looted Hindu, and Hindu Moslem. Armed sepoys, with the blood of their British officers fresh-soaked on their British uniforms, and the unspent pay of “John Company” still jingling in their pockets, danced weird, wild devil-dances through the streets, clearing their way, when they saw fit, with cold steel or wanton volleys. Women screamed. Caste looted caste. Loose horses galloped madly through the streets. Here and there a pitched battle raged, where a merchant who had wealth had also courage, and apprentices and friends to help him defend his store.
And through all the din and clamor, under and above the howling and the volleys and the roar of flames, sounded the steady thumping of the sacred war-drums. The whole sky glowed red. The Indian night was scorched and smoked and lit by arson. Hell screamed with the cooking of red mutiny, and throbbed with the thunder of the sacred temple-drums. And that was only one of the hells, and a small one. India glowed red that night from end to end!
Juggut Khan, free-lance Rajput and gentleman of fortune, had ridden out of that caldron of Jailpore. His house was a heap of glowing ashes, and his goods were tossed for and distributed among a company. But his mark lay indelibly impressed upon the town. There were three European women and a child who were nowhere to be found; and there was a trail that led from somewhere near the palace to the western gate. It was a red trail.
In one spot lay a sepoy pierced through by a lance, and with half of the lance-shaft still standing upright in him. That had been bad art — sheer playing to the gallery! Juggut Khan had run him through and tried to lift him on the lance-end for a trophy. It was luck that saved the day for him that time, not swordsmanship.
But a man who has done what he had done that day may be forgiven. There lay nine other men behind him where his lance was left, and each of them lay face upward with a round red hole in his anatomy where the lance had entered.
And from the point where he had broken his lance and left it, up to where a self-appointed guard had refused at first to open the city gate for him, there was a trail that did honor to the man who taught him swordsmanship. One man lay headless, and another’s head was only part of him, because the sword had split it down the middle and the two halves were still joined together at the neck.
There were men who claimed afterward that of the twenty-three who lay between his lance-shaft and the city gate, some five or six had been slain in brawls and looting forays. And Juggut Khan was never known to discuss the matter. But the fact remains that every man of them was killed by the blade or point of a cavalry-saber, and that Juggut Khan broke out of the place untouched.
And another fact worthy of record is, that underneath a stone floor, in a building that was partly powder-magazine-surrounded at every end and side by mutineers who searched for them, and very nearly stifled by the dust of decaying ages — there lay three women and a child, with a jar of water close beside them and a sack of hastily collected things to eat. They lay there in all but furnace-heat, close-huddled in the darkness, and they shuddered and sobbed and blessed Juggut Khan alternately. Below them the whispering echoes sighed mysteriously through a maze of tunnels. Around them, and around their sack of food, the rats scampered. Above them, where a ten-ton stone trapdoor lay closed over their heads, black powder stood in heaps and sacks and barrels. Closing the trapdoor had been easy. One pushed it and it fell. Not all the mutineers in Jailpore nor Juggut Khan nor any one could open it again without the secret. And no man living knew the secret. The three women and the child were safe from immediate intrusion!
Those three women and that child were not so exceptionally placed for India, of that date. Two of the women had seen their husbands slain that afternoon, before their eyes. They were mother and daughter and grandson; and the fourth was an English nurse, red-cheeked still from the kiss of English Channel breezes.
“If only Bill were here!” the nurse wailed. “I know he’d find a way out. There wasn’t never nothing nowhere that beat Bill. Bill wouldn’t ha’ left us! Bill’d ha’ took us out o’ here, an’ saved our lives. Bill — snnff, snnff — Bill wouldn’t ha’ — snnff, snnff — shoved us in a rat-hole and took hisself off!”
She had not yet lost her English point of view. She still believed that the strong right arm of an English lover could play ducks and drakes with Destiny. One-half of the world, at least, still swears that she was wrong, and her mistress and the other woman thought her despicable, ridiculous, unenlightened. It was a hardship to them, to be endured with dignity and patience, but none the less a hardship, that they should be left and should have to die with this woman of the Ranks Below to keep them company. She was an honest woman, or they would never have engaged her and paid her passage all the way to India. But she was not of their jat, and she was a fool. It happens, however, that her point of view saved England for the English, and that the other point of view had brought England to the brink of utter ruin.
“If you’d leave off talking about your truly tiresome lover, and would pray to God, Jane,” said Mrs. Leslie, “the rest of us might have a chance to pray to God too! This isn’t the time, let me tell you, to be thinking of carnal love-affairs. Recall your sins, one by one, and ask forgiveness for them.”
In the gloom of the vault, poor Jane was quite invisible. The sound of her snuffling and sobs was the only clue to her direction. But her bridling was a thing that could be felt through the stuffy blackness, and there was a ring in her retort that gave the lie to the tears that she was shedding.
“The only sin I ask forgiveness for,” she answered in a level voice, “is having let Bill come to India alone. Pray to God, is it? Go on! Pray! If Bill was here, he’d start on that stone door without no words nor argument, unless some one tried to stop him. Then there’d be an argument! And he’d get it open too. Bill’s the kind that does his prayin’ afterward, and God helps men like Bill!”
“Well — I’m afraid that your Bill isn’t here, and can’t get here. So the best thing that you can do is to pray and let us pray.”
“I’ll pray for Bill!” said Jane defiantly. “Bill don’t know that I’m in India, and he surely doesn’t know I’m here. But if he knew — Oh, God! Let him know! Tell him! He’d come so quick. He’d — snnff, snnff — he’d — why, he’d ha’ been here long ago! Dear God, tell Bill I’m here, that’s all!”
V.
General Baines was in a position to be envied. No soldier worthy of his salt is other than elated at the thought of war. Now for the proving of his theories. Now for the fruit of all his tireless preaching and inspection and preparing — the planned, pegged-out swoop to victory!
He knew — as few men in India knew — the length and the breadth of what was coming. And when two of his non-commissioned officers sent in word that the whole country was ablaze, he realized, as few other men did in that minute, that this was no local outbreak. The long-threatened holocaust had come, and he had to act, to smite, to strike sure and swift at the festering root of things, or Central India was lost.
But his hands were tied still. He knew. He could see. He could feel. He could hear. But he had his orders. That very morning they had been repeated to him, and with emphasis. In a letter from the Council he had been told that “slight disturbances, of a purely local character, were not without the bounds of possibility, due partly to religious unrest and partly to local causes. Under no circumstances were any extended reprisals to be undertaken until further orders, and generals commanding districts were required to keep the bulk of their commands within cantonments.”
The countryside was up. All India probably was up. His own men, set by himself to watch with one definite idea, had confirmed his worst fears. And he was under orders to stay with the bulk of his command in Bholat! Corked up in cantonments, with three thousand first-class fighting-men squealing for trouble, and red rebellion running riot all around him though it might be quelled by instant action!
And then worse happened. Juggut Khan clattered in to Bholat, spurring a horse that was so spent it could barely keep its feet. I
t fell in a woeful heap outside the general’s quarters, and Juggut Khan — all but as weary as the horse — swung himself free, staggered past the sentry at the door and rapped with his hilt on the tough teak panel. They had to give him brandy and feed him before he could summon strength enough to tell what he had seen and heard and done.
“And Brown stayed on at the crossroads?”
“Aye, General sahib! He stayed!”
The general sat back and drummed his heels together on the floor in a way that his aides had come to recognize as meaning trouble.
“You say that all of the European officers in Jailpore have been killed?”
“I did not count. I did not even know them all by mine or sight. I think, though, that all were killed. I heard men among the mutineers declare that all had been accounted for, save only three women and a child, and me. Those four I myself had hidden, and as for myself — I too was accounted for, and not without credit to the Raj for whom I fight!”
“I believe you, Juggut Khan! Did you have to cut your way out?”
The Rajput smiled.
“There was a message to deliver, sahib! What would you? Should I have waited while they arrested me?”
“Oh! You managed to evade them, did you?”
“At least I am here, sahib!”
The general chewed at his mustache, leaned his chair back against the wall and tapped at his boot with a riding-cane.
“Tell me, Juggut Khan,” he said after another minute’s thought, “what is your idea? Is this sporadic? Is this a local outbreak? Will this die down, if left to burn itself out?”
The Rajput laughed aloud.
“‘Sporadic,”’ he answered, “is a word of which I have yet to learn the meaning. If ‘sporadic’ means rebellion from Peshawur to Cape Cormorin — revolution, rape, massacre, arson, high treason, torture, death to every European and every half-breed and every loyal native north, south, east and west — then, yes, General sahib, ‘sporadic’ would be the proper word. If your Honor should mean less than that, then some other word is needed!”
