Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “By gad, they are! Look! The enemy are moving to cut them off!”

  “I must get back to the other wing!” said General Turner. “But that looks like the making of an opportunity! Keep both eyes lifting, Carter, and advance the moment you see any confusion in the enemy’s ranks.”

  He rode off, and Colonel Carter stared long and steadily at the approaching horsemen. He saw a dense mass of the enemy, about a thousand strong, detach itself from the left wing and move to intercept them, and he noticed that the movement made a tremendous difference to the ranks opposed to him. He stepped up to young Bellairs and touched his sleeve. Bellairs started like a man roused from a dream.

  “That’s your wife over there!” said Colonel Carter. “There can’t be any other white woman here-abouts riding with a Rajput escort!”

  Bellairs gripped the colonel’s outstretched arm.

  “Where?” he almost screamed. “Where? I don’t see her!”

  “There, man! There, where that mass of men is moving! Look! By the Lord Harry! He’s charging right through the mob! That’s Mahommed Khan, I’ll bet a fortune! Now’s our chance Bugler!”

  The bugler ran to him, and he began to puff into his instrument.

  “Blow the ‘attention’ first!”

  Out rang the clear, strident notes, and the non-commissioned officers and men took notice that a movement of some kind would shortly be required of them, but the din of firing never ceased for a single instant. Then, suddenly, an answering bugle sang out from the other flank.

  “Advance in echelon!” commanded Colonel Carter, and the bugler did his best to split his cheeks in a battle-rending blast.

  “You remain where you are, sir!” he ordered young Bellairs. “Keep your guns served to the utmost!”

  Six-and-twenty horsemen, riding full-tilt at a thousand men, may look like a trifle, but they are disconcerting. What they hit, they kill; and if they succeed in striking home, they play old Harry with formations. And Risaldar Mahommed Khan did strike home. He changed direction suddenly and, instead of using up his horses’ strength in outflanking the enemy, who had marched to intercept him, and making a running target of his small command, he did the unexpected — which is the one best thing to do in war. He led his six-and-twenty at a headlong gallop straight for the middle of the crowd — it could not be called by any military name. They fired one ragged volley at him and then had no time to load before he was in the middle of them, clashing right and left and pressing forward. They gave way, right and left, before him, and a good number of them ran. Half a hundred of them were cut down as they fled toward their firing-line. At that second, just as the Risaldar and his handful burst through the mob and the mob began rushing wildly out of his way, the British bugles blared out the command to advance in echelon.

  The Indians were caught between a fire and a charge that they had good reason to fear in front of them, and a disturbance on their left flank that might mean anything. As one-half of them turned wildly to face what might be coming from this unexpected quarter, the British troops came on with a roar, and at the same moment Mahommed Khan reached the rear of their firing-line and crashed headlong into it.

  In a second the whole Indian line was in confusion and in another minute it was in full retreat not knowing nor even guessing what had routed it. Retreat grew into panic and panic to stampede and, five minutes after the Risaldar’s appearance on the scene, half of the Indian line was rushing wildly for Hanadra and the other half was retiring sullenly in comparatively dense and decent order.

  Bellairs could not see all that happened. The smoke from his own guns obscured the view, and the necessity for giving orders to his men prevented him from watching as he would have wished. But he saw the Rajputs burst out through the Indian ranks and he saw his own charger — Shaitan the unmistakable — careering across the plain toward him riderless.

  “For the love of God!” he groaned, raising both fists to heaven, “has she got this far, and then been killed! Oh, what in Hades did I entrust her to an Indian for? The pig-headed, brave old fool! Why couldn’t he ride round them, instead of charging through?”

  As he groaned aloud, too wretched even to think of what his duty was, a galloper rode up to him.

  “Bring up your guns, sir, please!” he ordered. “You’re asked to hurry! Take up position on that rising ground and warm up the enemy’s retreat!”

  “Limber up!” shouted Bellairs, coming to himself again. Fifteen seconds later his two guns were thundering up the rise.

  As he brought them to “action front” and tried to collect his thoughts to figure out the range, a finger touched his shoulder and he turned to see another artillery officer standing by him.

  “I’ve been lent from another section,” he explained: “You’re wanted.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there, where you see Colonel Carter standing. It’s your wife wants you, I think!”

  Bellairs did not wait for explanations. He sent for his horse and mounted and rode across the intervening space at a breakneck gallop that he could barely stop in time to save himself from knocking the colonel over. A second later he was in Ruth’s arms.

  “I thought you were dead when I saw Shaitan!” he said. He was nearly sobbing.

  “No, Mahommed Khan rode him,” she answered, and she made no pretense about not sobbing. She was crying like a child.

  “Salaam, Bellairs sahib!” said a weak voice close to him. He noticed Colonel Carter bending over a prostrate figure, lifting the head up on his knee. There were three Rajputs standing between, though, and he could not see whose the figure was.

  “Come over here!” said Colonel Carter, and young Bellairs obeyed him, leaving Ruth sitting on the ground where she was.

  “Wouldn’t you care to thank Mohammed Khan?” It was a little cruel of the colonel to put quite so much venom in his voice, for, when all is said and done: a man has almost a right to be forgetful when he has just had his young wife brought him out of the jaws of death. At least he has a good excuse for it. The sting of the reproof left him bereft of words and he stood looking down at the old Risaldar, saying nothing and feeling very much ashamed.

  “Salaam, Bellairs sahib!” The voice was growing feebler. “I would have done more for thy father’s son! Thou art welcome. Aie! But thy charger is a good one! Good-by! Time is short, and I would talk with the colonel sahib!”

  He waved Bellairs away with a motion of his hand and the lieutenant went back to his wife again.

  “He sent me away just like that, too!” she told him. “He said he had no time left to talk to women!”

  Colonel Carter bent down again above the Risaldar, and listened to as much as he had time to tell of what had happened.

  “But couldn’t you have ridden round them, Risaldar?” he asked them.

  “Nay, sahib! It was touch and go! I gave the touch! I saw as I rode how close the issue was and I saw my chance and took it! Had the memsahib been slain, she had at least died in full view of the English — and there was a battle to be won. What would you? I am a soldier — I.”

  “Indeed you are!” swore Colonel Carter.

  “Sahib! Call my sons!”

  His sons were standing near him, but the colonel called up his grandsons, who had been told to stand at a little distance off. They clustered round the Risaldar in silence, and he looked them over and counted them.

  “All here?” he asked.

  “All here!”

  “Whose sons and grandsons are ye?”

  “Thine!” came the chorus.

  “This sahib says that having done my bidding and delivered her ye rode to rescue, ye are no more bound to the Raj. Ye may return to your homes if ye wish.”

  There was no answer.

  “Ye may fight for the rebels, if ye wish! There will be a safe-permit written.”

  Again there was no answer.

  “For whom, then, fight ye?”

  “For the Raj!” The deep-throated answer rang out promptly f
rom every one of them, and they stood with their sword-hilts thrust out toward the colonel. He rose and touched each hilt in turn.

  “They are now thy servants!” said the Risaldar, laying his head back. “It is good! I go now. Give my salaams to General Turner sahib!”

  “Good-by, old war-dog!” growled the colonel, in an Anglo-Saxon effort to disguise emotion. He gripped at the right hand that was stretched out on the ground beside him, but it was lifeless.

  Risaldar Mahommed Khan, two-medal man and pensionless gentleman-at-large, had gone to turn in his account of how he had remembered the salt which he had eaten.

  MACHASSAN AH

  I.

  Waist-held in the chains and soused in the fifty-foot-high spray, Joe Byng eyed his sounding lead that swung like a pendulum below him, and named it sacrilege.

  “This ‘ere navy ain’t a navy no more,” he muttered. “This ‘ere’s a school-gal promenade, ‘and-in-’and, an’ mind not to get your little trotters wet, that’s what this is, so ‘elp me two able seamen an’ a red marine!”

  From the moment that the lookout, lashed to the windlass drum up forward, had spied the little craft away to leeward and had bellowed his report of it through hollowed hands between the thunder of the waves, Joe Byng had had premonitory symptoms of uneasiness. He had felt in his bones that the navy was about to be nose-led into shame.

  At the wheel, both eyes on the compass, as the sea law bids, but both ears on the more-even-than-usual-alert, Curley Crothers felt the same sensations but expressed them otherwise.

  “Admiral’s orders!” he muttered. “Maybe the admiral was drunk?”

  The brass gongs clanged down in the bowels of H.M.S. Puncher and she gradually lost what little weigh she had, rolling her bridge ends under in the heave and hollow of a beam-on monsoon sea.

  “How much does he say he wants?” asked her commander.

  Joe Byng in the chains and Curley Crothers at the wheel both recognized the quarter tone instantly, and diagnosed it with deadly accuracy; every vibration of his voice and every fiber of his being expressed exasperation, though a landsman might have noticed no more than contempt for what he had seen fit to log as “half a gale.”

  “He says he’ll take us in for fifty pounds, sir.”

  “Oh! Tell him to make it shillings, or else to get out of my course!”

  It is not much in the way of Persian Gulf Arabic that a man picks up from textbooks but at garnering the business end of beach-born dialects — the end that gets results at least expense of time or energy — the Navy goes even the Army half a dozen better. The sublieutenant’s argument, bawled from the bridge rail to the reeling little boat below, was a marvel in its own sweet way; it combined abuse and scorn with a cataclysmic blast of threat in six explosive sentences.

  “He says he’ll take us in for ten pounds, sir,” he reported, without the vestige of a smile.

  “Oh! Ask Mr. Hartley to step up on the bridge, will you?”

  Two minutes later, during which the nasal howls from the boat were utterly ignored, the acting chief engineer hauled himself along the rail hand over hand to windward, ducking below the canvas guard as a more than usually big comber split against the Puncher’s side and hove itself to heaven.

  “It beats me how any man can keep a coat on him this weather,” he remarked, and the sublieutenant noticed that the streams that ran down both his temples were not sea water. “Send for me?”

  His temper, judging by his voice, would seem to be a lot worse than could be due to the pitching of the ship.

  “Yes. There’s a pilot overside, and our orders are to take a pilot aboard when running in, if available. There are three men bailing that boat below there, and the sea’s gaining on them. They’ll need rescuing within two hours. Then we’d have a pilot aboard and would have saved the government ten pounds. Point is, can you manage in the engine-room for two or three hours longer? Three more waves like that last one and the man’s ours anyway!”

  “He might not wait two hours,” suggested Mr. Hartley. “He might get tired of looking at us, and beat back into port. Then where would be your strategy?”

  “Then there wouldn’t be a pilot available. I’d be justified in going in without one. Point is, can you hold out below?”

  “Man,” said Mr. Hartley, “you’re a genius.” He peered through the spray down to leeward, where the pilot’s boat danced a death dance alongside, heel and toe to the Puncher’s statelier swing. “Yes; there are three men bailing, and you’re a genius. But no! The answer’s no! The engines’ll keep on turning, maybe and perhaps, until we make the shelter o’ yon reef. There’s no knowing what a cherry-red bearing will do. I can give ye maybe fifteen knots; maybe a leetle more for just five minutes, for steerage way and luck, and after that—”

  Even crouched as he was against the canvas guard he contrived to shrug his shoulders.

  “But if we go in there are you sure you can contrive to patch her up? It looks like a rotten passage, and not much of a berth beyond it.”

  “I could cool her down.”

  “Oh, if that’s all you want, I can anchor outside in thirty fathoms.”

  Curley Crothers heard that and his whole frame stiffened; there seemed a chance yet that the Navy might not be disgraced. But it faded on the instant.

  “Man, we’ve got to go inside and we’ve got to hurry! Better in there than at the bottom of the Gulf! Put her where she’ll hold still for a day, or maybe two days—”

  “Say a month!” suggested the commander caustically.

  “Say three days for the sake of argument. Then I can put her to rights. I daren’t take down a thing while she’s rolling twenty-five and more, and I’ve got to take things down! Why, man, the engine-room is all pollution from gratings to bilge; if I loosened one more bolt than is loose a’ready her whole insides ‘ud take charge and dance quadrilles until we drowned!”

  “You won’t try to make Bombay?”

  “I’ll try to give ye steam as far as the far side o’ yon reef. After that I wash my hands of a’ responsibility!”

  “Oh, very well. Mr. White!”

  The sublieutenant hauled himself in turn to windward. Curley Crothers gave the wheel a half-spoke and looked as if he had no interest in anything. Joe Byng in the chains bowed his head and groaned inwardly; his sticky, spray-washed lead seemed all-absorbing.

  “Tell that black robber to hurry aboard, unless he wants me to come in without him.”

  The little boat had drifted fast before the wind, and the sublieutenant had to bellow through a megaphone to where the three men bailed and the ragged oarsmen swung their weight against the storm. The man of ebony, who would be pilot and disgrace the Navy, balanced on a thwart with wide-spread naked toes and yelled an ululating answer. With his rags out-blown in the monsoon he looked like a sea wraith come to life. The big gongs clanged again, and the Puncher drifted rather than drove down on the smaller craft. A hand line caught the pilot precisely in the face. He grabbed it frantically, fell headlong in the sea, and was hauled aboard.

  “He says he wants a tow for that boat of his,” reported the sublieutenant. “Said it in English, too — seems he knows more than he pretends.”

  “Missed it, by gad, by just about five minutes!” said the commander aloud but to himself. “Well — the bargain’s made, so it can’t be helped. That boat’s sinking! Throw ’em a line, quick!”

  The pilot’s crew displayed no overdone affection for their craft, and there was no struggle to the last to leave it. One by one — whichever could grab the line first was the first to come — they were hauled through the thundering waves and their boat was left to sink. Then, before they could adjust their unaccustomed feet to the different balance of the Puncher’s heaving deck, the gongs clanged and the destroyer leaped ahead like a dripping sea-soused water beetle, into her utmost speed that instant.

  All conscious of his new-won dignity, and utterly regardless of his boat, the pilot had found the bridge at once. He cl
ung to the rail there and braced one naked foot against a stanchion. To him the ship’s speed seemed the all-absorbing thing, for either Mr. Hartley had forgotten just how many revolutions would make fifteen knots or else he had underestimated his engine-room’s capacity. The Puncher split the waves and spewed them twenty feet above her, racing head-on for the reef, and Curley Crothers was too busy at his wheel to pass the pilot the surreptitious insult he intended.

  The gongs clanged presently, and the Puncher swallowed half her speed at once, giving the pilot courage.

  “This exceedingly damn dangerous place, sah!” he remarked.

  “No bottom at eight!” sang Joe Byng in the chains.

  Three words passed between the commander and Crothers, and the Puncher hove a weed-draped underside high over the crest of a beam-on roller as she veered a dozen points, ducked her starboard rail into the trough of it, and sliced her long thin nose, sizzling and swirling, into the welter ahead. It was growing weedier and dirtier each minute.

  “No bottom at eight!” chanted Joe Byng.

  And at the sound of his voice the pilot hauled himself up by his leverage on the rail and found his voice again.

  “This most exceedingly damn dangerous place, sah!”

  But the commander was too busy acting all three L’s — Log, Lead and Lookout — his shrouded figure swaying to the heave and fall and his eyes fixed straight ahead of him on the double line of boiling foam. He had conned his course and had it charted in his head. There was no time to argue with a pilot.

  “Port you-ah hel-um, sah! Port you-ah hel-um!”

  “By the mark — seven!” sang Joe Byng from the chains.

  “Port you-ah hel-um, sah!” yelled the pilot in an ecstasy of fright.

  “Starboard a little,” came the quiet command.

  Curley Crothers moved his wheel and the Puncher’s bow yawed twenty feet, as if Providence had pushed her.