Mohammed's Tooth/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
“A head is worth a hundred-thousand rifles!””
THE sun went down in an angry glare behind the hills at Kangra Khan's back as he stood in the doorway muttering oaths into his beard. He did not choose to be laughed at by a woman. Nevertheless, he postponed reprisals, and the reason appeared presently.
“See that!” he snarled, tossing an envelope to me.
It was dark inside the hut. I went to the door and walked out past him, holding the letter toward the last red rays of sunshine. It was written in Persian.
To Kangra Khan of the Orakzai (it ran] from Athelstan King. Take notice. This affair is between you and me. You have prisoners, a woman and a man. Their honor and their lives are in your keeping. You and I now have a bone to pick and if need be the jackals shall tell the answer to the night. Settle your own quarrel with the Raj. Look to me to hold you answerable for the proper treatment of my friends.
I began to read the message aloud to Joan Angela, but Kangra Khan Snatched it from my hand.
“Mashallah! Does he think I am a wild beast?” he demanded. “Curse his impudence! Those Lancers have slain a dozen of my men this afternoon, and the fliers have finished off another score. Shall I not play tit-for-tat on you two?”
A well-aimed blow would have cracked his head against the door-post, but there were two many men in the dark behind him to make that chance worth taking. Besides, it was decidedly unlikely he would kill such valuable prisoners as he calculated us to be, and he was possibly the only friend we had in sight.
“He invites you to act like a gentleman,” I suggested.
“Not he! He threatens me!”
“He says it's between you and him,” I retorted. “We're only prisoners. You can't drag us into it.”
He seemed to see the force of that. A savage always is at a disadvantage when his sense of fairness is appealed to. It is only the civilized folk who hold ethics subject to convenience. I think what angered him was that King should have doubted his proper intentions.
“Ye shall eat as I eat, sleep as I sleep, march as I march, suffer as I suffer!” he growled. “By Allah, ye shall pay the price I name, or be forever prisoners!”
He strode into the hut as if to seize Joan Angela, but was satisfied when she came backing out in front of him.
“By Allah, who is Lord of all, now hear me! Ye have a hundred days. Pay me the money before the hundred days are up, or I take this woman for a wife and shoot thee, Ramm-is-den. That will be my answer to Attleystan King!”
He tore the letter into little bits in front of us and threw them to the winds, then turned and strode away, tossing an order back over his shoulder to the men who were clustered in a group between us and the edge of the rock on which the hut stood. They signed to us to follow him and closed in before and behind, so that we trod on the heels of the men in front and those be hind crowded us.
Escape would have been impossible, and after an hour's hard traveling the chance grew even less, for we followed a track that wound in and out among crags and ravines with seldom more than room for two to go abreast, and often only room for single file. It was impossible to see into the ravines, for the cliffs above us cast a deep-black shadow and only the snarling of Jhelum's tributary streams among the boulders hinted now and then at what might be in store for any one who stumbled.
But Joan Angela was a long way yet from being ill-pleased with her lot. She was getting what she had come away from home for—excitement. Money had taught her that you can't buy anything worth having, except responsibility, and she was tired of expensive civilization—bored to rebellion against it. This was fun, in her eyes; real risk; genuine adventure; thrilling. She began to sing, until a man turned in his tracks and curtly ordered her to be silent.
Joan Angela was going much the stronger of the two of us. A blow on the back of the head leaves effects that are not thrown off too easily. At the end of the second hour I began to feel dizzy and had to sit down for a rest at intervals, to the awful disgust of our escort and the alarm of Joan Angela.
“The big bullock weakens soonest!” they quoted, sneering.
“I'd better offer to pay up, although I hate to,” Joan Angela said with a mixture of disappointment and generosity. “I'm not going to let my obstinacy kill you.”
It only made it worse of course, to have to argue with her. I did not propose to cost her a million dollars. What was worse still, Kangra Khan looking down from above overheard us, and joined in.
“Ye have but a hundred days to pay!” he reminded us; and though I could not see him I could almost feel him grin. “One month for a letter to go to America. One month for the letter to return. A month for negotiations, and ten days to make the payment in! Be but one day late, and the woman shall know what wifing means in a village of the Orakzai! Attleystan King may come then and make a feud for her; mayhap he will bury such bones of thine as the jackals haven't cracked up, Ramm-is-den!”
“Better pay!” said my friend Akbar bin Mahommed, with a hand on my shoulder. “Mashallah! It is shame to see a corpse like thine blistering in a nullah. Write thou the letter, and go free when the money comes. Make a feud with him thereafter, and I will join thee!”
I thought that a mighty handsome offer and it put new heart in me. That was no time or place to write letters. We could do that in the morning, if Joan Angela should then elect to yield. A man who offers friendship to a fellow in a tight place ranks ace high in my esteem, whatever his friendship may be actually worth. I struggled on again; and after a while we came to a circular cup in the hills, where a group of stone huts surrounded a corral, in which were three lean horses.
There was argument. There always is in that land when anything whatever is to be done or left undone; but at the end of half an hour's explosive blasphemy, in which the name of Allah mingled with pollution and the angels were summoned to witness the mess, two of the horses were finally “borrowed under duress” for Joan Angela and me, and the poor old skate that fell to my lot started on the worst, and last adventure of his life.
I overheard Kangra Khan saying he took the horses, not on my account, but because their owners would want them back and consequently would be wary of offending him by giving information to any British troops who might chance on our line of retreat. That sounded plausible, but it may have been only his method of keeping up a reputation with his own men for iron hearted craftiness. It served, at any rate to inform me on two points. I bullied my sorry beast until I was knee to knee with Joan Angela.
“Our host is afraid of pursuit, and is not too popular hereabouts,” I told her. “Pathans are poor hands at sticking together. If there's a dispute among themselves, our chance to escape improves.”
She nodded.
“I won't pay as long as your head holds out!” she answered. “But you and I are friends, Jeff, and you know me well enough to cry quit the minute you feel like it. If it weren't for your injury I'd call it good fun.”
“Well, opinions differ as to what is fun. Now, looking back at it, I can see her point of view; but just then there was nothing except dislike for squealing—to apply no stronger term—that kept me from counseling surrender. I made up my mind to let things take their course, hoping some obvious means of escape would present itself.
Joan Angela can endure as much as any man alive in the way of roughing it, and about the only man who doesn't find her splendid company is the kind who can't or won't forget the sex problem. To her mind sex is no problem, and if I had played the part of a heavy male protecting her against a world too dangerous for her, she would have held it against me all my days. I would have lost a friend I value.
We rode interminably up and down a winding track that would have suited goats, dismounting and walking often because the horses were too weak to negotiate stiff places with our weight on them—mine especially. Once or twice, as if to prove the dissension among the Pathans that I suspected, there were shots fired near at hand; but whether at us or in pursuance of some regulation feud it was impossible to guess. We were making a prodigious noise, stumbling over the rocks and kicking loose stones that went echoing down into the gorges. Sound travels in those hills as if through speaking-galleries, and a wakeful enemy might have heard us coming from miles away.
The strange part was that, although we saw the flash of a rifle frequently, and our men usually fired at the spot where the flash was seen, not a bullet sang near us. It was like a sham fight, staged for the motion pictures, and Kangra Khan led on, and on, as if there were no fight at all.
Then the moon rose, wan and silvery, veiled like a bride in a wreath of mist; and we came to a cliff shaped like Gibraltar. At the angle facing us the track divided, turning to right and left. Kangra Khan took the left hand, and we filed after him. Close behind me walked Akbar bin Mahommed, and there were two more men guarding our rear about fifty or a hundred yards behind—both busy at the moment with an enemy who yelled insults and fired wildly from between rocks practically out of range.
The wan moonlight shone on that Gibraltar-shaped cliff, and it was impossible to pass it without being seen. There was a distance of possibly two hundred yards along which the track that Kangra Khan had chosen wound like a glistening snake before it dipped into gloom again. It looked like sheer, stark suicide to follow that course under fire; the track was narrow; there were no caves, nor many boulders; a man's shape would be silhouetted against gleaming cliff; an owl swooped by, and bird and shadow were as clear as if they had been etched. The only element of safety was the deep, dark ravine on the left hand, which was so wide that an enemy under cover on the far side would have to sight carefully; but even so, the range was not more than three or four hundred yards.
However, Kangra Khan hurried forward, perhaps in haste to get the danger done with, and his men hurried at his heels at two or three-yard intervals. Akbar bin Mahommed, close behind me, made no comment; and the firing in the rear ceased suddenly. Silence fell, as if the air had suddenly refused to carry any sound except the snarling of a waterfall a mile away.
“Wait a minute!” I said; and Joan Angela drew rein.
We watched Kangra Khan and his men step forward into the pale light.
“Allah! What now?” asked Akbar bin Mahommed.
SUDDENLY a hurricane of rifle-firing split the silence, and for about a minute the ledge on the far side of the ravine was lit with spurting flame. There must have been fifty men pot shotting out of ambush, and at one spot enough powder flashed to suggest a machine-gun. Bullets splashed against the glistening cliff, and whole sections of shale shuddered and slid downward. Yet Kangra Khan continued on his way, and not even his men seemed in any special hurry.
“You see for yourself!” I said, turning to Akbar.
“Ho!” he answered. “That is nothing! Those are the Jebel Waziris. They came to loot across the border, but they quarreled with us. Now they think to leave a feud or two behind them on their way home. But, by Allah, none can shoot straight against that cliff in this light—as the British learned a year ago. By day a boy could hold the path against a hundred men. By night—ride on and see!”
“By Allah, no!” I answered; and I seized Joan Angela's rein to make sure no spirit of daring should take hold of her and send her galloping across the line of fire.
“I'm not afraid of anything those savages dare face!” she said, laughing at me; and Akbar bin Mahommed was in the act of seizing my rein to drag the horse forward, when it suddenly occurred to me that our chance had come. There were only two men to our rear. If we could make those plugs of ours gallop, we had a reasonably good chance to escape.
I thought of the knife, but there was not time to pull that out from its hiding-place. Besides, even in that crisis I doubt whether I would have used the blade of it on Akbar; he and I had grown too friendly—though I don't doubt he would have shot me. I swung my fist back for a blow that should have stunned him—and the horse shied.
Something—brown-black—heavy—slid in an avalanche of loose shale and fell from the ledge above us plump on to Akbar's shoulders. His rifle went spinning into the ravine. A hand went to his mouth, and he lay helpless, heaving in spasms underneath a dark-robed thing that might have been a colossal vampire-bat. In the shadow at our feet the outspread sleeves of the garment looked like wings. But the bat's head turned, and Grim's pale face glanced up at me!
“Take the right-hand track!” he snapped. “Hurry!”
But I could hear the rear-guard coming. I jumped off the horse and waited for them, trying to draw the knife while I crouched in the shadow of a projecting spur of the rock wall. But they came too fast, and I failed to get my belt undone in time. So I punched the first man in the nose, and he went over backward, rifle and all, into the ravine, crying out to Allah as he fell. The other fellow fired at me point-blank and singed the bandage on my head. I wrenched the rifle away and swung the butt-end upward, catching him below the jaw, and he followed his friend, making no outcry whatever. I heard the two of them fall—thump-thump—on the rocks below. I had broken the rifle, so I threw it after them.
Now the rear was open for retreat, I didn't doubt for a second Grim would change his plans. Hurrying back, I found Joan Angela helping him to lash Akbar bin Mahommed's hands with the reins belonging to my sorry screw. Neither of them recognized Grim, and even to me he seemed like an apparition in a dream. Not a word was said until Akbar's hands were tied. Then Grim said—
“Mount!” and we obeyed him.
I reached for my brute's nose to pull him round and start back along the way we had come; but Grim slapped his rump and kicked him forward, and in a second we were trotting straight for the great Gibraltar rock, Joan Angela leading. Grim had Akbar bin Mahommed by the neck, and made him run beside us.
There was one great pool of light to cross before we could plunge into darkness on the right-hand side. Just before we reached it Grim vaulted up behind me, and the miserable horse nearly collapsed under our joint weight. Joan Angela jockeyed her plug into a gallop, shot through the zone of brightness, and was swallowed in the gloom. We followed at an amble, which was our poor beast's last, broken-hearted effort. Midway through the zone of light a bullet, I don't know from what direction, struck him behind the girth, and he pitched to the ground, throwing Grim and me into a heap in front of him. Grim pulled a pistol out and finished that business. Then we ran, each with a hand on Akbar, and found Joan Angela dismounted, waiting for us in the darkness just around the bend.
My head was swimming, but I supposed we must hurry on. However, Grim said no.
“Sit down and take a cinch on things,” he suggested, fingering my bandage. “Is your head bad?”
“Who are you?” Joan Angela asked, not recognizing him. “Jim Grim? Fate seems to drag you into everything! Thanks awfully for coming!” She began to talk of Egypt, where they met the last time.
“Where's King?” I asked, as soon as I could pull myself a bit together.
“Lord knows! He and I took the trail the minute the Lancers said Miss Leich was missing. They had opinions of their own, of course, but King suspected Kangra Khan instantly. It was probable you'd have to lie up all day, and that gave us time to overtake you if we used our wits; and King knew of a bunch of Jebel Waziris, whom he once befriended in some border row. So he and Narayan Singh took one side of the ravine to get their help if possible, and I came this way picking up your trail.
“I'm supposed to be Ali Ibraim, a very holy person from Arabia. They tell things to a holy man, you know, and don't molest him—much. I carry a tooth of the Prophet with me—found it in a dead man's skull this side of the Jhelum. Those were the Jebel Waziris on the far side of the ravine. I was afraid they'd shoot us all, but Allah was on our side that time.”
“How on earth did you manage to keep in touch?” Joan Angela asked him.
“It looked impossible. But Narayan Singh sent a woman to me to have herself blessed for child-birth. I gave her a written amulet, which wouldn't be any good until she'd found him again and had him write the name of Mohammed and several angels on the back of it. After that she'd have twins. So I guess he got my message. But, by Gorry, if I don't sleep and eat soon I'll be no good!”
I gave him the rice and chupatties I had cached in my handkerchief—a most disgusting mess it was.
“Have you two eaten recently?” he asked, and then, when we told him yes, devoured the lot as if he liked it.
“This is the best fun ever!” said Joan Angela—truthfully—fervently.
She wouldn't have changed places with a woman in the world just then! Grim met her eyes, and glanced at me.
“We're not through yet!” he assured her curtly.
As he spoke there came the stuttering din of rifle-firing from around the cliff behind us—angry, spasmodic stuff—and yells of imprecation.
“That'll be Kangra Khan trying to fight his way back,” said Grim. “He hasn't a chance. But the trouble is, our Waziri friends have made themselves unpopular. They're being hounded. Two outfits of Pathans are on their heels to scupper them before they can reach home; so all we've got is two hundred men in a hurry to reach the skyline with every man's hand against 'em! Retreat to the border is cut off absolutely. Kangra Khan has bragged about Miss Leich and her millions; he was using that yesterday as a talking point to rally armed men to his standard. All he accomplished was to arouse cupidity, and now they're all on the watch for her between here and the border. She's a prize worth bagging!”
“Won't the British troops come for us?” Joan Angela asked.
“Let's hope not!” he answered. “The tribes would stop quarreling among themselves and make common cause. Even our friends the Waziris would be forgiven pro tem. The best thing the British can do is to withdraw across the border and pretend they don't care a hoot. Time's the main thing. Every day that passes without cash in sight will tend to decrease your market price. Meanwhile, the more they quarrel among themselves for your possession, the better our chance. Gee whiz! They're hitting her up!”
It began to be clear now why Kangra Khan had led his handful of men so boldly along that moonlit track. He had re-enforcements waiting for him somewhere along there, and now he was leading them back to find his prisoners, suspecting probably that the Waziris had seized us. He seemed to have enough men with him to force the issue, judging by the din; but the light was against him, and the yells from the far side of the ravine were triumphant, not discouraged.
“If King's with the Waziris, you can bet on them safely,” Grim said, listening intently. “Lord! Let's hope the noise don't bring marauders our way! We haven't a friend to windward! The Waziris are our one reliance—and a shifty lot at that!”
Joan Angela showed him her pistol, but he shook his head.
“Keep that for the last contingency,” he advised. “Are you fit? Can you march? Is your nerve all right? Then never show your pistol to a soul until you have to use it on yourself! Getting killed don't hurt. The most the best of us can ask for is to die clean. Hide that thing away.”
But he drew his own pistol, and stood leaning against the horse, with an outcrop of the cliff on his right hand, so that he could watch the track either way and have the best of any sudden turn of affairs. I noticed he had two more pistols in a belt under his dark cloak, and when I proposed he should lend me one of them he passed it butt-first. About a second after that we came within an ace of accident.
To our right, in a momentary lull between the bursts of rifle-fire, we heard the sound of hurrying feet and clinking weapons. I stood up and leaned over the horse be side Grim, and we raised our pistols to fire point-blank along the track. It was impossible to see anything; the bulge of the cliff cut off the zone of moonlight; one and the same thought urged both of us, to stagger the attacking force by a sudden burst of unexpected pistol-shots, and then make a bolt for it. Joan Angela guessed our intention and stood by to jump on the horse.
But the hurrying ceased, and the thirty or forty pairs of feet we had heard reduced themselves to three or four, who advanced at a walk more cautiously. So much the better for our plan! I calculated the probable level of a man's heart and managed to pull that long knife out as well, for a furious set-to before we beat retreat. We heard a great gruff voice giving orders in Pishtu:
“Careful now! Dark and the mother of death are one! Halt! I go forward alone!”
SOMETHING blacker than the darkness loomed around the serrated outcrop. I fired. Grim knocked my pistol up in the very nick of time.
“God save you, sahib, that is the only turban I have!” said a voice I recognized, and Narayan Singh stepped up to us, showing his teeth in a great white grin in the midst of his black beard.
He pulled the turban off and rubbed his head where the bullet had grazed the scalp.
“I have thirty men behind me,” he went on, beginning to rebind the turban as casually as if he were in camp. “But it is difficult, for these Waziris are not in love with Sikhs, who have slain too many of their comrades in the border fights. King sahib bade me bring these ruffians to hold this track, lest Kangra Khan should fight his way around the corner yonder in spite of everything. They are picked men, but who shall pick diamonds from a dung-hill?” he asked, giving the turban a final twist, and adjusting the whole at last as a woman gives the final touches to her hat.
“Is the sahiba well?”
We introduced him to Joan Angela, who shook hands. She had met him before in Egypt,[1] and was as pleased as he was to renew the acquaintance.
“Thou and I are birds who love the storm, sahiba!” he said gallantly. “Better to die well than to live ill. This would look like opportunity; yet the Gods know best. These sahibs know I speak the truth when I say I am your servant.”
I did not catch her answer. Some one shouted for Narayan Singh, and we all went hurrying back along the track to the corner, where we piled up such loose rocks as we could find and, in the lime-light as it were, held that point of disadvantage against Kangra Khan's men while King worked his Waziris down into the ravine below.
Every man of ours had a rifle stolen from the British, and they squandered ammunition as men always do waste stolen goods; but even so, we failed in our object. Kangra Khan detected King's purpose to join us; the Waziris made too much noise negotiating the watercourse; to judge by their yelling some of them reached our side, but when it came to climbing the steep slope they were met by a sweeping fire from several hundred rifles. Kangra Khan told off a couple of dozen men to keep us busy and poured the rest of his nickeled lead into the ravine.
Once I heard a long, shrill whistle—King's in all likelihood, and after that there was more or less silence below while the Waziris beat retreat under a galling fire up the slope they had so easily descended. Only one man reached us—a fellow with a bullet through his arm, immensely angry.
By dint of threatening to tie her hand and foot I had persuaded Joan Angela to keep out of sight behind the corner. The newcomer crawled behind our barricade of stones until he reached her hiding place, and then got to his feet. I followed him to make sure of his intentions, but he only looked at her; he did not seem to regard her as anything more than a curiosity. Before he spoke to me he tore a strip of calico from his filthy shirt, and, with one end of the strip in his teeth, proceeded to bind his arm. Joan Angela instantly offered to do it for him, but he grinned savagely and turned his face to me.
“Allah's wonders! We are all dead men below there!” he said, jerking his right thumb across his shoulder. “Why not sell this woman to the Pathans if they desire her so much? My people wish to go home.”
“How many did you lose down there in the ravine?” I asked him.
“A thousand,” he answered. He presumably meant ten. “Where is Jimgrim? I was to speak with Jimgrim. Who art thou?”
I told him I was Jimgrim, doubting whether it was safe to strip off Grim's disguise as a holy man from Arabia.
“Well met!” he answered. “But thou art a liar none the less! I am King sahib's friend, and he told me Jimgrim is the Hajji Ali Ibraim, whom men call Jimgrim because he is beautiful and loved of many women.”
It is no insult to be called a liar in those raw hills—rather a compliment. They envy those who have enough imagination to invent an untruth on the spur of an occasion.
“What is the message?” I asked him. “I am Jimgrim's friend.”
“King sahib says, 'She should die, and if a youth should step into her shoes, and he a holy man, it might be well,” But he said: 'Jimgrim is the man who will attend to it.” None the less, if Jimgrim fights among the rocks there, thou and I might throw her over the cliff and save him trouble. Have you the holy youth ready to take her place?”
“Let Jimgrim do his own work,” I answered, stepping between Joan Angela and him. “What is the rest of the message?”
“Where is that Sikh? Is he here?”
We peered around the corner, and I pointed out Narayan Singh crouching behind a boulder, firing into black night.
“By Allah's teeth, I have a bone to pick with that Sikh! The dog called me a"
“Pick it with me then,” I answered. “Give me the rest of the message first.”
I laid a hand on him, for he was minded to go after Narayan Singh that minute. He tried to break away, but I jerked him round again to face me.
“Kill him!” said a voice beside me. “It was he who set fire to the cloth-stalls in Peshawar half-a-year since!” And Akbar bin Mahommed, with his hands still lashed behind him, thrust his face between us. “Yussuf, thou dog, I would kill thee myself if I were not tied!”
“Trussed like a pig!” answered Yussuf, and spat into Akbar's face.
For answer Akbar ducked his head and butted the Waziri like a ram, hitting him in the belly and sending him reeling backward into the line of fire, where a bullet drilled him through the head from ear to ear and he lay grinning in the moonlight, twitching his fingers, with his brains oozing out on the rock.
So we never received the latter part of King's message, and had no means of guessing what his plan might be. I dragged a fellow out of the line of fire, and sent him to try to cross the ravine and bring an answer back; but he never returned, and whether he was shot or simply ran away I don't know.
When I had sent that messenger I shouted for Grim, but though he heard me it was several minutes before he came crawling behind the improvised barricade. Heavy firing had resumed from the far side of the ravine, but there was still a chance that Kangra Khan's men might try to rush the corner and Grim saw fit to give that danger his first attention. He was moving from man to man, encouraging each in turn. I saw him pull out the “Prophet's Tooth” and show it to several of them. Then their war-cry went up—“Allaho Akbar!”—and there ceased to be much risk of flinching.
Meanwhile Akbar bin Mahommed thrust his face up close to mine and stared into my eyes as if he could see through them to the thought behind.
“Let my hands go, Ramm-is-den!” he urged. “I swear friendship! By Allah and the Prohpet and the honor of my father; by my father's beard and mine, and by the Holy Tomb, I swear I am thy friend! Untie my hands. By Allah's breath I will be thy brother until I die!”
He turned to Joan Angela, and looked into her eyes as he had into mine.
“Sahiba, thou art this man's wife! Bid him loose me! I will be thy man and his until Azrael summons all of us!”
She did not understand a word of Pushtu, but his appeal was obvious enough. He shook the hands behind him that were lashed with the leather thong so tightly and the wrists were swelling, and turned half-toward her so that she might loose the knots if I refused.
“Do you know these hills?” I asked him.
“By Allah, there is not a cranny I do not know!”
“How far to the nearest village?”
“There are four villages that I could reach before the moon sets.”
“Have you friends among them?”
“Nay! Who loves me hereabouts?”
He doubtless read the disappointment on my face, for his eyes were close to mine again.
“But there are those who fear me!” he added. “There is a woman who must do my bidding lest I laugh in her husband's face, and she die of his knife! Listen, Ramm-is-den! Inshallah, I may help thee, for I heard what that dog of a Waziri said. If she is to die—” he glanced at Joan Angela—“and a youth shall take her place—by Allah, am I wrong, or does it mean that she shall not die, and that only the clothes are needed, so that she may pass for a hairless boy? Then I am the man to manage it! Loose my hands and give me a weapon! Give me that knife!
“I know a young Afridi hereabouts who has been to Bokhara and picked up foreign manners there, along with a way of wearing clothes that would shame a Hindu. He teaches some new kind of politics to the younglings, because the elders will not listen to him, and goes unharmed because they say he is mad. I will strip him naked, and she may wear his foppery. Loose me! Let me make haste!”
“Can you bring him here alive?” I asked.
He hesitated, looking straight into my eyes.
“Let that be the test of thy good faith,” I said. “Wherever we go, follow, and bring that youth alive to us.”
“Good. I will do it. Ye will not go far among these hills,” he answered with a note of irony.
Then Grim came, and I gave him King's message.
“Shall I let this fellow go?” I asked, explaining why.
Grim nodded, and I cut the thong, then gave Akbar the knife. He held it out for Grim and me to touch the hilt, hesitated in front of Joan Angela, and after a moment held it out for her to touch too—a prodigious concession, for it is not thought manly to show a woman too much courtesy in that land. Then he was gone, running like the wind up the track away from us.
The rifle-firing was as furious as ever. Now and again there would come half a dozen fairly steady volleys from the far side of the ravine, as if King was trying to instil some system into the Waziris. Then there would be a riot of independent shots, followed by silence, and volleys again at intervals. Kangra Khan's men were wasting ammunition as if it were the easiest stuff to come by in the world, instead of having to be stolen from the British or bought for its weight in coined silver.
“We're beaten,” said Grim, “and I don't know what to do.” It was the first time in all my knowledge of him that he had ever admitted that. “King can't get to us, nor we to him. The tribes will have heard this shindy, and when morning comes they'll surround us all. Then good-by!”
But Joan Angela, who should have been the most discouraged, laughed.
“Why will the tribesmen wait until the morning?” she asked, with a woman's flair for questions.
“They dread the dark. Unless they're caught out, they stay in and stir late,” Grim answered.
“Then we've hours ahead of us. Anything might happen. Let's try our luck. Mine's always good.”
Grim was racking his brains, and it was no use my proposing anything. I knew the language well enough, but did not know the hills; nor did he know them nearly as well as King, who was out of reach. Whatever we might elect to do, there would be no means of getting word of it across that ravine in time to give King a chance to follow up.
“If we wait until dawn we can signal,” Grim said, scratching his chin. “King and I know the Morse code.”
“How many men are hurt?” I asked him.
“Several—eight or nine. I know of four dead. We can't leave the wounded here.”
“I'll bet you King does something clever!” said Joan Angela. “He has the most men. He'll realize it's up to him.”
“If he don't, we're all done for,” Grim answered gloomily.
But it did not sound as if King were being clever. His Waziris, yelling imprecations, started suddenly to squander ammunition more furiously than ever. The edge of the ravine along the far side became a line of spurting flame. He seemed to have persuaded his men to space themselves along a wider front, and perhaps a scout or a false alarm had put them in fear of a rush by Kangra Khan's contingent.
Shot answered shot across the impenetrable darkness, and I wondered how long the cartridges would last, when suddenly Narayan Singh leaped up and shouted:
“Ahah! See them! Ahah! King sahib, thou art a king, a king, a great one! Ho! A head is worth a hundred thousand rifles! Jimgrim sahib! Rammy sahib! Come and see!”