Mohammed's Tooth/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
“I'm sorry I'm a woman!”
THE moon had shifted to the westward far enough to uncover Kangra Khan's position, and because of the shape of the Gibraltar-rock all the advantage of light was coming our way—and King's. Outline by outline, Kangra Khan's predicament disclosed itself. Suddenly the moon-beams touched with silver a long ledge, higher than the Pathan's position, and I could see King—knew it must be he.
No man on earth stands exactly as he does when he is himself, not playing parts. His unselfconsciousness seems absolute then. He grows so utterly absorbed in what he sees and hears that neither danger nor convenience exist for him. He stood like a statue beyond the ravine, on a crag that overhung that moonlit ledge, directing his Waziris, half of whom had crawled to the new position and were pouring a galling fire down into the sangar[1] Kangra Khan was holding.
There was still the ravine in the way, but at that point it curved in Kangra Khan's direction and grew considerably narrower, so that the utmost range was not more than two hundred yards. Kangra Khan's men were forced to crouch close to their stone wall, which put them almost out of action, although there was room for about twenty of them in a square, stone tower at one corner, from which they were answering the Waziris' fire. The others, under the wall, had to content themselves with yelling, and by the noise they made I judged there were several hundred of them; but numbers don't mean much—except to increase the problem—when the tide of fortune turns.
About a third of King's Waziris had remained in the old position covering the moonlit track that led from us to the sangar. They had practically ceased fire. Only an occasional warning shot served notice that the way was barred, and notified us that it was a “one-way street.” A one eyed charwoman could have recognized our opportunity.
Grim pulled out his Prophet's Tooth and acted like a regimental chaplain showing Irish troops a crucifix. We had about twenty men still fit for action, and they began their chant—“Allaho Akbar—Allaho Akbar,” gaining and gaining in speed and noise until it sounded like the tumult of a hundred, and the echo went grinding and clamoring away into the hills, cannoned back and forth from crag to crag. We may have sounded like a thousand to the Pathans up there in the sangar, already desperate under the slanting hail of Waziri bullets.
I shouted to Joan Angela to stay where she was, and rushed forward to get in the front rank with Grim and Narayan Singh. (There was no room for more than three or four abreast at any point along the track.) In a second I was passed by half a dozen of our Waziris, so I practically led the rear guard, stumbling over lumps of shale that had been shot down from the cliff-wall on our right hand.
I believe we would have made the sangar wall unnoticed by Kangra Khan's men, in spite of the yelling and the noise of the loose shale underfoot; for they, too, were yelling, and the echoes were so confusing that our particular din might have been coming from anywhere. But King's Waziris saw us, and opened a supporting fire too soon, so that we rushed with a screaming stream of bullets overhead, and the pat-pat-patter of their hail on the sangar wall preceded us.
One huge Pathan leaped up on the wall waving a tulwar, and crumpled up backward under a hail of bullets. Another took his place, and was run through the belly by Narayan Singh's long saber. Half a dozen more leapt over the wall, engaging Grim, Narayan Singh and several of our men long before I could come on the scene, for it was a straggling rush we made, not timed to meet the exigencies of the slowest. Then we of the rear-guard came up breathless, and a man beside me lent me the use of his knee to leap the wall.
So I was first over, yelling I don't doubt like three men, for that enthusiasm is contagious. Only Grim was silent. Narayan Singh roared for a dozen. He and Grim were over close behind me. I stumbled over a dead Pathan and seized his tulwar. In a second we were backed against the stone wall in the shadow fighting for dear life, with fifty of Kangra Khan's contingent at our throats, and our own men scrambling over one by one to drop down and hack and thrust before their feet touched ground.
That was a first-class fight! One of our men was drilled clean through the head by a Waziri bullet from over the ravine as he crossed the wall, for King's men did not cease fire soon enough. But I think nineteen got over unscathed, and the odds against them, and the utter hopelessness of quarter, made them fight like devils on the slag. To our left front King never ceased his hail of fire against the tower and the wall on that side, so we would have been mowed down if we had left our cover; and many of Kangra Khan's Pathans who tried to get at us by taking a short cut across the midst of the enclosure fell before they came half way.
It was knife-work—butt and blade and pistol. The Pathan falls back on his natural weapon and tactics in a tight place, and none of us had time to load, or even to aim, for they came at us in the shadow of the wall in a series of spurts and rushes, and when a man was down that was not by any means the end of him. A Pathan with hardly life left in him would crawl in close and try to thrust his knife home before Allah beckoned him.
We lost nine of our nineteen, all dead, for there was no chance for a wounded man except to fight on—no quarter—no appeal for it. I broke the tulwar on a rifle-barrel thrust up by a Pathan to guard his head, and the broken half of the blade went half-way through his skull between the eyes. Then I emptied the pistol, and after that I ducked, to avoid a blow, and grabbed a dead man's rifle, using butt and thrust like an old-time quarterstaff.
Once, and then again, I was saved by a pistol-shot that flashed up from under my arm when three Pathans attacked at once. I had the outside berth, on the edge of the line of moonlight, where the hail of King's Waziri bullets swept within a yard of me, and there were men who went down under my clubbed butt who were nearly shot to pieces as they lay; so I was easier for the Pathans to see than any other of our party, and well for me that single-stick and gloves have always been my favorite pastime! Fifty times in half as many minutes I was dead, but for the training of hand and eye those sports had given me.
And more than a dozen times, from under my legs or arms, or over my shoulder, something—someone—that I had no time to turn and see created a diversion. It was swift, wild, savage work, brute instinct up, with Karma signifying who were to be slain, and who the survivors. Luck, some fellows call it. Law, say I. Neither my time, nor Grim's, nor Narayan Singh's had come. No flinching yet on either side. Nothing but a shambles in the dark. And King's move next.
The firing over our heads ceased, and a yell as from the emptying graves on Judgment Day came up from the ravine, announcing that a third of King's Waziris were making a second attempt to cross. And this time they came like the wind, for the remainder kept up such a withering hail of fire from the new position on the ledge that none could man the walls to make the ravine impassable—and besides, there were we who had to be dealt with before any man dared turn his back on us. Once, from the stone tower, Kangra Khan in desperation turned his fire in our direction; but his riflemen, already wild and wavering, could not see us in the shadow. They mowed down half a dozen of their own side, and then had to turn again to rake the flanks of the ravine.
And suddenly the show was over, with the swiftness of a hail-storm. How the word spread among the ranks of the defenders I don't know. There was a last savage rush in our direction—a last mêlée breast to breast, with long knives thrusting upward from behind between the legs of those in front and the curses hot in your face as a man's life winged to its account—then almost silence!
They melted. They flitted away like ghosts. They vanished over the rear wall of the sangar like a string of shadows cast by magic-lantern rays, leaving nothing but a lot of dead men and some broken, empty cartridge-boxes. One wounded man sat up in the midst of the open space, laughed like a ghoul, fired at me point-blank, missed by an inch, and fell backward stone-dead. That was the last shot fired in that engagement.
I TURNED to see who stood behind me, and looked straight into Joan Angela's gray eyes! She held an empty pistol in one hand, and in the other a long tulwar that had blood on the end of the blade.
“You fight like a man, Jeff!” she said with a little nervous laugh. “I'm sorry I'm a woman. I was only useful once or twice.”
Her overcoat was torn, and stained with blood where she had knelt to guard my legs. Her lips were parted, and her eyes wild with excitement. She did not seem afraid, but the hand that held the tulwar was shaking—with excitement I suppose.
“Are you hurt at all?” I asked her.
“No,” she answered. “How's your head?”
I had forgotten my head. It was bleeding. The cut had opened, and the bandage was a sticky mess. I think it was that, and the exertion, that saved me from a protracted spell of illness, for my brain was clear again and there was no more numbness. Joan Angela took a dead man's turban and began to look for a clean piece to make a new bandage. I was pulling off the old one, turning at the same time to see where Grim and Narayan Singh might be, when the next thing happened.
Our men were all leaning over the wall to watch King's Waziris come climbing out of the ravine, yelling jokes at them and boasting. I had dropped my clubbed rifle to attend to the bandage. Suddenly two of Kangra Khan's Pathans rushed out from a shadow, and one of them aimed a blow at me with a tulwar that made my skin tingle as I ducked. The other seized Joan Angela around the waist.
I yelled for help, and closed with my man, crushing the breath out of him before he could swing the tulwar a second time. I got his wrist and twisted it until he let the weapon fall, and that took only seconds, but it gave the other fellow time enough. He carried Joan Angela away into the shadow, seizing her from behind with great hairy arms like an orang-outang's. She could not scream, but she kicked and nearly tripped him, and he had his hands full.
I shouted, and some of our men and Narayan Singh came running. I hurled my prisoner into the midst of them backwards and don't know what happened to him. When I saw him again he was dead. I heard Joan Angela gasp in the darkness somewhere. There was a struggle, for the man gasped too, and swore. We rushed for the sound, and cornered the two of them between two inside buttresses, and the Pathan realized the game was up, for he spoke. You could not see anything—not even his eyes.
“By the blood of my father, I will choke her if you move another step!” he snarled.
So he had no weapon. That was something. Pathans don't strangle people if they have a knife available. Joan Angela did not speak; he had his hand over her mouth; but I could hear her heels cracking against his shins. Then she gurgled, and I knew he was choking her. Narayan Singh and I rushed in simultaneously.
The Pathan took to his heels, and we missed him in the dark, cannoning into each other. We had to stop and listen. Then we heard him dragging her body along the stones, and he had reached the corner of the wall before we overhauled him. Then he had to step into the moonlight, and we saw he had her by the coat-collar. She seemed either dead or unconscious, and he had the nerve to try to vault the wall and hoist her over before we reached him. Narayan Singh jumped for him and I grabbed the girl; but he kicked Narayan Singh in the jaw and slipped down out of sight over the wall, taking the overcoat with him, minus one sleeve.
Joan Angela's tongue was out between her teeth, and it took several minutes' hard rubbing before the muscles of her throat and neck began to function properly and she opened her eyes. By that time King's Waziris were swarming over the wall, so I picked her up and carried her toward the tower, to stow her in the upper-chamber, out of harm's way. Those Waziris were allies rather by accident than design, and there was no guessing yet what their attitude might be toward a valuable prisoner. We were at their mercy absolutely. They might see fit to compensate themselves for their heavy losses in the night's engagement, and if they in their predicament should assert their own right now to hold Joan Angela to ransom, no other argument than force was likely to have much weight.
So I carried her up the irregular steps that formed an outside support to the tower on two sides, and into the draughty square chamber, pierced for rifle-fire. There was no roof-only burned beams where a roof had once been, and most of the stones that had formed the roof were still littered about the floor, which in one place had broken under the weight. In the midst was a square hole above the deep well that gave the tower its excuse for being and made it tenable against attack. There was no windlass or rope and bucket, but a ladder made of sticks lashed clumsily with hide, up and down which whoever wanted water had to climb. I tested the ladder with my own weight, and told Joan Angela to get down into the dark hole and hide there if I should give the alarm.
Then I went out on the crazy wooden platform at the stair-head outside and waited, hoping nobody had missed me and that none had seen me carrying the girl across the moonlit enclosure. It was a wild hope, I admit, but a man throws reason overboard when it argues only pessimism in a tight place; and besides, our small party of Waziris were celebrating victory with their friends who swarmed over the wall, chanting a battle-song, greeting friends, exchanging boasts, and some searching the bodies of the dead for loot. I could see Grim and Narayan Singh trying to persuade some of them to mount guard on the defences. King had not appeared over the wall yet, and it was impossible to guess what he was doing in the dark, but I could hear voices somewhere midway down our flank of the ravine.
My perch on the platform gave me a view of all of the enclosure that was not in shadow, and of acres of darkness and moonlight to the northward beyond the wall. Crags like glistening teeth arose in irregular rows and curves out of silvery mist that seemed to float on a coal-black sea. If Kangra Khan were half a leader, and his men not more than half-beaten, our position was likely to become as untenable as his had been—and that before we should have much time to make our dispositions. Daylight would see us helpless.
The well in all likelihood was all that had persuaded natural warriors to fortify such an unpromising place. It was true, it overlooked the track up which we had come, but in turn it was overlooked from three directions, and unless the surrounding heights were held in force it would be worse than useless as a point of vantage. But there were circumstances connected with the well that I did not know yet, and there is always more than meets the eye when a savage's reason for taking laborious pains is not immediately obvious.
The Waziri women came up the ravine at last, loaded like pack-animals with cooking-pots, fuel, the scant supplies and the scanter remaining ammunition. The Waziris had gone to the border on plunder bent, expecting to replenish their stocks at the expense of Punjab villages and British outposts. Now they were parlous short of everything except ambition, and the women, heaving their packs over the wall, began at once to strip whatever the men had not yet taken from the dead. Such Pathans as yet had life in them received short shrift, and there were mutilations not to be described. Then one by one they threw the corpses down into the ravine, and after that the widows of Waziri dead began their wailing, keening to the night like hopeless ghouls.
Then sudden silence. Something was about to happen—none knew what—save Kangra Khan, who had, the call on opportunity—and King, perhaps. There were King, and possibly fifty Waziris, still to be accounted for. Our folk within the sangar began, as if instinctively, to seek the shelter of the wall, like jackals surprized by the dawn slinking off to their lairs. Here and there a woman stayed crying by her dead mate but, except for those, within sixty seconds the enclosure seemed utterly deserted, the silence broken only by click-click-click as men opened their magazines to make sure, and snapped them into place again.
Then the storm broke, Himalaya fashion, and the wind came with it, as if even the elements had taken sides against us. All the wreaths of white mist that had floated like foam among the crags were whipped and whirled into one hurrying cloud, and out of that came spurts of flame as Kangra Khan's men started to woo vengeance in the name of Allah. Their yells out-dinned the rifle-fire. The range was short. They had crept under cover of the mist to a position on the nearest overlooking crag, not much more than a hundred yards away. Naturally thy supposed we had manned the tower. A hundred bullets rattled against the masonry, and I ducked in through the door, shoving Joan Angela in front of me, as another fusillade splintered the dry wood of the platform at the stair-head.
Our men did not answer yet. They seemed cowed by the suddenness of the attack. The wind shrieked, as it can only in those infernal hills, bearing the din of the firing and imprecation down toward us, making answering yells useless; and that is a worse handicap in savage warfare than odds of two to one. It is not enough to know that Allah is on your side; you must be able to assert the fact and to make the other fellow listen, whether he will or no. Curses must reach his ears to have effect. Taunts must prove to him your own contempt for danger, or the danger grows as real as he intends it shall be. Yells are as deadly as bullets, estimated by result.
I PEERED through the slits in the wall, but could see nothing except spurts of flame and hurrying white mist. But suddenly there came an answering din, whose source I could not see. Somewhere on the far side of Kangra Khan's men, King was turning a flanking fire on their position. The stutter of Kangra Khan's riflemen ceased and began again as some of them turned their attention to the unexpected enemy. It was obvious that if we hurried we could save the night. But you have to preach, and teach, and stir before you can change dumb disgruntlement into an assault against wind and mist and high-perched riflemen.
“Will you stay here?” I asked Joan Angela.
“Why?” she demanded; and I cursed all women under my breath.
“Will you hide down that well at the first sign of danger?”
“No!” she said candidly.
I did not argue. I swept her up into my arms and carried her, protesting violently, down the rickety ladder into the well-shaft, and stood her on a platform near the bottom. It was pitch-dark. You could only See a faint, square patch of dimness up above, pricked out with a pattern of abnormally bright stars. You could hardly hear the din of fighting down there, although it began to sound as if our men were coming into action.
“How dare you, Jeff! I'll not forgive you for this!” she said angrily.
“We'll discuss forgiveness afterward,” I answered. “Will you stay down here, or must I tie you to the ladder?”
I took her by the wrist by way of emphasis, and maybe I seized hold hard. Hot temper and haste are bad medicine in the dark where there isn't any chance to see, nor time to explain. She misunderstood; or it maybe her nerves were overstrained, or perhaps I hurt her. At any rate, she struck me in the face with her open hand.
“Get up that ladder and leave me here, Jeff Ramsden!” she said, more bitterly than I had ever heard her speak. And I grew dumb with the anger that I dare say any fellow feels under the sting of the implied accusation. I did not answer. I went up the ladder hand-over-hand, simmering indignation like a bear driven out of his den. She called to me out of the well, but I did not listen.
“Jeff!” I heard, booming up hollow behind me. But I paid no attention.
I stepped out on the platform, in a mood to welcome bullets as a concrete insult that a man could fight back at. I was mad, that minute. Nothing mattered—neither night nor morning, nor the mist, nor odds, nor the outcome—least of all Joan Angela's opinion of me. I had had enough of that. I turned my back on it, and her, and went down the steps in running jumps, six steps at a time, sprawled headlong at the bottom over loose stones fallen from the roof, got to my feet in a greater rage than ever, grabbed a rifle from a man who lurked in the lee of the wall and struck him half-unconscious when he protested—then vaulted to the wall and shook the rifle in full moonlight, with my feet in blown mist and my body bathed in silver light above it.
“Allaho Akbar!” I roared; and I can bellow like a bull when the mood is on me.
I dare say, seen through the mist-film from below, I looked encouraging to those crouching Waziris; but I don't know why I was not shot to pieces by the storm of bullets that greeted me from Kangra Khan's position. I stood there unscathed. Rage may be an armor after all. I saw Grim, and then Narayan Singh scrambling to the wall to follow my example—heard the yelling and din of King's riflemen, and next the roar of our men beginning at last to work themselves into a frenzy with the battle cry:
“Allaho Akbar! Allaho Akbar!”
Over the wall I went, brandishing the rifle; and over they came in my wake—not pausing—not firing—swept forward by the impulse that had surged in me and that carried me on like a crazy, unreasoning bull in an arena. If I had a thought at all it was to hack my way as far as possible from where Joan Angela and her opinions were. I wished never to see her again, and least of all to suffer explanation and apology. Death did not cross my mind. I was not wooing martyrdom. Anger was the all-embracing force that moved me, and it lent my feet wings, heavy and slow as they are as a rule.
No Waziri–not even Grim or Narayan Singh, who are fleet of foot—passed me on that crazy charge from our sangar wall to the ledge where Kangra Khan had deployed his men. We plunged into darkness, and had no breath to yell with, so the roar to Allah ceased. Maybe Kangra Khan misunderstood the silence beyond our breast work. Perhaps he and his men believed our first yells, if they as much as heard them up-wind, were an effort of despair, that died away. They kept a steady fire pouring on the wall and, we not pausing to reply from the darkness beneath the hurrying mist, they had no means of divining what we were up to.
So we were up there and among them before they guessed we were coming, and that night's second shambles was staged on a ledge, with a sheer fall of fifty feet for whoever set a foot wrong, or was forced over backward in hand-to-hand fight.
I don't remember using the rifle as it should be used, although when it was all over I found the magazine was empty. Perhaps the fellow I snatched it from had emptied it and not reloaded. Maybe I fired instinctively and forgot it as a man forgets the breath he drew. I do,know I clubbed the thing and fought Berserker fashion all along the ledge, driving Kangra Khan's Pathans along in front of me, myself untouched, not even in danger as I remember it. They quailed in front of the flailing rifle-butt, and I wake up now at night sometimes in a hot sweat, from dreaming of their bearded faces as they fell in front of me and toppled off the cliff. Some fell before I struck them, stepping backward to avoid the blow.
I don't know what Grim and Narayan Singh or our Waziris did. That was a one-man fight as far as I was conscious of it—a delirium of anger. I'm not proud of it, although they tell me the Waziris have composed a song about that fury of mine. I may say I was hardly in it. It was passion—all the brute, hereditary instincts using my strength. I don't remember how I got there, but I found myself at last sitting heaving for breath on a rock at the end of the ledge, with the blood-beastly rifle over my knees, wondering stupidly why the magazine was empty.
Grim came and told me that our Waziris were scattered in all directions in pursuit of Kangra Khan's men, and that he hoped they would find their way back before day light. Then King came, and stood looking at me, with his back to the moon. I think he understood, for he said nothing—nothing personal, that is. He turned and talked to Grim.
“All right so far,” he said. “Kangra Khan has likely had enough. But the tribes will gather now to hound the Waziris harder than ever. They'll argue they're tired and running out of ammunition. To morrow, or next day at latest, will see us surrounded again. Where's Miss Leich?”
Grim did not know. He asked me. I knew, or thought I knew, but that slap in the face was as fresh in my memory as if it had happened that instant. He had to ask me twice before I answered.
“The last I saw of her, she was in that tower,” I said, jerking my thumb in the direction of the sangar.
Doubtless they thought my surliness was due to the reaction after fighting. They walked away along the ledge, and presently found Narayan Singh, and sent him to keep an eye on me, while they started off for the sangar, keeping an eye on each other for fear of Pathan knives lurking in the mist.
Narayan Singh came and sat down on the rock beside me, and he and I are such old friends that there was no need to speak unless either of us felt disposed. We were silent for perhaps five minutes, he pulling a rag through a rifle he had picked up some where. Presently he took the rifle off my knees, pitched it over the cliff, and replaced it with the one he had cleaned.
“That is better,” he said quietly.
I did not answer. I was hardly more than conscious of his presence. Such process as was going on in my mind was hardly to be dignified with the name of thought, but I was dimly aware of contentment that he should be there; and because he was not of my race I preferred him just then to either King or Grim. I felt he might be less inclined, and less able than they to interpret my state of mind and draw conclusions. But I was entirely wrong.
“Sahib,” he said presently, running the fingers of his right hand upward through his beard, “all women are the . Of two, the more beautiful is the worse; and of three, the youngest.”
“What the do you know about women?” I asked him.
“This: That a man's own error is reflected in their faces; his goodness or his badness, his strength or his weakness in their hearts. A man sees himself in a woman, and the more he loves her, the worse the vision shocks him. So he goes off and acts like the madman that he naturally is—even as an ape making faces at himself in a stolen looking-glass.”
“You're polite!” said I.
“I am the sahib's friend. I am a man who has seen much—including my own heart in a woman's—at which I look no longer—having no delight in it.”
I was about to answer—hotly, it may be—when we both heard some one scrambling breathlessly up the track. In a minute Grim came stumbling over stones along the ledge.
“Miss Leich!” he said. “Where is she?”
“In the tower,” I answered, aware of an uncomfortable premonition.
“No,” Grim said, “she isn't there.”
“She's down on the platform at the bottom of the shaft,” said I.
“No, she's not,” he answered. “We've looked everywhere. She's gone! No trace!”
- ↑ A stone-walled enclosure