The Winds of the World Part 24

"Forget not the water for thy trooper, Ranjoor Singh!"

He looked up to see Yasmini's face framed in the opening, and he thought there was more devilment expressed in it, for all her loveliness, than in her voice that never quite lost its hint of laughter. He did not answer, and the trap-door closed again.

He knelt and began to grope through the dark on hands and knees, but gave that up presently because the dust from old sacks and piles of rubbish began to choke him. Then rats came to investigate him. He heard several of them scamper close, and one bit his leg; so he made ready to fight for his life against the worst enemy a man may have, praying a little in the Sikh way, that does not reckon G.o.d to be far off at any time.

Suddenly the trap-door opened, and the rats scampered away from the light and noise.

"Thus is a soldier answered!" muttered Ranjoor Singh.

"Is the risaldar-major sahib thirsty?" wondered Yasmini.

He could hear her pouring water out of a bra.s.s ewer into a dish, and pouring it back again. The metal rang and the water splashed deliriously, but he was not very thirsty yet; he had been thirstier on parade a hundred times.

When her head and shoulders darkened the aperture, he did not trouble this time to look at her.

"Is it dark down there?" she asked him; but he did not answer.

So she struck a match and lit a newspaper. In a moment a ball of fire was floating downward to him, and it was then that the smell of dust and kerosene entered his consciousness as pincers enter the flesh of men in torment. He stood up with hands upstretched to catch the fire-caught it-bore it downward-and smothered it in gunny-bags.

"Still dark?" she said, looking through the aperture once more. "I will send another one!"

So Ranjoor Singh found his tongue and cursed her with a force and comprehensiveness that only Asia can command; he gave her to understand that the next fire she dropped on him should be allowed to work G.o.d's will and burn her-her, her rats, her cobras, and her cutthroats. Two honest Sikhs, he swore, would die well to such an end.

"Drop thy fire and I will fan the flame!" he vowed, and she believed him.

"I will send my cobras down to keep the sahib company!" she mocked.

But Ranjoor Singh proposed to take one danger at a time, and he was quite sure that she wanted him alive, not dead, for otherwise he would have been dead already. He held his tongue and listened while she splashed the water.

"Thy trooper is very thirsty, sahib!"

She was on a warmer scent now, for that squadron of his and the men of his squadron were the one love of his warrior life. Some spirit of malice whispered her as much.

"The trooper shall have water when Ranjoor Singh sahib has promised on his Sikh honor."

"Promised what?" His voice betrayed interest at last; it suggested future possibilities instead of a grim present.

"That he will do what is required of him!"

"Is that the price of a drink for Jagut Singh?"

"Aye! Will the sahib pay, or will he let the trooper parch?"

"Ask Jagut Singh! Go, ask him! Let it be as he answers!"

He could hear her hurry away, although she slammed the trap-door shut. Evidently she was not satisfied to speak through the little hole, and he suspected that she was showing the man water, perhaps giving some to the Afridi for sweet suggestion's sake. She was back within five minutes, and by the way she opened the trap and grinned at him he knew what her answer would be.

"He begs that you promise! He begs, sahib! He says he is thy trooper, thy dog, thy menial, and very thirsty!"

"Bring some one who knows better how to lie!" said Ranjoor Singh. "I know what his answer was! He said, 'Say to the risaldar-major sahib that I have eaten salt, but I am not thirsty!' Go, tell him his answer was a good one, and that I know he said it! I know that man, as men know each other. Thou art a woman, and thy knowledge is but emptiness. Thou hast heard now twice what the answer is, once from him and once from me!"

"I will leave thee to the rats!" she said, slamming the trap-door tight.

The rats came, and he began to grope about for a weapon to use against them. He caught one rat in his fingers, squeezed the squealing brute to death and flung it away, and he heard a hundred of its messmates race to devour the carca.s.s.

He began to see little active eyes around him in the blackness, that watched his every movement, and he kept moving since that seemed to puzzle them. Also he wondered, as a drowning man might wonder about things, how long it would be before Colonel Kirby would send for him to ask about the murdered trooper. Something would happen then, he felt quite sure.

The rats by this time had grown very daring, and he had been bitten again twice; he found time to wonder what lies Yasmini would tell to account for her share in things. He did not doubt she would lie herself out of it, but he wondered just how, along what unexpected line. It began to seem to him that the colonel and his squadron were a very long time coming.

"But they will come!" he a.s.sured himself.

He was nearer to the mark when he expected unexpectedness from Yasmini, for she did not disappoint him. A door opened at one end of the black dark cellar, and again the rats scampered for cover as Yasmini herself stood framed in it, with a lantern above her head.

She was alone, and he could not see that she had any weapon.

"This way, sahib!" she called sweetly to him.

Never-North, South, East or West, in olden days or modern-did a siren call half so seductively. Every move she ever made was poetry expressed, but framed in a golden aura shed by the lamp, and swaying in the velvet blackness of the pit's mouth, she was, it seemed to Ranjoor Singh, as no man had ever yet seen woman.

"Come, sahib!" she called again; and he moved toward her.

"Food and water wait! Thy trooper has drunk his fill. Come, sahib!"

She made no move at all to protect herself from him. She did not lead into the cavern beyond the door. She waited for him, leaning against the door-post and smiling as if she and he were old friends who understood each other.

"I but tried thee, Ranjoor Singh!" she smiled, looking up into his face and holding the lantern closer to his eyes, as if she would read behind them. "Thou art a soldier, and not a buffalo at all! I am sorry that I called thee buffalo. My heart goes out ever to a brave man, Ranjoor Singh!"

He was actually at her side, her clothes touched his, and he could have flung his arms around her. But it was the move next after that which seemed obscure. He wondered what her reply would be; and, moving the lantern a little, she read the hesitation in his eyes-the wavering between desire for vengeance, a soldierly regard for s.e.x, and mistrust of her apparent helplessness. And, being Yasmini, she dared him.

"Like swords I have seen!" she laughed. "Two cutting edges and a point! Not to be held save by the hilt, eh, Ranjoor Singh? Search me for weapons first, and then use that dagger in thy hair-I am unarmed!"

"Lead on!" he commanded in a voice that grated harshly, for it needed all his willpower to prevent his self-command from giving out. He knew that behind temptation of any kind there lie the iron teeth of unexpected consequences.

She let the lantern swing below her knees and leaned back to laugh at him, until the cavern behind her echoed as if all the underworld had seen and was amused.

"I called thee a buffalo!" she panted. "Nay, I was very wrong! I laugh at my mistake! Come, Ranjoor Singh!"

With a swing of the lantern and a swerve of her lithe body, she slipped out of his reach and danced down an age-old hewn-stone pa.s.sage, out of which doors seemed to lead at every six or seven yards; only the doors were all made fast with iron bolts so huge that it would take two men to manage them.

He hurried after her. But the faster he followed the faster she ran, until it needed little imagination to conceive her a will-o'-the-wisp and himself a crazy man.

"Come!" she kept calling to him. "Come!"

And then she commenced to sing, as if dark pa.s.sages beneath the Delhi streets were a fit setting for her skill and loveliness. Ranjoor Singh had never heard the song before. It was about a tiger who boasted and fell into a trap. It made him more cautious than he might have been, and when the darkness began to grow less opaque he slowed into a walk. Then he stood still, for he could not see her any longer.

It occurred to him to turn back. But that thought had not more than crossed his mind when a noose was pulled tight around his legs and a big sheet, thrown out of the darkness, was wrapped and wrapped about him until he could neither shout nor move. He knew that they were women who managed the sheet, because he bit one's finger through it and she screamed. Then he heard Yasmini's voice close to his ear.

"Thy colonel sahib and another are outside!" she whispered. "It is not well to wait here, Ranjoor Singh!"