Told in the East Part 12

It was met, long before the jackals had dug down to General Baines' remains, by the advance-guard of Colonel Kendrick's column, which was coming out of Harumpore because things were not brisk enough in that place to keep it busy. Kendrick himself was riding with the cavalry detachment that led the way southward.

"Who's in command now?" he asked, for they had told him of General Baines' death by poison.

"I am," said a gray-haired officer who rode up at that moment.

"I'm your senior, sir, by two years," answered Kendrick.

"Then you command, sir."

"Very good. Enough time's been wasted. The column can wait here until my main body reaches us. Then we'll march at once on Jailpore. This idea of leaving Jailpore to its fate is nonsense! The rebels are in strength there, and they have perpetrated an abominable outrage. There we will punish them, or else we'll all die in the attempt! If we have to raze Jailpore to the ground, and put every man in it to the sword before we find the four Europeans supposed to be left alive there, our duty is none the less obvious! Here comes my column. Tell the men to be ready to march in ten minutes."

He turned his horse, to look through the dust at the approaching column, but the man who had been superseded touched him on the sleeve.

"What's that? Better have a rest? Tired out, you say? Oh! Form them all up in hollow square, then, and I'll say a few words to them. There are other ways of reviving a leg-weary column than by letting it lie down."

Ten minutes later a dull roar rose up through a steel-shot dust-cloud, and three thousand helmets whirled upward, flas.h.i.+ng in the sun. Three thousand weary men had given him his answer! There was no kind of handle to it; no reserve-nothing but generous and unconditional allegiance unto hunger, thirst, pain, weariness, disease or death. It takes a real commander to draw that kind of answer from a tired-out column, but it is a kind of answer, too, that makes commanders! It is not mere talk, on either side. It means that by some sixth sense a strong man and his men have discovered something that is good in each other.

XI.

"You've made good time, friend Juggut Khan!" said Brown, advancing to meet him where the men and the fakir and the interpreter would not be able to Overhear.

"Sahib, I killed one horse-the horse you looted for me-and I brought away two from Bholat. One of them carried me more than fifty miles, and then I changed to this one, leaving the other on the road. I have orders for you, sahib."

"Hand 'em over then," said Brown. "Orders first, and talk afterward, when there's time!"

The Rajput drew out a sealed envelope, and pa.s.sed it to him. Brown tore it open, and read the message, scowling at the half-sheet of paper as though it were a death-sentence.

"Where's the general?"

"With his column-twenty or thirty miles away to the northward by now!"

"And he's left me, with this handful, in the lurch?"

"Nay, sahib! As I understood the orders, he has left you with a very honorable mission to fulfil!"

Brown stared hard at the half-sheet of notepaper again. Reading was not his longest suit by any means, and at that he infinitely preferred to wrestle with printed characters.

"Have you read it, Juggut Khan?" he asked.

"Nay, sahib. I can speak English, but not read it."

"Then we're near to being in the same boat, we two!" said Brown with a grin. "I'll have another try! It looks like a good-by message to me-here's the word 'good-by' written at the end above his signature."

"There were other matters, sahib. There was an order. I can not read, but I know what is in the message."

"Well?"

"You, and your twelve-"

"Nine!" corrected Brown.

"Three dead?"

Brown nodded.

"Your nine, then, sahib, and you and I are to proceed immediately to Jailpore, and to gain an entrance if we can, rescue those whom I concealed there and bring them to Harumpore, or to the northward of Harumpore, wherever we can find the column."

"Eleven men are to attempt that?"

Brown was studying out the letter word by word, and discovering to his amazement that its purport was exactly what Juggut Khan pretended.

"If there are no more than eleven of us, then yes, eleven! And, sahib, since you seem to hold at least an island here where a man may lie down unmolested, I propose to sleep for an hour or two, before proceeding. I have had no sleep since I left Jailpore."

"Nothing of the sort!" said Brown. "If we're to march on Jailpore, off we go at once! You can sleep on the road, my son! It's time we paid a visit to that village, I'm thinking. Those treacherous brutes need a lesson. I'd have been down there before, only I wanted to be in full view of the road in case anybody came looking for me from Bholat. We'll need a wagon for the fakir. You can sleep in it too."

"Sleep with a fakir? I? Allah! I am a Rajput, sahib! A sergeant of the Rajput Horse, retired!"

"I wouldn't want to sleep with him myself!" admitted Brown. "Come and look at him. You can smell him from here, but the sight of him's the real thing!"

The Rajput swaggered up beside Brown, after loosening his horse's girths and lifting the saddle for a moment.

"He's not the only one that needs a drink!" said Brown. "We're all dry as brick-dust here, except the fakir!"

"He must wait a while before he drinks. Show me the fakir. Why, Brown sahib, know you what you have there?"

"The father of all the smells, and all the dirt and all the evil eyes and evil tongues in Asia!" Brown hazarded.

"More than that, sahib! That is the nameless fakir-him whom they know as HE! Has there been no attempt made to rescue him?"

"They rescued him once, and murdered three of my men to get him. When they tried again, I put a halter round his neck and he and I arranged a sort of temporary compromise."

"And the terms of it?"

"Oh, he's supposed to have performed a miracle. He made us unslip the halter, and fall down flat, and he's supposed to be keeping us by him, by a sort of spell, so's to give us something extra-special in the line of ghastly deaths at his own convenience. That way, I was able to wait for news from Bholat-see?"

"You could have captured no more important prisoner than that, sahib, let me tell you! They believe him to be almost a G.o.d; so nearly one that the G.o.ds themselves obey his orders now and then! It was he, and no other, that told the men of Jailpore that he would make them impervious to bullets. If we have him, sahib, we have the key to Jailpore!"

"We, have certainly got him," said Brown. "You can see him, and you can smell him. I'll order one of the men to p.r.i.c.k him with a bayonet, if you want to hear him, too! I wouldn't feel him, if I were you!"

"He must come, too, to Jailpore!"

"Of course he comes!"

"Then, sahib, let us move away from here to where there is water. There let us rest until sundown, and then march, in the cool of the evening. It will be better so. And of a truth I must sleep, or else drop dead from weariness."