Told in the East Part 16

Pattering footsteps sounded on the causeway, and a little crowd of nearly doubled figures came up it at a run.

"Fire!"

The volley took the rebels absolutely by surprise, and no man could miss his mark at that short range. Five of the rebels fell back headlong, and the rest, who followed up the causeway, turned on their heels and ran.

"'Bout turn!" Brown shouted suddenly. "Use the steel, men! Use the steel!"

His own sword was flas.h.i.+ng, and lunging as he spoke, and he had already checked a sudden rush by the prisoners.

They had thought the moment favorable for joining in the scrimmage from the rear.

"All right! That'll do them! I'll attend to 'em now!"

A man came running up with the lantern Brown had asked for, and Brown took it and began waving it above his head.

"They must have heard that volley!" he muttered to himself. "Ah! There's the answer!"

A red light began to dance over in the British camp, moving up and down and sidewise in sudden little jerks. Brown read the jerks, as he could never have read writing, and a moment later he answered them.

"Now, down below, the lot of you! Give me your rifle, you. I'll need it."

"Not coming, sir."

"Not yet. There's something else yet, and I can do it best. Besides, some one has got to guard the causeway still. There might be a rush again at any minute. Listen now. Obey Juggut Khan implicitly as soon as you get down. His orders are my orders. Understand? Very well, then. And you without a weapon, your job is to shut the door that you leave the magazine by tight from the outside-d'you understand me? Call up when you're all through the door, and then shut it tight!"

"But, how'll you get out, sir?"

"That's my business. One minute, though. Here they come again. Get ready to fire another volley!"

The mutineers made another and a more determined rush up the causeway, coming up it more than twenty strong, and at the double. Brown let one volley loose in the midst of them, then led his men at the charge down on them and drove them over the edge of the causeway by dint of sheer impact and cold steel. Not one of them reached the ground alive, and in the darkness it must have been impossible for the mutineers below to divine how many were the granary's defenders.

"That'll keep 'em quiet for a while, I'll wager! Now, quick, you men! Get down below, and follow Juggut Khan, and don't forget to shut the door tight on you. These prisoners here are going to follow you-they may as well go down with you for that matter. No! that won't do. They could open the door below, couldn't they? They'll have to stay up here. Got any rope? Then bind them, somebody. Bind their hands and feet. Now, off with you!"

Brown spent the next few minutes signaling with the lantern, and reading answering flashes that zig-zagged in the velvet blackness of the British lines. Then, as a voice boomed up through the granary, "All's well, sir! I'm just about to shut the door!" he fixed his eyes on the fakir, and laughed at him.

"You and I are going to turn in our accounts of how we've worked out this 'Hook.u.m hai' business, my friend!" he told him. "You've given orders, and I've obeyed orders! We've both accounted for a death or two, and we've both accepted responsibility. We're going to know in less than five minutes from now which of us two was justified. There's one thing I know, though, without asking. There's one person, and she a woman, who'll weep for me. Will anybody weep for you, I wonder?"

A lantern waved wildly from the British camp, and Brown seized his own lantern and signaled an answer.

"See that? That's to say, you gla.s.sy-eyed horror you, that our mutual friend Juggut Khan has been seen emerging like a rat from a hole in the wall. I'll give him and his party one more minute to get clear. Then there's going to be a holocaust, my friend!"

He c.o.c.ked his rifle, and examined the breech-bolt and the foresight carefully. The fakir shuddered, evidently thinking that the charge was intended for himself.

"No! It won't be that way. I know a better! I'm taking a leaf from your book and doing harm by wholesale!"

Brown leaned down into the opening of the dome, and brought the rifle to his shoulder. There was a chorus of yells from the prisoners, and a noise like a wounded horse's scream from the fakir. The rest were bound, but the fakir rose and writhed toward him on his heels, with his sound arm stretched up in an att.i.tude of despair beside the withered one.

A chorus of bugles burst out from the British camp, and a volley ripped through the blackness.

"All right! Here goes!" said Brown. And he aimed down into the shadowy powder-magazine, and pulled the trigger.

Ten minutes later, an army three thousand and five hundred strong marched in through the gap made in the outer wall by a granary that had spread itself through-and not over-what was in its way. There were seventeen tons of powder that responded to the invitation of Brown's bullet.

XIV.

Explosions are among the few things-or the many things, whichever way you like to look at it!-that science can not undertake to harness or account for. When a gun blows up, or a powder-magazine, the shock kills whom it kills, as when a sh.e.l.l bursts in a dense-packed firing-line. You can not kill any man before his time comes, even if a thousand tons of solid masonry combine with you to whelm him, and go hurtling through the air with him to absolutely obvious destruction.

The fakir's time had come, and the prisoners' time had come. But Sergeant William Brown's had not.

They found him, blackened by powder, and with every st.i.tch of clothing blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond. There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton of broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof that he had come belched out of a holocaust. The men who came on him had given their officer the slip, and were bent on a private looting-expedition of their own. But by the time that they had dragged him from the water, and he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe himself, their thoughts of plunder had departed from them. Brown had a way of quite monopolizing people's thoughts!

There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all through the morning and the afternoon that followed. He held them together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered and compelled them through the h.e.l.l-tumult of the ghastliest thing there is beneath the dome of heaven-house-to-house fighting in an Eastern city. And at the end of it, when the bugles blew at last "Cease fire," and many of the men were marched away by companies to put out the conflagrations that were blazing here and there, he led them outside the city-wall, stood them at ease in their own line and saluted their commanding-officer.

"Twenty men of yours, sir. Present and correct."

"Which twenty?"

"Of Mr. Blair's half-company."

"Where's Mr. Blair?"

"Dunno, sir!"

"Since when have you had charge of them?"

"Since they broke into the city yesterday, sir."

"And you haven't lost a man?"

"Had lots of luck, sir!"

"Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm Sergeant Brown, sir."

"Of the Rifles?"

"Of the Rifles, sir."

"Were you the man who signaled to us from the magazine and blew it up and made the breach in the wall for us to enter by?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you alive, or dead? Man or ghost?"