Rung Ho! Part 26

"It looks hotter than the horns of h.e.l.l!" said Cunningham.

"The horns of h.e.l.l, sahib, are what we leave behind us! They grow hot now! Thy countrymen--the men who hated thee so easily--heated them and sit now between them for their folly!"

"How d'you mean? 'Pon my soul and honor, Risaldar, you talk more riddles in five minutes than I ever heard before in all my life!"

"There be many riddles I have not told yet--riddles of which I do not know the answer. Read me this one. Why did the British Government annex the state of Oudh? All the best native soldiers came from Oudh, or nearly all. They were loyal once; but can a man be fairly asked to side against his own? If Oudh should rise in rebellion, what would the soldiers do?"

"Dunno, I'm sure," said Cunningham.

"Read me this one, then. By pacifying both Mohammedan and Hindoo and by letting both keep their religion, by sometimes playing one against the other and by being just, the British Government has become supreme from the Himalayas to the ocean. Can you tell me why they now issue cartridges for the new rifles that are soaked in the fat of cows and pigs, thus insulting both Mohammedan and Hindoo?"

"I didn't know it was so."

"Sahib, it is! These d.a.m.ned new cartridges and this new drill-sahib, I--I who am loyal to the marrow of my bones--would no more touch those cartridges--nor bite them, as the drill decrees--than I would betray thee! Pig's fat! Ugh!"

He spat with Mohammedan eloquence and wiped his lips on his tunic sleeve before resuming.

"Then, like a flint and steel, to light the train that they have laid, they loose these missionaries, in a swarm, from one end of India to the other. Why? What say one and all? Mohammedan and Hindoo both say it is a plot, first to make them lose their own religion by defilement, then to make Christians of them! Foolishness to talk thus? Nay! It was foolishness to act thus!

"Sahib, peace follows in the wake of soldiers, as we know. Time and time again the peace of India has been ripped asunder at the whim of priests!

These padre people, preaching new d.a.m.nation everywhere, are the flint and steel for the tinder of the cartridge fat!"

"I never knew you to croak before, Mahommed Gunga."

"Nor am I croaking. I am praising Allah, who has sent thee now to the place whence the wind will come to fan the h.e.l.l flames that presently will burn. The wind will blow hot or cold--for or against the government--according as you and I and certain others act when opportunity arrives! See yonder!"

They had been seen, evidently, for hors.e.m.e.n--looking like black ants on the desert--seemed to have crawled from the bowels of the living rock and were galloping in their direction.

"Friends?" asked Cunningham.

"Friends, indeed! But they have yet to discover whether we are friends.

They set me thinking, sahib. Alwa is well known on this country-side and none dare raid his place; few would waste time trying. Therefore, it is all one to him who pa.s.ses along this road; and he takes no trouble, as a rule, to send his men out in skirmis.h.i.+ng order when a party comes in view. Why, then, does he trouble now?"

"Couldn't say. I don't know Alwa."

"I am thinking, sahib, that the cloud has burst at last! A blood-red cloud! Alwa is neither scare-monger nor robber; when he sends out armed men to inspect strangers on the sky-line, there is war! Sahib, I grow young again! Had people listened to me--had they called me anything but fool when I warned them--thou and I would have been cooped up now in Agra, or in Delhi, or Lucknow, or Peshawur! Now we are free of the plains of Rajputana--within a ride of fifty of my blood-relations, and they each within reach of others! Ho! I can hear the thunder of a squadron at my back again! I am young, sahib--young! My old joints loosen! Allah send the cloud has burst at last--I bring to two thousand Rangars a new Cunnigan-bahadur! Thy father's son shall learn what Cunnigan-bahadur taught!"

He lapsed into silence, watching the advancing hors.e.m.e.n, who swooped down on them in an ever-closing fan formation. His tired horse sensed the thrill that tingled through its rider's veins, and pranced again, curving his neck and straining at the bit until Mahommed Gunga steadied him. The five behind--even the mule-drivers too--detected excitement in the air, and the little column closed in on its leaders. All eyes watched the neck-and-neck approach of Alwa's men, until Cunningham at last could see their turbans and make out that they were Rangars, not Hindoos. Then he and the Risaldar drew rein.

There were twenty who raced toward them, but no Alwa.

"It is as I thought!" declared Mahommed Gunga. "It is war, sahib! He has summoned men from his estates. As a rule, he can afford but ten men for that fort of his, and he would not send all his men to meet us--he has a garrison up yonder!"

Like blown dust-devils the twenty raced to them, and drew up thundering within a lance-length. A sword-armed Rangar with a little gold lace on his sleeve laughed loud as he saluted, greeting Mahommed Gunga first.

The Risaldar accepted his salute with iron dignity.

"Forgive him, sahib!" he whispered to Cunningham. "The jungli knows no better! He will learn whom to salute first when Alwa has said his say!"

But Cunningham was in no mood just then to stand on military ceremony or right of precedence. He was too excited, too inquisitive, too occupied with the necessity for keeping calm in the face of what most surely looked like the beginning of big happenings. These hors.e.m.e.n of Alwa's rode, and looked, and laughed like soldiers, new-stripped of the hobble ropes of peace, and their very seat in the untanned saddles--tight down, loose-swaying from the hips, and free--was confirmation of Mahommed Gunga's words.

They wheeled in a cloud and led the way, opening a little in the centre to let the clouds of sand their horses kicked up blow to the right and left of Cunningham and his men. Not a word was spoken--not a question asked or a piece of news exchanged--until the whole party halted at the foot of Alwa's fortress home--a great iron gate in front of them and garden land on either side--watered by the splas.h.i.+ng streamlet from the heights above.

"Men of the house of Kachwaha have owned and held this place, sahib, since Allah made it!" whispered Mahommed Gunga. "Men say that Alwa has no right to it; they lie! His father's father won the dower-right!"

He was interrupted by the rising of the iron gate. It seemed solid, without even an eyehole in it. It was wide enough to let four horses under side by side, and for all its weight it rose as suddenly and evenly as though a giant's hand had lifted it. Immediately behind it, like an actor waiting for the stage-curtain to rise, Alwa bestrode his war-horse in the middle of a roadway. He saluted with drawn sabre, and this time Cunningham replied.

Almost instantly the man who had led the gallopers and had saluted Mahommed Gunga spurred his horse up close to Cunningham and whispered:

"Pardon, sahib! I did not know! Am I forgiven?"

"Yes," said Cunningham, remembering then that a Rajput, and a Rangar more particularly, thinks about points of etiquette before considering what to eat. Alwa growled out a welcome, rammed his sabre home, and wheeled without another word, showing the way at a walk--which was all a wild goat could have accomplished--up a winding road, hewn out of the solid mountain, that corkscrewed round and round upon itself until it gave onto the battlemented summit. There he dismounted, ordered his men to their quarters, and for the first time took notice of his cousin.

"I have thy missionary and his daughter, three horses for thee, and thy man," he smiled.

"Did Ali Partab bring them?"

"Nay. It was I brought Ali Partab and the rest! My promise is redeemed!"

Mahommed Gunga thrust his sword-hilt out and smiled back at him.

"I present Raff-Cunnigan-sahib--son of Pukka-Cunnigan-bahadur!" he announced.

Alwa drew himself up to his full height and eyed young Cunningham as a buyer eyes a war-horse, inch by inch. The youngster, who had long since learned to actually revel in the weird sensation of a hundred pairs of eyes all fixed on him at once, felt this one man's gaze go over him as though he were being probed. He thanked his G.o.d he had no fat to be detected, and that his legs were straight, and that his tunic fitted him!

"Salaam, bahadur," said Alwa slowly. "I knew thy father.

So--thou--art--his--son. Welcome. There is room here always for a guest.

I have other guests with whom you might care to speak. I will have a room made ready. Have I leave to ask questions of my cousin here?"

Cunningham bowed in recognition of his courtesy, and walked away to a point whence he could look from the beetling parapet away and away across desert that shone hot and hazy-rimmed on every side. If this were a man on whom he must depend for following--if any of all the more than hints dropped by the risaldar were true--it seemed to him that his reception was a little too chilly to be hopeful.

After a minute or two he turned his eyes away from the dazzling plain below and faced about to inspect the paved courtyard. Round it, on three sides of a parallelogram, there ran a beautifully designed and wonderfully worked-out veranda-fronted building, broken here and there by cobbled pa.s.sages that evidently led to other buildings on the far edge of the rock. In the centre, covered by a roof like a temple-dome in miniature, was the ice-cold spring, whose existence made the fort tenable. Under the veranda, on a long, low lounge, was a sight that arrested his attention--held him spell-bound--drew him, tingling in a way he could not have explained--drew him--drew him, slow-footed, awkward, red--across the courtyard.

He heard Mahommed Gunga swear aloud; he recognized the wording of the belly-growled Rangar oath; but it did not occur to him that what he saw--what was drawing him--could be connected with it. He looked straight ahead and walked ahead--reached the edge of the veranda--took his helmet off--and stood still, feeling like an idiot, with the sun full on his head.

"I'd advise you to step into the shade," said a voice that laughed more sweetly than the chuckling spring. "I don't know who you are, but I'm more glad to see you than I ever was in my life to see anybody. I can't get up, because I'm too stiff; the ride to here from Howrah City all but killed me, and I'm only here still because I couldn't ride another yard.

My father will be out in a moment. He's half-dead too."

"My name is Cunningham."

"I'm Miss McClean. My father was a missionary in Howrah."

She nodded to a chair beside her, and Cunningham took it, feeling awkward, as men of his type usually do when they meet a woman in a strange place.

"How in the world did you get in?" she asked him. "It's two days now since the Alwa-sahib told us that the whole country is in rebellion. How is it that you managed to reach here? According to Alwa, no white man's life is safe in the open, and he only told me today that he wouldn't let me go away even if I were well enough to ride."

"First I've heard of rebellion!" said Cunningham aghast at the notion of hearing news like that a second hand, and from a woman.

"Hasn't Alwa told you?"

"He hasn't had time to, yet."