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Barclay of the Guides

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Title: Barclay of the Guides

Author: Herbert Strang


        
Release date: April 23, 2010 [eBook #32102]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32102

Credits: Produced by Chris Curnow, Lindy Walsh, Mary Meehan and the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BARCLAY OF THE GUIDES ***




Produced by Chris Curnow, Lindy Walsh, Mary Meehan and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









                        BARCLAY OF THE GUIDES

                          BY HERBERT STRANG


HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON

_Copyright 1908 in the United States of America_

REPRINTED 1924 IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




PREFACE


The great Mutiny embraced so wide an area, in which momentous events
happened almost simultaneously in places far apart, that it seemed
advisable to confine the historical background of this story to the
siege of Delhi, the city which was the heart of the rebellion. In regard
to the historical persons introduced, care has been taken to adhere as
closely as possible to facts; and, where the romancer's licence must
needs put words into their mouths, to conform to probability and their
known characters. If the boys who read these pages should care to know
more of the great men of whom they get glimpses, they will find a store
of good things in _Lumsden of the Guides_, by Sir Peter Lumsden and
George R. Elsmie; the _Memoirs of Sir Henry Daly_, by Major H. Daly; _A
Leader of Light Horse_ (Hodson), and the _Life of John Nicholson_, both
by Lieut.-Colonel Trotter. The history of the Mutiny, as related in the
pages of Kaye and Malleson, will never lose its fascination.

HERBERT STRANG




CONTENTS


CHAPTER THE FIRST The Raid

CHAPTER THE SECOND The Making of a Pathan

CHAPTER THE THIRD Sky-high

CHAPTER THE FOURTH The Return of Sherdil

CHAPTER THE FIFTH Reprisals

CHAPTER THE SIXTH In the Nets

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH Jan Larrens

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH A Competition Wallah

CHAPTER THE NINTH A Fakir

CHAPTER THE TENTH The Delhi Road

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH The Missy Sahib

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH Bluff

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH Some Lathi-wallahs and a Camel

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH Kaluja Dass, Khansaman

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH Within the Gates

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH The Coming of Bakht Khan

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH The Doctor's Divan

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH The Spoilers Spoiled

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH Asadullah

CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH Wolf and Jackal

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST Master and Servant

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND The Fight of Bakr-Id

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD Ordeal

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH Nikalsain

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH The Storming of Delhi

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH Eighty to One

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH Duty

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY




CHAPTER THE FIRST

The Raid


Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan, chief of the village of Shagpur, was making
his lonely way through the hills some three miles above his home. He
could see the walled village perched on a little tract of grassy land
just where the base of the hills met the sandy plain. It was two
thousand feet or more below him, and he could almost count the
flat-topped houses clustered beyond his father's tower, which, though
actually it rose to some height above them, dominating them, and
affording an outlook over miles and miles of the plain, yet appeared to
Ahmed, at his present altitude, merely a patch in the general level.

Between him and the village lay three miles of grey rugged hill country,
scarred with watercourses, and almost void of vegetation. A mile away,
indeed, there was a long stretch of woodland, lying like a great green
smudge upon the monotony of grey. It was a patch of irregular shape,
narrowing here, broadening there, filling a valley which bent round
towards the village. Ahmed was accustomed to shoot there occasionally,
but he preferred the more exciting and more dangerous sport of hunting
on the hills, where he might stalk his quarry from crag to crag, leaping
ravines, swarming up abrupt and precipitous cliffs, always in peril of a
fall that might break his limbs even if it did not crash the life out of
him. For Ahmed was of a daring disposition, fearless, undauntable, yet
possessed of a certain coolness of judgment by which he had hitherto
brought himself unscathed through sixteen years of adventurous boyhood.

He was a tall, slim, lissom fellow, with very black hair and a swarthy
skin, which set off the spotless white of his turban. He wore the loose
frock and baggy trousers of the country. Yet one observing him would
have marked certain differences between his features and those of the
Pathans among whom he dwelt. His nose was arched, but it was thinner
than was usual among his countrymen. His lips were not so thick as
theirs, nor was his mouth so large, and his eyes, instead of coal-black,
were of a curious steely-grey. And any one who saw him bathing with the
lads of his village (itself a strange pastime, for the hill-men have no
great partiality for water) would have been struck by the paleness of
his skin where it was protected from the sun and the weather. The
observer's conclusion would probably have been that Ahmed was a Pathan
of a particularly refined type, and in all likelihood an offshoot of
some noble family which time's vicissitudes had reduced.

Ahmed stood for a few moments looking down at Shagpur, then turned to
pursue his way. He had a fowling-piece slung at his back; his intention
was to ascend the hills for perhaps another thousand feet, to a spot
where he would probably come upon a small herd of black-buck. But he had
not mounted far from the place at which he had paused when he halted
again, and, putting his left hand above his eyes to shield them from the
sun's rays, gazed steadily in a direction away from the village. Below
him the plain stretched for many miles, bare and desolate, though when
the rains came by and by it would be clothed with verdure. Scarcely a
tree broke its level, and so parched was it now that no beast could have
found sustenance there. But far away Ahmed's keen eye had descried what
appeared to be a speck upon the horizon, and he watched it intently.

There was nothing unusual in the sight itself. Many a time he had seen
just such a speck in the sky, watched it grow in breadth and height,
until it stretched across the plain like an immense wall, thirty miles
long, a thousand feet high. He had seen it approach like a monstrous
phantom, driving before it, as it were, circling flights of kites and
vultures, enveloping the bases of the hills, shutting out the sun with
yellow scudding clouds. But such a dust-storm ordinarily swept over the
plain southwards: Ahmed had never seen one approach from the west; and
after a long and steady gaze at the speck, which grew slowly in size, he
suddenly dropped his hand, uttered an exclamation in the Pashtu tongue,
and turning his back began to retrace his course, at a speed vastly
greater than that at which he had formerly been moving, towards his
distant village.

The moving speck had resolved itself into a band of horsemen. They had
been too far away for him to distinguish individuals and know who and
what they were; but, considering the quarter from which they were
coming, his instant thought was that they were an enemy, and it behoved
him to give his people warning. In that wild country of the border raids
were frequent enough. Especially was a warning necessary to-day, for the
village was in poor condition to defend itself. Only the day before,
Rahmut Khan, his father, had ridden out with all the younger men to raid
horses on the British frontier. Ahmed shrewdly suspected that tidings of
this expedition had been conveyed to Minghal Khan, the chief's
inveterate enemy and rival, and Minghal had taken advantage of it to
make the attack for which he had no doubt long awaited a favourable
occasion. And what occasion could be more favourable than the absence of
the old warrior on an enterprise from which, if at once successful, he
could not return for five or six days, and which, if he found himself at
first baulked in it, might occupy him for a fortnight?

Ahmed was well aware of the danger in which Shagpur lay. The village had
a high wall; but he had no belief that the gates could withstand the
assault of a determined enemy. It would be something to the good,
however, if the assailants could be checked for a time, and they might
be checked by the shutting of the gates. But the villagers could not see
from the walls the advancing band; unless there was some one on the
tower, or Ahmed himself should give warning, the enemy would be upon
them before the gates could be closed, and then it would be a tale of
rapine and massacre. He knew that, make what speed he might, he could
not, if he followed the way he had come, reach the village before the
mounted men. The only chance was to gain the wood, through which, being
on a level, he could run fleetly. Swerving, therefore, from the direct
line to the village, Ahmed scrambled down the rough hillside, leaping
little chasms, springing from rock to rock with the agility of a
mountain goat, yet with circumspection, for should he miss his footing a
sprained ankle would be the least of his mishaps, and Shagpur was lost.

Down and down he went, stumbling, slipping, barking his shins, but never
heeding such slight mishaps so long as nothing brought him to a check.
And now, just as the dark woodland seems at his very feet, he pulls up
with a sudden cry of "Hai!" for in front of him there yawns a ravine,
four or five paces across, and many feet deep. He glances to either
side: a little to the left it narrows slightly, but only by reason of a
jagged spit of rock that juts out--a spit so small as barely to afford
resting-place to a foot. At every other spot the ravine is even wider
than where he was brought to a halt. He waits but a moment--long enough
to reflect that he dare not go the toilsome way round, lest he arrive
too late; and then, setting his teeth and clenching his fingers so
tightly that the nails press deep into his palms, he takes a leap.
Misjudgment of the distance by an inch would dash him into the chasm
below; but practice has given him perfect command of his muscles; he
springs lightly, confidently; his right foot lands on the precariously
narrow spit of rock, and as he stoops his body he brings the left foot
against the right; then, just as it would seem that the momentum of his
flight must cause him to sway and stagger and topple over sideways, he
rises as on springs to his full height, and with another effort of his
well-trained muscles he hurls himself from the spit on to the broader
ledge behind, and is safe.

Panting as he was, Ahmed sped off without delay. At last he reached the
edge of the wood; he plunged into it, and finding a track which he had
often followed, he ran easily as a deer. When he emerged at the other
end, he dashed across the fields, green with his father's crops, and
came to the gates.

"Minghal Khan is upon us!" he cried, as he entered. Some young boys
playing in the street took up the cry and ran screaming into their
houses; old Ahsan, the gate-keeper--now frail and bent, but once the
best rider and the cunningest horse-stealer of Shagpur--came tottering
out of his hut.

"Minghal Khan, say you, Ahmed-ji? That son of a dog!" and he slammed-to
the gates and barred them, muttering curses on the enemy.

By this time the cries of the children had brought the villagers into
the street. They were for the most part old men and feeble; the young
and able-bodied were with Rahmut Khan; but there were among them a few
men in the prime of life and some boys of about Ahmed's age.
Breathlessly he told them what he had seen.

"The gates are but as ghi to Minghal," cried old Ahsan. "They will not
keep him out till the sun sets."

"Then we will go into the tower," said Ahmed, "and shut ourselves up
there until my father returns."

He ran into his father's house and brought out the chief's two wives and
three daughters, who fled swiftly to the tower upon the wall. Then with
the aid of some of the people he collected what provisions he could; the
women filled their brass pots with water at the well, and carried them
on their heads to the tower; men followed them with arms and ammunition,
and with strong balks of wood for barricading the foot of the winding
stair. Within ten minutes of Ahmed's arrival in the village all who
chose had shut themselves with him in the refuge.

Not all chose. Even while these preparations were being made some of the
men held aloof. Minghal Khan was a younger, wealthier, and more powerful
chief than Rahmut: what was the good of holding out against him? There
had been for many years a feud between them; such an attack as was now
imminent might long have been foreseen. The more powerful must win: it
was Fate. Had they not known many such cases? Was it not better to yield
to the enemy at once and make their peace with him? Ahmed and old Ahsan
hotly protested, appealed to their loyalty, reminded them of what the
chief's anger would be when he came back and found that they had
betrayed him. These appeals were effective with the bolder spirits, but
there was still a good proportion of the villagers who foresaw that
their chief's dominion was at an end, and were eager to make their own
future secure by nailing the rising sun. These remained in the village
street, and when, a few minutes after Ahmed and his party had shut
themselves in the tower, the band of horsemen, fifty strong, with
Minghal at their head, rode up to the gates and demanded admittance, one
of the disaffected removed the bars and made humble obeisance as the
rival chief entered.

The new-comers uttered loud shouts of exultation at the ease of their
victory, not at first aware of the resolute little band in the tower. It
was only when Minghal had entered the chief's house and found it
deserted that he suspected what had happened. Then with a grim smile he
questioned the villagers, all most obsequious to their new master; and
Ahmed, watching the scene from a latticed window high up in the tower,
wondered what the smile portended. He expected to see Minghal's men
collect the grain-stuffs and everything else of value that the village
contained, and then set fire to the houses; but old Ahsan by his side,
better acquainted with the long feud which had existed between the two
chiefs, stroked his beard and groaned.

"Hai! hai!" he muttered. "It has come at last. But I am too old, too
old, to serve a new master. Shagpur will have another gate-keeper now,
Ahmed-ji."

"What meanest thou, old man?" asked Ahmed, wondering.

"Minghal has come not for plunder, but for mastery," was the reply.
"'Tis what he has meditated for a dozen years; and who can strive
against Fate? When the master comes back he will find that Shagpur is no
longer his. If he resists he will be slain; if he accepts his lot, he
will be loaded with chains or cast out of the village, a beggar to the
end of his days."

"And what of us, then?" asked Ahmed.

"Hai!" said the old man. "As for you, I speak not, Ahmed-ji; but for me,
I am too old, as I said. I have my knife."

Ahmed looked into the gate-keeper's face. He read there neither fear nor
despair, nothing but a calm resolution. Then he uttered a scornful
laugh.

"No one can strive against Fate, truly," he said; "but who knows that
Fate has given us into Minghal's hand? By the beard of the Prophet,
Ahsan----"

But the old man put his hand on the boy's mouth.

"Hush, Ahmed-ji," he said, with a sort of stern tenderness; "'tis not
meet, little one, that oath in your mouth. You have well-nigh forgotten,
but I do not forget. We are as we were born, and you were born a
Feringhi."




CHAPTER THE SECOND

The Making of a Pathan


Eight years before this raid of Minghal's on Shagpur, a small boy, dark,
bright-eyed, happy-looking, was sitting on the grass at some little
distance from an open tent, nursing a wooden sword, and trying to make
conversation in babbling Urdu with a big, swarthy, bearded Pathan who
squatted opposite him, and smiled as he tried to understand and answer
the little fellow's questions. From the tent came the sound of voices,
and the Pathan would now and then lift his eyes from the child and dart
a keen glance towards the spot where Mr. George Barclay,
deputy-commissioner of the district, was engaged in dealing with one of
the troublesome cases that came before him for settlement.

For many years the dwellers in the plains of the Panjab had suffered
from the encroachments of their neighbours in the hills. At first these
hill-men only came to the plains in the winter-time, when their own bare
lands became uninhabitable from frost and snow, and returned in the
summer, when they might find sustenance for their flocks, and good
hunting. But seeing the weakness of the plain-dwellers and the fertility
of their soil, the hill-men had not been satisfied with paying these
winter visits, and, after remaining as uninvited guests, returning to
their own place without having made a domicile in the plains. They began
to regard the land on which they temporarily settled as theirs, and by
and by exacted tribute from the rightful owners. Thus they became
possessed of two homes, one for the winter, one for the summer.
Naturally this seizure of property was little to the liking of the
plain-dwellers. They made some resistance and fought the oppressors, but
were no match in arms for the more warlike hill-men. When, however, the
Panjab was incorporated in the dominions of John Company, some of the
dispossessed land-owners took advantage of the well-known respect of the
British for law to make an attempt to recover their property through the
agency of their new rulers; and it was to show cause why he should not
yield the lands he held in the plain that Minghal Khan, one of the hill
chieftains, had been summoned before the deputy-commissioner.

Minghal obeyed the summons grudgingly. In the hills he was free, and
owned no master save God; it irked him that any one, least of all the
sahib-log, infidels, eaters of pigs, should question his rights in the
plains; for though he knew that the lands in dispute were not his by
inheritance, yet might was right, and if the plain-men were not strong
enough to hold them--why, so much the worse for them. And when he came
down from the hills to argue the case before the British commissioner,
he begged his nearest neighbour, Rahmut Khan of Shagpur, to accompany
him and give him at least moral support. Rahmut did not refuse this
request; but he was above all things a warrior; he had no skill in
reasoning, like his more wily neighbour Minghal; and while the latter
was using all his eloquence, every trick and artifice of which he was
capable, to persuade Mr. Barclay that forcible possession was of more
account than title-deeds, Rahmut amused himself by talking to and
playing with the deputy-commissioner's little son. The boy's mother had
died in Lahore some little while before, and his father kept him
constantly in his company, even when his duties called him into remote
parts of his district.

Rahmut, like all his race, was passionately fond of children; the
fearlessness of the bright-eyed boy appealed to him, and day after day,
while Minghal was waiting his turn, and when he was trying Mr. Barclay's
patience inside the tent, Rahmut spent hours with the boy, giving him
rides on his horse, laughing as he strutted by with a wooden sword,
allowing him to fire a shot or two from his pistol. And so, by the time
Minghal's case was decided Rahmut and Jim Barclay--the big, bearded
Pathan warrior of near sixty years, and the English boy of eight--were
fast friends.

Minghal lost his case. The deputy-commissioner decided against him, and
gave judgment that he must quit the lands he had usurped. Minghal left
the tent in a rage, muttering curses on the infidel dog who had
rejected, quietly but firmly, all his pleas, and declaring to Rahmut
that he would one day have his revenge. Rahmut was not a whit more
friendly disposed to the new rulers than was Minghal himself; but he was
a man of few words, and never threatened what he could not at once
perform. Moreover, he had never thought much of his neighbour's case,
and was not surprised at its failure. Minghal found him less sympathetic
than he considered to be his due, and returned to his home in the hills
in a very ill humour.

The opportunity for vengeance came sooner than he could have expected.
In the spring of the next year, when a civil servant named Vans Agnew
and Lieutenant Anderson of the Bombay army were escorting a new diwan or
governor to the city of Multan, they were treacherously attacked, and
their murder was the signal for a general uprising of the Sikh soldiery.
News of the rebellion was carried through the country with wonderful
speed; it came to the ears of Rahmut and Minghal, and, fretting as they
were under the restraints imposed upon them by the proximity of the
British, they resolved at once to make common cause with the revolted
Sikhs. It happened that Mr. Barclay had lately "gone into camp" at a
spot very near the place where he had given his decision against
Minghal. The Pathan chiefs set off with their armed followers, rushed
Mr. Barclay's almost unprotected camp, for he had as yet heard nothing
of the revolt at Multan, and the deputy-commissioner, without a moment's
warning, was shot through the heart. His little son would have suffered
the same fate, so bitter was the tribesmen's enmity against all the
Feringhis, but for Rahmut, who remembered how much he had been attracted
by the boy, and saw an opportunity for which he had yearned--of
providing himself with an heir. One of his wives, now dead, had borne
him two sons, but both had died fighting against Ranjit Singh, and his
two living wives had given him only daughters. In such cases it was
common for a chief to adopt a son and make him his heir. Rahmut, now
getting on in years, had envied the English sahib who was blessed with a
boy so sturdy and frank and fearless. While Minghal, therefore, was
wreaking his vengeance on the father, Rahmut caught up the son, set him
on his saddlebow, and forbade any of his men to lay hands on him. He had
resolved to take the boy back with him by and by to Shagpur, to bring
him up as a Pathan, and if he proved worthy, to proclaim him his heir.

Minghal was very indignant when the old chief announced his intention.
The boy, he protested, was an infidel dog: it was shame to a Pathan and
a follower of the Prophet to show kindness to any of the hated race who
had laid their hands on this land, claiming tribute from the free-men of
the hills, deposing and setting up governors at their will. But Rahmut
would not be denied. Minghal dared not cross the old warrior; for the
moment he appeared to acquiesce, but in his heart he hated his neighbour
chief, and resolved from that time to set himself in rivalry against
him. If he could not remove the boy, he could at least bide his time,
and when Rahmut's time came to die, it should be seen whether he could
not rely on racial and religious prejudice to prevent the scandal of a
tribe being ruled by an infidel Feringhi.

Rahmut kept the boy with him in the Panjab through the campaign. He
joined forces with the troops sent by the king of Kabul to the
assistance of the Sikhs. He fought in the terrible battle of
Chilianwala, and when Gough signally routed his brave enemy at Gujarat,
he fled with the Afghans and Pathans to their inaccessible hills,
escaped the pursuit of the Company's troops, and reached in safety his
mountain home at Shagpur.

Then he carried out his intention. He called the boy Ahmed, and had him
trained in the Mohammedan faith by the mullah of his village, who taught
him to read the Koran (though, being in Arabic, he never understood a
word of it). Ahmed wore a white turban, kept the Musalman fasts and
feasts, and though he was at first very miserable, and wept often for
the father he had lost, he gradually forgot his early life, and
delighted his new father's heart as he grew up a straight, sturdy Pathan
boy. Rahmut was wonderfully kind to him. His wives were at first jealous
of the boy, and there were some in the village who never lost their
first distrust and envy of him; but as years passed by, and Ahmed proved
himself to be as bold and daring as he was sunny-tempered, as good at
hunting and warlike exercises as he was in the ritual of religion, he
became a favourite with most. The chief visited with heavy punishment
some who dared to give expression to their resentment at his adoption of
a Feringhi boy, and after that the ill-feeling died down, and if any
remained it found an outlet only in murmurs which the envious ones were
careful to keep from their chief's ears.

Ahmed was now sixteen. He was his adoptive father's constant companion
at home; but the old chief, while he allowed the boy to take part in his
hunting expeditions, would never permit him to share in the raids which
he sometimes made on the villages of his neighbours, nor in the
horse-stealing enterprises he ventured in the British lines. He seemed
to be beset by a fear lest the boy should be snatched from him, and in
particular he dreaded lest any contact with the British should awake
dormant recollections in his mind and be the means of carrying him back
to his own people. The only experience Ahmed had of contests with men
had been gained in occasional attacks on caravans of merchants as they
passed between Persia and Afghanistan. But now that the boy was sixteen,
Rahmut thought it was high time, he should be married in accordance with
the customs of his country, and was looking about for a suitable bride.
The old chief argued that when Ahmed was married there would be less
likelihood of his ever wishing to leave his tribe, and he might then be
given a greater freedom and take a full share in all their activities.

Though Ahmed thus had few enemies in Shagpur itself, there was one in
Minghal's village of Mandan who caused Rahmut Khan some anxiety. This
was his nephew Dilasah, a man near forty years old. Dilasah had expected
to succeed his uncle in the chiefship, but he was an idle,
ill-conditioned fellow, not without a certain fierce bravery when
roused, but little inclined to bestir himself without great cause,
exceedingly fond of eating, and very fat. For him Rahmut had the deepest
contempt. There was a stormy scene between uncle and nephew when the
Feringhi boy was brought to the village and formally adopted by the old
chief; Rahmut poured out his scorn upon Dilasah, and the latter withdrew
in high wrath and indignation from the village and joined himself to
Minghal's folk. Rahmut was at first glad to be rid of him, but as years
passed, and Minghal, by cunning wiles and stealthy diplomacy, increased
his influence in the country and drew more and more men into his tribe,
the chief of Shagpur foresaw that one day he might have serious trouble
with his rival, and that the succession of Ahmed would be disputed. But
he hoped that he would live long enough to see the boy develop into a
full-grown warrior, able to hold his own by force of arms if the need
should arise.

If he had guessed that his absence on the horse-stealing expedition
would be taken advantage of by his enemy, he would without doubt have
remained at home. But he had heard that Minghal had gone westward to
intercept a caravan of cloth merchants on the road to Kabul; it was a
trick of Minghal's to draw the old man out of the way; and thus it
happened that the village was so poorly defended when Minghal made his
attack.




CHAPTER THE THIRD

Sky-high


Old Ahsan, the gate-keeper, looked gloomily out of the lattice window
and watched the proceedings of the invaders. He had spied Dilasah, his
master's nephew, among them, and knew that the incident was more than an
ordinary raid. Minghal's men gave no sign of any intention to collect
the villagers' property--whether in goods or in animals--and afterwards
burn the village; it was clear that the chief meant either to seize the
place as his own, or to set his henchman Dilasah at the head of it. And
that Ahsan had rightly guessed was proved when Minghal himself came to
the foot of the tower and summoned all within it to descend and salaam
to their new lord Dilasah.

Ahmed drew the gate-keeper back and put his head out.

"What dost thou think of us, Minghal Khan?" he cried scornfully. "Are we
asses or even as camels? Know that we hold this tower for our rightful
lord Rahmut, and thou had best return to thy little dwelling while there
is yet time."

The Pathan's face darkened with anger.

"Thou darest mock me, Feringhi dog!" he cried. "Come down at once, or we
will burn thee alive and send thee to the Pit."

But Ahmed only laughed. Talk of burning was mere foolishness, for the
tower was of stone, and though they might burn the door, there was
nothing else inflammable within their reach, save only the barricade
which had been thrown across the winding stair, and even a Pathan's
courage might shrink from attacking that in face of sturdy defenders
armed with jazails on the stairs. Of this barricade, however, Minghal
was as yet unaware, and his reply to Ahmed's scornful laugh was to set
his men to make an assault upon the door. But they had no sooner
approached it than a matchlock flashed from a narrow slit in the wall,
and one of the assailants staggered back with a bullet in his leg.
Furious, Minghal shouted to the other men to do his bidding, but another
shot fell among them as they crowded about the door, and since they
could not see who had fired, nor had any chance of hitting if they shot
back, they made haste to flee out of harm's way, and Minghal himself saw
that the task he had set them was impossible. The door was of stout and
massive timber, and could not be broken in without a deal of hard
battering; it would be folly to lose lives in that way when his purpose
might be achieved by means of a charge of gunpowder. So he called off
his men and bade them search the village for powder, not having brought
more with him than was contained in his men's powder-flasks.

At this Ahmed chuckled: all the powder lay in two large bags in one of
the upper rooms of the tower, whither it had been conveyed at the first
alarm. The men's hunt through the village was fruitless. But Ahsan
sighed heavily a little later when he saw two leave the village and
gallop at a hot pace in the direction of Mandan.

"Minghal has sent for powder, Ahmed-ji," he said. "Without doubt we
shall all be blown up."

"No, no; they cannot get back before morning," replied Ahmed, "and every
day favours us. Maybe my father will come back earlier than we suppose."

"And if he does not?"

"Why, then we must defend ourselves as long as we can. Suppose they
bring powder: they cannot lay a charge against the door in the daytime,
for we could fire into them and blow them up with their own stuff. And
when night comes, the moon will light up the inner wall for some hours,
so that they would still be in great danger. And if, when the moon goes
to the other side, they contrive to place their charge and blow in the
door, it will only be to find us with our jazails at the barricade, and
they will never get beyond it."

Ahmed's cheerfulness inspirited the old gate-keeper and the rest of the
garrison. The women and girls had been conveyed to the upper chambers,
and Ahmed at the fall of night went up to them and did what he could to
reassure them. Once or twice during the night, after the moon had gone
down, there were sounds from below indicating that another attempt was
to be made on the door; but a shot from the window was sufficient to
send the men scuttering back to the houses, and the hours from midnight
to dawn passed undisturbed. The garrison snatched a little sleep, and
were roused by the morning cry of the mullah in the village mosque
calling to the faithful to awake: "Prayer is more than sleep!"

It was afternoon when the two men who had left the village were seen
returning with three others, their horses loaded with bags, which no
doubt contained gunpowder. They were received with shouts of "Wah! wah!"
from their comrades as they entered the gate. Ahmed, watching them with
Ahsan and others, saw them convey the powder to a lean-to beside the
gate-keeper's hut against the wall. There was great cheerfulness among
Minghal's men, who had idled away the day in gambling. Early in the
morning Ahmed had seen three of them leave the village in the opposite
direction from Mandan; and going to the top of the tower, he watched
them ride for some two miles until they reached a hillock whose summit
rose a little higher than the tower roof. There they dismounted and led
their horses into a thin copse. They did not reappear, and Ahmed guessed
that they had been sent there as an outpost to guard against any
surprise from the sudden return of Rahmut Khan. It was clear that
Minghal was resolved to carry through his design to the uttermost.

Confident as he was in appearance, Ahmed in reality felt no little
anxiety. The quantity of powder brought into the village by Minghal's
messengers was large enough not merely to blow in the door and the
barricade, but even to make a breach in the tower wall. He knew very
well that if the enemy once forced their way into the tower the case was
hopeless; for the men he had with him were all well on in years, and
with the fatalism of their race they would regard the first success of
the enemy as a clear sign of Heaven's favour. It seemed to him
imperative that Minghal should be by some means prevented from
succeeding in any part of his purpose, and as the afternoon wore on he
took counsel with Ahsan, telling him frankly of his anxieties.

"What you say is true," said the old man; "but how is it possible to do
anything? They have the powder--may their graves be defiled!--and when
it is dark we shall not be able to see to take aim at them as they bring
it to the door."

"If we had but one friend in the village! The cowards! And they are
fools as well, to desert a chief like my father for one like Minghal
Khan. Were there one brave man having any wits among them, he would blow
up that powder, and our trouble would be gone."

Ahsan could only sigh and wish that the chief had not gone
horse-raiding.

"He is too old for such deeds. 'Tis time he rested and made ready to
obey the last call. Hai! and some day, if he continues thus, he will
fall into a snare--some calamity will light on him. It may be with him
even as it was with Mir Ismail of Bangash."

"Why, how was it with him?"

"He had gone on just such an errand, and he was old, like our master
Rahmut. He had cut a hole in the stable of the Malik he had gone to rob,
and was in the very act of loosening the horse's halter when he was
disturbed by a noise. Loh! he made haste to escape by the hole he
himself had made, but being old and stiff, he had but got his head and
shoulders out when his legs were caught from behind. Hai! hai! and then
was he in desperate fear lest he should be dragged back and known by his
captors, for he was a famous stealer of horses, and it would have
snapped his heart-strings if they saw him and gloated over his capture.
The honour of his family and people would be smirched. Wherefore he
cried aloud to his son, who waited outside, bidding him cut off his head
rather than let that shame fall upon him. His head being gone, they
would not recognize his trunk."

"And did his son obey him?" asked Ahmed.

"He did, and so was the honour of his house saved," replied the old man.

Ahmed was silent for a minute or two; then he said--

"Ahsan, think you I could cut a hole in that shed where the powder-bags
are laid?"

"Hai! How wouldest thou get there?" said the gate-keeper. "Verily not by
the door; were it opened, Minghal's dogs would burst in."

"True, but could you not let me down over the wall by a rope?"

"And what then? The gates are shut: there is no entrance."

"But I know of a place on the other side of the village where there are
notches in the wall, by which I might mount; and, the wall scaled, I
could steal my way to the shed and maybe cut a hole and lay a train, and
so fire the powder that lies there for our destruction."

"You could never get over the wall unspied," said the old man; "and if
they catch you, you are dead."

"But the place where I can scale the wall will be in darkness when the
moon shines on the tower. If it is to be done it must be done before the
moon has crept round, for as soon as the tower door is in darkness be
sure they will set about their purpose."

Ahmed was deaf to all entreaties, and about an hour before the earliest
moment when the besiegers might be expected to begin their operations,
he was let down by a rope from a window overlooking the wall, this side
being in deep shadow. Having reached the ground, he stole along at the
foot of the wall until he came to a spot some little distance away where
he believed the notches to be. They had not been made intentionally, but
were due to the crumbling of the clay of which the wall was made, and
had not been filled up. He found them without difficulty, the outer side
of the wall being at this point partially illuminated, while the inner
side, in the shadow of the houses, was dark. Pausing a moment to make
sure that all was quiet within, he set his bare foot in the lowest
notch, and, aiding himself with his hands, heaved himself slowly up.

When his head was just below the top of the wall, he waited again,
listening intently for sounds of movement or speech within the village.
All was quiet in the immediate neighbourhood, though voices came faintly
to his ear from the direction of the tower. He raised his head and
peered over: nothing was to be seen; then with a final heave he rolled
himself over the top, hung by his hands for a moment or two until his
feet found a hollow to rest in, and then as quickly as might be made the
descent, dropping the last six feet and alighting noiselessly on his
bare soles.

A narrow lane ran between the wall and a large barn in which the
villagers' grain was stored. Beyond this was the smithy, the potter's
house, and one or two more small buildings, so that he could come, with
fair security, to within a few feet of the shed where the powder lay.
These last few feet of space were not screened, and in crossing them his
risk would be greatest. Having come to the edge of it, he passed round
the corner of the building, and saw to his joy that the enemy was hid
from his view by the projecting shed itself. He stole along by the wall,
gained the side of the shed, and without an instant's delay set to work
with a chisel he had brought with him to loosen one of the planks in the
wooden side, working with all possible silence. Once the light sound of
a footstep caused him to scurry back to the shadowed lane; but the
disturber, whoever he was, passed in another direction, and Ahmed sped
back to finish his work.

Having removed the plank, he squeezed through into the shed without much
difficulty, being slim, and groping about soon laid hands on one of the
powder-bags. In this he cut a hole, then laid a train of powder to the
opening in the shed wall, lighted the slow match Ahsan had furnished,
and, breathing hard, ran like a deer back along the lane. At first he
could not find the spot where he had descended the wall, and feared lest
the explosion should occur before he had regained the tower. But
discovering the place at length, he swarmed up, and now in his haste
ventured to drop the full height of the wall. He fell on his face, rose
in an instant, and scampered back to where the rope still dangled from
the window. He had but just laid hands on it when there was a deafening
explosion, followed by a great outcry from the men. When he regained the
top of the tower, he ran with Ahsan and others to a window whence he
could look down upon the scene. The shed was in flames; and he was
surprised to see two or three forms prone on the ground near it. One of
the men who had been keeping watch told him that several of the enemy
had come to the door of the shed, no doubt to bring out the powder, at
the moment when the explosion took place, and had been hurled to the
ground by the flying timbers.

Minghal and Dilasah were raging up and down among their men. They looked
on helplessly while the shed burnt, Minghal crying out that there was a
traitor in the village. The street and the open space in front of the
tower were crowded with people who had been startled from sleep by the
uproar, and Minghal in his fury sent his men among them, to slash and
slay. The poor villagers fled away and hid themselves, Ahsan declaring
that they deserved no pity, because they had deserted their rightful
master for the invader.

There was much rejoicing in the tower at the success of Ahmed's bold
enterprise. Even the most faint-hearted now took courage. But it was
clear that the enemy had no intention of departing. The failure of their
scheme had made them only the more vindictive. Minghal sent some of his
men for more powder; the rest, keeping well out of gunshot, squatted
against the walls of the houses, ready to prevent any egress from the
tower. It was plain that Minghal meant to make another attempt, and if
he failed to gain entrance, to starve the defenders out.

Ahmed did not fear the first, but was greatly troubled at the prospect
of a prolonged siege. In the few minutes' grace between his arrival in
the village and the coming of the enemy there had not been time to
convey a large supply of food and water into the tower. The water was
already running short, and it was necessary to put the inmates on a
scanty allowance. With great economy they might make it last for two or
three days; then, unless help came, there would be no choice but to
surrender, or to make an attempt to escape at night by means of the
rope. Minghal as yet, clearly, had no suspicion that the powder had been
fired by any one from the tower. It might be easy for the men and boys
to let themselves down as Ahmed had done, but it would not be so easy
for the women and girls to descend in the same way, and the least sound
would bring the enemy upon them. From the top of the tower during that
day Ahmed cast many an anxious glance in the direction whence his father
might be expected to return; but there was no sign of him, and indeed,
but for some mischance in his expedition, it was hardly likely that he
would be back for several days.

In the afternoon Minghal's messengers returned with another supply of
powder. As ill-luck would have it, with the fall of night a thick mist
came down upon the village, obscuring the moon; and under cover of the
darkness the men brought powder to the tower door and fired it. The
door, massive as it was, was blown to splinters, and with yells of
triumph the assailants rushed in when the smoke had cleared, confident
that they were on the point of mastery. But the defenders had had ample
time to prepare for them, and when, ignorant of the barricade, they
began to rush up the winding stairs, Dilasah being at their head, they
were met with a sharp fusillade, which struck down several of them and
sent the rest scuttling away with yells of alarm. Dilasah himself was
among those who were wounded, and Ahmed from his conning post above
could dimly see his rival being carried away by two of the men.

This set-back, while it eased Ahmed's position for the moment, had the
effect of making the enemy still more determined. Hitherto the most part
of the men had not been greatly interested in the business. The quarrel
was a personal one of their chief's; for themselves they would have been
satisfied with plundering the village and returning to their own place.
Even though Minghal inflamed their racial and religious prejudices
against Ahmed as one of the hated Feringhis, they saw little to gain by
capturing or killing him. But now that they had themselves suffered,
their warlike instincts and their passion for revenge were aroused; and,
moreover, they were nettled by their failure, considering that they
outnumbered the defenders by at least ten to one.

The night passed quietly, but evidence of their new spirit was shown
next day. Ahmed, looking from his window, saw signs of great activity
below, though for a time neither he nor Ahsan nor any other of his
comrades understood what was afoot. By and by, however, it became clear
that the enemy were busily constructing shields of wood and goat-skins
with which to defend themselves against musket-shots from beyond the
barricade. The work was apparently finished by midday, for the men
squatted in groups on the ground, taking their dinner, and talking with
great cheerfulness. But when the hours of the afternoon went by without
the expected attack, Ahmed concluded that it was put off till night, and
felt that this time it would be pushed home. Defended by their shields,
the men could easily bring powder to the base of the barricade, and if
that was blown away it was only a question of minutes. It was useless to
attempt to disguise from his comrades the great danger in which they
stood, especially as they were now reduced to their last pitchers of
water.

Now Ahsan made a proposal.

"'Tis time for you to leave us, Ahmed-ji," he said. "Minghal, that son
of a dog, is bent on seizing you. It matters little about the rest of
us, but you are the apple of the master's eye, and if you are safe, 'tis
of little moment what happens to us. We shall become Minghal's men; we
shall at least be saved alive. Do you, then, escape by the rope when
darkness falls, and run to the hills, where you may hide until the
master returns; and when you are gone, after a time we will deliver
ourselves up to Minghal."

This suggestion was applauded by the other men. They had in truth little
to gain by further resistance. If their lives were spared they would
only pass into the service of another chief, and since Minghal's star
seemed to be in the ascendant, that was a fate which all expected sooner
or later to befall them. But Ahmed was very unwilling thus to throw up
the sponge. Apart from his disinclination to desert his post, he knew
how his father would be cut to the heart at the triumph of his rival,
and felt that he himself would be for ever disgraced if this calamity
should come upon the old chief during his absence. Yet he felt the
impossibility of holding out much longer, and was troubled at the
thought that all those with him might be killed if he did not yield.

"I will go apart and think over what you have said," he said to the man,
"and I will come again and tell you my thoughts."

He went to the top of the tower, and leaning over the parapet began to
ponder the difficult situation in which he found himself. And as he was
sadly thinking that there was no other course than to surrender (for to
run away and leave his comrades was abhorrent to him), his eye was
suddenly caught by a small dark patch moving on the hillside far away
towards the British frontier. The sun was behind him, the air was clear,
and, gazing at what had attracted his notice, he was not long in coming
to the conclusion that the dark shadow on the hill was a body of
horsemen.

A great hope sprang up in his mind. It might be Rahmut returning with
his men. True, it might be a band belonging to another chief, or even a
troop of British horsemen, or of natives in the British pay. Keen as his
eyes were, it was impossible at this distance--at least twelve miles, as
he judged--to tell who the men were. But they were certainly
approaching, though very slowly; they were coming from the very quarter
whence his father would return, there was at least a good chance that
they were friends. He ran down at once to the room where Ahsan and the
rest were awaiting his return, and told them of what he had seen. They
went back with him and looked eagerly across the plain. The horsemen
appeared to have halted, they were no nearer than when he had seen them
last; none of his comrades was better able than he to identify them.

"Let us make a beacon here," said one of the men. "If they are our own
people they will ride at once to our help; if they are not, we shall be
none the worse off."

"No, no," said old Ahsan; "that would be a foolish thing to do.
Minghal's men cannot have spied them yet; we at this height can see many
miles further than they below. And they cannot have been seen by the
outpost on the hillock yonder, for, look! the copse is between them. Let
us do nothing to put our enemies on guard. And besides, say we light a
beacon, and our master comes riding to our help, Minghal, seeing the
fire, would know its meaning, and even though he saw not the master's
troop, he would suspect, and lay an ambush, and the master might be
killed."

"But how, then, can we bring them to us?" asked Ahmed. "They have
halted, as you see; perhaps they have had a long day's march and are
tired. Perhaps they may encamp for the night; and if they do, or even if
they continue to come slowly towards us, they may arrive too late. Shall
we fire shots?"

"That is no better than to light a beacon," said Ahsan. "The shots would
bring them fast enough to us; but as thou knowest, Ahmed-ji, the sound
of their riding would be heard while they were yet far away, and they
have but to come a little nearer to be seen by the outpost. The end
would be the same: Minghal would lie hid in readiness to meet them, and
they would fall into his hands."

"Yet we must do something," cried Ahmed, "and before it is dark. When
night comes we shall be attacked and overcome; and my father, when he
hears the firing, will come up in haste, and as you say, the sound of
his riding will be heard; having overcome us, Minghal would have time to
prepare to meet him."

"There is one way, Ahmed-ji," said Ahsan slowly. "One of us must go down
the rope and haste to meet him and give him warning of what has befallen
us here. And who better than thyself? Thou art swift of foot and skilled
in the secret tracking down of prey: who more fit to undertake this
errand or more likely to accomplish it?"

This was perfectly true; but the old man had another motive. There was
still uncertainty whether the horsemen were friends or foes, and he
wished in either case to secure the lad's safety. Ahmed did not see
through the gate-keeper's design; he knew that, of the company there
assembled, he would have the best chance of success; and so he agreed,
as soon as dusk fell, to slip down the rope, make his way round the
village, and set off towards the distant hill on which the dark patch
could still be seen, stationary.

It wanted still two hours of dusk when this decision was come to. During
that time Ahmed and the gate-keeper talked over the plan, and as they
did so they saw the band of horsemen begin to move once more slowly
towards them. They were at once alive to a danger. The horsemen were at
least twelve miles from the village. At the pace at which they appeared
to be riding it would take them four hours to reach the walls. But when
they had covered half the distance they would come in sight of the
outpost on the hillock; the alarm would be given, and they would arrive
only to fall into a trap. Yet it was impossible to warn them. It would
be unsafe for Ahmed to leave the tower until the approach of dark, and
by that time the horsemen might have come within view from the hillock.
Ahmed waited in great restlessness and anxiety, feeling his
helplessness.

"'Tis in the hands of Allah," said Ahsan, trying to quiet him. "What is
to be will be. But that thou hast Feringhi blood in thee, Ahmed-ji, thou
wouldst not be so disturbed. We cannot hasten the dark; we cannot speak
through the air to warn the master. But look what Allah can do; they
have halted again."

And pointing over the parapet, he showed that the dark irregular shadow
had rested a little lower down the hill, upon which lay the glow of the
now setting sun.

As soon as the dusk was merging towards dark, Ahmed was let down by the
rope. Ahsan had promised to hold out against any attack that Minghal
might make. Then, creeping stealthily along by the foot of the wall, he
continued till he came to a place where the ground was broken by a
nullah, into which he leapt, and ran along its dry bottom at full speed
until he arrived safely in the hills. By this time it was quite dark;
but the moon was just rising, and in a little he was able by its light
to guide his steps so that he did not stumble into a ravine or trip over
a salient rock.

As he came near the place where the outpost was stationed he went very
cautiously. The men had taken shelter in a rude shepherd's cairn; he saw
the faint glow of their charcoal fire and heard their voices as he
slipped by. Then he pushed on at greater speed, choosing a course in
which he would never come within sight of the men, however carefully
they might keep watch. At one spot he halted and looked behind, to catch
a last glimpse of the tower before he rounded the base of a hill that
would hide it from view. The moon was shining full upon it, and he hoped
that the enemy would defer their threatened attack, as at the first
attempt, until the door was shrouded in darkness.

On and on he hastened, for mile after mile, running down the slopes
where he could, wading brooks, climbing bluffs, doggedly, without rest.
When he came to an eminence where he could scan a long stretch of the
comparatively level ground over which the horsemen would come, he looked
eagerly for some sign of them; but though the greyish soil shone white
in the moonlight and the outlines of things were very clear, he failed
to descry them, and could not but think that they had encamped for the
night. If it was so, still greater was the necessity for speed, since at
any moment the attack on the tower might be begun and the frail
barricade forced or blown up.

Every now and again he paused for a moment to listen, both for sounds
from the village behind him and for the hoofs of the horses. In the
still air of the night the crack of musket-shots might well reach him if
the assault on the tower were begun. But he heard nothing save the
rustle of falling water or the cry of a jackal, and he went on again,
buoyed up by a great hope that he might be in time.

At length, heated and weary, after breasting a steep knoll he espied, in
a well-sheltered hollow far below him, the glow of camp fires. With the
caution habitual in a hill-man he crept down warily; if he should
blunder on a hostile party the chances of saving the village and warning
his father would be small indeed. Taking cover from bushes and angular
projections of the hillside, he drew nearer and nearer to the camp. He
had little fear of encountering a sentry, for the Pathans, in some
matters highly cautious, are in others equally careless. And thus he
came within earshot of the camp, and, lying flat on his face, peered
down to spy if the men there were or were not his friends.

Now he was able to see the dark forms of a number of horses tethered to
trees beyond the camp, and in the middle of the hollow, around the
fires, the shapes of sleeping men. Still he was unable to distinguish
them. He wriggled forward on all fours until he was within a spear-cast
of them, and then caught sight of the red turban which his father always
wore. No other man of the tribe wore a turban of that colour; but still
it might be affected by one of another tribe, and Ahmed was not yet
satisfied. So he crept very stealthily round the encampment until he
reached the line of horses, and his heart leapt with delight when, on
the very first of the line, he recognized the housings of Rahmut Khan's
favourite arab. He hesitated no longer, but gave a low hail, and rising
to his feet walked down towards the fires. His call, low as it was, had
reached the ears of several of the men and of the chief himself. They
rose, gripping their long muskets that lay beside them, and as they
recognized Ahmed, they came forward to meet him, and asked him eagerly
the meaning of this nocturnal visit.

It did not take him long to explain what had happened. Growling with
anger, but breaking off to speak a fond word of approbation to Ahmed,
the old chief called to his men to mount their horses. "Bah!" he cried,
with a scornful intonation, "we will see if the eagle cannot deal with
the night-hawk."

The blood of the old warrior was up; Minghal should rue the day when he
conceived the folly of setting himself in rivalry to Rahmut Khan.

The chief was quick to form his plan. The first thing was to guard
against any alarm among Minghal's men. It was necessary to silence the
two men of the outpost. This would cause some delay, but it was of the
first importance that they should neither see nor hear the advancing
body, since by firing their matchlocks they could put their comrades in
the village on the alert.

It was seven miles from the camp to the outpost. Rahmut durst not ride
towards it with his full body of men, for the clatter of fifty horses'
hoofs could not fail to be heard. Yet the case was urgent, for very
soon, perhaps even at this moment, the tower might be assaulted. Delay
there must be, but to lessen it as much as possible Rahmut decided to
muffle the hoofs of three of the horses with strips of blanket, and to
send three of his men with Ahmed to surprise the outpost. Meanwhile he
himself with the rest of his party would ride in a circular course to
the southward, so that they might sweep round the dangerous point at
sufficient distance to be out of earshot.

The muffling was soon done, and the three chosen men set off, Ahmed
being mounted behind one of them. Following his directions, they came
unerringly to within a short distance of the hillock upon which the
scouts were posted. Then they dismounted, and, Ahmed leading the way,
they crept round and up so as to come on the men from above. The scouts
were reclining in the cairn behind the fire, still talking in low tones.
There was a sudden rush, a cry, a wild scuffle, and then silence.

Their task accomplished, the four returned to their horses and galloped
across the country to join the main body, whom they met at the appointed
rendezvous, a copse on rising ground some three miles south of the
village. From that point Rahmut had decided to make the advance on foot,
so that the chances of premature discovery by the enemy should be
diminished. The moon was sinking in the sky; they could not see the
tower from the place where they dismounted; but the favourable moment
for Minghal's intended assault had certainly now come, and Ahmed
expected within a little to hear the sound of firing.

The whole party, save a few men left to guard the horses, set off at a
rapid march towards the village. It was possible that as they approached
it a keen look-out might descry them from the tower, but they would be
invisible to any one on a lower level. True, a man perched on the wall
might see them; but Minghal, having posted scouts on a hillock
commanding all the surrounding country for several miles, would be
little likely to take this extra precaution.

Marching rapidly, the party had come within a few hundred yards of the
village wall when they heard an explosion, followed by cries and the
crack of muskets. The assault had begun. The gates being shut, it was
only possible to enter the village by climbing the wall, and Ahmed led
the band at the double to the spot where he had mounted when he fired
the powder in the shed. Shouts and the sound of firing still came from
the village; it was clear that a desperate fight was in progress; and
since the din must drown all other noises, Rahmut's troops made no
effort towards silence, but rushed with all speed.

The place for which Ahmed was making was on the opposite side of the
village from the tower. Thus it was possible to climb the wall without
attracting the attention of the enemy. Ahmed was first up; while some of
the men were following him one by one he ran round to the gate on the
chance that it might be left unguarded. He would then throw it open and
give admittance to the rest of his party. But when he came within sight
of it he found that a sentry was on guard there. He dared not risk the
sound of a scuffle, so he slipped back to his friends and waited until
the whole party had climbed the wall. Then, drawing his talwar, Rahmut
put himself at the head of his men and led them through the streets
towards the tower.

Their advance was not at first seen, for the villagers, drawn out of
their houses by the sounds of fighting, had flocked to the neighbourhood
of the tower, and were watching the progress of Minghal's attack. The
barricade at the foot of the winding stair had been blown up, and a
fierce contest was now going on. Ahsan and his comrades were making a
stout resistance, buoyed up by the belief that their chief was coming to
their help; but they were on the point of being overpowered when a great
shout arose from the street, and Rahmut and his men burst through the
ranks of the onlookers and fell upon the rear of Minghal's force. The
surprise was complete. The new-comers laid about them doughtily with
their terrible swords; their enemies fell into a panic, and in a few
minutes the whole crowd, save those who had already fallen, were running
in every direction. Many of them were cut down as they fled. Some made
straight for the gate, which the men stationed there had thrown open at
the first sign of what was happening. Among the fugitives was Minghal
Khan. Rahmut had ordered his men to take the rival chief alive, but in
the darkness it was difficult to distinguish one from many, and Minghal
made good his escape with a few of his followers, and fled away into the
night.




CHAPTER THE FOURTH

The Return of Sherdil


To pursue the fugitives was impossible in the darkness; nor, indeed,
were Rahmut's men capable of further exertions. They were worn out by
two days and nights of hard riding. Before proceeding to carry out the
prime object of his expedition, the old chief had turned aside to raid
the village of an enemy near the frontier, and had scarcely completed
his work there when he was spied by a troop of the Feringhis, who chased
him with such pertinacity that he was forced to abandon his purposed
quest. Having secured, therefore, those members of Minghal's band who
had life in them and were not too severely wounded to escape, Rahmut
ordered the gates to be again closed and the community to rest.

Before he sought his own couch, however, the old chief heard from Ahsan
the full story of what had happened during his absence. Enraged as he
was at Minghal's action, he was still more delighted with the part Ahmed
had played. He embraced the lad fondly, called him by endearing names in
the extravagant Oriental way, and declared that, after punishing
Minghal, he would devote himself in earnest to the quest of a suitable
bride for his heir.

In the morning he caused all the villagers to assemble in the open space
before the tower, and bitterly upbraided those who had tamely submitted
to the enemy. He ordered his nephew Dilasah, who had been severely
wounded, to be brought out among the people, and, cursing him in the
name of the Prophet, he bade all men to witness that he disowned him
utterly. Then he waxed eloquent in praise of Ahmed, about whose neck he
hung a chain of silver cunningly wrought, and called on the people to
recognize him as their future chief. And, finally, he announced that
Minghal Khan should not go unpunished. When the time was ripe his enemy
should lick the dust.

When the assembly was dismissed, Rahmut called his chief men about him
to discuss the means of taking vengeance on Minghal. Ahmed felt a glow
of pride at being admitted to the council. In the ordinary way he could
not have expected so great an honour until he had proved himself in
actual warfare and become a married man. But the old chief was so much
pleased with his coolness and daring, that he was resolved to give the
lad a real share in the activities of the tribe.

There was a long discussion as to the method by which reprisal might be
made on Minghal Khan. It was speedily agreed that to attack his village
openly was impracticable, or would at least expose them to the risk of
disaster. Minghal had lost some twenty men in the fight, but it was well
known that he could still put eighty or ninety good warriors in the
field, whereas Rahmut had but forty or fifty. Success could only be
hoped for from a stratagem. But Minghal, while inferior as a warrior to
Rahmut, was more than his match in wiles. Rahmut, indeed, disdained
trickery of any kind; he had won his reputation by sheer prowess and
skill in generalship, and if it came to a contest in cunning, Minghal
would easily bear the palm. No doubt the wily chief would expect
retaliation, and would be fully prepared to meet it. No one among the
council was able to suggest a likely scheme, and it broke up without
having come to a decision.

Two days passed, and still no plan had suggested itself. On the third
day, there rode up to the village a tall, black-bearded horseman clad in
worn and tattered garments of dust colour, and carrying sword, lance and
carbine. When he had come within a short distance of the gate Ahsan
shouted--

"Halt, there! Who are you, and what is your business?"

"Knowst thou me not, Ahsan?" came the reply. "Dost not remember Sherdil,
son of Assad? Thou didst thrash me often enough, and truly the soft part
of me will never forget thy thwackings."

"Why, Sherdil, thy beard has grown since those days. I remember thee
well. Come in, and say why thou ridest in garments of so strange a
make."

Sherdil rode in, eyed curiously by the crowd of men and boys whom the
brief conversation had drawn to the spot. He was a magnificent specimen
of a Pathan, tall, handsome of feature, well made, and his horse was a
match for him. Dismounting, he led his horse by the bridle and went to
pay his respects to the chief.

Sherdil had left the village nearly eight years before, when he was a
youth of seventeen. He had been the wildest and most unruly boy of the
tribe, always in mischief, showing no respect for his elders--one day he
had called a holy sayad "old scaldhead," and laughed when his father
thrashed him for it. He had been incorrigibly lazy at school: not all
the mullah's thwackings drove into his thick head the scraps from the
Koran which formed the greater part of his lessons, and he was always
very rebellious at having to fast from sunrise to sunset in Ramzan, the
ninth month. But in tent-pegging and racing and sword-play he beat all
boys of his age, and indeed many of the men; and when he insisted on
joining them in their expeditions, which happened at the age of sixteen,
he excelled them all as a highway robber and a horse-thief.

When he was seventeen he ran away, and nothing had since been heard of
him. His mother grieved, for he was her firstborn; but his father,
having three more sons, was not greatly distressed, for the boy had
always been a trouble to him. And now he had come back, grown out of
knowledge, with a fine black beard and the look of a seasoned warrior.

His father, Assad, as in duty bound, made a great feast in honour of the
returned prodigal. He invited a great number of his neighbours, and
regaled them with the flesh of sheep and goats and--this was a great
luxury--fowls, and beautifully light chapatis baked by his wife Fatima
herself, and luscious sweetmeats made of honey and ghi; but the only
drink was water. And having been well fed, Sherdil related the story of
his life since he had left Shagpur--a good riddance, as most of the folk
thought.

It was a stirring tale, of wild doings on the borders, among men who
kept the passes into the hills and lived amid inaccessible rocks, whence
they swept down upon unsuspecting travellers and merchants in the
plains, and even pushed their forays across the frontiers among the
sahib-log. His audience uttered many an exclamation of wonderment and
admiration as he recounted his exploits, and you may be sure he did not
minimize them. The men about him were robbers and brigands and murderers
themselves, but their deeds faded into insignificance beside the bold
and desperate adventures of Sherdil. Ahmed, who was among the company,
listened with all his frame thrilling. He had a faint recollection of
Sherdil as a big fellow who, rough as he was, had treated him with a
certain kindness, and had shown him first how to snare a rabbit. And he
felt a good deal of envy of this fine stalwart fellow who had seen and
done so much.

One story of Sherdil's made the company hilarious. The chief to whom he
for a time attached himself--one Dilawur, a native of Jahangia, a
village on the Cabul river--heard one day that a wealthy Hindu
shopkeeper was to be married. He instantly determined to profit by the
bridegroom's happiness. With his men, among whom Sherdil was one, he lay
in wait on the bank of the Indus at a place which the Hindu must pass on
his way to the bride's house. When the expectant bridegroom came in
sight, all bedizened with wristlets and chains and jewels, the brigands,
armed with pistol, sword and dagger, fell upon the party, seized the
luckless man, dragged him to the river bank, and thrust him into an
inflated cow-hide. Then Sherdil mounted upon this monstrous bladder, and
paddled it across the river. When the rest were across, the Hindu was
carried away into the hills, and Dilawur's scribe--for he could not
write himself--penned a letter to his sorrowing friends, informing them
that their relative was well and happy, and would be restored to them
fat and jolly for the little sum of two hundred rupees.

"Wah! wah!" said the company in chorus. "And what next, O lion of the
hills?"

And Sherdil, whose name means "lion-hearted," chuckled and said--

"Why, did ye ever know a Hindu who would pay a price without bargaining?
And the richer they are, the more they haggle. 'Two hundred rupees? No,
no: we cannot afford that. The sickness fell on our goats last winter;
we are very poor; our friend is very dear to us, but he will be too dear
if we pay that price. We will give a hundred rupees, when we are sure
our friend has lost no flesh.' But Dilawur Khan has not the patience of
a camel. When he got their foolish answer he sent me with another
letter, saying that if the two hundred rupees were not in his hands
within seven days, he would strike off their dear relative's head and
send it them as an offering of peace; only having been at the expense of
feeding him with good fattening food all that time, he would require two
thousand rupees as recompense."

"Wah! wah!" shouted the delighted hearers, to whose sense of justice
this appealed no less than to their sense of humour; "and what was the
answer?"

"Why, the answer was two hundred rupees, full tale, and a present of
goats beside. And the Hindu--whom fear and the delay of his marriage had
most marvellously thinned--was restored to his home, with good wishes
for a long life and many sons--for our sons to pluck likewise."

And in the midst of the laughter this story evoked, one of the guests
asked a question--

"But why, O Sherdil, hast thou given up the dress of thy
forefathers--the chogah, and the blue trousers drawn in at the ankles,
and the sandals? Why dost thou wear this strange garb, like the dust of
the plain or corn of the fields in colour?"

"Eha, that is a strange story too," said Sherdil, and he drew himself
up. "I am a servant of the sahib-log."

"Hai! hai!" gasped the company in astonishment. "A servant of the
sahib-log! the accursed Feringhis! sayest thou, O Sherdil?"

"'Tis true. My coat is the colour of corn, say you? yes, but it is the
colour of the lion also. Is not my name Sherdil? A great sahib, his name
Lumsden, heard of me; he knows everything; no man who does brave deeds
escapes him. Having heard of my great daring in the hills, he sent one
to me who had served him long and was as brave as myself, and begged me,
if it were not too much trouble, to go and see him. And then he spoke
fairly to me: the sahibs are just and speak true; he told me that he had
learnt somewhat of my doings, and asked whether it would suit my honour
to join a company of warriors like myself--Afridis and Gurkhas, Sikhs
and Hazaras, Waziris and even Kafirs, many bloods but one spirit. And
before I made my answer he showed me them at their sports, and verily,
brothers, never did I see such skill among so many men. I saw them throw
the spear at a mark, and doing nazabaze, which is, to fix a stake of a
span length in the ground and take it up on the spear's point when
passing at a full gallop; and, for another sport, putting an orange on
the top of a bamboo three spans high, and slicing it through with the
sword as they ride by at full speed. 'By my beard!' I thought, 'these
are fit mates for me;' and I asked the sahib whether I might try the
nazabaze myself. And he allowed me, and when I caught up the stake on my
spear point he smote his hands together and said words in his tongue to
Hodson Sahib that stood by him, and then he offered me good wages to be
one of his men--Guides, they call them. And I agreed, and therefore it
is, my friends, that I wear this garb, which being of the colour of
earth cannot be seen from afar so clearly as our own garments."

Assad, for the first time in his life proud of this son of his, swelled
with gratification.

"Well did I name thee Sherdil, my son," he said. "But tell us, what dost
thou do for the pay these Feringhis--curst unbelievers--give thee?
Assuredly it is easy work, or thou wouldst not do it."

Sherdil laughed.

"You ask what we do, my father--we of Lumsden Sahib's Guides. We do what
we are bid to do--is not that strange? It is strange to me myself, I
own; for I never did what you bade me, father. But with the
sahibs--well, that is a different matter. They say, Do this! and we do
it, with a cheerful countenance. Canst thou see Sherdil handling a
pick-axe? Say we have no water, and the sahib wishes a well to be sunk.
We of the Guides do it, and I, Sherdil, am the most diligent among them.
Say we need bricks to make a wall; the sahib bids us mould the clay and
burn it, and lo! the bricks are made. Say the sahib desires to go
a-hunting--and a mighty hunter he is, by Allah!--he bids us go into the
jungle as beaters, and gives us rounds of ammunition for ourselves. And
if we do well in our tasks, he gives us goats and rice, and after the
feast we sing songs and make merry."

"But this is not work fit for warriors of the hills," said Assad,
looking a little blank. "Dost never fight and steal?"

"To steal is forbidden," replied Sherdil; "it is against the sahibs'
law. But fight!--do we not fight, my father! Didst never hear how we
fought at Multan, with Fatteh Khan? And how we took the fort of
Goringhar, Rasul Khan being our leader? Lo! I have many tales to tell;
they will last the days of my leave. Yes, we fight, when we get the
chance. Why, only four days ago we spied a troop of fifty or more
hill-men away there in the hills, and we chased them for two days and
nights, but they would never stand to take a shot at us, so much are we
feared."

Inquiry soon discovered that Sherdil had been among the troops which had
kept Rahmut Khan on the run, and loud was his laughter when he learnt
that it was his own chief whom they had been chasing. He became serious,
however, when he heard of what had befallen the village during the
chief's absence, and cursed Minghal Khan with the true vigour of a
Pathan. And on being told that no plans had yet been formed for the
punishment of the offender, he vowed by the beard of the Prophet that
some way should be found before his leave was expired.

Next day he sought an interview with the chief, and had not been in
conversation with him more than half-an-hour before Rahmut called his
council together and asked their opinion of an enterprise Sherdil had
suggested. It won their hearty admiration. One of Minghal's sources of
revenue consisted of a tribute levied on traders passing to and from
Central Asia. Their route lay within a few miles of his village, and,
indeed, sometimes they made use of a change-house in it. They usually
travelled in bodies of considerable size, and sufficiently well armed to
offer a good defence against marauders. But they found it profitable to
placate the principal chiefs through whose territories they passed by
paying a tribute varying with the importance of the chiefs; and the
chiefs on their side recognized that their interests were better served
by the regular income thus derived than by forays which might or might
not be successful, and which would ultimately have the effect of scaring
away the trade caravans altogether.

Sherdil had suggested that advantage of this fact might be taken to
practise a trick on Minghal. He proposed that a small party of Rahmut's
men should be equipped as traders, and thus gain admittance to Minghal's
village. Then, at night, they might find some means of seizing his
tower, and while the village was in confusion Rahmut could attack it
with the main body of his men.

The old chief himself, true to his character, was at first reluctant to
fall in with this cunning scheme. He pointed out that Minghal's attack
on his own tower had failed, and foresaw many possibilities of failure
in the proposed adventure. He would have preferred to wait until he
could have gathered a sufficient reinforcement to enable him to make a
direct attack in force on his enemy. But Sherdil laughed away his
doubts; the burden of his reasoning was that against a wily enemy like
Minghal, wiles must be employed. And as for the matter of the tower, and
a possible failure there, that was not worth considering.

"Minghal had no Sherdil and no Ahmed," he said, with a magnificent
gesture. "I, Sherdil, have learnt somewhat from the sahibs, and has not
Ahmed the blood of sahibs in his veins? We are more than a match for
Minghal, believe me."

Rahmut frowned, and threw an anxious glance at Ahmed when this reference
was made to his English birth. This admiration of the sahibs was little
to his liking; but he discreetly said nothing of what was passing in his
mind, and the general opinion being favourable to the scheme, he gave
his assent to it. Then he threw himself keenly enough into the
preparations suggested by Sherdil. He declared that if the stratagem was
to be attempted, it must be done thoroughly. Any carelessness would
invite discovery, and discovery would mean death to those engaged in it.

Sherdil undertook the arrangements. The first step was to select the
members of the pretended trading party. Five well-tried warriors were
chosen from among those who had accompanied the chief on his recent
expedition. Having been absent from the village during Minghal's attack,
they were not likely to be recognized by his men when they entered his
village. And Sherdil himself begged that Ahmed might be allowed to join
the party. To this the chief at first objected. The enterprise was
fraught with great danger; Minghal would like nothing better than to get
the chief's heir into his hands; and Ahmed, having taken so prominent a
part in the defence of the tower, would certainly be recognized. But
Sherdil had conceived a great admiration for the part Ahmed had played
in resisting Minghal's raid, especially for his exploit in blowing up
the powder. He assured Rahmut Khan that the lad could easily be
sufficiently disguised; Ahmed himself pleaded very hard to be allowed to
join the expedition; and the old chief at last, bethinking himself that,
if successful, it might serve as an additional bond between Ahmed and
the villagers and strengthen his consideration with them, gave his
consent.

"Go, my son, and God go with thee," he said, laying his hands fondly on
the boy's head. "But come back to me, for I am well stricken in years,
and I would fain go to the grave happy, knowing that thou wilt be lord
of Shagpur, and not Dilasah."




CHAPTER THE FIFTH

Reprisals


At sunset of the day on which Sherdil's plan was adopted, the little
party of seven set off from Shagpur in the opposite direction from
Minghal's village. Their goal was a small town on the frontier, many
miles away, where in the bazar they might obtain the articles necessary
to their proper equipment as traders. Sherdil, who had doffed his khaki
uniform and assumed the native dress of his village, thought it best to
start at night so as to evade any spies whom Minghal might have placed
in the neighbourhood.

The journey was to have a great importance in the life of Ahmed, son of
Rahmut Khan. He rode close beside Sherdil all the way, and when they
halted at roadside serais for rest and refreshment, those two ate
together and squatted or lay side by side. The things of which Sherdil
had spoken at his father's feast had fired Ahmed's imagination. Though
the impressions of his early childhood had become dim, and the people
among whom he had then lived were mere shadows, he remembered that he
was of English birth, and Sherdil's words had stirred within him a
desire to know more about his own people. In the first days of his life
at Shagpur he had sometimes thought of running away, but he soon found
this to be impossible, and of late the desire had quite left him. The
old chief, he knew, had saved his life on that terrible day when his
real father was killed. That was a tie between them which could not
easily be broken. And he had now become so thoroughly imbued with Pathan
ideas and customs that he never thought of any other destiny than that
of Rahmut Khan's successor. But his contact with a man who was actually
in the service of the sahibs had roused within him a curiosity to see
the people to whom he rightly belonged, and he plied Sherdil with
questions about them.

Further, Sherdil's references to great fights in which the corps of
Guides had been engaged appealed strongly to his spirit of adventure,
and he pressed the man to tell him more.

"What was that fight at Multan of which you spoke?" he asked, as they
took their siesta in the hot hours of the next day.

"Ah! the fight of Fatteh Khan," replied Sherdil. "'Tis a brave tale, and
I will tell it thee. 'Twas seven years and more ago. We were in the
trenches before Multan. Lumsden Sahib was absent; there were only three
sahib officers with us. One day a kasid galloped into our camp with news
that a party of the enemy's horse, some twenty strong, had driven off a
herd of camels from their grazing near the camp of General Whish. Fatteh
Khan was our risaldar, and he called to us to mount and follow him to
punish those marauders. We galloped off, no more than seventy, the kasid
going before to show the way. And lo! when we had ridden three miles,
and came to the place he had spoken of, we discovered, not twenty, but
the whole host of the enemy's cavalry, full twelve hundred men. They had
been sent, as we learnt, to cut off a convoy of treasure which was said
to be on the way to our general's camp; but they failed in this, and
were now wending back to their own city.

"Did Fatteh Khan bid us halt and return? That is not Fatteh Khan. Wah!
he cried to us to ride like the wind, and the enemy, seeing us, halted,
not knowing what this strange thing might be. And straight through them
we rode, with sword and lance, and when we had come out on the other
side we wheeled about and clove through them again. Wah! they were like
a flock of sheep, witless, huddling together, springing this way and
that without any sense. Again we rode into them, though our arms were
weary and our horses much spent. And then that great host, crying on
Allah to preserve them, broke apart and fled for their lives, and we
pursued them up to the very walls of their city. That is one of the
deeds of Fatteh Khan with Lumsden Sahib's Guides, of whom I am not the
least."

With other stories like this Sherdil beguiled the hours of rest, and
Ahmed became more and more eager to do something in emulation of the
Guides. Perhaps this expedition on which he was soon to be engaged would
provide him with an opportunity; he vowed that if it came he would not
let it slip.

Four days later the party of seven was returning. But it presented a
very different appearance now. The men had changed their costume so as
to appear like peaceable traders. They wore white turbans and long coats
girt about with a sash. All weapons save long talwars slung at their
belts--for even traders must be prepared to make some defence of their
wares--had disappeared. They had two camels, loaded with bales which
might very well contain cloth. The youngest of the party, who, when he
left Shagpur, was a smooth-cheeked youth with a ruddy duskiness of
complexion, was now a shade or two darker in hue, and bore a thin black
moustache on his upper lip.

These transformations had been effected within a day's march of
Minghal's village. The party made their slow way between hill and plain,
so timing themselves that they came to the gate a little before sunset.
To the customary demand of the gate-keeper that they should say who they
were and what their business, Sherdil replied--

"We are traders from Rawal Pindi to Cabul, but a small party, as you
see, and we dare not encamp for the night in the open, lest some
accursed sons of perdition fall upon us and rob us. All the world knows
of Minghal Khan's benevolence to strangers, and we beg a refuge for the
night, O gate-keeper."

"And what do ye offer in return for this favour?" asked the gate-keeper.

"'Tis unworthy of your chief's illustriousness, we fear," said Sherdil
humbly, "but such as it is we make it with grateful hearts. 'Tis indeed
a quantity of cloth, of good weaving, and such as the Amir of Cabul
approves; therefore, unworthy as it is, we yet hope it may find favour
in the eyes of Minghal Khan."

The gate was thrown open without more ado. The traders were led to the
village change-house, where they stalled the camels and their horses,
Sherdil then immediately setting out with one of the men to convey the
present of cloth to Minghal. When he returned, he reported with great
satisfaction that the chief was residing in his tower, which was distant
no more than eighty yards away. And then, with Ahmed's assistance, he
unloaded from the back of one of the camels a small wooden case, which
they carried carefully into the one large room of which the
guest-portion of the change-house consisted. There were only two other
travellers in the room--big bearded Afghans, one of whom inquired
curiously what was the contents of the case which the new-comers had
brought with them.

"Porcelain from Delhi," replied Sherdil at once. "Care is needed, lest
it be shivered to atoms." And he laid it down in a corner near the
charpoy placed for him, and covered it with a roll of cloth.

The travellers ate a simple supper, and conversed freely with the
Afghans; then they all laid themselves down, and there was silence save
for some few snores and the grunting of the camels, which was heard very
clearly through the thin wooden wall.

Some hours later, about three o'clock in the morning, there was a slight
and almost noiseless scuffle within the change-house. The two Afghans
were suddenly awakened from sleep by rough hands laid upon them. The
flickering oil lamp gave little light; the Afghans' sleepy eyes but half
apprehended the meaning of what they saw; and their tongues suffered
from a sudden impediment, for, as they opened their mouths to cry out,
gags were slipped in, and fierce voices muttered in their ears a warning
to be quiet and lie still, or worse would befall them. Their
fellow-guests, the apparently peaceable dealers in cloth and porcelain,
with wonderful dexterity and speed tied their feet and hands together,
and the Afghans had not recovered from their amazement when they saw two
of the merchants creeping out of the door, carrying the small case of
precious porcelain between them.

Meanwhile the other members of the party, after a little fumbling among
their bales of merchandise, had withdrawn from the folds of innocent
cloth a musket apiece, and after the departure of their fellows stood
just behind the door in the attitude of men awaiting a call. One of them
peered round the door; another slightly drew aside the slats of the
adjacent window--an unglazed opening in the wall--and looked eagerly
across the street. There was no moon; the village was in darkness; but
the forms of the two men who had gone out could be dimly seen as they
crept stealthily along by the wall in the direction of the tower between
them and the gate.

The two reached the foot of the tower and laid their burden
down--gently, as befitted a box containing precious porcelain--at the
door. Then one of them stooped lower, and appeared to thrust something
into a hole near the bottom of the box. The watchman on the wall must
have been half-asleep, or he would have noticed a sudden spark at the
foot of the tower. It flashed but for a moment; then the two men,
bending low, hastened back stealthily by the way they had gone, came to
the change-house, and slipping in by the still half-open door, closed it
behind them.

They waited for perhaps a minute, and there was not a sound within the
guest-chamber save the slight smothered grunting of the Afghans through
their gags. Then from without there came a sudden roar; the ground
trembled, the building rocked as if it would fall about their heads, and
the waiting men, drawing a long breath, threw open the door and ran with
great nimbleness towards the tower The street was filled with acrid
fumes; here and there men were crying out, but the merchants paid no
heed, but rushed through the smoke and plunged into the yawning chasm
where the tower door had been. The opening was clogged with burning wood
and fragments of masonry; the intruders stumbled over these, coughing up
the smoke that entered their lungs, and groped their way up the narrow
winding stairway.

Cries from above assailed them. At the top of the first flight of steps
stood a man armed with a long spear. The stairway was so narrow that
only one man could pass at a time, and the man at the head of the
mounting party, coming too suddenly upon the spearman, received a thrust
in the breast and toppled backward. But the man behind him slipped aside
to avoid his falling body, and caught the spear before it could be
withdrawn, dragging the spearman forward. Two others--they were Sherdil
and Ahmed--seized the occasion to squeeze past him; but they gained the
top of the flight only to see the two men who, behind him, had been
content to let him bear the brunt of the attack, dash back across the
narrow passage to a door on the other side. The passage was lit by a
small oil lamp--a wick floating in a shallow saucer. By its light
Sherdil and Ahmed saw the men fling themselves through the door into the
room beyond. They sprang after them, but the door was slammed in their
faces and the bolt shot.

And now great shouts floated up the stairway from below. They were cries
of surprise and fear, calls for arms, mingled with the fierce war-shout
of Pathan warriors. Some little while after the party of merchants had
found entrance to the village, Rahmut Khan with all his fighting men had
come up in the darkness and lain in hiding beyond the walls. The
explosion had been the signal for an attack on the village. They had
dashed forward; some had forced the gate, others had scaled the walls,
and they now held the village at their mercy, for the explosion had been
so startling, and the attack so sudden, that any effective defence was
out of the question.

Meanwhile, Sherdil and his band, finding themselves blocked by the
bolted door, had sought for some means of breaking it down. Their
chief's quarrel was with Minghal Khan, and it was Minghal Khan whom they
were most eager to secure. Some minutes passed before axes could be
found, then with a few shattering blows the door was broken in. Sherdil
sprang into the room, followed closely by Ahmed and the rest. The birds
had flown. The room was small, with one narrow window in the outer wall.
A rope hung from it; the men had descended by this and made their
escape. Ahmed rushed down the stairs to inform his father, and to send
men out in pursuit. Sherdil hastened to the upper apartments in the hope
that Minghal might not have been one of the two who had escaped. But he
found no one in the tower except the women and children.

The surprise had been entirely successful save in this one matter of the
escape of Minghal. The village had fallen to Rahmut almost without a
blow. Indeed, save for the one man who had been speared at the head of
the steps, and one who had been shot by the sentry before he himself was
cut down, the victory had been bloodless. Rahmut's men patrolled the
streets until dawn. Then he called the people to a meeting and reassured
them as to his intentions. Without doubt they had been led away, he told
them, in their attack on Shagpur, by the evil designs of their chief,
Minghal. Minghal was now gone--had fled away to escape disgrace and
humiliation. But his cowardice was a disgrace still greater. None but a
coward would have taken flight thus, leaving his men without a leader
and his family defenceless.

"Minghal has a serpent's cunning, but the heart of a hare," cried the
old chief. "He is not fit for rule. He tried to take my village, and
failed; and we have shown that even at tricks we can beat him. I will
punish no man for Minghal's ill-doings. I myself will be your chief, and
you shall be my people."

The men sent out in pursuit of Minghal returned by and by unsuccessful.
In that hilly country there were many hiding-places where he might
dwell. In the afternoon Rahmut returned to Shagpur, leaving one of his
principal lieutenants in charge with a score of men, and taking a like
number of Minghal's men with him for safety's sake.

Sherdil received great praise for his skilful stratagem. Rahmut wished
to keep him at Shagpur, offering him great inducements to remain. But
Sherdil was not to be tempted. He had eaten Lumsden Sahib's salt, he
said, and when his furlough was over he would return to his duties at
Mardan, the head-quarters of the Guides. Perhaps later on, when his term
of service had expired and he was granted a pension, he might settle in
his native village; but for the present he was content to remain one of
the Guides and serve the sirkar. And when, a few days later, he donned
his khaki again and rode away to rejoin his comrades, no one in Shagpur
was sorrier than Ahmed. Sherdil's departure had left a blank.




CHAPTER THE SIXTH

In the Nets


The capture of Minghal's village gave such an accession of strength to
Rahmut Khan that he was soon emboldened to plan an expedition of greater
importance than any he had undertaken before. He heard that the chief of
a small hill village had refused to pay the Government revenue, and that
Sir John Lawrence, the Commissioner in Peshawar, would shortly dispatch
a force to the village to enforce the payment. The community being a
small one, it was not likely that the British force would be numerous;
and Rahmut conceived the idea of laying an ambush for it on its return
and running off with the revenue. He had a motive beyond that of the
mere acquisition of wealth. He felt that a successful attack on a
British force would greatly enhance his prestige, and strengthen his
hold on the allegiance of his new clansmen.

The project was talked over in council, and the only man who ventured to
oppose it was old Ahsan the gate-keeper, who, since his defence of the
tower, had enjoyed a much higher consideration with the chief. Ahsan
warned Rahmut against measuring his strength with the British. It was
one thing to make an occasional raid on the frontier stations for the
purpose of stealing horses, and quite another to attack a properly
equipped force. But his warning fell on deaf ears, and no one more
vehemently opposed him than the chief's nephew Dilasah, who, since
recovering from the wound he had received in the attack on the village,
had professed repentance and left nothing undone to win his uncle's
favour. The old man, being of a frank and unsuspicious disposition,
freely pardoned Dilasah for his former ill-behaviour and his dealings
with Minghal, and was greatly delighted one day when the man told him
that he gave up all pretensions to the chiefship and admitted Ahmed's
claims. Dilasah had a certain reputation for shrewdness and bravery, and
his voice, being unhesitatingly in favour of the scheme Rahmut proposed,
outweighed what was regarded as the more timorous counsel of Ahsan.

The expedition having been decided on, Rahmut sent Dilasah himself to
Peshawar in the disguise of a pedlar, to discover what he could of the
composition of the British force and the date of its setting out.
Meanwhile he was troubled by the request that Ahmed had made to be
allowed to join the expedition. The boy had shown himself brave and
resourceful; and Rahmut felt that if he took arms against his countrymen
the last link would be removed between him and them. On the other hand,
he did not fail to see that the expedition would be a dangerous one, and
though he believed that he could carry it through successfully, he was
anxious to keep Ahmed out of harm's way, and especially to run no risk
of his falling into English hands. If Ahmed should be taken prisoner,
the old chief feared lest the contact with Englishmen should awaken race
feelings now dormant, and the boy be lost to him. So, after much
hesitation and much pleading on the part of Ahmed, the old chief told
him kindly enough that he was not to accompany him, but to be left in
charge of the village during his absence.

Ahmed was deeply disappointed. Rahmut gave him no reasons for his
decision; he was a wise old man; reasons could be combated and overcome.
When Ahmed asked Ahsan why his father was so loath to let him try his
manhood, Ahsan confessed that he did not know, which was true and yet
untrue; for, though the chief had not told him, Ahsan had made a shrewd
guess.

"Rahmut does not wish it ever to be said of you, 'He takes off his
clothes before he reaches the water,'" said Ahsan, quoting a proverb
against precipitancy. "Why fear?" he went on. "'Milk even in good time
becomes curds.' He who has patience wins. It will come to you in good
time to lead men and do great things."

"I hate your proverbs," said Ahmed; "they have no comfort in them. Will
my father never see that I am grown up?"

"Thou wouldst not fight against thy own countrymen, Ahmed-ji?"

"Why not? Sherdil fights against his countrymen, why not I? And they are
my countrymen no longer; my countrymen are here. What have I to do with
these strangers who come lording it over the free people of the hills?"

"Hush, Ahmed-ji!" said the old man. "Children cry to their parents. To
speak ill of the Feringhis is to speak ill of yourself. Let be, my son;
what a man desires he will gain if it be God's will."

And Ahmed, being a sensible boy, did not nurse his disappointment. But
perhaps the old chief would have changed his mind had he known that his
refusal had only made the boy more eager to see the white men of whom
Sherdil had told him so much.

Dilasah presently returned from his journey to Peshawar. His information
was that the expedition was to start in a week's time, and to consist of
a single troop of Sikh horsemen under the command of one sahib. He had
learnt the route it was to follow; it would pass within three days'
march of Shagpur. Rahmut praised him, and did not inquire how he had
made these discoveries; but Ahsan put the question bluntly when the
chief called his council together and told them what he had learnt.

"It was the talk of the bazar," said Dilasah, looking astonished.

"Then it cannot be true," said Ahsan. "Would the Feringhis let their
purpose be known? Are there not hundreds who would carry the news to Lal
Jan, the chief, and warn him, so that he had time to get away into the
hills? If it was the talk of the bazar, 'tis very certain that things
will be otherwise."

Dilasah appeared for a moment to be taken aback. Ahsan was certainly
right, and the older members of the council showed their agreement with
his reasoning. But Dilasah, after a hesitation so brief as to be
scarcely noticeable, said with a disdainful smile--

"The ass does not know how to laugh. Is Ahsan the only man of knowledge
and understanding? The knowing bird is not caught in the snare, and I,
Dilasah, am not a fledgeling. The expedition was in truth the talk of
the bazar, but I did not swallow what was said there. How should the
truth be known? I sought out in Peshawar a holy fakir whom I know. He
hates the infidel Feringhis, and he has means of finding out their
plans, most marvellous. The talk of the bazar and the truth were as
different as fire and water; and what I have told is not the bazar-talk,
but the truth as I learnt it from the fakir."

"Then, if he hates the Feringhis, will he not warn Lal Jan, and so Lal
Jan will fly to the hills with his treasure, and the Feringhis will get
nothing, so that when our people fall upon them their bags will be
empty?"

"Not so," said Dilasah, in answer to this further question of Ahsan. "He
is no friend to Lal Jan; Lal Jan is, indeed, a thorn in his quilt; he
will gain double delight from the spoiling, first of Lal Jan, and
afterwards of the Feringhis. But why talk thus? If Ahsan, who is old and
toothless, thinks himself so clever, let him go to Peshawar and learn
the truth of things. As for me, I have done the chief's bidding; it is
for him to command."

And with the air of one who had been deeply offended, Dilasah left the
council.

After he had gone, Rahmut asked Ahsan why he threw doubt on the accuracy
of the information; and when the old man confessed that he had no reason
save a distrust of Dilasah, the chief was angry. Dilasah could have no
object in bringing false information, for he was to accompany the chief
in the proposed raid, and would suffer equally with the rest if it
should fail. It was decided in the end to accept his report as accurate,
and preparations for the expedition were hurried on.

A few days later, Rahmut Khan left the village at the head of eighty
men--the pick of his own and of Minghal's warriors. Ahmed, left behind
with a score of fighting men to defend the village, watched his father's
departure with envy. How he longed that the place at the chief's right
hand had been bestowed on him instead of on Dilasah! But it was useless
to repine; he could only swallow his disappointment and hope that during
his father's absence something might happen to give him an opportunity
for active work.

Rahmut could scarcely be expected to return before a fortnight. The
British force would take some time in the work assigned to it, and the
chief's plan was to ambush it on its return journey, when in possession
of the revenue it had been sent to collect. Ahmed went every day to the
top of the tower to scan the surrounding country, but saw nothing to
attract his attention. Life went on in the village from day to day as
usual, the fighting men spending most of the time in playing games of
chance, the workers toiling for an hour or two and idling the rest.
Ahmed was of too active a disposition to remain idle. He practised
swordsmanship with one or two of the men, went hunting in the hills
behind the village with some of the youths, and induced some of the best
riders to join him in the game of nazabaze, in which he proved himself
easily first.

And then one day, the fifteenth since his father's departure, he saw
from his look-out on the tower a band of horsemen approaching. There was
great excitement in the village when he told them the news; nobody had
any doubt that the chief was returning successful, and all excitedly
speculated on the amount of booty he had taken. Ahmed watched the
approach of the horsemen as eagerly as any one. At first a mere blot on
the sky, sometimes disappearing behind a copse or in a valley, the band
gradually became more distinct and definite, and after two hours he was
able to assure himself that it did indeed consist of his father's men.

But it seemed somewhat diminished, and when, an hour later, it had come
so near that he could distinguish the individuals composing it, he
suddenly caught Ahsan by the arm and cried--

"Where is my father? I do not see him; do you?"

"Your eyes are better than mine, Ahmed-ji," replied the old man.
"Without doubt your father is there in the midst, and you will see him
by and by."

But after a few more minutes Ahmed cried again--

"He is not there. I do not see his red turban or his white beard. I see
Dilasah, but not my father."

And then, feeling no little alarm at the chief's absence, he ran down to
the foot of the tower, mounted his horse, and galloped out to meet the
advancing band.

"Where is my father, Dilasah?" he cried, while he was still some
distance away.

"Hai! hai! he is not here," replied the man, with a gloomy look.

"But where is he? He is not dead?"

"No, truly he is not dead, praise to Allah! Not one of us is killed,
Ahmed; but my honoured uncle, with some few more, is a prisoner with
those pigs of English, woe is me!"

"A prisoner! Then he failed?"

"We failed, all of us. We came to the place which we had appointed for
our ambush, and there we waited three days, and on the third day we saw
the accursed Feringhi and his men coming down the defile towards us.
Then we split up into three bands, as we had arranged, and my reverend
uncle went with one band to one side, and I with my band to the other
side, Rajab going with the third to the end of the defile to cut off the
enemy when they should seek to escape."

"And what then?"

"Woe is me! From our post high up in the rocks we could see the chief
with his band creeping on foot round on the other side of the defile,
and there on a sudden men seemed to spring out of the earth; my honoured
uncle had walked into a trap without doubt set for him by those accursed
sons of dogs. In an instant he was surrounded, and what could he do with
his few men against twice the number of Sikhs? There was no time even to
fight, for the Sikhs were armed with the short guns that fire quickly,
and the white-faced Feringhi called in a loud voice to the chief to
yield or he would be a dead man. What could he do? And so he was made
prisoner with all his band."

"And you--did you nothing to help him?"

"Nay, how could I tell that Sikhs were not coming on my side also to
encompass me?"

"You ran away?"

"What could I do? If we had fired a shot we should have betrayed
ourselves to the enemy, and we were not strong enough to fight them when
the chief and his party were gone. And there was danger that Rajab, who
was at the end of the defile behind us and had not seen what had
befallen the chief, might fire and so be discovered also; and it seemed
best to join him, so that our company should be stronger in case the
enemy attacked us."

A youth of Pathan blood would without doubt have burst forth into shrill
cursing and reviling; there would have been a fierce war of words, and
by and by perhaps a knife-thrust. But Ahmed never displayed anger in the
Pathan way; in this he was often a puzzle to the people of Shagpur. He
said not a word now in answer to Dilasah. The lines of his face had
hardened; his lips were pressed tight together; a strange look had come
into his grey eyes. He rode at a quick foot-pace beside Dilasah back to
the village, listening to the man's repetition of the story of the
capture. He listened to it again in the village, where Dilasah told it
in the street, and the people made great lamentation with cries and
groans. And then, when the horsemen had dismounted and gone to their
homes, he accompanied Ahsan to his little hut, and asked the old man
what he thought of the things that had happened.

"Dilasah is a coward--that is sure," said Ahsan. "Did we not know it? He
fled away as a lark flies at the first throw. A man fights; a dog turns
tail. 'Tis an evil fate has befallen the master, and this village of
Shagpur also."

"Is Dilasah's story true, think you?" asked Ahmed.

"Without doubt it is true. A lie has no legs. Did not all the men hear
what he said? He would not say what is false in the hearing of them all,
for they would put him to shame."

"And what will become of my father?"

"Hai! that Allah knows, Ahmed-ji. Jan Larrens is a stern man, they say,
and swift to punish. The Feringhis have many ways of punishing.
Sometimes they slay with a rope; sometimes they make a man pay much
money; sometimes they hold him prisoner. Who can tell what they will do
with the master!"

"And we cannot help him, can we, Ahsan?"

"Ahuh! 'tis impossible. Peshawar is a strong city: once and twice I have
been there in my youth--before the Feringhis came. Jan Larrens is the
governor now; he has many soldiers, both Feringhis and true believers
who take their pay, like Sherdil, son of Assad. It would be like a man
beating his head against the rocks to go there and try to release the
master by force. And to buy his freedom is alike impossible. In the old
days we might have sent presents to the jailer, or to the governor of
the prison, or to the governor of the city, and if the presents were
rich enough the gates of the prison would open. But that is all changed
since the servants of Jan Kumpani came. Strange are the ways of the
Feringhis! Their eyes do not shut when one offers to put rupees in their
palms; nay, I heard of a young Feringhi at Lahore, who, when Kunwar Khan
spoke of giving him a great sum if he would buy Kunwar's mildewed grain
for the soldiers--this young Feringhi doubled his fist and smote Kunwar
in the face, and he fell backward, showing the soles of his feet. Truly
the Feringhis are a strange folk."

"Well then, Ahsan, there is but one thing to do. I shall be chief now,
and I will get more and more men about me until we are strong enough to
make an attack on the prison and bring my father out. He has broken into
their places with a few men and taken their horses; why should not I
with a great company break into their prison and bring forth a man?"

Ahsan shook his head.

"You can climb the mulberry-tree, but not the thorny acacia," he said;
"that is foolish talk. And you forget Dilasah."

"What of Dilasah?"

"Hai! He will make himself chief now, Ahmed-ji; and listen, let me speak
in your ear. Did I not distrust Dilasah? Did I not doubt him when he
spoke of the talk of the bazar?"

"What do you mean? Why do you speak in whispers? Tell me, Ahsan."

"Hush! Traitors have long ears." Then, bending forward until his lips
almost touched the ears of Ahmed, he said: "Do we know that Dilasah did
not make ready this trap for the master?"

Ahmed started. This suspicion had not occurred to him. But remembering
Dilasah's long association with Minghal, the man of wiles, and his
sudden change of attitude towards his uncle, he saw that Ahsan's
suggestion might be well founded. Who stood to gain so much from Rahmut
Khan's disappearance as Dilasah? He coveted the chiefship; he had been
consumed with anger when Rahmut adopted Ahmed as his heir; nothing was
more likely than that he should seize such an opportunity of getting rid
of the old chief, and so open the way to his ambition.

"Then it will be a fight between Dilasah and me," said the boy, setting
his teeth.

"Hai! That is again foolishness," replied the old man. "What can you do,
Ahmed-ji? Dilasah is a grown man, cunning as a leopard. He will speak
soft words to the people, and when he tells them 'tis a choice between
him and you, and you a Feringhi, think you they will respect the desires
of the master when he is far away? Many love you, some are indifferent,
some are envious; but when Dilasah has said his say, and made his
promises, and got the mullah on his side--as he will do with presents of
sheep and tobacco--think you that even those who love you will offend
Allah and risk the pains of Gehenna for you? There is talk even now that
the Feringhis wish to make us all Christians. Dilasah and the mullah
will persuade the folk that you, if you become their chief, will turn
them from the true belief. I am an old man, Ahmed-ji, but though I have
a white beard and toothless gums I can yet see a cloud in the sky."

Ahmed frowned. He had not foreseen these difficulties. He repeated the
Koran and said the prayers the mullah had taught him; in nothing did he
fall short of the observances required of good Mohammedans. In the early
days of his life in Shagpur, when he went tearfully to bed, he had
repeated the little prayers learnt at his mother's knee; but in the long
years since then, during which he had heard no word of English spoken
around him, these English prayers had slipped from him. It was absurd to
suppose that when he became chief he would try to turn the people to a
religion of which he knew nothing. He could not but think that Ahsan's
fears were groundless, and when next day Dilasah met him with a frank
smile, and, after a word of commiseration of the unhappy fate of Rahmut
Khan, addressed him with apparent cordiality as the new chief, he ran to
tell Ahsan that he was quite mistaken.

There was sorrow in the village at the loss of Rahmut Khan. The people
were proud of him, and with shrill cries called down maledictions on the
Feringhis. But no one spoke of attempting anything on his behalf;
Ahsan's views on that matter were shared by them all. Dilasah led the
way in professions of loyalty to Ahmed, much to the wonderment of the
old gate-keeper. Ahsan watched him narrowly. He did not believe in his
sincerity, and yet could see no object in his feigning a loyalty he did
not feel. And it was not until some days had passed that a light flashed
upon him. Though Dilasah agreed with the rest of the men that it was
impossible to rescue the old chief, he said that it was surely desirable
that an attempt should be made to discover his fate. And at that, Assad,
the father of Sherdil, offered to make the journey to Peshawar to
inquire.

"Who better than I?" he said. "Sherdil, my son, is a great man among the
Feringhis; it is a good thing that I, his father, should visit him and
see with my own eyes the greatness that has come to him. Without doubt
he will be in Peshawar or some place near at hand; it will be easy for
me to find him, and he will assuredly know what has become of our
master. I will go to Peshawar, and bring back news of the chief, and
also, I doubt not, some manifest tokens of the estimation in which my
son is held."

This offer he made to Ahmed in the presence of Dilasah, and the latter
strongly urged its acceptance. Accordingly, two days after the return of
the luckless expedition, Assad set off disguised as a mendicant, to
escape all danger of being snapped up by a hostile tribe if he went
otherwise. And shrewd old Ahsan now saw through the conduct of Dilasah.
The man would not feel safe until he knew for certain that Rahmut Khan
was permanently out of the way. If there was the least chance of the
chief's return--whether by escape, or by payment of a fine, for Dilasah
was very hazy as to what his punishment would be--it behooved him to go
carefully. Shagpur would never side with him against its rightful chief;
and if Rahmut should come back and find that he had tried to oust Ahmed,
he knew that he could expect no mercy from his kinsman. He was thus
biding his time, thought Ahsan, until Rahmut's fate was known with
certainty, and then he would show his hand.

"You must be ready for flight when Assad comes back," said the
gate-keeper to Ahmed.

"Why should I flee?" asked the boy.

"Because if you do not it will befall you as it befell Sundar Khan. He
had a rival in the succession to his father, even as you have, and
Gulam, the rival, offered to put the matter before a council of the
clansmen and abide by their choice. The choice fell upon Sundar Khan,
whereupon Gulam made a great feast to celebrate the happy end of the
dispute, to which came Sundar Khan and many of his friends. And when the
pipe of peace was passing round after the feast, Gulam slipped away
secretly to the door and lighted a match, and even as he himself ran for
his life, Sundar Khan and all his friends were blown up into the air. So
Gulam made himself chief, and so also will Dilasah if he learns that
Rahmut Khan is put out of the way."

This advice was distasteful to Ahmed, and for some days he refused to
consider it. Dilasah was still very pleasant; made no assumption of
authority; said once, with a mournful shake of the head, that Ahmed
would soon be chief in reality, for Rahmut, being old, could not long
survive imprisonment. But a day or two after he said something which
recalled the story Ahsan had told, and Ahmed for the first time began to
think that his life might indeed be in danger.

"'Tis to be feared we shall never see Rahmut Khan again, Ahmed-ji," said
Dilasah, "and when Assad returns with the news of what has befallen him,
and we have no longer hope, we must put away our sorrow and make a feast
to hail thee as chief. Dost thou approve, Ahmed-ji?"

Ahmed looked at the fat, smiling face with the cunning little eyes, and
in the light of what Ahsan had said saw villainy there.

"It will be well, Dilasah," he said. "We will have a feast, and Rahmut's
women and my sisters shall make us sweetmeats with their own hands. That
will be a great day, Dilasah."

And Dilasah smiled and rubbed his hands, and Ahmed went off to tell
Ahsan. There was no longer any doubt that Rahmut's nephew meditated
mischief, but Ahmed was still disinclined to take flight. He was popular
with the younger men, and suggested to Ahsan that they might form a
party in opposition to Dilasah and forestall him.

"Hai!" said Ahsan. "Crows home in the nests of hawks. It is vain,
Ahmed-ji. I have seen Dilasah many times in converse with the mullah; he
is cunning as a fox. Thou wilt be safe only by flight. My counsel to
thee is to have thy good horse Ruksh ready, and when Assad returns with
the bad news--for my heart tells me it will be bad--ride out that very
night."

"And whither should I ride, Ahsan? This is my home. I have nowhere to
go."

"Make thyself known to the Feringhis, Ahmed-ji. Maybe thou hast kinsmen
among them."

"'Tis folly, Ahsan. Who would believe me? I cannot speak the Feringhi
speech, save one or two words that come back to me sometimes. I know
nothing of the Feringhis' ways; I do not know the name of my true
father. Dost thou remember it, old friend?"

"Nay, I have often sought for it in my mind, but it is gone. Rahmut
knows it, and Minghal also, but it is clean gone from me."

"Then how could I prove to the Feringhis that I am one of them? No, I
like it not; and furthermore, Rahmut lies in prison, and I begin to
believe that it is even as thou sayest--that Dilasah betrayed him. Is it
not my duty by some means to bring Rahmut back and deal with Dilasah as
he deserves?"

"Hai! foolish talk again. Think of what I say, Ahmed-ji; the time is not
long; Assad will soon be back, and then if thou art not gone, Dilasah
will seek thy life and take it."

Ahmed was impressed by the warnings of Ahsan, still more when he found
that the old gate-keeper's views were shared by Rahmut Khan's family.
Since Minghal's raid these ladies, with their children and servants,
like Ahmed himself, had remained in the tower, and the chief's usual
house had been unoccupied. Dilasah had been given the house in which he
had lived before his breach with his uncle years before. On the day
after Ahsan had spoken so seriously, when Ahmed paid his usual visit of
respect to Rahmut's principal wife, Meriem, the lady strongly urged him
not to go about the village alone.

"That evil man Dilasah hates thee," she said. "Gather some of the young
men who love Rahmut and thee, Ahmed-ji, and have them always about thee
when thou goest into the streets."

Ahmed thought the advice worth taking, but the position irked him. The
constraint was unendurable after his customary life of freedom, and he
felt that it must be ended one way or another. The obvious way--the
natural way to a Pathan--was to meet Dilasah with his own weapons and
kill him at the first opportunity. But Dilasah's party was stronger than
his own, and supposing his enemy were out of the way, the prejudice
against him as one of Feringhi birth would render his position still
very insecure. The death of Dilasah would probably result in a feud
between his faction and Ahmed's. No one could say how such a strife
would end, but certainly it would in no way help towards the restoration
of Rahmut Khan to his village, the object Ahmed had most at heart. The
boy concluded that he had better leave the village and go to Peshawar,
to see whether some means might not be found of freeing the old chief.
It was a debt he owed to the man who had saved his life and loved him so
well. Ahsan might talk of the difficulties, but Ahsan was an old man;
old men often saw difficulties where young men could see none. Ahsan
would not have crept to the shed and blown up Minghal's powder; Ahsan
would not have taken part in Sherdil's daring stratagem against
Minghal's village; yet both of these hazardous enterprises had been
successful. Ahsan might talk as he pleased: certainly this was what
Ahmed would do.

But Ahsan, when the new plan was put to him, did not speak of the
difficulties. He applauded the boy's decision, and even begged him to
carry it out at once, without waiting for Assad's return. Ahmed would
not consent to this. Assad's news might have some bearing on his future
course of action. Besides, before he left the village he wished to know
whether their suspicions of Dilasah were well founded. If they were, he
would have two aims in life: to bring back Rahmut Khan, and to punish
Dilasah.

It was three weeks before Assad returned. He came in one day weary and
footsore, and in great depression of spirits.

"Hai! Sherdil was ever a liar," he said dolefully, when amid a circle of
the chief men of the village he made his report to Ahmed. "He a great
man with the sahibs, forsooth! Why, he is but a servant, and does
foolishness. I found him not in Peshawar; weary as I was, I had to go
two days' journey to Mardan in the north-east. And what did I see there?
Two score of men standing in line beneath the walls, and a Feringhi with
a boy's face calling out strange words to them, and as he spoke these
men lifted their right feet all together, and held them in the air as a
goose does, and then let them fall to the ground again, and up came
their left feet, all together, and so they marched, very slowly. And
then they stopped, and moved their feet up and down without walking;
'twas the most foolish thing I ever saw. And then at another word from
the Feringhi dog they lifted their guns--short guns for babies, not like
our jazails--and held them straight before their noses, and at another
word they let them down again and crossed their hands over them, and so
stood without motion, as quiet and still as if they had been trees. And
I called to Sherdil, and bade him come and greet his father; but he
neither looked at me nor said a word, not daring to make a movement
except at the bidding of the Feringhi boy. And afterwards, when the
Feringhi made a hissing between his teeth--'Dissmisss!' was the word of
the foolish one--Sherdil came to me and asked me with great violence why
I had tried to get him punished, for it seems that if he had walked out
of the line, or lifted a hand, or spoken a word save at the bidding of
the Feringhi, he would have suffered grievous stripes, or have received
no sheep's flesh to eat. Cursed be the dogs of Feringhis! That is what
they make of the free-men of the hills."

"But what of my father?" asked Ahmed, to whom this description of
European drill was not interesting.

"Thy father? Hai! He is shut up for five years."

He was interrupted by shrill cries from the men around. Ahmed, stealing
a glance at Dilasah, saw his eyes flash with satisfaction.

"Yes, for five years he is to lie in the Feringhis' prison. That is the
judgment of Jan Larrens. And Sherdil, my wretched son, said that it was
his just deserts and the due reward of foolishness. Hai! if I had known
what I know now, I would have cut off Sherdil's right hand sooner than
let him go back to do goose-step and other things unworthy of a Pathan.
And when I told him what I thought, he laughed at me with great
laughter, and said, 'Go back, foolish one, or verily I will tell Lumsden
Sahib of thee, and ere thou knowest thou wilt be doing goose-step too.
Lumsden Sahib will have thee.' And I shook the dust off my feet and
departed; and my heart is sore vexed, for I thought my son was a great
man, and would do me honour in my old age."

There was much shaking of heads at this exposure of Sherdil's
boastfulness, and much sympathy expressed for Assad. But the man was an
ignorant fellow, a dyer by trade, who had seldom left the village, and
Ahmed felt sure that he had in some way been mistaken.

Assad's news about Rahmut Khan did but confirm his resolution to leave
the village. He was on the point of mentioning it to Dilasah when that
plausible man himself came to him, all smiles and geniality.

"Salaam, Ahmed," he said. "'Tis to be feared we shall never see our
chief Rahmut Khan again. He is an old man; the prison will kill him. No
man can strive against fate, and it is not meet that we sorrow overmuch
for what cannot be altered. Therefore am I come to bid thee to a feast,
Ahmed-ji, at which we will hail thee as chief and be merry."

"But I cannot be chief while my father lives."

"True, but what matters it? Thou wilt be chief in his absence, it is
what he himself would wish; and if by Allah's mercy he does not die in
the Feringhis' prison, but comes back to us, he will rejoice that we
held a feast in thy honour. This feast will be to-morrow, Ahmed-ji, and
I have already ordered the finest sheep to be killed."

Ahmed had no reasonable excuse for declining the invitation, and Dilasah
went away well pleased.

But later in the day there came to Ahmed an old Hindu scribe who had
settled in the village years before. In all considerable Pathan villages
there were a few men of Hindu race--low-caste men, who plied petty
trades among the Mohammedans in the hope of making money. This man had
been protected once by Ahmed against the rabble of the village when he
had unwittingly given them offence. He came to the tower as soon as it
was dark, and being admitted to Ahmed's room, said--

"Hazur, I come to warn you. I remember the kindness wherewith you saved
your servant when he was in peril of his life, and it is meet and right
to show gratitude. Besides, our lord and master Rahmut Khan will reward
me when he returns, as he assuredly will do. But that is a little
matter. I may be dead before that time comes, and even without a reward
I would do much for you, hazur. And now what I say is this: go not to
the feast to which Dilasah has bid you. I have spoken it."

"But why, Dinga Ghosh?"

"To-day," said the man, dropping his voice, "when I was sitting at my
writing behind my lattice, I heard two of Dilasah's friends talking
together. Without doubt they supposed me asleep, and indeed it was very
hot, and I should have been asleep but for some good jin that held my
eyelids. The men talked, and spoke of the morrow's feast, at which they
would be guests, and one said that it would be a merry feast, and when
it was ended no man would be in doubt as to who was chief of Shagpur.
And both chuckled at this, and shortly after went away, and peeping
through my lattice I beheld them that they were minions of Dilasah. For
this reason have I come to warn you; without doubt mischief is
intended."

"I thank thee, Dinga Ghosh," said Ahmed, "and be sure that my father
will reward thee when he comes back."

"Salaam, hazur," said the Hindu, and went away as secretly as he had
come.

Ahmed had no longer any doubt that he must go; Shagpur was no longer
safe for him. He had no scruples about leaving his father's household;
Dilasah would never dare to molest them, in face of public opinion.
There was nothing to detain him. But, as he had told Ahsan, he would
never slink out of the place furtively like a dog in fear of a whipping.
No doubt if he pleased he might slip down over the wall in the night. He
would not use that way, but go openly and in broad daylight through the
gate.

Next morning, therefore, he told the chief's family of his resolve.

"It is wise, Ahmed-ji," said Meriem; "but we are loath to lose thee. Yet
it is the part of a good son to do what may be done for his father, and
we shall love thee the more if thou bringest back our lord in safety.
But I fear lest Dilasah will not let thee go."

"Wah! He will be glad to be rid of me," said Ahmed.

"Not so. Does he wish our lord Rahmut to return? Will he feel safe if he
live in fear that thou mayst return one day, perhaps after many years,
and become in very truth lord of Shagpur? Nay, Dilasah would fain kill
thee while thou art yet a boy; it will not be so easy when thou art a
man."

"Nevertheless, O pearl, I will go, and Dilasah shall not stay me."

He bade farewell to the ladies and their daughters, left them, and went
immediately to saddle his horse. A Pathan starting on a journey needs
but little equipment; his horse, his weapons, a trifle of money, a
wallet of food--with these he is ready. A few minutes after he left the
women he rode boldly from the courtyard towards the gate. He was
surprised to find it closed, and in charge of a new gate-keeper.

"Where is Ahsan?" he demanded sharply.

The man replied that Ahsan being sick, he had been sent to take his
place. Ahmed immediately grasped the situation. This was Dilasah's first
move; he meant to make sure that his invited guest and victim should not
escape him. Luckily Dilasah's house was at the other side of the
village; Ahmed felt that he had perhaps a few moments to spare.

"Open the gate," he said to the new gate-keeper.

The man hesitated; clearly he had his orders. Instantly Ahmed's knife
flashed before his eyes. There was no escape for him, with Ahmed above
him. Haltingly he moved towards the gate, trying to gain time. Perhaps
Dilasah or some of his friends would arrive before Ahmed had passed
through. There were men and children in the street, and Ahmed heard them
calling to one another; no doubt, unless they were in the secret, they
were surprised at seeing the young chief leaving the village on the very
day of the feast. The news would soon fly through the place.

"Quick!" cried Ahmed to the gate-keeper, "or you are a dead man."

The man cringed, and drew the bolts. Ahmed, his knife in one hand, leant
forward and with the other pulled open the massive structure, which
creaked on its hinges. Seizing the opportunity, the man slipped aside
and ran up the street shouting for assistance. Ahmed walked his horse
quietly through the gateway. He heard cries behind him; it would take a
minute or two for horsemen to saddle up, mount, and follow, and there
were few horses within fifty miles that could match his Ruksh in
speed--the arab he had trained to come at his call, and to kneel down at
a word. Some one might shoot at him from the wall, but he must take his
chance of that; he disdained to run while he was yet in sight. He turned
his horse towards a hill a quarter of a mile away, and did not set him
to a trot until he had rounded the shoulder and the village was hid from
him. Then he rode on for half-a-mile until he gained a spot whence the
walls again came into view. Turning his head, he saw a dozen horsemen
pouring through the gate. It was time to be off. With a touch upon his
flank and a word in his ear the horse broke into a gallop. Even with a
heavier burden than his master the arab could outpace any horse in the
village, and under Ahmed's light weight he would, barring accidents,
easily distance the pursuers.

Ahmed had purposely chosen a track that wound along at the base of the
hills, for the undulations of the country would baffle the pursuers, who
could not press on at their utmost speed for fear of a fall. Every now
and then he had to pull in his horse to avoid a stumble, and his care
enabled the enemy for a mile or two to keep him in sight. They could not
circumvent him, for he knew every foot of the hills, and could turn off
in any direction at need, with perfect confidence in his ability to
elude them. They were bound to follow in his tracks. So for some time
the chase continued, the distance between pursuers and pursued scarcely
varying. At length Ahmed, feeling that the hills had served their turn
in tiring the horses of Dilasah and his troop, swept down into the plain
and gave Ruksh his head. The gallant animal flew on at a bounding pace.
In half-an-hour the pursuers were hopelessly distanced. Coming to a
point from which he could see a long stretch of level ground behind him,
Ahmed pulled up, turned in his saddle, and narrowly scanned the course
of his flight. There in the far distance were his pursuers, but riding
the other way. They had given up the chase.




CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

Jan Larrens


It was early morning when Ahmed, riding through the level plain, among
gardens which, though it was autumn, still scented the air, came to the
cantonments outside the walls of Peshawar. What he saw filled him with
amazement. The ground was studded with tents, amid which soldiers of all
races--tall bearded Sikhs, active little Gurkhas, red-coated
Englishmen--swarmed like bees in a hive. And there in the distance he
sees a lady galloping, followed by a sais, and she is not veiled, as
were all the women in Shagpur, save those of low caste; Ahmed had rarely
seen the faces of Rahmut Khan's wives for a year or two. And here comes
a carriage drawn by two horses, and in it are a lady, she too unveiled,
and a Feringhi man in spotless white clothes. And as it dashes past him,
the lady turns to the officer at her side and says--

"What a fine-looking young fellow! Who is he, Fred?"

"He? A Pathan from the hills, Alice, and a most accomplished brigand,
you may be sure."

Ahmed hears the words, and though he does not understand them, they set
him thrilling with a strange excitement. Long-forgotten scenes are
coming back to him; he remembers ladies just like this one--ladies who
used to speak in the same clear low tones, and men, sometimes in red
coats, sometimes in white, who used to dance him up and down on their
knees. His brain was in a whirl; recollection came to him like the dim
remembrance of things seen in dreams. These were people of his
blood--and he was a stranger among them.

He rode on dizzily, and entering the Kabul gate, found himself in a wide
street, thronged with folk of every race of the borderland. The size of
the place staggered him; Shagpur was a kennel compared with it. How
could he find his way about this huge town? And among so many people,
what place could there be for him? He knew not which way to turn, and as
for seeking an interview with the great sahib, Jan Larrens, of whom he
had heard, his heart sank at the mere thought of it. The speech he heard
around him was not his speech; he began to fear lest he should be unable
to make the least of his wants understood. But catching sight by and by
of a man in the chogah of the hill-men, he rode up to him eagerly, and
asked him where he might find a serai in which to stable his horse. To
his joy the man answered in his own tongue.

"You are a stranger. Whence do you come?"

"From Shagpur, in the hills."

"Hai! the village of Rahmut Khan."

"I am his son. Where is he?"

"That Allah knows. He is gone from here. The foolish one! He is even as
the ass that tried to get horns and lost his ears. Why was he so
foolish?"

"But tell me, where is he gone? 'Twas told us in Shagpur that the
Feringhis had put him in prison for five years. Where is the prison?"

"Did I not say that Allah knows? He was taken from this prison and sent
to some other. He is not my chief: why should I trouble about him? And
if you have come to see him, your journey is vain. Go back to Shagpur;
in five years you will see him again, if Allah wills."

"Show me a place where I may stable my horse, and then I will go and see
the Feringhi Jan Larrens; perhaps he will tell me that which I wish to
know."

"A stone will not become soft, nor Jan Larrens a friend. But you are a
bold youth, that is certain. And that is a good horse of yours; have a
care lest it be stolen. If a stranger may give counsel, I say stable him
not, but keep him always with you--though to be sure you cannot ride
into the room where Jan Larrens is. Wah! no matter; leave the beast with
the sentry at the door; he will keep him safe."

"Then tell me where this Jan Larrens is to be found. I would see him at
once."

"And there is little time to lose, for when the sun is high the
Feringhis cannot be seen any more till night. Come with me; I will show
the way. 'Tis without there, towards the west."

He turned the horse's head, and led the way out again by the gate, and
so on for two miles until they came to the British cantonments which
Ahmed had already passed. He stopped at a small and unpretentious
building, at the door of which stood a red-coated sepoy. After a brief
conversation with him the Pathan hitched the bridle of Ahmed's horse to
a nail in the wall, and bade him go forward into the lobby. Several men
were squatting on the floor, Hindus in one part, Mohammedans in another,
awaiting audience with the Englishman, who devoted certain hours of the
morning to personal interviews with the natives. Ahmed found a place
among the Mohammedans, and squatted upon his heels to wait his turn. He
felt strangely depressed and forlorn. He was the youngest among the
waiting company, the most of whom ranged in age from the prime of
manhood to white old age. Some talked of their affairs with their
friends, others maintained silence; every now and then one would be
summoned to the room beyond, and the door opened to let out one and let
in another. These interviews were brief, and hardly an hour had passed
when Ahmed received his call. He rose and followed the servant, quaking
with nervous anticipation, and found himself in the presence of a
stern-looking, bronzed and bearded man, in plain clothes of the European
sort, his coat off, his shirt-sleeves tucked up to his elbows, seated at
a table strewn with papers. A younger man stood beside him.

"What does this youngster want?" said John Lawrence to the other, and
Ahmed again felt that strange thrill at the sound of English words. The
officer, recognizing his costume, asked him in the Pashtu tongue his
name and his business.

"I am Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan of Shagpur," said the boy, "and I come
to ask Jan Larrens of my father's welfare."

The officer stared a little at this plain and simple statement, not
prefaced by "Hazur!" or any other title of respect.

"He's the son of that rascally freebooter we caught the other day," said
the officer. "Wants to know how the old villain is. Shall I tell him?"

"Oh yes, tell him, but not where we have sent him; we don't want a gang
of Pathans prowling round on the chance of breaking into the jail."

The officer then told Ahmed what he already knew--that his father was
imprisoned for five years.

"I wish to see him," said Ahmed. "Tell me where he is."

"Come, my boy, this is your first meeting with an Englishman, I take it,
and you don't know our ways. Your father is in prison: we cannot tell
you where he is; but if your tribe behaves itself and gives us no more
trouble, it is possible that his Excellency may reduce the sentence."

"I want to ask Jan Larrens to set him free. That is why I came."

The officer smiled as he translated this to Lawrence. The governor did
not smile. Had it been Sir Henry Lawrence instead of Sir John, the
interview might have ended differently; the former had a sympathetic
manner and understood the natives; the latter was of sterner stuff.

"Tell him it's absurd," he said gruffly. "The man is well out of the
way, and if his people try any more tricks, we'll serve them the same.
The youngster has no claim on us; make that clear, and send him about
his business."

And thus it happened that within five minutes of his entering the room
Ahmed was outside again, disheartened but not abashed. The officer had
spoken to him not unkindly, toning down the governor's sternness, and as
he was speaking Ahmed felt a momentary impulse to blurt out that he too
was English. But he was held back by the same consideration as had moved
him when discussing the matter with Ahsan, and by another motive--the
feeling that such a statement now would savour an appeal to charity. The
Pathans are a proud race; and Ahmed had, besides the pride fostered
among them, a pride that was his birthright. As he stood before his
fellow-countrymen that pride surged within him; there was no humbleness
or subservience in his bearing, and when he left them his unspoken
thought was: "They shall know some day that I am even as they
themselves, and they shall be proud to know it."

He was tingling with excitement, too; some of the words used by the
Englishmen had fallen familiarly upon his ear. "Boy," "business"--these
were two of the words that woke echoes in his memory, and he glowed with
the thought that, if he could spend a little time among Englishmen, he
might soon recover his native speech. So it was with a light in his eyes
that he stepped forth into the street again--a light that deceived his
Pathan friend who had been awaiting him at the door.

"Wah! were the words of Jan Larrens words of honey, then?" he said.

"No; he would tell me nothing that I knew not already, but he will
assuredly tell me more some day. And now let us go to the serai, for I
would fain eat, having some few pice to pay withal. But stay, friend,
canst tell me whether among all these soldiers here there are those that
serve one Lumsden Sahib? I have a friend among them I should like to
see."

"No, they are not here, but at Hoti-Mardan, two days' march towards the
north-east. Two days, I say; but with this horse of yours you could get
there in one. What is your friend's name?"

"Sherdil. Do you know him?"

"No. Well, we will go into the bazar and get food, and then I will put
you in the way for Hoti-Mardan. But if you think to become one of those
Guides of Lumsden Sahib yourself, 'twill be a waste of time; for there
be many now waiting to put on the khaki for whom there is no room. Hai!
I do not understand it; I am a swordsmith and will make swords for them,
receiving a fair price, but Allah forbid I should ever give up my
freedom to serve the sahibs."

He trudged beside Ahmed into the town again, chattering all the way.
They had a simple meal together, Ahmed keeping a watchful eye on his
horse tethered at the door; and then the swordsmith took his leave, with
a sententious maxim by way of parting counsel.

"Friends are serpents: they bite. Strangers are best. May God go with
you."

After resting a while, Ahmed set off on his ride to Hoti-Mardan, the
head-quarters of the Guides. He had always intended to visit Sherdil,
and see for himself whether his position was so ignominious as his
father Assad had made out. But now, as he left the suburban gardens of
Peshawar behind, and came into the wide sandy plain, over which he must
ride for thirty miles or more, other ideas came into his mind. Jan
Larrens had said that he had no claim on the Government of the Panjab:
that was true; but what if he should establish a claim? What if he could
do something for the sahibs as a Pathan, and so not merely attain a
position in which he might serve his father, but also prove his right to
the name of Englishman? It was clear that he could not go back to
Shagpur; he was surprised to find himself glad that he could not. New
feelings were springing within him. To be chief of Shagpur seemed no
very desirable thing; to win his title of Englishman, to prove himself
worthy to stand among these white men, who ruled, not villages, but
empires--this seemed to him a goal worth striving towards.

And how could it be accomplished? The obvious answer to the question
was: Join the Guides as Sherdil had done. But there were two
difficulties. His friend the swordsmith had said that there were already
many candidates waiting for admission to the corps; it was very unlikely
that room could be made for a new-comer, and one so young. It might be
years before he could be enrolled, and he was loath to wait; the little
money he had would soon be gone, and then the only course open to him
would be to join some band of freebooters in the hills, for to earn his
living by any menial occupation would never have entered his head. That
was a matter of caste.

The second difficulty was also a matter of caste. Sherdil was the son of
a man who, while not of the lowest caste, like the washermen and
sweepers and musicians, was certainly not of a high caste. If all the
Guides were like him, Ahmed felt that he, as the son of a chief, would
demean himself by joining them. His bringing-up made him very sensitive
to caste distinctions. No doubt the Englishmen he had lately left were
of high caste: no doubt his own real father had been one of them; he
must certainly do nothing that would make him lose caste in English
eyes.

These problems occupied his mind as he rode. They dropped from his
thoughts by and by when he came in sight of his destination. He saw,
standing in a clearing amid jungle and scrub, a walled fort, with a
tower on which a flag was flying. Beyond rose the great mountain mass of
the Himalayas. Outside the walls were huts and tents of every sort and
size. As he rode among them up to the gate Ahmed saw men of every border
race in their different costumes; none of them was in khaki, so that
these were apparently not members of Lumsden Sahib's corps. He wondered
whether they were the candidates of whom the swordsmith had spoken, and
his heart sank, for they were strong, stalwart fellows of all ages, none
so young as he, and looked as if they had been men of war from their
youth.

Challenged at the gate, he asked for Sherdil, the son of Assad. And in a
few minutes the man came swaggering to him in his khaki, not a bit like
the downtrodden wretch his father had lamented. He hailed Ahmed
effusively, and invited him proudly into the fort. It was, as Ahmed
found, in the shape of a five-pointed star. Sherdil showed him the
officers' quarters on four of the points, and the magazine and armoury
on the fifth; the rude huts of the infantry tucked away under the
parapets; the hornwork in which the cavalry portion of the corps had
their quarters. Two British officers happened to cross the parade-ground
as Sherdil was showing Ahmed round. Sherdil saluted.

"That is Lumsden Sahib," he said--"the tall one. The other is Bellew
Sahib, the hakim. Hai! his powders are terrible: they bite the tongue,
and make, as it were, an earthquake in one's inside."

And then he went on to describe an ailment from which he had recently
suffered, and Dr. Bellew's drastic treatment. But Ahmed only half
listened: he was more interested in Lumsden Sahib, the commander of this
corps of Guides. He saw a tall, athletic figure, surmounted by a fine
head--much handsomer than Jan Larrens, he thought, almost as handsome as
Rahmut Khan. Ahmed was struck with a sudden fancy: allowing for
differences of dress, Rahmut must in his young manhood have borne a
striking resemblance to this Feringhi. Harry Burnett Lumsden was at this
time thirty-five years of age. He had come to India at the age of
seventeen, with a cadetship in the Company's service, and while still a
lieutenant, at the age of twenty-five, had been ordered by Sir Henry
Lawrence to raise the corps of Guides, which he had commanded ever since
except for a brief period when Lieutenant Hodson held the command. His
rank was now that of captain, with a brevet majority.

Sherdil was so taken up with his task of showman that he did not at once
ask Ahmed's purpose in visiting him. But when he learnt what had
happened at Shagpur since the capture of the chief, he cried--

"Wah! Ahmed-ji, I will get leave and go and kill that dog Dilasah. It
cannot be yet, alas! for I have already had my leave for this year. But
Dilasah shall die, and you shall be chief; by my beard, it shall be so."

"I do not want to be chief, Sherdil," said Ahmed; then, brought face to
face with his thoughts, "I want to join the Guides--if I lose no caste
by it."

"Hush! do not speak of caste. We are all high caste--we Guides."

"But you, Sherdil?"

"Hush! no one knows. Lumsden Sahib will only take men of good caste. I
had to lie: lying is an honest man's wings, you know. Hai! you will lose
no caste. We are all good men. But you are young, Ahmed, and there are
many waiting. Those outside the walls: you saw them: they have encamped
there to wait until there is room for them. And they are good men--some
of the finest brigands of the hills, and sons of chiefs among them. I
fear me you are too young. There are thirty waiting, and they live out
there with their friends, spending their money in feeding themselves and
their horses; can you do the same?"

"For a month; no more."

Sherdil drew a long face.

"A month! it is very little. Yet it may be well. Wah! it shall be well.
Maybe there will be room for one or two in a month. And a month will
give us time. I will teach you."

"Teach me what?"

And then Sherdil explained Lumsden's way of filling the vacancies as
they occurred. He held a competition among the candidates, and took them
to the rifle range to shoot it off among themselves: the best shots got
the places.

"And if there are some who shoot equally well, what then?" asked Ahmed.

"Oh, then he does as Hodson Sahib did. He makes them ride unbacked
horses, and the man that rides furthest before being thrown off, that is
the man for the Guides."

"I can shoot, and I can ride, Sherdil," said Ahmed, with a smile. "I do
not fear the tests."

"That may well be: but you are young, we have no boys in the Guides. Yet
it may be possible. If we could give you a moustache and the beginnings
of a beard!"

"That may not be until Allah wills."

"Nay, there is a very cunning magician in the bazar at Peshawar, who
with some few touches of a stick can make the semblance of hair on the
face. So we might add a few years to you till the tests are over: after
that it will be as Heaven wills."

Ahmed thought over this suggestion for a minute, and then said--

"Nay, it cannot be so, Sherdil. Dost thou want me to be shamed? What if
the shooting and riding be good and then it is proved that the hair is
false? It would make my face fall before my countrymen."

"Thy countrymen! Hai! If thou thinkest so, better go straightway to
Lumsden Sahib and say, 'I am a Feringhi, of the sahib-log like yourself.
Give me clothes such as the sahibs wear, and a portion of pig to eat.'"

"Silence, son of a dog!" cried Ahmed. "I will tell all at a fitting
time. And thou, Sherdil, wilt lock thy tongue and say nothing of these
matters, or verily it will be a sad day for thee. Swear by the grave of
thy grandmother."

Sherdil looked astonished at the sudden vigour of Ahmed's speech. He
took the oath required. Then ensued a long conversation, at the end of
which Ahmed rode back to Peshawar and Sherdil sought an interview with
his commander.

"Well, what can I do for you?" shouted Lumsden in his breezy way as
Sherdil stood before him, saluting humbly.

"If it please the heaven-born," said Sherdil, "I have a friend who
wishes to put on the khaki and serve the Kumpani."

"Aha! another son of a dyer, like Sherdil, son of Assad?"

Sherdil gasped. Was his origin known after all?

"The heaven-born knows everything," he said, with a sigh. "No; this
friend is of high caste and the son of a chief--a good man."

"His name?"

"Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan."

"The villain we chased not long ago!"

"The heaven-born says; and the same villain is my own chief, and is now
laid up in the sahibs' prison, and can make no more trouble; but there
is trouble in the village----"

"Disputed succession, I suppose?"

"Hazur! Dilasah, a fat rascal, makes himself chief until I can slay him,
and Ahmed wishes to serve the heaven-born until such time as his father
is mercifully set free."

"How old is he?"

"I cannot tell that to a day, heaven-born. He seems somewhat younger
than Sherdil thy servant, but he is well-grown, and can ride a horse and
hit a mark. Moreover, he is exceeding skilful in the nazabaze."

"Well, well, I have put his name down. He makes the thirty-second. Is he
here? Is he the boy I saw with you on the parade-ground?"

"Heaven-born, how could it be? Ahmed is in Peshawar: that boy was his
cousin." Sherdil lied without a blush.

"Well, take yourself off now. I will let you know when a vacancy occurs,
and then your friend must take his chance with the rest."

And next day, in the serai where he had put up in Peshawar, Ahmed learnt
from Sherdil that his name stood thirty-second on the list of candidates
for the Guides.




CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

A Competition Wallah


Sherdil did not do things by halves. He was now as keen as Ahmed himself
that the boy should become one of the Guides. During the next fortnight
he devoted every spare moment to coaching him in the shooting tests.
Ahmed had never shot with a carbine, but only with the heavy jazail of
the tribesmen. Sherdil sought out a secluded spot among the lower hills
where practising could be carried on without attracting attention, and
lent Ahmed his own carbine to practise with. And since it was impossible
to obtain ammunition belonging to the corps, he spent some of his saved
pay in buying powder, shot, and percussion caps in Peshawar, and
refilled some old cartridge cases. He drew a rough target on the face of
a rock, and diligently played musketry instructor until he could declare
that Ahmed was as good a shot as any of the candidates was likely to be
at various ranges.

About three weeks after Ahmed's arrival, Lumsden Sahib announced one day
that there was a vacancy in the cavalry. One of the men had overstopped
his leave, and was summarily dismissed. It appeared later that the
trooper had employed his leave in hunting down a hill-man whose father
had spoken disrespectfully of his own grandmother, and until the slight
was avenged the man had no other object in life.

Sherdil lost no time in conveying the news to Ahmed. There was great
bustle among the candidates and their friends, and as the day appointed
for the competition drew near, the camp outside the walls of the fort
became monstrously swollen with relatives of the competitors and people
who had come from Peshawar for the mere pleasure and excitement of the
event. Among them were representatives of every race of the borderland,
speaking a variety of dialects, and keen partisans of the men of their
own blood among the competitors.

The men of the Guides were as much excited as the rest. The corps was
divided into companies, each of which consisted of men of one race; and
though all were as loyal as any European soldiers could be, and had as
high an ideal of soldierly duty and the honour of the corps, the men of
one company would, on slight provocation, have flown at the throats of
those of another if they met when on leave. The vacancy being for a
cavalryman, the competitors were almost all exceptionally tall,
strapping fellows, and the little Gurkhas among the candidates were
vastly disappointed that the defaulting Guide had not been an
infantryman.

On a fine October morning, with a light cold wind blowing down from the
hills--herald of the winter--the competitors marched to the rifle range,
accompanied by three of the English officers--Lumsden himself, Quintin
Battye, the second in command, and Kennedy, commandant of the cavalry.
Behind them came a rabble of spectators, laughing and yelling with
excitement, and almost the whole of the corps. Arrived at the range, the
competitors, twenty-five in all, were drawn up in line--Afridis and
Sikhs, Hazaras and Waziris, Afghans and Pathans of different clans--and
answered to their names as Lumsden Sahib called over the list. Ahmed's
name came last, and as he, like the rest, answered "Hazur! I am here,"
he caught the eyes of all the officers fixed on him, and felt a strange
nervousness under the scrutiny.

"Where is that rascal Sherdil?" cried Lumsden.

"Hazur! I am here," replied the man, saluting as he stepped out from the
throng, and looking very like a dog that expected a whipping.

"What does this trick mean? This Ahmed of yours is a mere boy; you said
he was a little younger than yourself. You seem to be playing up for a
flogging, my man."

"Heaven-born, is it a time to be unjust? Did I not answer truly? I said
I would not tell his age to a day, and the heaven-born would not have
had me say he is older than I. That would have been very foolish."

"But this is a boy: his beard is not grown; we have no place for such in
the corps."

"As for the beard, heaven-born, that will come. If I shave my beard and
moustache--which Allah forbid!--my face will be even as Ahmed's. Shoes
are tested on the feet, sahib, and a man in a fight. Behold him; his
forehead is bright, since his sword-tip is red with blood. He has slain
beasts and men; did he not come with me and blow up Minghal's tower? And
then, to be sure, he had a moustache and the shadow of a beard, and if
the heaven-born pleases we can get the conjurer in Peshawar to furnish
him very quickly with the necessary hair. And he can shoot; if I do not
offend to say it, he can shoot as well as the heaven-born himself; and
he is a good shikari; and as for riding a horse--wah! let Kennedy Sahib
judge of that. Look at a man's deeds, heaven-born, not whether he is
tall or short. The thorn which is sharp is so from its youth, and----"

"Chup!" said Lumsden, who, with the other officers, had scarcely been
able to keep his countenance during this address. "You have a moist
tongue. You quote your proverbs at me; I'll give you one: 'A closed
mouth is better than talking nonsense.'"

"True, sahib," said Sherdil quickly, "and there is yet another: 'If you
are not a good judge of beasts, choose a young one.'"

At this, and Sherdil's sententious look, as of one who says "That's a
clincher," Lumsden laughed outright.

"'The child is father of the man,'" said Battye, with whom quoting was a
habit. "Give the boy a trial; we'll soon see whether this man's talk is
all froth."

And so Ahmed was admitted to the competition. The spectators had been
growing restless and restive during the colloquy, but now that the first
man took post opposite the target, and lay flat on the ground, they
hushed their noise and awaited the issue breathlessly. The range was
three hundred yards; the marksman was a tall, grave-looking Sikh, and as
his musket flashed and the marker signalled a bull's-eye, a great shout
arose from his compatriots.

"Shahbash! Bravo! That's a fine shot. Thou'lt surely win, Faiz."

And then the partisans of the other men tried to shout the Sikh's
friends down.

"Bah! what is that? A bull's-eye, you say. But it was an accident; the
wind carried the bullet. Allah willing, he will miss next time. Courage,
Sula; look not at the cock on his dunghill."

Similar cries, varying as the result of the shots, greeted the Sikh's
succeeding attempts. Then came Sula's turn.

"Hai! Now he shoots!" cried his friends. "What is the marker about? A
miss? Truly the jins are spiteful, the musket is bewitched. Do not lose
heart, O Sula, the sahib will give thee another musket, and then wilt
thou show thyself more than a match for that son of a pig."

And Sula, having taken another musket, fired off his six shots and
retired.

The next came along, an Afghan, with features of a markedly Semitic
cast, and with him a flock of his partisans. The same scene was enacted,
the same yells of delight and howls of derision, the same words of
flattery and of abuse--all kept within certain bounds, however, by the
presence of the sahibs.

At last it came to Ahmed's turn. The colloquy between Lumsden Sahib and
Sherdil had drawn particular attention to him, and the Pathans of the
Guides, who outnumbered men of other races in the corps, were specially
interested in the doings of this young candidate. For ten days past
Sherdil had boasted of his pupil's ability, and Sherdil having a moist
tongue, as Lumsden Sahib had put it, and being something of a favourite,
the Pathans were prepared to open their lungs in vociferous plaudits.
Ahmed fired and missed. A growl of dismay broke from the Pathans' lips;
the other men, who resented the cocksureness of Sherdil and his friends,
leapt about with shrieks of delight. Sherdil himself looked a little
blue; and as for Ahmed, he was quivering with excitement and
nervousness, as the Englishmen perceived.

"Chup! you sons of dogs!" cried Kennedy Sahib. "Let the boy have fair
play. This din of cats would spoil any man's eye. Chup! The boy has five
more shots."

And Ahmed, pulling himself together, took careful aim amid a breathless
stillness, drew the trigger--and the marker signalled a bull's-eye.

"Shahbash! Shahbash!" cried Sherdil, pirouetting like a mad fakir,
brandishing his sword, hurling abuse at the friends of the other
candidates. "Wah! did I not say he could shoot? How should he not, when
I am his teacher? Of a truth, he is the man for the Guides."

When Ahmed had finished his round, he was equal with four others. Amid
the din of altercation which ensued, Lumsden Sahib's voice was heard
calling for order. The competitors had still to shoot at the longer
ranges of five hundred and seven hundred yards. The excitement grew to
fever heat as the number gradually thinned, until the choice clearly
rested between Ahmed and a Rajput named Wahid. They were to have six
shots at seven hundred yards to finish the match. Ahmed had now lost his
first nervousness, and waited quietly with Sherdil and a group of his
friends while Wahid fired his round. The spectators watched in dead
silence as the man took aim. The first shot was a bull's-eye. "Wahid
will win! Wahid will win!" roared a hundred throats. The second was an
inner, the third an outer, and now Sherdil's party were hilarious,
crying that Wahid's eye was crooked, his arm was as weak as a woman's;
what was he good for, except to play the fiddle at a Hindu wedding? But
their jubilation was checked when with his last three shots he scored
three bull's-eyes.

"Wah! where is the Pathan now?" shouted the Rajput's partisans. "Sherdil
eats greens and breathes pulao. A great sound and an empty pot. Come,
let us see what the smooth-faced boy can do."

Ahmed took his place. Four times he scored a bull's-eye, and his friends
fairly shrieked with delight.

"Wah! he will eat up Wahid till not a little bit is left. Let Wahid tend
asses, that is all that he is good for."

The fifth shot was an inner.

"Hai!" said Sherdil. "Some low-born Rajput is breathing, and his foul
breath blows the bullet away. But the next will be a bull's-eye; be
ready, brothers, for Ahmed will win."

But when the marker signalled an outer the uproar became deafening. The
scores of Wahid and Ahmed were equal. The partisans of each clamoured
for the choice to fall on their man. Wahid was the father of two boys:
therefore he was the better candidate. Ahmed was not so fat: therefore
he would prove the better Guide. Wahid had stolen horses for twenty
years: who so fit to catch horse-thieves? Ahmed had blown up fifty men
with gunpowder (Sherdil did not stick at trifles): where would they find
a Rajput who could say the same? Thus they bellowed against one another,
urging more and more ridiculous reasons on behalf of their favourites,
and then Lumsden cried for silence.

"There is only one place," he said, "and these two are equal as shots.
For the life of me I don't know which of them to give it to. Come along,
we'll try the riding test. Fetch out that unbroken colt; jaldi karo!"

The jabbering began afresh, while a sais went off to fetch the colt. The
whole company repaired to a level stretch of about three hundred yards,
where the men practised the game of nazebaze. A post stood at the
further end. When the colt was brought up--a mettlesome beast with arab
blood in it--Lumsden ordered the course to be cleared, and the excited
throng having been pressed back on either side, told Ahmed to mount and
ride the animal bareback to the post and back. Ahmed sprang on to the
quivering horse, which bucked and reared, making frantic efforts to
throw him. But the boy had been given his first lesson in riding in just
this way; Rahmut Khan had set him on horseback and bade him look after
himself. So now, gripping the reins firmly and pressing his knees into
the animal's flanks, at the same time speaking soothing words that he
used with his own horse Ruksh, he succeeded in turning its head towards
the post, and in another moment was off like the wind. The shouts of the
crowd terrified the horse; it reared and plunged, and then made a dash
for the centre of the yelling mob on the right, which broke apart and
scattered with shrieks of alarm. But Ahmed controlled his steed before
it reached the edge of the course. He turned it once more into the
straight; it ran on past the post at a mad gallop, which was only
checked by a hillock in front of it. Then, giving it a minute to
recover, Ahmed patted it and coaxed it, wheeled round, and rode straight
back to the starting-point.

Sherdil and the Guides roared with applause.

"By Jove!" said Lieutenant Battye, turning to Kennedy, "what a seat the
fellow has got! Better make him your riding-master, old chap."

"Don't want one," was the answer. "All my fellows can ride. Let's see
what the Rajput can do."

Wahid was about the same height as Ahmed, but broader and heavier. He
leapt on to the horse's back nimbly enough, and kept his seat, as it
seemed, by sheer muscular force. The horse appeared to fear him, and
started for the post with a docility that surprised everybody, and sent
Sherdil's hopes once more down to zero. Wahid reached the post; then,
instead of galloping past, he pulled the horse up with a violent tug on
the reins, and wheeled it round to return. But the animal had a temper;
this treatment did not please it at all; and when it had got half-way
back to the starting-point, and the crowd was already yelling that the
prize was to Wahid, because he had shown the better management, suddenly
the horse stopped dead, planting his fore feet firmly in the sand; up
flew its hind hoofs, and the Rajput went clean over its head, falling
with a thwack just in front of its nose.

The roar that went up from the crowd might almost have been heard at
Peshawar. The Guides to a man shouted Ahmed's name; the Pathans among
the spectators danced a kind of war-dance, and some, losing their heads,
fired off their jazails with imminent risk of blowing some one to
pieces. Sherdil, after a glance at his commander's face, in which he
read the verdict, called to a comrade, and Ahmed was hoisted on to their
shoulders and carried in triumph back to the fort.

"Wah! Did I not say it?" cried Sherdil. "What a man seeketh happens to
him. I said 'I, Sherdil, will teach thee, Ahmed, the right way and make
thee a Guide.' And now we will have a tamasha. Lumsden Sahib will give
us a sheep or a goat, and we will be very merry."

Thus Ahmed became a trooper of the Guides.




CHAPTER THE NINTH

A Fakir


Ahmed had enlisted in the Guides with two very definite purposes--the
one closely connected with the other. The first was, to achieve
something that would establish a claim on the sahibs; the second, to
effect the release of Rahmut Khan, or at least to shorten his
imprisonment. Since the possibility of the second depended on the first,
he bent his whole energies, from the moment he donned the khaki, to the
mastery of his duties. The circumstances of his admission to the corps
were such that many eyes were watching him. Some of the men were
curious; others, Sherdil's friends, were jealous that he should justify
them; the British officers were interested, not merely in observing the
result of the experiment of enlisting one much below the average age,
but in the boy himself. There was in him a nameless something that
attracted them, and all of them, from Lumsden downwards, kept a special
eye upon his progress.

He showed himself quick at drill, and at exercise with the sword and
lance. Assad had reported quite accurately about the goose-step; but
Ahmed, so far from feeling any indignity in standing on one foot, found
it amusing to watch the lines of men lifting and setting down their feet
like automata at the word of the officers, and gravely balancing
themselves like herons at a pond. He had nothing to learn in "stables"
save some small matters of routine, and in three months passed as a
thoroughly efficient sowar. Furthermore, he was on good terms with his
comrades. Sherdil treated him as a show pupil, and one day took an
opportunity of asking Lumsden Sahib whether his praise of Ahmed had not
been well deserved.

"Do you want us to make him a risaldar at once?" said Lumsden, with a
laugh.

"The heaven-born knows that I, Sherdil, am not yet a naik," said the man
readily. Lumsden owed a great part of his influence with the men to the
freedom he permitted in his intercourse with them. His attitude towards
them was that of one brave man to another; it made for mutual respect;
yet no man forgot that the commander was a hazur or presumed on his
_bonhomie_.

Ahmed was one of the escort that accompanied Lumsden and Sir John
Lawrence to their interview with Dost Muhammed, the Amir of Kabul, at
the entrance to the Khaibar Pass on the first day of the New Year. He
wondered whether Jan Larrens would recognize him, but the great man was
too preoccupied to notice a trooper. When it became known that in
pursuance of the agreement made at that meeting Lumsden was to go before
long on a mission to Kandahar, Ahmed hoped that he would be chosen among
the escort on that occasion. Proximity day after day to the British
officers would provide him with many opportunities of picking up their
language. But before the time came for the mission to start he had
reason to change his mind.

One evening, as he was passing alone through the Pathan lines of the
infantry, he heard through the kusskuss matting which formed the doorway
of one of the huts, and which had been blown aside for a second by a
gust of wind, a voice that sounded strangely familiar. It was not the
voice of any of his comrades, and for a moment he could not remember to
whom it belonged. Not greatly concerned, he was passing on when he
recalled it in a flash; it was certainly very much like the voice of
Minghal, ex-chief of Mandan, and his father's enemy. He paused; if the
speaker was indeed Minghal, what had brought him to Hoti-Mardan? Ahmed
wondered whether the defeated chief had heard of his enlistment in the
Guides, and had come on his own or Dilasah's behalf to do him a
mischief. It occurred to him that he might be mistaken; but it was as
well to make sure.

The hut was one of a row, beneath the parapet of the wall, built of mud,
and eight or ten feet apart. At first Ahmed thought of creeping up to
the doorway and pushing aside the matting gently so as to get a view of
the occupants. There was some risk in this, however; he might be seen by
those inside the hut, or by some one passing outside, and then his
purpose would be defeated. So he crept round to the back, trying to find
a crack in the wall of the flimsily-built hut, such as were often caused
by the shrinking of the mud under the sun's heat. But in this he was
disappointed. The hut, being close against the wall of the fort, had
been defended from the sun's rays. Nothing daunted, he proceeded with
his knife to cut a hole, very gently, as his tribesmen were wont to do
when stealing horses. He was so dexterous in this that he soon scratched
away the dried mud until he had made a hole a little larger than his
eye. Then, as he expected, he came upon the straw network with which the
mud was held together. So far his movements had been almost soundless,
but there was a considerable risk of being heard if he cut the straw
which alone stood between him and the occupants of the hut. Every now
and then a gust of wind came, whistling as it swept between the hut and
the wall. Taking advantage of this slight noise, he inserted the point
of his knife and gently severed the straw until he was able to see
pretty clearly the interior of the hut, lit as it was by a small
saucer-lamp.

The occupants appeared to be three in number. Two of them were Panjabis,
whom, being infantrymen, he knew but slightly. In the third he did not
recognize, as he expected to do, the figure of Minghal Khan. It was a
fakir, with long matted grey hair and a straggling beard. Cold as the
weather was, the fakir was almost entirely unclothed; his body was
smeared with ashes.

And then Ahmed blessed the caution which had prevented him from creeping
up to the doorway of matting in front. Just behind it, so much in shadow
that Ahmed had not at first perceived him, stood a fourth man, who
peeped through now and again, as if to see that nobody approached
without warning. At the same time he lent an ear to the conversation
going on among his comrades, who were seated, cross-legged, on the
floor. There was something suspicious in the attitude of the man on
guard. Ahmed had once or twice lately noticed a certain restlessness
among some of the Musalman members of the corps. He felt quite sure that
the men were after no good, and removing his eye from the aperture, he
turned his ear towards it The meeting was evidently a secret one, and it
seemed to him important to know what was going on. The strange
resemblance of the voice of one of the men to that of his enemy Minghal
still disturbed him, and, as was perhaps natural in the circumstances,
he still had a suspicion that he was himself the subject of their
discussion; but as he listened, he soon found that they were talking
about matters far more weighty than the latest recruit of the Guides.

"The Feringhis are attacking our religion," were the first words he
heard. "Is it not a time when all good Musalmans should lay aside their
little personal quarrels and join hands against the common foe?"

It was evidently the fakir who was speaking, and Ahmed was again struck
by the likeness of his voice to Minghal's.

"The time is at hand when all the Feringhis shall be smitten," the voice
continued. "Why have the infidels enlisted so many followers of Islam in
their army? Why are they making this new cartridge? To turn the sons of
the Prophet from the true faith."

"Bah!" said one of the group. "The Feringhis' religion has nought to do
with the eating of pigs. They are men of the Book. They eat pigs, it is
true; but that concerns not their religion."

"Foolish one, dost thou not see? This cartridge is smeared with the fat
of pigs, and when a true believer bites off the top, as the need is,
does he not lose his caste and become a pariah? Will his father speak to
him? Will his brother eat with him? Nay, he loses father, brother, all
his kin; and then the Feringhi comes and says, 'Dog, thou art outcast.
Embrace my religion, or thou art friendless in this world as well as
damned in the next.'"

"That may be so, O holy one," said the second man; "but what does it
concern us? We have not the new cartridge of which you speak. Our sahibs
are honourable; they would do nothing in despite of our religion;
Lumsden Sahib told me when I became a Guide that he would not permit any
man to interfere with that."

"Hai! Remember the saying, 'What is the goat, what is its flavour?' The
goat can never become a camel, nor can its milk ever taste like the
buffalo's. Your sahibs are kafirs; they hold not the faith; they but
bide the time, and then assuredly you will be defiled."

"But didst thou not say that nothing can be done without the help of the
accursed Hindus? I for one will not join hands with the dogs."

"Nay, nay, in this matter Islam and Shiva are at one. The Hindu by
tasting the fat of the sacred cow, the Musalman by tasting the fat of
the loathed swine, become alike defiled. The Feringhis are powerful.
They are in the saddle. If the Hindus will aid us in tearing them out of
the saddle, shall we despise their help? Have you not a saying,
'Buffalo! though we are not of one mountain, we belong to one thicket'?
We Musalmans have our horns in the thicket; shall not Hindus help to
disentangle them? When the Feringhis are smitten and sent to perdition,
then will be the time for us true believers to deal fitly with the Hindu
dogs. Will it not be then as it was in the days of the great Shah Nadir?
Once more the Afghans, men of your race and faithful sons of the
Prophet, will pour into the plains and set up a new and glorious
kingdom. Who reigns now in Delhi? Bahadur Shah, toothless, feeble-kneed,
a puppet in the hands of the Feringhis, doing nought from sunrise to
sunset but invent foolish verses. We will change that; we will restore
him to his dignities, or set up another in his room. As in the old days,
every soldier in our host shall become a zamindar. There will be no
goose-step to learn; no useless drill; none of the humiliation of
obeying the commands of the white-faced dogs."

Though the fakir spoke in low tones, there was an intensity in his
utterance that had its effect upon the listeners. This news of the
fat-smeared cartridge troubled them in spite of themselves. They had
heard nothing of it before; as a matter of fact, it had not yet been
issued from the factory at Dam-dam; and but for the insolence of a
Lascar, probably no suspicion of it would have arisen. The Lascar asked
a Hindu one day for a drink of water from his brass lotah, which the
Hindu indignantly refused, since he could not himself use the vessel
again without losing caste. Upon this the Lascar retorted that he would
soon have no caste to lose, since he would have to bite a cartridge
smeared with the fat of pigs and cows. The news spread like wild-fire
through the native army; and the terrible fear that the introduction of
the new cartridge was a cunning device to make them pariahs, acting on
superstitious minds which had other causes of disaffection, wrought the
sepoys to a dangerous state of unrest.

But the fakir, besides appealing to his hearers' religious feelings,
appealed also to their cupidity. He knew his men well. Like many of the
Guides, they were by nature and training robbers. The prospect of
unlimited plunder fired their imagination, and they received his last
speech with a grunt of approval. He was quick to seize his advantage.

"Listen, brothers," he said in a mysterious whisper which Ahmed could
barely catch. "'Tis nigh a hundred years since the Feringhi Clive, that
son of perdition, defeated the host of Siraj-uddaula at Plassey. A holy
man foretold that when the evil dominion of the Feringhis had endured
for a hundred years, it should fade and vanish as a dream. The time is
at hand, my brothers. Have I not lately received the sign from the hands
of the Maulavi himself, the saint who now goes to and fro to stir the
hearts of the faithful? Behold!"

Ahmed turned his eye quickly to the hole, and saw the fakir produce from
his loin-cloth a chapati--a flat cake of unleavened bread--which he
handed with a solemn gesture to one of the Guides. The man took it as
though it were a sacred object.

"That is the sign chosen by the holy Maulavi Ahmed Ullah of Faizabad.
Pass it to your comrades, brother, such of them as are true. I myself
may no longer stay: I have far to go. Work in silence and discreetly,
but with no loss of time. The hour is at hand; no man knoweth when the
Maulavi may give the word. The train is laid from Meerut to Calcutta.
The prize--wealth in this world and bliss in the world to come--is for
him who leads, not for him who follows, in the blessed work. I will
record your names, so that the Maulavi may have you in remembrance."

Ahmed had been so intently watching, that, being unable to hear and see
at the same time, he lost part of this address. When he put his ear
again to the hole, he could not catch the whispered words. With his
knife he slightly enlarged the opening, and was straining his ears when
he heard a light footfall behind him. Before he could turn, an arm was
flung round his neck, a hand was pressed over his mouth, and in spite of
his struggles to free himself he was held there until his captor, joined
by others, securely gagged and trussed him. The man nearest him in the
hut had heard the scratching of his knife, and crept out; his companions
had followed him; and Ahmed was a prisoner.

While one of the men was scouting to make sure that nobody approached,
the others dragged their captive round the hut and in at the doorway. As
he entered, the fakir rose to his feet, and a glare of triumph lit his
eyes.

"A spy!" he cried in a whisper. "Allah protects the faithful."

"Shall it be a knife, holy one?" asked one of the men.

"Nay, nay," said another, "a knife means blood on the floor. And how
could we carry him from the lines? Within a little the gun will signal
for 'lights out,' and the gates will be closed. We could not carry a
dead man without being seen by the sentry. 'Tis easier to carry a man
alive than dead."

"But we cannot keep him here," said the third. "'Tis Ahmed, the child
who puts his elders to shame at man's work, and licks the boots of the
sahibs. Search will be made for him; the braggart Sherdil, who shares
his hut, will raise a cry when he is missed. This is evil work: he will
betray us."

"Listen to me," said the fakir. "When the gun fires I go. But I will
remain without, at the foot of the wall. When the night is far spent, do
you lift him and throw him over the wall. Then will I take him and cast
him into the river, and none will know."

"But the sentry!" said one of the men.

"Bah! has he eyes all round? The night is dark; none will see. Brothers,
he is a kafir; he is a Feringhi who has come among you to learn your
secrets and betray you. He shall die. So may all perish that stand in
the way of the faithful."

And then Ahmed knew that the fakir was in very truth his enemy, Minghal.
The voice, the glance of hate, the knowledge that he was an
Englishman--all proved that his first suspicion was just. At the fakir's
words one of the men spat upon him; then he was cast to the floor behind
a charpoy that lay on one side of the entrance. Another charpoy was on
the opposite side. It was near this that the conspirators had been
squatting. The charpoy behind which he had been flung concealed him from
the view of any one who should enter the doorway, and one of the men now
placed the little lamp on the floor near the end of the charpoy, so that
a shadow was cast on the place where Ahmed lay.

His hands and feet being tied, and his mouth gagged, the men felt free
to listen to the fakir as he told them their prisoner's history. Ahmed
felt that that history would soon come to an end. Even if a friend
should enter the hut, he was so well concealed that he might escape
observation. He had no means of giving an alarm; he saw no way of
escape: and when the lights were out and the fort was in darkness, it
would be no difficult matter for the men to do as the fakir had
suggested. And should the sound of his fall from the wall attract the
notice of a sentry, and bring any one to the spot, he knew that Minghal
would certainly dispatch him even though he should himself be seized. A
knife-thrust would take but the fraction of a second; and Minghal was
such an adept in cunning that he might make good his escape.

And so he lay helpless while his captors planned how they would lower
him over the wall by a rope, so that no sound of falling should catch
the sentry's ear. They agreed that they ran a risk; but there was
greater risk in any other course. To dispose of him was imperative, or
they themselves were doomed. The safest time would be two hours after
"lights out," when the sentries had been changed; it would not be many
minutes before the signal gun was fired.

Ahmed tried again and again to think of some way of escaping the
impending doom. If only he could attract the attention of some of his
friends in the corps, all might be well. He longed that Sherdil, or
Dilawur, or Rasul, all good friends of his, might be brought by some
lucky chance into the hut. There was a possibility that he might then
raise himself above the charpoy and be seen. With all his heart he hoped
that the men would not extinguish the lamp before the signal was given,
and he felt that if no help should come while it still burned he was
lost indeed.

With the thought of the imminent extinction of the light a wild chance
suggested itself. On the charpoy, close to his feet, was a small bundle
of straw which had apparently been used as a pillow. It was almost
opposite to the lamp. Drawing up his feet slightly, he gently pushed the
bundle to the edge of the charpoy. He was careful to move it slowly, for
straw crackles, and he expected that the slight rustle he could not help
making would be heard by the men. But if they heard the sound at all,
they probably attributed it merely to his uneasy movements. He pushed
the bundle inch by inch until it came to a position where in a few
moments it must fall over the edge of the charpoy to the floor. Would it
fall on the lamp? If it did, would it extinguish the flame? If it did
not extinguish the flame, would it catch light quickly enough to prevent
the men from quenching the flame? To all these questions was added
another: Would the signal gun be fired before anything could be done?

Ahmed saw that the men were so near to the lamp that even if the bundle
caught fire they could stamp out the flames before they made such a
glare as would raise an alarm. By some means this must be prevented. The
very signal he had dreaded lent him aid. The gun was fired. The fakir
rose to go. In another moment the lamp would be put out. Ahmed gave the
little bundle the last tilt necessary to cause it to overbalance, and
next instant he drew his feet up, stuck them under the charpoy, and,
suddenly shooting them out, kicked it directly upon the three men, who
were still squatting on the floor, looking towards the fakir as they
bade him farewell. The three or four seconds thus gained achieved his
object. The straw was ignited, a huge flame shot up in an instant to the
roof. This, as in all Indian huts, was low. Being made of thatch it
caught fire readily. The hut was ablaze.

For the moment the conspirators were thrown so completely off their
balance that they knew not how to act. But it soon dawned on them that
the fire must bring the whole camp down on them; already there were
cries from without. The discovery of Ahmed bound, dead or alive, would
be fatal to them. They could not get rid of him. Safety lay in flight
alone. Barely five seconds after the sudden outbreak of flame they
dashed out of the hut, rushed among the men who were flocking up, and in
the confusion made for the gate and disappeared.

But the fakir was not with them. On the point of departing when the
straw caught fire, he too had been dazed for a moment by the sudden
glare, and took a step forward to flee. But then he turned, whipped out
his knife, and ran to where Ahmed lay. Ahmed saw him coming, saw the
knife in his hand, knew his fell purpose. Quick as thought he wriggled
against the wall and drew up his knees. Minghal came swiftly towards
him, intent only on his murderous design. Suddenly out shot the
prisoner's bound feet; they caught the stooping fakir square on the
knees. He reeled back against the loose matting of the doorway, and
stumbled against one of the crowd whom the fire had summoned.

The man hurled him aside. He fell and was trampled by the feet of
others. There were cries all around; some were shouting for water,
others were beating at the burning roof with their swords; no one paid
heed to the man on the ground. Bruised with kicks he wriggled through
the press until he came near the gate; then, in full sight of the
sentry, he raised his hands and piously besought the aid of Allah to
save the dwellings of the faithful.

Meanwhile the British officers had run up to the scene of the
conflagration. First of them was Lieutenant Hawes, the adjutant. The men
fell back from him as he pushed his way towards the blazing hut.

"Where are the men?" he cried. "Is any one inside?"

"That we know not, sahib," replied a Gurkha.

"We cannot see through the smoke, sahib," added a tall Afridi; "we are
beating out the flames."

"Idiots!" cried the lieutenant. "Out of the way!"

He rushed through the entrance. The hut was so full of smoke that for a
moment he could see nothing. Then he caught sight of a figure against
the wall: a trooper with his arms crossed on his face to defend it from
the shreds of burning thatch that were falling. His legs were drawn up
to avoid the flames from a charpoy already half consumed. Thinking he
was unconscious, Lieutenant Hawes seized him by the feet and hauled him
by main force into the open air.

"Who is it?" asked Lumsden, standing there with Dr. Bellew.

The prostrate trooper moved his arms.

"Ahmed!" cried the adjutant. "You had no business in the hut. Get up!"

Ahmed wriggled, but could neither stand nor speak.

"Let me see," said the doctor, stooping. "Why, God bless me, he is
gagged and tied up!"

He slit the cords and removed the gag, and Ahmed got up on his feet. He
was half suffocated, and his eyes were red, and watering with the smoke.

"There's some devilry here," cried Lumsden. "Bellew, take him to my
quarters. Hawes, see that nobody leaves the fort. Some of you men put
out the fire and then go quietly to your beds."

The gates were by this time shut. When Lieutenant Hawes asked the sentry
whether he had noticed any suspicious characters leaving the fort, he
replied--

"No, sahib. The last to go before I shut the gate was a holy fakir, who
besought Allah that we might be saved from the fire."




CHAPTER THE TENTH

The Delhi Road


"Just overhaul him, doctor," said Lumsden, when he reached his quarters
with Ahmed. "He has had a narrow squeak."

"Hair singed, eyes a trifle inflamed; nothing else wrong," said the
doctor, after a rapid examination. "Who tied you up, youngster?"

"Let us begin at the beginning," Lumsden interposed. "What were you
doing in that hut?"

Ahmed told his story in as few words as possible. The officers did not
interrupt him until he began to relate what he had heard the pretended
fakir say about the Maulavi. Then Lumsden brought his fist down heavily
on the table before him and said--

"That's the rascal I saw at Lahore a few months ago, without a doubt--a
tall, lean, lantern-jawed fellow with a beak like the old Duke's. They
told me he seemed to be very busy, though no one knew what his business
was. Now, Ahmed, could you judge by what you heard whether this fakir
had spoken to any other men in the corps?"

"I do not think he had, sahib. He was persuading these men to speak to
the others."

"Very well. Go on with your story."

Ahmed repeated, as nearly as he could remember them, the actual words
used by the fakir, and then described how he had been seized and
carried, bound, into the tent, and lay gagged while his captors
discussed how they should dispose of him. When he had related the manner
in which he had set the hut on fire, Lumsden looked pleased.

"It was a good thought, and cleverly done, my lad. That's the kind of
thing I like to see in my Guides--quickness, decision, willingness to
take risks. I shall keep my eye on you. But now, you fellows," he added
in English, the other officers having entered the room, "what are we to
do about an explanation? The men will be desperately excited, you may be
sure; those three scoundrels must be marked off as deserters, and Ahmed
must have some tale for the rest of the men."

"Say they were in a funk at burning down the hut," suggested Lieutenant
Battye.

"Won't wash, Quintin. The punishment would only be stopping of leave or
something of that kind: none of the men would run away from that."

"Ask the youngster," said the adjutant. "These Pathans are good at fairy
tales."

The question was put to Ahmed.

"It might be done thus, sahib," said the boy. "The fakir was not a true
fakir. He is one Minghal, once chief of Mandan, and we blew up his tower
and captured his village."

"I remember. Sherdil told me of that little piece of trickery--a box of
porcelain from Delhi, eh? Well?"

"He is my enemy, sahib. We could say that he came to kill me, and indeed
he tried to stick his knife into me just before Hawes Sahib came, but I
kicked him down. The rest might be told even as it happened, except for
what the fakir said."

"Very good. An excellent notion: you others agree? You shall tell them
that. Now get to your hut: you have done very well."

Ahmed saluted and went away. He found Sherdil awaiting him in great
excitement. The story he told seemed perfectly convincing. The conduct
of Minghal was just what might have been expected of him, and the three
Guides who abetted him clearly had no other course than to take flight.
And the explanation spread through the whole corps next day, and was
accepted with equal belief.

When Ahmed had gone, the officers sat up far into the night discussing
the incident. It indicated the possibility of grave disorders arising.
They were all aware of an undercurrent of disaffection in many regiments
of the native army. Apart from the fears aroused by the threatened
introduction of the new cartridge, there were other causes of discontent
and suspicion, both among the sepoys and the native population
generally. The native officers did not take kindly to the system of
promotion by seniority instead of by merit. Slight instances of
insubordination had been too leniently dealt with by the officers, and
the men had begun to regard themselves as of vast importance. Tales had
been spread of the difficulties of the British army in the Crimea; many
of the sepoys believed that it had been almost entirely destroyed, and
the British prestige had fallen in consequence. They had a grievance,
too, in the matter of foreign service. When they were enlisted they were
expressly guaranteed against service over sea. But the Government, with
reprehensible disregard of this engagement, ordered some native
regiments to sail across the dreaded kala pani, and when they refused,
neither enforced the order nor punished the refusal as mutiny. Since
then a law had been passed withdrawing the reservation in the case of
new recruits, and the older men believed that the guarantee was to be no
longer observed in their case.

Attempts to graft Western ideas and customs on an Oriental people had
embittered the populace generally. Changes in the land system which had
prevailed from time immemorial had exasperated the zamindars.
Interference with the native customs in regard to succession had enraged
the princes, and the recent annexation of the province of Oudh had
alienated an immense population from which the native regiments were
largely recruited.

These and other matters bred a spirit of unrest and distrust, and made
the minds of the sepoys fit soil for the seeds of disaffection which
religious fanatics were beginning to sow among them.

The possibility of a general rising caused grave disquiet to a few of
the more thoughtful of the British authorities--those who knew the
natives best, and were aware of the lengths to which superstition might
drive them. But the great majority were blind to what was passing under
their eyes, and disregarded the warnings of the keener-sighted. Even
when, on February 27, the 19th Native Infantry at Barhampur rose in
mutiny, impelled by a panic fear that the greased cartridges were to be
forced on them at the muzzles of our guns, the incident was regarded as
an isolated eruption instead of a symptom of general uneasiness, and a
strange lack of firmness was shown in dealing with it. "A little fire is
quickly trodden out which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench."

Major Lumsden felt that he could trust the Guides. They were not
affected by many of the matters that agitated the other native
regiments. Their officers had shown such tact and wisdom in respecting
their religious scruples that the men had no fears of enforced
conversion to the Christian faith. Peculiar ties of personal loyalty and
devotion bound officers and men together; the latter had "eaten the
sahibs' salt," and had developed a singular pride in the honour of the
corps. They had, further, a vast contempt for the sepoys of the native
regiments of the line. The latter assumed insufferable airs of
superiority towards the Sikhs, Panjabis, and hill-men, from whom the
Guides were mainly recruited, and turned the cold shoulder on such of
them as enlisted in their own regiments. But though Lumsden had this
confidence in his men's loyalty, he was not blind to the necessity of
watchfulness. At the first hint of trouble he gave orders that any
wandering fakir who might be discovered in the neighbourhood of the fort
should be intercepted and severely dealt with.

A few weeks after news arrived of the rising at Barhampur, Lumsden left
Hoti-Mardan at the head of his mission to Kabul. Among the officers who
accompanied him was Dr. Bellew. The command of the Guides during his
absence was given by Sir John Lawrence to Captain Daly, commander of the
1st Panjab Cavalry. The Guides awaited with considerable curiosity the
arrival of their new commander. He reached Hoti-Mardan at sunset on the
28th of April, and the genial manner of his address to the men on the
parade-ground next day, coupled with his reputation as a gallant
soldier, won their instant confidence.

"Daly Sahib is a good man," said Sherdil to Ahmed, "though in truth he
has not so much hair as Lumsden Sahib."

Thus he alluded to his new commander's premature baldness. Sherdil was
rejoicing in the rank of naik, to which Lumsden had promoted him before
leaving the fort. The good fellow was perfectly convinced that he owed
his new dignity not merely to his merits, but to the broad hint he had
given his commander, and suggested that Ahmed should look out for an
opportunity to make a similar suggestion to Daly Sahib.

"I must wait until I have been in the corps as long as you," replied
Ahmed, with a laugh.

Daly had been but a fortnight in his command when he received grave news
in a letter from Colonel Edwardes at Peshawar. Edwardes had heard by
telegraph that on Sunday, the 10th of May, the sepoys at Meerut had
mutinied. Five days before, when cartridges were served out to the men
of the 3rd Native Light Cavalry for the parade ordered for the next
morning, eighty-five troopers refus

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