King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure

Chapter XVII

Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap, the Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity. As King went toward him to see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb, and King looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd together on the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.

They seemed stout soldierly fellows. Men of another type were being kept at a distance by dint of argument and threats. Away in the distance was Muhammad Anim with his broad back turned to the cave, in altercation with a dozen other mullahs. For the time he was out of the reckoning.

“Some of these are wounded,” the Pathan explained. “Some have sores. Some have the belly ache. Then again, some are sick of words, hot and cold by day and night. All have served in the army. All have medals. All are deserters, some for one reason, some for another and some for no reason at all. Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way. Speak thou to them about the pardon that is offered!”

So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his supposed trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that would well up. The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a night. He wanted to shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.

A man bared a sword cut. He bent over him, and if the mullah had turned to look there would have been no ground for suspicion. So in a voice just loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what he had told the Pathan the day before.

“But who art thou?” asked one of them suspiciously. Perhaps there had been a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim's voice, but he acted faultlessly when he answered. Voice, accent, mannerism, guilty pride, were each perfect.

“Political offender. My brother yonder in the cave mouth”--(The Pathan smirked. He liked the imputation)--“suggested I seek pardon, too. He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the sirkar may forgive me for service rendered.”

The Pathan's smirk grew to a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the hakim's trustworthiness. But the East is ever cautious.

“Some say thou art a very great liar,” remarked a man with half a nose.

“Nay,” answered King. “Liar I may be, but I am one against many. Which of you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others? Nay, sahibs, I am a political offender, not a soldier!”

They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in a pliant mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to a head.

“Are we agreed?” he asked. “Or have we waggled our beards all night long in vain? Take him with us, say I. Then, if pardons are refused us he at least will gain nothing by it. We can plunge our knives in him first, whatever else happens.”

“Aye!”

That was reasonable and they approved in chorus. Possibility of pardon and reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand, had brought unity into being. And unity brought eagerness.

“Let us start to-night!” urged one man, and nobody hung back.

“Aye! Aye! Aye!” they chorused. And eagerness, as always in the “Hills,” brought wilder counsel in its wake.

“Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard? He has sought blood and has let blood. Let him drink his own.”

“Aye!”

“Nay! He is too well guarded.”

“Not he!”

“Let us stab him and take his head with us; there well may be a price on it.”

They took a vote on it and were agreed; but that did not suit King at all, whatever Muhammad Anim's personal deserts might be. To let him be stabbed would be to leave Yasmini without a check on her of any kind, and then might India defend herself! Yet to leave the mullah and Yasmini both at large would be almost equally dangerous, for they might form an alliance. There must be some other way, and he set out to gain time.

“Nay, nay, sahibs!” he urged. “Nay, nay!”

“Why not?”

“Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore. Same are most dear to me and I to them. I find it expedient to make great effort for my pardon. Ye are but fifty. Ye are less than fifty. Nay, let us gather a hundred men.”

“Who shall find a hundred?” somebody demanded, and there was a chorus of denial. “We be all in this camp who ate the salt.”

It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them the more confidence in him.

“But Khinjan,” he objected. The crimes of the Khinjan men were not to the point. Time had to be gained.

“Aye,” they agreed. “There be many in Khinjan!” Mere mention of the place made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect, as having right of entry through the forbidden gate.

“Then I have it!” the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake to opportunity. “Many of you can hardly march. Rest ye here and let the hakim treat your belly aches. Bull-with-a-beard bade me wait here for a letter that must go to Khinjan to-day. Good. I will take his letter. And in Khinjan I will spread news about pardons. It is likely there are fifty there who will dare follow me back, and then we shall march down the Khyber like a full company of the old days! Who says that is not a good plan?”

There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have nothing the matter with them and could have marched at once. The rest were of the other way of thinking and agreed in asserting that Khinjan men were a higher caste of extra-ultra murderers whose presence doubtless would bring good luck to the venture. These prevailed after considerable argument.

Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan men's consideration. Pardon and leave to march again behind British officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the Prophet, which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry. They knew Khinjan men were flesh and blood--humans with hearts--as well as they. But caution had a voice yet.

“She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves,” suggested the man with part of his nose missing. “She will have thee flayed alive!”

“Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee! Be thou heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!” laughed the Pathan, and the butt of the jest spat savagely. In the “Hills” there is only one explanation given as to how one lost his nose, and they all laughed like hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim came rolling and striding back.

By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah called him off and drove the crowd away to a distance; then he drove King into the cave in front of him, his mouth working as if he were biting bits of vengeance off for future use.

“Write thy letter, thou! Write thy letter! Here is paper. There is a pen--take it! Sit! Yonder is ink--ttutt--ttutt!--Write, now, write!”

King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the mullah, tugging at his beard, grew furious.

“Write thine own letter! Invent thine own argument! Persuade her, or die in a new way! I will invent a new way for thee!”

So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own. He had spoken once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer. At the end of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and Muhammad Anim made as if to read it, trying to seem deliberate, and contriving to look irresolute. It was a fair guess that he hated to admit ignorance of the scholars' language.

“Are there any alterations you suggest?” King asked him.

“Nay, what care I what the words are? If she be not persuaded, the worse for thee!”

He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it; he also contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.

“I will copy it out again,” he said.

The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of authority was needful, growled out:

“Remember all I said. Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves or I swear by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns--and her, too, when the time comes!”

Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter. There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance, as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of better judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for the rest.

“Very well,” King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say, taking so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the mullah strode up and down the cave swearing and kicking things over.

The mullah pounced on the finished letter, pretended to read it, and watched him seal it up, smudging the hot wax with his own great gnarled thumb. Then he shouted for the Orakzai Pathan, who came striding in, all grins and swagger.

“There--take it! Make speed!” he ordered, and with his rifle at the “ready” and the letter tucked inside his shirt, the Pathan favored King with a farewell grin and obeyed.

“Get out!” the mullah snarled then immediately. “See to the sick. Tell them I sent thee. Bid them be grateful!”

King went. He recognized the almost madness that constituted the mullah's driving power. It is contagious, that madness, until it destroys itself. It had made several thousand men follow him and believe in him, but it had once given Yasmini a chance to fool him and defeat him, and now it gave King his chance. He let the mullah think himself obeyed implicitly.

He became the busiest man in all the “Hills.” While the mullah glowered over the camp from the cave mouth or fulminated from the Quran or fought with other mullahs with words for weapons and abuse for argument, he bandaged and lanced and poulticed and physicked until his head swam with weariness.

The sick swarmed so around him that he had to have a body-guard to keep them at bay; so he chose twenty of the least sick from among those who had talked with him after sunrise.

And because each of those men had friends, and it is only human to wish one's friend in the same boat, especially when the sea, so to speak, is rough, the progress through the camp became a current of missionary zeal and the virtues of the Anglo-Indian raj were better spoken of than the “Hills” had heard for years.

Not that there was any effort made to convert the camp en masse. Far from it. But the likely few were pounced on and were told of a chance to enlist for a bounty in India. And what with winter not so far ahead, and what with experience of former fighting against the British army, the choosing was none so difficult. From the day when the lad first feels soft down upon his face until the old man's beard turns white and his teeth shake out, the Hillman would rather fight than eat; but he prefers to fight on the winning side if he may, and he likes good treatment.

Before if was dark that night there were thirty men sworn to hold their tongues and to wait for the word to hurry down the Khyber for the purpose of enlisting in some British-Indian regiment. Some even began to urge the hakim not to wait for the Orakzai Pathan, but to start with what he had.

“Shall I leave my brother in the lurch?” the hakim asked them; and though they murmured, they thought better of him for it.

Well for him that he had plenty of Epsom salts in his kit, for in the “Hills” physic should taste evil and show very quick results to be believed in. He found a dozen diseases of which he did not so much as know the name, but half of the sufferers swore they were cured after the first dose. They would have dubbed him faquir and have foisted him to a pillar of holiness had he cared to let them.

Muhammad Anim slept most of the day, like a great animal that scorns to live by rule. But at evening he came to the cave mouth and fulminated such a sermon as set the whole camp to roaring. He showed his power then. The jihad he preached would have tempted dead men from their graves to come and share the plunder, and the curses he called down on cowards and laggards and unbelievers were enough to have frightened the dead away again.

In twenty minutes he had undone all King's missionary work. And then in ten more, feeling his power and their response, and being at heart a fool as all rogues are, he built it up again.

He began to make promises too definite. He wanted Khinjan Caves. More, he needed them. So he promised them they should all be free of Khinjan Caves within a day or two, to come and go and live there at their pleasure. He promised them they should leave their wives and children and belongings safe in the Caves while they themselves went down to plunder India. He overlooked the fact that Khinjan Caves for centuries had been a secret to be spoken of in whispers, and that prospect of its violation came to them as a shock.

Half of them did not believe him. Such a thing was impossible, and if he were lying as to one point, why not as to all the others, too?

And the army veterans, who had been converted by King's talk of pardons, and almost reconverted by the sermon, shook their heads at the talk of taking Khinjan. Why waste time trying to do what never had been done, with her to reckon against, when a place in the sun was waiting for them down in India, to say nothing of the hope of pardons and clean living for a while? They shook their heads and combed their beards and eyed one another sidewise in a way the “Hills” understand.

That night, while the mullah glowered over the camp like a great old owl, with leaping firelight reflected in his eyes, the thousands under the skin tents argued, so that the night was all noise. But King slept.

All of another day and part of another night he toiled among the sick, wondering when a message would come back. It was nearly midnight when he bandaged his last patient and came out into the starlight to bend his back straight and yawn and pick his way reeling with weariness back to the mullah's cave. He had given his bag of medicines and implements to a man to carry ahead of him and had gone perhaps ten paces into the dark when a strong hand gripped him by the wrist.

“Hush!” said a voice that seemed familiar.

He turned swiftly and looked straight into the eyes of the Rangar Rewa Gunga!

“How did you get here?” he asked in English.

“Any fool could learn the password into this camp! Come over here, sahib. I bring word from her.”

The ground was criss-crossed like a man's palm by the shadows of tent-ropes. The Rangar led him to where the tents were forty feet apart and none was likely to overhear them. There he turned like a flash.

“She sends you this!” he hissed.

In that same instant King was fighting for his life.

In another second they were down together among the tent-pegs, King holding the Rangar's wrist with both hands and struggling to break it, and the Rangar striving for another stroke. The dagger he held had missed King's ribs by so little that his skin yet tingled from its touch. It was a dagger with bronze blade and a gold hilt--her dagger. It was her perfume in the air.

They rolled over and over, breathing hard. King wanted to think before he gave an alarm, and he could not think with that scent in his nostrils and creeping into his lungs. Even in the stress of fighting be wondered how the Rangar's clothes and turban had come to be drenched in it. He admitted to himself afterward that it was nothing else than jealousy that suggested to him to make the Rangar prisoner and hand him over to the mullah.

That would have been a ridiculous thing to do, for it would have forced his own betrayal to the mullah. But as if the Rangar had read his mind he suddenly redoubled his efforts and King, weary to the point of sickness, had to redouble his own or die. Perhaps the jealousy helped put venom in his effort, for his strength came back to him as a madman's does. The Rangar gave a moan and let the knife fall.

And because jealousy is poison King did the wrong thing then. He pounced on the knife instead of on the Rangar. He could have questioned him--knelt on him and perhaps forced explanations from him. But with a sudden swift effort like a snake's the Rangar freed himself and was up and gone before King could struggle to his feet--gone like a shadow among shadows.

King got up and felt himself all over, for they had fought on stony ground and he was bruised. But bruises faded into nothing, and weariness as well, as his mind began to dwell on the new complication to his problem.

It was plain that the moment he had returned from his message to the Khyber the Rangar had been sent on this new murderous mission. If Yasmini had told the truth a letter had gone into India describing him, King, as a traitor, and from her point of view that might be supposed to cut the very ground away from under his feet.

Then why so much trouble to have him killed? Either Rewa Gunga had never taken the first letter, or--and this seemed more probable--Yashiini had never believed the letter would be treated seriously by the authorities, and had only sent it in the hope of fooling him and undermining his determination. In that case, especially supposing her to have received his ultimatum on the mullah's behalf before sending Rewa Gunga with the dagger, she must consider him at least dangerous. Could she be afraid? If so her game was lost already!

Perhaps she saw her own peril. Perhaps she contemplated--gosh! what a contingency!--perhaps she contemplated bolting into India with a story of her own, and leaving the mullah to his own devices! In such a case, before going she would very likely try to have the one man stabbed who could give her away most completely. In fact, would she dare escape into India and leave himself alive behind her?

He rather thought she would dare do anything. And that thought brought reassurance. She would dare, and being what she was she almost surely would seek vengeance on the mullah before doing anything else.

Then why the dagger for himself? She must believe him in league with the mullah against her. She might believe that with him out of the way the mullah would prove an easier prey for her. And that belief might be justifiable, but as an explanation it failed to satisfy.

There was an alternative, the very thought of which made him fearfully uneasy, and yet brought a thrill with it. In all eastern lands, love scorned takes to the dagger. He had half believed her when she swore she loved him! The man who could imagine himself loved by Yasmini and not be thrilled to his core would be inhuman, whatever reason and caution and caste and creed might whisper in imagination's wake.

Reeling from fatigue (he felt like a man who had been racked, for the Rangar's strength was nearly unbelievable), he started toward where the mullah sat glowering in the cave mouth. He found the man who had carried his bag asleep at the foot of the ramp, and taking the bag away from him, let him lie there. And it took him five minutes to drag his hurt weary bones up the ramp, for the fight had taken more out of him than he had guessed at first.

The mullah glared at him but let him by without a word. It was by the fire at the back of the cave, where he stooped to dip water from the mullah's enormous crock that the next disturbing factor came to light. He kicked a brand into the fire and the flame leaped. Its light shone on a yard and a half of exquisitely fine hair, like spun gold, that caressed his shoulder and descended down one arm. One thread of hair that conjured up a million thoughts, and in a second upset every argument!

If Rewa Gunga had been near enough to her and intimate enough with her not only to become scented with her unmistakable perfume but even to get her hair on his person, then gone was all imagination of her love for himself! Then she had lied from first to last! Then she had tried to make him love her that she might use him, and finding she had failed, she had sent her true love with the dagger to make an end!

In a moment he imagined a whole picture, as it might have been in a crystal, of himself trapped and made to don the Roman's armor and forced to pose to the savage 'Hills'--or fooled into posing to them--as her lover, while Rewa Gunga lurked behind the scenes and waited for the harvest in the end. And what kind of harvest?

And what kind of man must Rewa Gunga be who could lightly let go all the prejudices of the East and submit to what only the West has endured hitherto with any complacency--a “tertium quid”?

Yet what a fool he, King, had been not to appreciate at once that Rewa Gunga must be her lover. Why should he not be? Were they not alike as cousins? And the East does not love its contrary, but its complement, being older in love than the West, and wiser in its ways in all but the material. He had been blind. He had overlooked the obvious--that from first to last her plan had been to set herself and this Rewa Gunga on the throne of India!

He washed and went through the mummery of muslim prayers for the watchful mullah's sake, and climbed on to his bed. But sleep seemed out of the question. He lay and tossed for an hour, his mind as busy as a terrier in hay. And when he did fall asleep at last it was so to dream and mutter that the mullah came and shook him and preached him a half-hour sermon against the mortal sins that rob men of peaceful slumber by giving them a foretaste of the hell to come.

All that seemed kinder and more refreshing than King's own thoughts had been, for when the mullah had done at last and had gone striding back to the cave mouth, he really did fall sound asleep, and it was after dawn when he awoke. The mullah's voice, not untuneful was rousing all the valley echoes in the call to prayer.

And while King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced Mecca in forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession down the midst--not strange to the “Hills,” where such sights are common, but strange to that camp and hour. Somebody rose and struck them, and they knelt like the rest; but when prayer was over and cooking had begun and the camp became a place of savory smell, they came on again--seven blind men.

They were weary, ragged, lean--seven very tatter-demalions--and the front man led them, tapping the ground with a long stick. The others clung to him in line, one behind the other. He was the only clean-shaven one, and he was the tallest. He looked as if he had not been blind so long, for his physical health was better. All seven men yelled at the utmost of their lungs, but he yelled the loudest.

“Oh, the hakim--the good hakim!” they wailed. “Where is the famous hakim? We be blind men--blind we be--blind--blind! Oh, pity us! Is any kismet worse than ours? Oh, show us to the hakim! Show us the way to him! Lead us to him! Oh, the famous, great, good hakim who can heal men's eyes!”

The mullah looked down on them like a vulture waiting to see them die, and seeing they did not die, turned his back and went into his cave. Close to the ramp they stopped, and the front man, cocking his head to one side as only birds and the newly blind do, gave voice again in nasal singsong.

“Will none tell me where is the great, good, wise hakim Kurram Khan?”

“I am he,” said King, and he stepped down toward him, calling to an assistant to come and bring him water and a sponge. The blind man's face looked strangely familiar, though it was partly disguised by some gummy stuff stuck all about the eyes. Taking it in both hands be tilted the eyes to the light and opened one eye with his thumb. There was nothing whatever the matter with it. He opened the other.

“Rub me an ointment on!” the man urged him, and he stared at the face again.

“Ismail!” he said. “You?”

“Aye! Father of cleverness! Make play of healing my eyes!”

So King dipped a sponge in water and sent back for his bag and made a great show of rubbing on ointment. In a minute Ismail, looking almost like a young man without his great beard, was dancing like a lunatic with both fists in the air, and yelling as if wasps had stung him.

“Aieee--aieee--aieee!” he yelled. “I see again! I see! My eyes have light in them! Allah! Oh, Allah heap riches on the great wise hakfim who can heal men's eyes! Allah reward him richly, for I am a beggar and have no goods!”

The other six blind men came struggling to be next, and while King rubbed ointment on their eyes and saw that there was nothing there he could cure the whole camp began to surge toward him to see the miracle, and his chosen body-guard rushed up to drive them back.

“Find your way down the Khyber and ask for the Wilayti dakitar. He will finish the cure.”

The six blind men, half-resentful, half-believing, turned away, mainly because Ismail drove them with words and blows. And as they went a tall Afridi came striding down the camp with a letter for the mullah held out in a cleft stick in front of him.

“Her answer!” said Ismail with a wicked grin.

“What is her word? Where is the Orakzai Pathan?”

But Ismail laughed and would not answer him. It seemed to King that he scented climax. So did his near-fifty and their thirty friends. He chose to take the arrival of the blind men as a hint from Providence and to “go it blind” on the strength of what he had hoped might happen. Also he chose in that instant to force the mullah's hand, on the principle that hurried buffaloes will blunder.

“To Khinjan!” he shouted to the nearest man. “The mullah will march on Khinjan!”

They murmured and wondered and backed away from him to give him room. Ismail watched him with dropped jaw and wild eye.

“Spread it through the camp that we march on Khinjan! Shout it! Bid them strike the tents!”

Somebody behind took up the shout and it went across the camp in leaps, as men toss a ball. There was a surge toward the tents, but King called to his deserters and they clustered back to him. He had to cement their allegiance now or fail altogether, and he would not be able to do it by ordinary argument or by pleading; he had to fire their imagination. And he did.

“She is on our side!” That was a sheer guess. “She has kept our man and sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith! Listen! Ye saw this man's eyes healed. Let that be a token! Be ye the men with new eyes! Give it out! Claim the title and be true to it and see me guide you down the Khyber in good time like a regiment, many more than a hundred strong!”

They jumped at the idea. The “Hills”--the whole East, for that matter--are ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a new blood-feud. Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since dead Englishman.

“We see!” yelled one of them.

“We see!” they chorused, and the idea took charge. From that minute they were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.

“To Khinjan!” they howled, scattering through the camp, and the mullah came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what possessed them.

“To Khinjan!” they roared at him. “Lead us to Khinjan!”

“To Khinjan, then!” he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort of double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw them the reins and leave to gallop. They roared back at him like the sea under the whip of a gaining wind. And Ismail disappeared among them, leaving King alone. Then the mullah's eyes fell on King and he beckoned him.

King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle of the night before. Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah showed him a letter he had crumpled in his fist. There were only a few lines, written in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be able to read, and they were signed with a strange scrawl that might have meant anything. But the paper smelt strongly of her perfume.

“Come, then. Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter Khinjan Caves. We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth's Drink.”

That was all, but the fire in the mullah's eyes showed that he thought it was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so.

“Khinjan is mine!” he growled. “India is mine!”

And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim. Yet he could see no alternative as yet. He could only be still and be glad he had set the camp moving and so had forced the mullah's hand.

“The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!” he told himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.

While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the women labored to roll them. The men began firing their rifles, and within the hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have fought a good-sized skirmish; but the mullah did not mind, for he had Khinjan Caves in view, and none knew better than he what vast store of cartridges and dynamite was piled in there. He let them waste.

Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the crowd, while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the cave. King left his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief who should care to steal them. He was safe from the mullah in the midst of his nearly eighty men, who half believed him a sending from the skies.

“We see! we see!” they yelled and danced around him.

Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started climbing the steep valley wall. The mullah on his brown mule thrust forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back, to keep at a distance from him. It was when the mullah had reached the top of the slope and was not far from being in the lead that Ismail appeared again, leading King's horse, that he had found in possession of another man. That did not look like enmity or treachery. King mounted and thanked him. Ismail wiped his knife, that had blood on it, and stuck his tongue through his teeth, which did not look quite like treachery either. Yet the Afridi could not be got to say a word.

Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the baggage.

But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.

“Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim! Be thou his hakim! Stay, we will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!”

The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly in the “Hills.”

Ismail came and held King's stirrup, striding beside him with the easy Hillman gait.

“Art thou my man at last?” King asked him, but Ismail laughed and shook his head.

“I am her man.”

“Where is she?” King asked.

“Nay, who am I that I should know?”

“But she sent thee?”

“Aye, she sent me.”

“To what purpose?”'

“To her purpose!” the Afridi answered, and King could not get another word out of him. He fell behind.

But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking back deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of his new band one by one and whispering to them. What he said was a mystery, but as they talked each man looked at King. And the more they talked the better pleased they seemed. And as the day wore on the more deferential they grew. By midday if King wanted to dismount there were three at least to hold his stirrup and ten to help him mount again.

Chapter XVIII

Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move so swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the “Hills,” where discipline is reckoned beneath a proud man's honor. There were many miles to go before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade them camp. He bade them camp because they would have done it otherwise in any case.

“And we,” said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him, “being men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will halt here and eat the evening meal and watch for an opportunity.”

“Opportunity for what?” they asked him.

“An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!” said King, and they had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them. Seeing he would not talk, they made their little fires all around him and watched while their women cooked the food. The mullah would not let them eat until he and the whole camp had prayed like the only righteous.

When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards and fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again. Only this time he sent twenty men to fetch him.

There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King's back was gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything. At the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner. But in the end the mullah's men drew off snarling, and before they could have time to receive new orders or reinforcements, King's die was cast.

There came another order from the mullah. The women and children were to be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for. There was murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among King's contingent. But King laughed.

“It is good!” he said.

“Why? How so?” they asked him.

“Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches tomorrow. Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!”

“But--”

“Please yourselves, sahibs!” The hakim's air was one of supremest indifference. “As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains. I am content.”

They murmured a while, but they gave the orders to their women, and King watched the women nod. And all that while Ismail watched him with carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest. And King understood. Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it does come, as a rule.

He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry into Khinjan easy. On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle and had set Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested him and tried him before tempting him at last.

She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself. She had sent Ismail for that purpose. It might be Ismail's business to drive a knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that. It was much more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have him murdered, she was superstitiously remorseful. Her course would depend on his. If he failed, she was done with him. If he succeeded in establishing a strong position of his own, she would yield.

All of which did not explain Ismail's whisperings and noddings and chin strokings with King's contingent. But it explained enough for King's present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to the problem. With or without Ismail's aid, with or without his enmity, he must control his eighty men and give the slip to the mullah, and he went at once about the best way to do both.

“We will go now,” he said quietly. “That sentry in yonder shadow has his back turned. He has over-eaten. We will rush him and put good running between us and the mullah.”

Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of action to wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on their bandoliers and made ready. Ismail brought up King's horse and he mounted. And then at King's word all eighty made a sudden swoop on the drowsy sentry and took him unawares. They tossed him over the cliff, too startled to scream an alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and shouted, they were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of dead men before the mullah even knew what was happening.

They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard, King trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops, and to the men to find the way.

“Whither?” one whispered to him.

“To Khinjan!” he answered; and that was enough. Each whispered to the other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent than money bribes.

When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with Ismail sitting at King's back and leaning a chin on his shoulder in order to hear better. Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew numb; King shook him off a dozen times; but each time Ismail set his chin back on the same spot, as a dog will that listens to his master. Yet he insisted he was her man, and not King's.

“Now, ye men of the Hills,” said King, “listen to me who am political-offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!” That was a gem of a title. It fired their imaginations. “I know things that no soldier would find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know.”

Now he had to be careful. If he were to invent too much they might denounce him as a traitor to the “Hills” in general. If he were to tell them too little they would lose interest and might very well desert him at the first pinch. He must feel for the middle way and upset no prejudices.

“She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim, but an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan! She has discovered that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills, and to sell Hillmen into slavery!” Might as well serve the mullah up hot while about it! Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile away the mullah was getting even by condemning the lot of them to death. “An eye for the risk of an eye!” say the unforgiving Hills.

“If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured. Be sure of that.”

Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had eyes. Ismail's chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.

“Now ye know--for all men know--that the entrance into Khinjan Caves is free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching. It is the way out again that is not free. How many men do ye know that have entered and never returned?”

They all nodded again. It was common knowledge that Khinjan was a very graveyard of the presumptuous.

“She has set a trap for the mullah. She will let him and all his men enter and will never let them out again!”

“How knowest thou?” This from two men, one on either hand.

“Was I never in Khinjan Caves?” he retorted. “Whence came I? I am her man, sent to help trap the mullah! I would have trapped all you, but for being weary of these 'Hills' and wishful to go back to India and be pardoned! That is who I am! That is how I know!”

Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive with the excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.

“But what will she do then?” asked somebody.

King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him a picture of the hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber Pass, and recollection of the man's words.

“Know ye not,” he said, “that long ago she gave leave to all who ate the salt to be true to the salt? She gave the Khyber jezailchis leave to fight against her. Be sure, whatever she does, she will stand between no man and his pardon!”

“But will she lead a jihad? We will not fight against her!”

“Nay,” said King, drawing his breath in. Ismail's chin felt like a knife against his collar bone, and Ismail's iron fingers clutched his arm. It was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune. “She will go down into India and use her influence in the matter of the pardons!”

“I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!” said the man who lacked part of his nose. “The Pathan went, and he did not come back. What proof have we.”

“Ye have me!” said King. “If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?”

They all grunted agreement as to that. King used his elbow to hit Ismail in the ribs. He did not dare speak to him; but now was the time for Ismail to carry information to her, supposing that to be his job. And after a minute Ismail rolled into a shadow and was gone. King gave him twenty minutes start, letting his men rest their legs and exercise their tongues.

Now that he was out of the mullah's clutches--and he suspected Yasmini would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn in any event--he began to feel like a player in a game of chess who foresees his opponent mate in so many moves.

If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and to join forces with him in there, he would at least have time to hurry back to India with his eighty men and give warning. He might have time to call up the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves before the hive could swarm, and he chuckled to think of the hope of that.

On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini and the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India with the news.

“Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break of day,” he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word had been law to them for years. Of all of them he was the only man in doubt--he who seemed most confident of all.

They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing behind King's horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards or so ahead as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see Khinjan loom above each next valley, for distances and darkness are deceptive in the “Hills,” even to trained eyes. Suddenly the advance guard halted, but did not shoot. And as King caught up with them he saw they were talking with some one.

He had to ride up close before he recognized the Orakzai Pathan.

“Salaam!” said the fellow with a grin. “I bring one hundred and eleven!”

As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around and leaned on rifles.

“Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?” King asked them.

“Aye!” they growled in chorus.

“What will ye?”

“Pardons!” They all said the word together.

“Who gave you leave to come?” King asked.

“None! He told us of the pardons and we came!”

“Aye!” said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside. “But she gave me leave to seek them out and tempt them!”

“And what does she intend?” King asked him suddenly.

“She? Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her! How should I know?”

“We will march again, my brothers!” King shouted, and they streamed along behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai Pathan striding beside King's horse, with a great hand on the saddle. Like the others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought not to be allowed much chance to escape.

Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest rose they topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the mile-wide bone-dry valley. They all stood and stared at it, leaning on their guns. All the “Men with New Eyes” saw it now for the first time, and it held them speechless, for with its patchwork towers and high battlements it looked like a very city of the spirits that their tales around the fire on winter nights so linger on.

And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur (for they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!) none else than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King's stirrup. He tugged and King backed his horse until they stood together apart.

“She sends this message,” said Ismail, showing his teeth in the most peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed. And then, omitting the message, he proceeded first to give some news. “Many of her men who have never been in the army, are none the less true to her, and she will not leave them to the mullah's mercy. They will leave the Caves in a little while and will come up here. They are to go down into India and be made prisoners if the sirkar will not enlist them. You are to wait for them here.”

“Is that all her message?” King asked him.

“Nay. That is none of it! This is her message. THOU SHALT KNOW THIS DAY, THOU ENGLISHMAN, WHETHER OR NOT SHE TRULY LOVED THEE! THERE SHALL BE PROOF, SUCH AS EVEN THOU SHALT UNDERSTAND!”'

“What does that mean?”

“Nay, who am I that I should know?”

Ismail slipped away and lost himself among the men, and none of them seemed to notice that he had been away and had come again. On King's advice a dozen men climbed near-by eminences and began to watch for the mullah's coming. The Khinjan men murmured openly; they wanted to be off.

“But no,” said King. “Go if ye will, but she has sent word that other men are coming. I wait for them here.”

After a great deal of resentful argument they consented to lie hidden for an hour or two “but no longer,” and King hid his horse in a hollow and persuaded three of them to gather grass for him. It was a little more than an hour after dawn and the chilled rocks were beginning to grow warmer when the head of a procession came out of Khinjan Gate and started toward them over the valley. In all more than five hundred men emerged and about a hundred women and children, and King's men were kept busy for half an hour counting them and quarreling about the exact number. Some of them were burdened heavily, and there was much discussion as to whether to loot them or not. Then:

“Muhammad Anim comes!” shouted a voice from a crag top.

They snuggled into better hiding, and there was no thought now of leaving before the mullah should go by. There began to be wagers as to whether her men would be hidden out of sight before the mullah could top the rise; and then, when the last man was safe across the valley and up the cliff and in hiding, there was endless argument as to how much each had betted and to whom he had lost. It needed an effort to quiet them when the mullah rose into view at last above the rise and paused for a minute to stare across at Khinjan before leading his four thousand down and onward. He was silent as an image, but his men roared like a river in flood and he made no effort to check them. He was like a man who has made up his mind to victory in any event. He seemed to be speculating three or four moves ahead of this one, and to hold this one such a foregone conclusion in his mind that it had ceased to interest. He was admirable, there was no doubt of that. In his own way, like an old boar sniffing up the wind for trouble, he could command a decent man's respect.

He dismounted, for he had to, and tossed his reins to the nearest man with the air of an emperor. And he led the way dawn the cliffside without hesitation, striding like a mountaineer. His men followed him noisily, holding hands to make human chains at the difficult places and shouting a great deal; but not quite naturally now. They were too impressed by the seriousness of what they undertook, and in their hearts too much afraid. The noise was bravado.

It was a weary long wait, watching from the crevices until the last man's back departed down the cliff, and the procession--Pied Piper of Hamelin and rats, (but no music!)--wound across the valley. At last Khinjan Gate opened and the mullah led in. The gate did not shut after the last man, King noted that.

“Let us go now!” shouted fifty voices, and every man of King's party showed himself and stretched. “Let us go! Why wait?”

But King would not go. Nor would he explain why he would not go. Nor could he tell himself what held him, gazing at Khinjan, except that he thought of Yasmini and ached to know what she was doing.

It was thirty minutes after the last of the mullahs men had vanished through the gate, and his own men in dozens and twenties were scattered along the cliff-top arguing against delay with growing rancor, when a lone horseman galloped out of Khinjan Gate and started across the valley. He rode recklessly. He was either panic-stricken or else bolder than the devil.

In a minute King had recognized the mare, and so had the eyes of fifty men around him. No man with half an eye for a horse could have failed to recognize that black mare, having ever seen her once. She came like a goat among the rocks, just as she had once dived into darkness in the Khyber with King following. In another two minutes King had recognized the Rangar's silken turban. And now there was no need to restrain the men; they all stood and watched, to know what new turn affairs were taking.

Most of them were staring downward at the Rangar's head as he urged the mare up the cliff path, when the explanation of Yasmini's message came. It was only King, urged by some intuition, who had his eyes fixed on Khinjan.

There came a shock that actually swayed the hill they stood on. The mare on the path below missed her footing and fell a dozen feet, only to get up again and scramble as if a thousand devils were behind her, the Rangar riding her grimly, like a jockey in a race. Three more shocks followed. A great slice of Khinjan suddenly caved in with a roar, and smoke and dust burst upward through the tumbling crust.

There was a pause after that, as if the waiting elements were gathering strength. For ten minutes they watched and scarcely breathed. Rewa Gunga gained the summit and, dismounting, stood by King with the reins over his arm. The mare was too blown to do anything but stand and tremble. And King was too enthralled to do anything but stare.

“That is what a woman can do for a man!” said Rewa Gunga grimly. “She set a fuse and exploded all the dynamite. There were tons of it! The galleries must have fallen in, one on the other! A thousand men digging for a thousand years could never get into Khinjan now, and the only way out is down Earth's Drink! She bade me come and bid you good-by, sahib. I would have stayed in there, but she commanded me. She said, 'Tell King sahib my love was true. Tell him I give him India and all Asia that were at my mercy!'”

While the Rangar spoke there came three more earth tremors in swift succession, and a thunder out of Khinjan as if the very “Hills” were coming to an end. The mare grew frantic and the Rangar summoned six men to hold her.

Suddenly, right over the top of Khinjan's upper rim, where only the eagles ever perched, there burst a column of water, immeasurable, huge, that for a moment blotted out the sun. It rose sheer upward, curved on itself, and fell in a million-ton deluge on to Khinjan and into Khinjan valley, hissing and roaring and thundering.

Earth's Drink had been blocked by the explosion and had found a new way over the barrier before plunging down again into the bowels of the world. The one sky-flung leap it made as its weight burst down a mountain wall was enough to blot out Khinjan forever, and what had been a dry mile-wide moat was a shallow lake with death's rack and rubbish floating on the surface.

The earth rocked. The Hillmen prayed, and King stared, trying to memorize all that had been. Suddenly it flashed across his mind that the Rangar who had striven like a fiend to stab him only a matter of hours ago was now standing behind him, within a yard.

He was up on his feet in a second and faced about. The Rangar laughed.

“So ends the 'Heart of the Hills!'” he said. “Think kindly of her, sahib. She thought well enough of you!”

He laughed again and sprang on the black mare, and before King could speak or raise a hand to stop him he was off, hell-bent-for-leather along the precipice in the direction of the Khyber Pass and India. Two of the men who had come out of Khinjan mounted and spurred after him.

King collected his men and the women and children. It was easy, for they were numb from what they had witnessed and dazed by fear. In half an hour he had them mustered and marching.

“Let us go back and loot the mullah's camp and take the women!” urged a dozen men at least.

“Go then!” said King. “Go back! But I go on!”

“He is afraid! The hakim is afraid of what he saw!”

King let them think so. He let them think anything they chose, knowing well that what had unnerved him had at least rendered them amenable to leading. They would have no more dared go back without him, and without at least a hundred others, than they would have dared go and hunt in the ruins of Khinjan.

Even Ismail clang to his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and eyes wider than any bird's.

“Why art thou here?” King asked him. “Had she no true men who would die with her?”

The Afridi scowled, but choked the answer back.

“Art thou my man now?” King asked him. But he shook his head.

So they marched without talking over the hideous boulder-strewn range that separates Khinjan from the Khyber, sleeping fitfully whenever King called a halt, and eating almost nothing at all, for only a few of them had thought of bringing food.

They reached the Khyber famished and were fed at Ali Masjid Fort, after King had given a certain password and had whispered to the officer commanding. But he did not change into European clothes yet, and none of his following suspected him of being an Englishman.

“A Rangar on a black mare has gone down the pass ahead of you in a hurry,” they told him at Ali Masjid. “He had two men with him and food enough. Only stopped long enough to make his business known.”

“What did he say his business is?” asked King.

“He gave a sign and said a word that satisfied us--on that point!”

“Oh!” said King. “Can you signal down the Pass?”

“Surely.”

“Courtenay still at Jamrud?”

“Yes. In charge there and growing tired of doing nothing.”

“Signal down and ask him to have that bath ready for me that I spoke about. Good-by.”

So he left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew noisier and more confident every hour. Ismail still clung to his stirrup, but began to grow more lively and to have a good many orders to fling to the rest.

“You mourn like a dog,” King told him. “Three howls and a whine and a little sulking--and then forgetfulness!”

Ismail looked nasty at that but did not answer, although he seemed to have a hot word ready. And thenceforward he hung his head more, and at least tried to seem bereaved. But his manner was unconvincing none the less, and King found it food for thought.

The ex-soldiers and would-be soldiers marched in fours behind him, growing hourly more like drilled men, and talking, with each stride that brought them nearer India, more as men do who have an interest in law and order. Behind them tramped the women from Khinjan, carrying their babies and their husbands loads; and behind them again were the other women, who had been told they would be overtaken in the Khyber, but who had actually had to run themselves raw-footed in order to catch up.

Down the Khyber have come conquerors, a dozen conquering kings, and as many beaten armies; but surely no stranger host than this ever trudged between the echoing walls. The very eagles screamed at them.

And as they neared Jamrud Fort the men who sought pardons began to grow sheepish. They began to remember that the hakim might after all be a trickster, and to realize how much too friendly--how almost intimate he had been with the sahibs at Ali Masjid. They began to cluster round him instead of letting him lead, and by the time they met the farthest outposts up the Khyber they were as nervous as raw recruits and ready to turn and bolt at a word--for no one can be more timid than your Hillman when he is not sure of himself, just as no one can be braver when he knows his ground.

Signals preceded them, and Courtenay himself rode up the Pass to greet them. But of course he was not very cordial to King, considering his disguise; and he chose to keep the Hillmen in doubt yet as to their eventual reception. But one of them, the Orakzai Pathan (for nothing could completely unman him), shouted to know whether it was true that pardons had been offered for deserters, and Courtenay nodded. They were less timid after that. Some of them pulled medals out and pinned them outside their shirts.

At Jamrud they were given food and their rifles were taken away from them and a guard was set to watch them. But the guard only consisted of two men, both of whom were Pathans, and they assured them that, ridiculous though it sounded, the British were actually willing to forgive their enemies and to pardon all deserters who applied for pardon on condition of good faith in the future.

That night they prayed to Allah like little children lost and found. The women crooned love-songs to their babies over the clear fires and the men talked--and talked--and talked until the stars grew big as moons to weary eyes and they slept at last, to dream of khaki uniforms and karnel sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor and who said things that were so. It is a mad world to the Himalayan Hillman where men in authority tell truth unadorned without shame and without consideration--a mad, mad world, and perhaps too exotic to be wholesome, but pleasant while the dream lasts.

Over in the fort Courtenay placed a bath at King's disposal and lent him clean clothes and a razor. But he was not very cordial.

“Tell me all the war news!” said King, splashing in the tub. And Courtenay told him, passing him another cake of soap when the first was finished. After all there was not much to tell--butchery in Belgium--Huns and guns--and the everlastingly glorious stand that saved Paris and France and Europe.

“According to the cables our men are going the records one better. I think that's all,” said Courtenay.