Barclay of the Guides Part 9

"'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 compet.i.tion. 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 c.o.c.k 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 c.o.c.ksureness 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 compet.i.tors 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 a.s.ses, 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 circ.u.mstances 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. a.s.sad 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 Pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 d.a.m.ned 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."