Captain Desmond, V.C. Part 42

"It was wrong of me to keep you in suspense even for a few minutes,"

she said, her gaze riveted on the table. "Please forgive me that I am driven to hurt you so, and please believe that I do realise what I am losing----"

"The loss is--not yours," he said on a note of restrained quietness: and in the stillness that ensued, the impatient horses could be heard champing their bits.

He sank into his chair with a gesture of unfeigned weariness; and she glanced at his face. Its mingled pain and patience pierced her heart.

But when at last he spoke, his voice was natural and controlled.

"I have only one word more to say. I confess I have not the courage to let you go altogether out of my life. Since nothing else is possible, will you at least accept me as your permanent and--devoted friend?"

She turned upon him in frank surprise.

"Do you mean that--really? _Can_ you do it? Men always say----"

He smiled a trifle bitterly.

"Do they? No doubt they are right--for themselves. But I know I have the strength to accept what I ask, or I would not dare ask it. You won't refuse me that much, will you--Honor?"

"No, indeed, no," she answered, greatly moved. "I can deny you nothing that I am not forced to deny you--Paul."

"Ah, there is no woman in the world to compare with you! Let me say it this once, as I may never tell you so again."

He rose in speaking, braced his shoulders, and stood looking down upon her, a strangely glad light in his eyes.

"I have _not_ lost you, after all," he said.

She rose also, and gave him both her hands. "No. You have gained me--for good. I--care now ever so much more than I did when I came out to you this morning."

"You _do_?"

"Yes--I do."

He drew her towards him. "Promise me this much," he said, "that if you should ever find it possible to--marry me on any conditions--even the hardest--you will tell me so at once, because after this morning I shall never open my lips on the subject again."

"I promise. Only--you must not let yourself hope."

He sighed. "Very well, I will shut out hope, since you command it. But I shall still have love and faith to live upon. You cannot deprive me of those--Honor. Now shall we go for our ride? Or would you rather go in and rest after all this?"

"No. We will have our ride. I can rest later if I need it."

"Let me put you up then. Come."

And she came without a word.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CHEAPER MAN.

"No proposition Euclid wrote, No formulae the text-books show, Will turn the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar's downward blow: Strike hard, who cares--shoot straight, who can; The odds are on the cheaper man!"

--RUDYARD KIPLING: _Arithmetic on the Frontier._

The second week in March found the little force from Kohat still skirmishing energetically through a network of ravines, nullahs, and jagged red hills; still dealing out rough justice to unrepentant Afridis in accordance with instructions from headquarters; or as nearly in accordance with them as Colonel Buchanan's p.r.o.nounced views on the ethics of warfare would permit. For Buchanan was a just man of independent character, a type not ostentatiously beloved by heads of departments. He had a reprehensible trick of thinking for himself and acting accordingly--a habit liable to create havoc among the card-houses of officialdom; and like all soldiers of the first grade, he was resolute against the cowardly method of striking at the guilty through the innocent; resolute in limiting the evils of war to its authors and active abettors.

He had taken full advantage of his temporary rank to run the expedition on his own lines; and although his instructions included the burning of crops, he had kept rigid control over this part of the programme; giving officers and men free scope for activity in the demolishing of armed forts and towers, and in skirmishes with the wild tribes who harried their transport trains, rushed their pickets, sent playful bullets whizzing through the mess-tent at night, and generally enjoyed themselves after the rough and ready fashion of the hillsman across the Border.

The Afridis in truth were merely tired of behaving like good children.

The unstained knives at their belts cried shame on them for their prolonged abstinence from the legitimate joys of manhood;--the music of bullets whistling down a gorge, the yielding of an enemy's flesh under the knife.

Therefore, when Colonel Buchanan and his little force started punitive operations, they were met by a surprisingly concerted and spirited resistance. The cunning tribesmen, having got what they wanted in the shape of excitement, were determined to make the most of it. Thus, the expedition had flared up into one of those minor guerilla campaigns which have cost England more, in the lives of picked officers, than she is ever likely to calculate; being, for the most part, careful and troubled about weightier matters.

The sweeping movement, organised to include all villages implicated in the raid, took longer than had been antic.i.p.ated. The demolishing of Afridi watch-towers, manned by the finest natural marksmen in the world, and built on bases proof against everything but gunpowder, is no child's play; and at almost every village on the line of route the troops had found their work cut out for them. That they carried it out gallantly and effectively need hardly be said, since we are dealing with the pick of India's soldiers, the Punjab Frontier Force.

Their daily march led them along broken tracks or boulder-strewn beds of torrents, winding through a land where "the face of G.o.d is a rock";--a land feigning death, yet alive with hidden foes who announced their presence from time to time by the snick of a breech-bolt, the whing of a bullet, or a concerted rush upon the rear-guard from some conveniently narrow ravine.

Little interruptions of this sort helped to keep all ranks on the alert, and to make things cheerful generally; but they also took up time. And although the middle of March found them back within twenty-one miles of Kohat, there seemed little hope of quieting the country under another week or two at least.

On the evening of the 16th, after two days of skirmishing and a broken night under the stars, imperative need of water compelled them to encamp at the open end of a valley whose enclosing heights narrowed abruptly to the northward into an ugly-looking gorge.

Tents sprang up right and left; lines for horses and mules established themselves in less time than it would take the uninitiated to see where and how the thing could be done; and that eighth wonder of the world, the native cook, achieved a four-course dinner with a mud oven, army rations, a small supply of looted fowls, and a large supply of ingenuity. A party of cavalry, having reconnoitred the ravines branching off into higher hills, reported no signs of the enemy. A cordon of sentries was told off for duty; and the posting of strong pickets on the near hill-tops, and in the neighbourhood of the camp itself, completed the night's arrangements. Clanking of accoutrements, jangle of harness, and all the subdued hum of human life, died away into stillness; lights dropped out one by one; and the valley was given over to silence and a mult.i.tude of stars.

Touched into silver here and there by the ethereal radiance--for starshine is a reality in India--the scene presented a Dantesque mingling of beauty and terror,--the twin elements of life, which are "only one, not two."

At a little distance behind the cl.u.s.tering tents the ground sloped boldly upward to summits dark with patches of stunted forest; and beyond these again the snow-peaks of the Safed Koh mountains stood dreaming to the stars. Lower down, at rare intervals, dwarf oaks and the "low lean thorn" of the desert stood out, black and spectral, against the lesser darkness of rocks and stones. In the valley itself the stones had it all their own way;--a ghostly company, rounded and polished by the stream, which crept among them now a mere ribbon of silver, but in four months' time would come thundering through the gorge in a garment of foam, with the shout of a wild thing loosed from bondage. The triumph of desolation was reached in the savage peaks that almost fronted the camp and descended to the valley in a cataract of crags. Here even the persevering thorn-bush could take no hold upon a surface of bare rock, split up into clefts, and chiselled to such fantastic shapes that the whole might have inspired Dante's conception of the ravine by which he descended to the nether h.e.l.l.

Absorbed in the requirements of earth, and untroubled by ghostly imaginings, officers and men slept soundly, with one eye open, as soldiers experienced in Frontier warfare learn to do; and when at last the earth, turning in its sleep, swung round towards the sun and the still air quivered with foreknowledge of morning, a sudden outcropping of life, where no life should be, amply justified the need for vigilance.

From the darkness of a ravine some distance above the camp, a shadowy ma.s.s of figures poured hurriedly, stealthily, into the valley--men of splendid physique, in loose dark draperies or sheepskin coats, carrying leathern shields and the formidable Afridi knife, bone-handled, with a two-foot blade that will halve a man's head as if it were a lemon.

By a preconcerted arrangement they divided into two parties, and keeping within the deepest patches of shadow, bore down upon the nearest pickets with a fierce, soundless rush,--the most disconcerting form of attack to sleepy sentries in the small hours, when life and courage are at their lowest ebb. But the picket sentries happened to be Sikhs; and they are ill men to tackle at close quarters or to spring on unawares.

Close upon the first determined rush came a scuffle, a smothered shout, the sharp crack of rifles in quick succession; and before the hills had flung back the volley of sound, the whole camp hummed with life from end to end, like a broken ant-heap.

A fusilade of shots rang out on all sides. Men hurried about among the tents, concentrating at the two points of attack. Here and there, amid the puffs of smoke that rose and vanished in the blue, a lifted sword or sabre gleamed like a flash of light.

A number of Afridis forced their way into the camp, lunging at every tent-rope within reach of their long knives, and in the dim light it was not easy to distinguish friend from foe. But the first sharp shock of encounter past, it became evident that the troops were getting the best of the affair; and the Afridis, whose valour is not always tempered with discretion, saw fit to beat a rapid retreat up the valley, hoping to reach the ravine before the cavalry started in pursuit.

The men in camp, meanwhile, had leisure to breathe freely, after their rough awakening; to look about and recognise one another, and exchange cheerful congratulations on the resolute stand made by the Sikhs.

"That you, Desmond?"

The Colonel's voice greeted Desmond as he emerged from his tent where his servant had been pressing on him a half-cold cup of cocoa; and the two men faced each other, bareheaded, in shirt and breeches, unmistakable stains upon their naked blades.

"The Ressaldar's falling in your squadron," Buchanan said briskly.

"Lose no time, and follow 'em up like h.e.l.l. They'll break away into the hills, of course. But the chances are they'll concentrate again in the gorge and try to catch the main body as it pa.s.ses through. So if they give you the slip now, ride straight on and secure the defile for us. I'll send out a detachment of infantry at the double to crown the heights; and I can safely leave all minor details to your discretion."