Rung Ho! Part 13

Sons of the sons of war we be, Sabred and horsed, and whole and free; One is the caste, and one degree,-- One law,--one code decreed us.

Who heads wolves in the dawning day?

Who leaps in when the bull's at bay?

He who dare is he who may!

Now, rede ye who shall lead us!

THE check that Ralph Cunningham's management of his police had caused, and the subsequent resumption of night looting, served to whet the appet.i.tes of the hungry crowd beyond the border. Those closest to Peshawur, who had always done the looting, were not the ultimate consignees by any means; there were other tribes who bought from them--others yet to whom they paid tribute in the shape of stolen rifles. Cunningham's administration had upset the whole modus vivendi of the lower Himalayas!

Though it all began again the moment he was superseded, there had been, none the less, a three-month interregnum, and that had to be compensated for. The tribes at the rear were clamorous and would not listen to argument or explanation; they had collected in hundreds, led by the notorious Khumel Khan, preparatory to raiding in real earnest and with sufficient force to carry all before them at the first surprise attack.

They were disappointed when the pilfering resumed, for a tribal Hillman would generally rather fight than eat, and would always prefer his dinner from a dead enemy's cooking-pot. They sat about for a long time, considering whether there were not excuse enough for war in any case and listening to the intricately detailed information brought by the deserting watchmen. And as they discussed things, but before they had time to decide on any plan, the Brigadier commanding the Irregulars got wind of them.

He was a man who did not worry about the feelings of senile heads of red-tape-bound departments; nor was he particularly hidebound by respect for the laws of evidence. When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he either acted or did not act, as the circ.u.mstances might dictate. And when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in several colored inks, on all the special forms he could get hold of. The heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying to get the form of the report straightened out to be able to give any attention to the details of it; and then it would be too late. But he was a brigadier, and what he could do with impunity and quiet amus.e.m.e.nt would have brought down the whole Anglo-Indian Government in awful wrath on the head of a subordinate.

He heard of the tribesmen under Khumel Khan one evening. At dawn his tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the green gra.s.s. The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.

The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the half-awakened plotters of the night before.

There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill. Long lances--devils'

antennae--searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments. In an hour, or less, there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again for a year or two to come.

But Khumel Khan was missing. Khumel Khan, the tulwar man--he whose boast it was that he could hew through two men's necks at one whistling sweep of his notched, curved cimeter--had broken through with a dozen at his back. He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.

"Mr. Cunningham! Take your troop, please, and find their chief! Hunt him out, ride him down, and get him! Don't come back until you do!"

The real thing! The real red thing within a year! A lone command--and that is the only thing a subaltern of s.p.u.n.k may pray for!--eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the opportunity to show their worth--lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight--as sure as G.o.d made mountains, a fight at the other end! There are men here and there who think that the day when they pa.s.s down a crowded aisle with Her is the great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun. And there are others. There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-ap.r.o.n-stringed unit out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.

There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to make the compa.s.s seem like a lie-begotten trick. There were gorges, hewn when the t.i.tans needed dirt to build the awful Himalayas--shadow-darkened--sheer as the edge of Nemesis. Long-reaching, pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them. The wind blew through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din which rides with armed men.

But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part of them, they tracked and trailed--and viewed at last. Their shout gave Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue, and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small, flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time. His companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry--his was the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan fresh villainies. He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the uselessness, and stood.

The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which the man at bay could no more escape than a fire-ringed scorpion.

"Call on him to surrender!" ordered Cunningham.

A chevroned black-beard half a horse-length behind him translated the demand into stately Pashtu, and for answer the hill chieftain mounted his stolen horse and shook his tulwar. He had pistols at his belt, but he did not draw them; across his shoulder swung a five-foot-long jezail, but he loosed it and flung it to the ground.

"Is there any here dare take me single-handed?" he demanded with a grin.

Of the eight-and-eighty, there were eighty-eight who dared; but there was an eighty-ninth, a lad of not yet twenty-two, whom Indian chivalry desired to honor. The troop had heard but the troop had not yet seen.

"Ride in and take him!" ordered Cunningham and there was a thoroughly well acted make-believe of fear, while every eye watched "Cunnigan-bahadur," and the horses, spurred and reined at once, pranced at their bits for just so long as a good man needs to make his mind up.

And Cunningham rode in.

He rode in as a Rajput rides, with a swoop and a swinging sabre and a silent, tight-lipped vow that he would prove himself. Green though he was yet, he knew that the troop had found for him--had rounded up for him--had made him his opportunity; so he took it, right under their eyes, straight in the teeth of the stoutest tulwar man of the lower Himalayas.

He, too, had pistols at his belt, but there was no shot fired. There was nothing but a spur-loosed rush and a shock--a spark-lit, swirling, slashing, stamping, snorting melee--a stallion and a mare up-ended--two strips of lightning steel that slit the wind--and a thud, as a lifeless border robber took the turf.

There was silence then--the grim, good silence of Mohammedan approval--while a native officer closed up a sword-cut with his fingers and tore ten-yard strips from his own turban to bind the youngster's head. They rode back without boast or noise and camped without advertis.e.m.e.nt. There was no demonstration made; only-a colonel said, "I like things done that way, quickly, without fuss," and a brigadier remarked, "Hrrrumph! 'Gratulate you, Mr. Cunningham!"

Later, when they camped again outside Peshawur, a reward of three thousand rupees that had been offered on the border outlaw's head was paid to Cunningham in person--a very appreciable sum to a subaltern, whose pay is barely sufficient for his mess bills. So, although no public comment was made on the matter, it was considered "decent of him"

to contribute the whole amount to a pension fund for the dependents of the regiment's dead.

"You know, that's your money," said his Colonel. "You can keep every anna of it if you choose."

"I suppose I needn't be an officer unless I choose?" suggested Cunningham.

"I don't know, youngster! I can't guess what your troop would do if you tried to desert it!"

That was, of course, merely a diplomatic recognition of the fact that Cunningham had done his duty in making his men like him, and was not intended seriously. n.o.body--not even the Brigadier--had any notion that the troop would very shortly have to dispense with its leader's services whether it wanted to or not.

But it so happened that one troop at a time was requisitioned to be ornamental body-guard to such as were ent.i.tled to one in the frontier city; and the turn arrived when Cunningham was sent. None liked the duty. No soldier, and particularly no irregular, likes to consider himself a pipe-clayed ornament; but Cunningham would have "gone sick"

had he had the least idea of what was in store for him.

It was bad enough to be obliged to act as body-guard to men who had jockeyed him away because they were jealous of him. The white scar that ran now like a chin-strap mark from the corner of his eye to the angle of his jaw would blaze red often at some deliberately thought-out, not fancied, insult from men who should have been too big to more than notice him. And that, again, was nothing to the climax.

Mahommed Gunga chose to polish up his silver spurs and ride in from his "estates" on a protracted visit to Peshawur, and with an escort that must have included half the zemindars on the countryside as well as his own small retinue. Glittering on his own account like a regiment of horse, and with all but a regiment clattering behind him, he chose the occasion to meet Cunningham when the youngster was fuming with impatience opposite the club veranda, waiting to escort a general.

On the veranda sat a dozen men who had been at considerable pains to put and keep the officer of the escort in his place. If the jingle and glitter of the approaching cavalcade had not been sufficient to attract their notice, they could have stopped their cars and yet have been forced to hear the greeting.

"Aha! Salaam sahib! Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, bohut salaam! Thy father's son! Sahib, I am much honored!"

The white scar blazed, but Mahommed Gunga affected not to notice the discomfort of his victim. Many more than a hundred sabred gentlemen pressed round to "do themselves the honor," as they expressed it, of paying Cunningham a compliment. They rode up like knights in armor in the lists, and saluted like heralds bringing tribute and allegiance.

"Salaam, Chota-Cunnigan!"

"Salaam, sahib!"

"Bohut salaam, bahadur!"

The Generals, the High-Court judges, and Commissioners on the club veranda sat unhonored, while a boy of twenty-two received obeisance from men whose respect a king might envy. No Rajput ever lived who was not sure that his salute was worth more than tribute; he can be polite on all occasions, and what he thinks mere politeness would be considered overacting in the West, but his respect and his salute he keeps for his equals or his betters--and they must be men indeed.

The coterie of high officials sat indignation-bound for ten palpitating minutes, until the General remembered that it was his escort that was waiting for him. He had ordered it an hour too soon, for the express sweet purpose of keeping Cunningham waiting in the sun, but it dawned now on his apoplectic consciousness that his engagement was most urgent.

He descended in a pompous hurry, mounted and demanded why--by all the G.o.ds of India--the escort was not lined up to receive him. A minute later, after a loudly administered reprimand that was meant as much for the swarm of Rajputs as for the indignant Cunningham, he rode off with the escort clattering behind him.

But on the club veranda, when the Rajputs with Mahommed Gunga had dispersed, the big wigs sat and talked the matter over very thoroughly.

"It's no use blinking matters," said the senior man present, using a huge handkerchief to wave the flies away from the polished dome which rose between two side wisps of gray hair. "They're going to lionize him while he's here, so we'd better move him on."

"But where?"

"I've got it! There's a letter in from Everton at Abu, saying he needs a man badly to go to Howrah and act resident there--says he hasn't heard from the missionaries and isn't satisfied--wants a man without too much authority to go there and keep an eye on things in general. Howrah's a h.e.l.l of a place from all accounts."

"But that 'ud be promotion!"

"Can't be helped. No excuse for reducing him, so far as I've heard. The trouble is the cub has done too dashed well. We've got to promote him if we want to be rid of him."

They talked it over for an hour, and at the end of it decided Cunningham should go to Howrah, provided a brigadier could be induced without too much argument to see reason.