The Jungle Girl Part 10

When he arrived home he found that Raymond and his own "boy" and sword-orderly (his native soldier-servant) had begun his packing for him, for his heavy baggage had to be despatched that afternoon. The bungalow was crowded with his brother-officers waiting to see him. He had intended to avoid them, for he felt disgraced by the Colonel's censure which it was evident the Commanding Officer had not kept secret, though the whole matter should have been treated as confidential. But they made light of his scruples and showed him that he had their sympathy. He had meant to dine alone in his room that night; but his comrades insisted on his coming to the Mess, where they were to give him an informal farewell dinner. They would take no refusal.

Daly, who was the Acting Quartermaster of the battalion, told him that the arrangements for his journey had been made. He was to leave at dawn and drive sixty miles in a _tonga_--a two-wheeled native conveyance drawn by a pair of ponies--to a village called Basedi on the sh.o.r.es of a narrow gulf or deep inlet of the sea which formed the eastern boundary of the State of Mandha. Here he would have to spend the night in a dak-bungalow--or rest-house--and cross the water in a steam-launch next morning. After that, five days more of travel by various routes and means awaited him.

Before dinner that night a few minutes apart with Hepburn made Frank happier than he had been all day. For his Company Commander told him that he had only agreed with the Colonel's action because he believed that it would be for the subaltern's own good, not because he considered that the latter had done anything to disgrace him. Hepburn added that if he was given command of the regiment in two years' time--as should happen in the ordinary course of events--he would be glad to have Wargrave back again in the battalion then. Frank, with a guilty feeling when he remembered his compact with Violet, thanked him gratefully, and with a lightened heart went to the very festive meal that was to be his last for some long time, at least with his old corps.

The Colonel had refused to agree to his being invited formally to be the guest of the regiment; and neither he nor the other married man, the Doctor, were present. If they slept that night they were the only two officers in the Cantonment that did; for none of the others, not even senior major, Hepburn, left the Mess until it was time to escort their departing comrade to his bungalow to change for the journey. And, as the _tonga_-ponies rattled down the road and bore him away, Frank's last sight of his old comrades was the group of white-clad figures in the dawn waving frantically and cheering vociferously from the gateway of his bungalow.

The memory of it rejoiced him throughout the terrible hours of the long journey in the baking heat and blinding glare of the Hot Weather day.

The worse moments were the stops every ten miles to change ponies, when he had to wait in the blazing sunshine. His "boy," who sat on the front seat of the vehicle beside the driver, produced from a basket packed with wet straw cooled bottles of soda-water, without which Wargrave felt that he would have died of sunstroke.

Then on after each halt; and the endless strip of white road again unrolled before him, while the never-ceasing clank of the iron-shod bar coupling the ponies maddened his aching head with its monotonous rhythm.

As the weary miles slid past him his thoughts were with Violet, so beautiful, so patient and brave in her self-denying endurance. And he cursed himself for having added to her pain, and inwardly vowed that some day he would atone to her for it.

At last the _tonga_ rattled into the bare compound of the Basedi dak-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy _khansamah_--the custodian of the rest-home--hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed hung with torn mosquito-curtains.

From a gla.s.s case in the sitting-room containing a scanty store of canned provisions the _khansamah_ provided a meal with such ill-a.s.sorted ingredients as Somebody's desiccated soup lukewarm, a tin of sardines and sweet biscuits to eat with them, and a bottle of beer to wash it down with. Wargrave was too choked with dust, too sickened with the heat and glare, to have any appet.i.te. After a smoke he dragged his weary body to bed and in spite of the mosquitoes that flocked joyously through the holes in the gauze curtains to feast on him slept the profound sleep of utter exhaustion.

He was up at daybreak; for the tide served in the early morning and only at its height could the launch approach the sh.o.r.e, which at low water was bordered with the filthy slime of mangrove swamps.

Landed at the other side of the gulf he had even a worse experience of travel before him than on the previous day. For the next stage of the journey was forty miles across a salt desert in a tram drawn by a camel.

The car was open on all sides and covered by a cardboard roof; and its wooden seats were uncomfortably hard for long hours of sitting. The heat was appalling. It struck up from the baked ground and seemed to scorch the body through the clothes. The glare from the white sand and even whiter patches of salt was blinding and penetrated through the closed eyelids. A hot wind blew over the hazy, shimmering desert, setting the whirling dust-devils dancing and striking the face like the touch of a heated iron. Wargrave's small store of ice and mineral water was exhausted, and he felt that he was likely to die of thirst. For in the villages where they changed camels cholera was raging; and he dared not drink the water from their wells.

The tram slid easily along the shining rails that stretched away out of sight over the monotonous plain, the camel loping lazily along, its soft, sprawling feet falling noiselessly on the sand. The last ten miles of the way lay through less sterile country; and the tram pa.s.sed herds of black buck--the pretty, spiral-horned antelope. Used to its daily pa.s.sage, the graceful animals, which were protected by the game-laws of the native State through which the line ran, barely troubled to move out of its way. They stood about in hundreds, staring lazily at it, some not ten yards off, the bucks turning their heads away to scratch their sides with the points of their horns or rubbing their noses with dainty hoofs.

That night Wargrave slept at a dak-bungalow near the terminus in a little native town with a small branch-railway connecting it with a main line. Then for four days he travelled across the scorching plains of India, shut up in stuffy carriages with violet-hued gla.s.s windows and Venetian wooden shutters meant to exclude the heat and glare. Over bare plains broken by sudden flat-topped rocky hills, through closely-cultivated fields and stretches of scrub-jungle, by mud-walled villages, he journeyed day and night. The train crossed countless wide river-beds in which the streams had shrunk to mean rivulets; but when it clattered over the Ganges at Allahabad the sacred flood rolled a broad and sluggish current under the bridge on its way to the far-distant Bay of Bengal.

On the fourth night Wargrave slept on a bench in the waiting-room of a small junction, Niralda, from which a narrow-gauge railway branched off to the north from the main line through Eastern Bengal. At an early hour next morning he took his seat in the one first-cla.s.s carriage of the toy train, which journeyed through typical Bengal scenery by mud-banked rice-fields, groves of tall, feathery bamboos and hamlets of pretty palm-thatched huts, their roofs hidden by the broad green leaves of sprawling creepers. Soon across the sky to the north a dark, blurred line rose, stretching out of sight east and west. It grew clearer as the train sped on, more distinct. It was the great northern rampart of India, the Himalayas. Then, seeming to float in air high above the highest of the dark mountain peaks and utterly detached from them, the white crests of the Eternal Snows shone fairy-like against the blue sky.

As Wargrave gazed enraptured, suddenly hills and plain were shut out from his sight as the train plunged from the dazzling sunlight into the deep shadows of a tropical forest. And the subaltern recognised with a thrill of delight that he was entering the wonderful Terai Jungle, the marvelous belt of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas through a.s.sam and Bengal to the far Siwalik range, clothing their lower slopes or scaling their steep sides into Nepal and Bhutan. Deep in its recesses the rhinoceros, bison and buffalo hide, herds of wild elephants roam, tigers prey on the countless deer, and the great mountain bears descend to prowl in it for food. Frank had learned on the way that Ranga Duar was practically situated in it; and the knowledge almost consoled him for his exile in the promise of sport that kings might envy.

At a small wayside station in a clearing in the forest his railway journey ended. Beside the one small stone building two elephants were standing, incessantly swinging their trunks, flapping their ears and shifting their weight restlessly from leg to leg. Frank, on getting out of his carriage, learned with pleasure from their salaaming _mahouts_ (drivers) that these animals were to be his next means of transport, a novel one that harmonised with the surroundings. On the back of each great beast was a ma.s.sive, straw-filled pad secured by a rope pa.s.sing surcingle-wise around its body.

Each _mahout_ carried a gun, one a heavy rifle, the other a double-barrelled fowling-piece, which they offered to Wargrave.

"_Huzoor_!" (the Presence--a polite mode of address in Hindustani), said one man, "the _Burra_ Sahib (the Political Sahib) sends salaams and lends you these, as you might see something to shoot on the way."

"Oh, the Political Officer. Very kind of him, I'm sure," remarked the subaltern. "What is his name?"

"Durro-Mut Sahib."

"What a curious name!" thought Frank. For in the vernacular "_durro mut_!" means, "Do not be afraid!" He concluded that it was a nickname.

"Why is he called that?" he asked in Hindustani.

"Because the Sahib is a very brave sahib," replied the man. "Where he is there no one need fear."

The other _mahout_ nodded a.s.sent, then said:

"The Commanding Sahib has sent Your Honour from the Mess a basket with food and drink. I have put it on the table in the _babu's_ (clerk's) office in the station."

Frank blessed his new C.O. for his thoughtfulness and made a welcome meal while he watched his baggage being loaded on to one of the elephants.

"_Buth_!" (Lie down) cried the _mahout_; and the obedient animal slowly sank to its knees and stretched out its legs before and behind. Frank's "boy" mounted timorously when the luggage had been strapped on to the pad. When the subaltern was ready the second elephant was ordered to kneel down for him; and he clambered up awkwardly and clung on tightly when the _mahout_, getting astride of the great neck, made it rise.

Along a broad road cut through the forest the huge beasts lumbered with a plunging, swaying stride that was very tiring to a novice. Holding both guns Frank glanced continually ahead, aside and behind him with a delicious feeling of excited hope that at any moment some dangerous wild beast might appear. On either hand the dense undergrowth of great, flower-covered bushes and curving fan-shaped palms, restricted the view to a few yards. From its dense tangle rose the giant trunks of huge trees, their leafy crowns striving to push through the thick canopy of vegetation overhead into the life-giving air and sunshine.

But no wild animal appeared to cheer Wargrave on the long way; and as hour after hour went by his whole body ached with the strain of sitting upright without a support to his back and being jolted violently at every step of the elephant. At last they reached a clearing in the forest where stood the _mahout's_ huts and a tall, wooden building, the _peelkhana_, or elephant stables. It lay at the foot of the mountains; and from here the road wound upwards among the lower hills, under steep cliffs, by the brink of precipices and beside deep ravines down which brawling streams tumbled.

As the party mounted higher and ever higher the big trees fell away behind them until Frank could look down on a sea of foliage stretching away out of sight east and west but bounded on the south by the Plains of India seen vaguely through the shimmering heat-haze. Up, up they climbed, until far above him he caught glimpses of buildings dotted about among jungle-clad knolls and spurs jutting out from the dark face of the mountains. And at last as evening shadows began to lengthen they reached a lovely recess in the hills, a deep horse-shoe; and in it an artificially-levelled parade-ground, a rifle-range running up a gully, a few bungalows dotted about among the trees and lines of single-storied barracks enclosed by a loopholed stone wall told Wargrave that he had come to his journey's end. This was his place of exile--this was Ranga Duar.

CHAPTER VI

A BORDER OUTPOST

"What a beautiful spot!" thought Frank as he gazed entranced at the scenery. "I've never seen anything like it. It looks like Heaven after the ugliness of Rohar. And how delightfully cool it is, too, up in the mountains! Well, with this climate and good shooting in the forest below life won't be as dreadful as I thought. I wish poor Violet were here out of the heat and glare. How she'd love all this beauty, these trees, these gardens, the glorious mountains!"

He sighed as he thought of the woman who was so far away.

"_Huzoor_, that is the Mess" broke in the voice of his _mahout_, as he pointed to a long, red-tiled building half-hidden among the trees a few hundred feet above them. To reach it they had to pa.s.s a large, well-built stone bungalow, two-storied, unlike all the others and standing in a lovely garden glowing with the vivid hues of the flowers, the flaming red of huge bushes of bougainvillea and poinsettia. Frank, glancing towards it, was about to ask the _mahout_ who lived in it when he started in horror and cried to the man:

"Stop! Stop your animal! Look there!"

And he s.n.a.t.c.hed at his rifle. For on the farther side of the house a huge tusker elephant in the garden stood over a little European boy about four years old, who was sprawling almost under the huge feet. And high above its head the brute held in its curved trunk a younger child, a girl with long golden curls, as if about to dash it to the ground.

As Frank grasped the rifle the _mahout_, who had turned at his cry, seized the barrel and said with a smile:

"_Durro mut_, Sahib! Do not fear, sir. Those are Durro Mut Sahib's babies and the elephant is their playmate."

And as he spoke Wargrave saw the elder child spring up from the ground and beat the great animal's legs with his tiny hands, crying:

"_Mujh-ko bhi_, Badshah! _Mujh-ko bhi! Uth! Uth!_ (Me too, Badshah! Me too! Take me up!)"

And the baby held aloft was crowing in glee and kicking its fat little legs frantically. The elephant lowered it tenderly to the ground and picked up the boy in its stead and lifted him into the air, while he laughed and clapped his hands. The two _mahouts_ raised their palms respectfully to their foreheads and cried to their animals:

"_Salaam kuro_! (Salute!)"

And the two trunks were lifted together in the _Salaamut_, the royal salute given to Kings and Viceroys.

Frank's _mahout_ explained.

"_Gharib Parwar_ (Protector of the Poor), the pagan ignorant Hindus around here say that the elephant is a G.o.d. Aye, and that his master, Durro Mut Sahib, is one too. _That's_ like enough. Well, Allah alone knows the truth of everything. But those two are more than mere man and animal, that is certain. _Mul, Moti_! (Go on, Pearl!)"

And he kicked his elephant under the ears with his bare feet to quicken her pace. But Frank bade him stop. Despite the man's optimism he could not believe it wise to allow tiny tots like that to play with such a huge, clumsy animal. He was sure that their mother would be horrified if she knew it. He loved children, and felt that it was madness to allow these babies to continue their dangerous pastime.