The Truants Part 26

"Well?" said Mudge.

"Wait a moment!"

Pamela Mardale was Millie Stretton's friend. There was that incident in the hall--Millie Stretton coming down the stairs and Pamela in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece. Finally there was Pamela's persistent presence at Millie Stretton's house this afternoon. One by one the incidents gathered in his recollections and fitted themselves together and explained each other. Was this offer a pretext to get him out of the way? Callon, after all, was not a fool, and he asked himself why in the world Mr. Mudge should, just at this moment when he was in desperate straits, offer him 2000_l_. a year to superintend a railway in Chili?

"Well?" said Mudge again.

"I must have time to think over the proposition," replied Callon. He meant that he must have time to obtain an interview with Millie Stretton. But Mudge was ready for him.

"Certainly," said he. "That is only reasonable. It is seven o'clock now. You dine with me at eight. Give me your answer then."

"I should like till to-morrow morning," said Callon.

Mr. Mudge shook his head.

"That, I am afraid, is impossible. We shall need all tomorrow to make the necessary arrangements and to talk over your duties. For if you undertake the work you must leave England on the day after."

Callon started up in protest. "On the day after!" he exclaimed.

"It gives very little time, I know," said Mudge. Then he looked Callon quietly and deliberately in the eyes. "But, you see, I want to get you out of the country at once."

Callon no longer doubted. He had thought, through Mr. Mudge's help, to laugh at his enemy; and lo! the enemy was Mudge himself. It was Mudge who had bought up his debts, who now held him in so secure a grip that he did not think it worth while to practise any concealment. Callon was humiliated to the verge of endurance. Two years in Chili, pretending to supervise a railway! He understood the position which he would occupy; he was within an ace of flinging the offer back. But he dared not.

"Very well," he said. "I will give you my answer at eight."

"Thanks. Be punctual." Mr. Mudge sauntered away. There could only be the one answer. Mr. Lionel Callon might twist and turn as he pleased, he would spend two years in Chili. It was five minutes past seven, besides. Callon could hardly call at the house in Berkeley Square with any chance of seeing Lady Stretton between now and eight. Mudge was contented with his afternoon.

At eight o'clock Callon gave in his submission and pocketed the cheque. At eleven he proposed to go, but Mudge, mindful of an evening visit which he had witnessed from a balcony, could not part from his new manager so soon. There was so little time for discussion even with every minute of Callon's stay in England. He kept Callon with him until two o'clock in the morning; he made an appointment with him at ten, and there was a note of warning in his voice which bade Callon punctually keep it. By one shift and another he kept him busy all the next day, and in the evening Callon had to pack, to write his letters, and to make his arrangements for his departure. Moreover, Pamela Mardale dined quietly with Millie Stretton and stayed late. It thus happened that Callon left England without seeing Millie Stretton again. He could write, of course; but he could do no more.

CHAPTER XVIII

SOUTH OF OUARGLA

"Halt!" cried Captain Tavernay.

The bugler at his side raised his bugle to his lips and blew. The dozen cha.s.seurs d'Afrique and the ten native scouts who formed the advance guard stopped upon the signal. A couple of hundred yards behind them the two companies of the Foreign Legion came to a standstill. The convoy of baggage mules upon the right flank, the hospital equipment, the artillery section, the herd of oxen which was driven along in the rear, in a word, the whole expedition, halted in a wood of dwarf-oaks and junipers at three o'clock in the afternoon.

The order was given to gather wood for the night's camp fires, and the companies were dismissed. Each soldier made his little bundle and fixed it upon his shoulders. Again the bugle rang out, sounding the "Fall in." And the tiny force marched out from the trees of the high plateaux into the open desert. It was extraordinary with what abruptness that transition was made. One minute the companies were treading upon turf under rustling leaves, the next they were descending a slope carpeted with halfa-gra.s.s, which stretched away to the horizon's rim, with hardly a bush to break its bare monotony. At the limit of vision, a great arc like a mirror of silver glittered out of the plain.

"Water," said a tall, bearded soldier, who marched in the front rank of the first company. It was he who had stepped from the train at Bel-Abbes with a light dust-coat over his evening dress suit. He pa.s.sed now as Fusilier Barbier, an ex-engineer of Lyons.

"No," replied Sergeant Ohlsen, who marched at his side: "the crystals of a dry salt lake."

In the autumn of last year Ohlsen--or, rather, to give him his right name, Tony Stretton--had marched upon an expedition from Mesheria to the Chott Tigri, and knew, therefore, the look of those tantalising salt lakes. That expedition, which had conducted a surrey for a road to the Figuig oasis, had brought him his promotion.

"But we camp by the lake to-night," he added. "The wells of El-Guethifa are close."

The companies went forward, and above that salt lake they saw the mirages begin to shimmer, citadels and hanging gardens, tall towers and waving woods and majestic galleons, topsail over topsail, floating upon summer seas. At the wells the sheikh of the district was waiting upon a mule.

"I want fifty camels with their saddles and their drivers at five o'clock to-morrow morning," said Tavernay; and although as far as the eye could reach there was no moving thing upon that vast plain except the small group of Arabs and soldiers about the well, by five o'clock the camels were squatting upon the sand with their drivers beside them. The mules were sent back from El-Guethifa that morning, the baggage was packed upon the camels, and the little force, insufficient in numbers and supplies, went forward on its long and untoward march.

It pa.s.sed through the oases of El-Maia and Methlili to Ouargla, at that time the last outpost of French authority. At Ouargla it rested for a week; and there, renewing its supplies, penetrated southwards to survey the desert country of the Touaregs for the construction of the oft-mooted trans-Saharan railway. South of Ouargla all the difficulties of the advance were doubled. The companies went down through the archipelago of oases in the dangerous Touat country amongst a sullen people, who had little food to supply, and would hardly supply it. Tavernay led his men with care, neither practising a discipline needlessly strict, nor relaxing into carelessness. But he was under-officered, and his officers even so were inexperienced.

Lieutenant Laurent, a man irritable and unjust, was his second in command, and there were but two _sous-lieutenants_ besides. In spite of all Tavernay's care the convoy diminished. One day a camel would stumble on the slippery bottom of a salt marsh, fall, and break its limbs; the next another would fail, and die through a long-untended wound, caused by the rough saddle upon its back. In the ranks of the soldiers, too, there was trouble, and Laurent was not the man to deal with it. There was hardly a company of the Legion, recruited, as it so largely was, from the outcasts and the men of sorrows, in which there were not some of disordered minds, some whom absinthe had brought to the edge of insanity. Upon these the severity of the expedition bore heavily. Tents had been perforce discarded. The men slept under the stars. They woke from freezing nights to the bitter winds of dawn, and two hours after dawn they were parched by a burning sun, and all the day they suffered under its pitiless and blinding glare. Storms whelmed them in lofty spirals of whirling, choking sand. For a week they would toil over high red mountainous ground of loose stones; then would follow the monotony of bare round plains, piled here and there with black rocks, quivering and glittering in the heat; the sun rose day after day upon their left hand in scarlet, and set in scarlet upon their right, and they themselves were still the tiny centre of the same empty inhospitable s.p.a.ce; so that only the difference of the ground they trod, the feel of soft sand beneath their feet, where a minute before they had marched on gravel, told them that they progressed at all. The worst of the men became p.r.o.ne to disobedience, eager for change; and every now and then a soldier would rise upon his elbow in the night time, gaze furtively about over his sleeping comrades, watch the sentries until their backs were turned, and then crawl past them into the darkness. Of these men none ever returned. Or some mania would seize upon them and fix a strange idea in their brains, such as that which besieged Barbier, the fusilier, who had once stepped out of the railway carriage in his evening dress. He leaned over towards Stretton one evening, and said in a hoa.r.s.e, trembling voice--

"I can stand it no longer."

Both men were sitting by a tiny fire, which Barbier was feeding with handfuls of halfa-gra.s.s and sticks. He was kneeling up in front of it, and by the red waving light Stretton saw that his face was quivering with excitement.

"What can't you stand?" he asked.

"It is Captain Tavernay," replied Barbier. He suddenly laughed in a pitiful fashion, and cast a glance over his shoulder. "There is a man put on to watch me. Night and day I am watched by Captain Tavernay's orders. He wants to fix a crime on me! I know. He wants to trap me.

But let him take care!"

Stretton fetched the doctor, who listened for a while to Barbier's rambling, minatory talk, and then shrugged his shoulders.

"Hallucinations," said he. "Ideas of persecution. The commonest form,"

and having fixed Barbier into his proper category, he walked away.

There was nothing to be done for Barbier upon this expedition. He had to be watched; that was all. Thus for seven hundred miles the force pushed southwards from Ouargla, and thus from within it disintegrated as it went. Tavernay could not but notice the change, but he said nothing to any subordinate. The men would fight well if fighting happened. That he knew, and meanwhile he marched on.

It was just when the seven hundred miles had been completed that Tavernay realised fighting was likely to happen. He went the round of the camp as the sun was setting, when the rifles were piled and the fires crackling. Stretton was at his side, and saw his commander stop and shade his eyes. Tavernay was looking westwards. Far away against the glowing ball of the sun, which was just dipping down behind the plain, the figure of an Arab mounted upon a camel stood motionless and black. Tavernay swung round and looked behind him. On the crest of a sandhill to the north a second rider stood distinct against the sky.

Tavernay watched the men for a long time through his gla.s.ses.

"Touaregs," said he, gravely. "Masked Touaregs," and that night the sentinels were doubled; and in the morning the bugle did not sound the _reveille_.

Moreover, when the force advanced, it advanced in the formation of a square, with the baggage camels in the centre, one gun in the front line, and the other in the rear. They had marched into the country where the Senoussa sect prevailed. The monasteries of that body sent out their missionaries eastward to Khordofan, westwards to Tafilet, preaching the purification of the Mohammedan religion and the enlargement of Mohammedan countries now subject to the infidels. But nowhere had the missionaries raised their standard with more success than in this Touat country of the Sahara. The companies marched that day alert and cheerful. They were consolidated by the knowledge of danger. Captain Tavernay led them with pride.

"An insufficient force, ill-found, inadequately officered," he thought. "But the men are of the Legion." They were _mes enfants_ to him all that day.

But the attack was not yet to be delivered. During the night the two scouts had ridden on their swift Meharis northwestwards, to the town of Insalah. They knocked upon the gates of the great mud fortress of Abd-el-Kader, the sheikh, and were instantly admitted to the dark room where he sat upon a pile of rugs. When the eyes of the scouts became accustomed to the gloom, they saw there was yet another in the room, a tall man robed in black, with a black mask of cotton wound about his face so that only his eyes were visible. This was the chieftain of the Hoggar Touaregs.

"Well?" said Abd-el-Kader. And the scouts told him roughly the number of the force and the direction of the journey.

Then Abd-el-Kader turned to the Touareg chieftain.

"We will let them go further south, since southwards they are marching," he said, in his suave gentle voice. "A hundred miles more, and they will be amongst the sand dunes. Since they have cannon, the attack must be sudden. Let it be at the wells of Bir-el-Gharamo."

The Touareg chieftain rode out that day towards his hills; and, unmolested, Captain Tavernay's expedition went down to the dunes.

Great waves of yellow sand, sometimes three hundred feet from crest to base, intersected the face of the desert; the winds had given to their summits the overhang of a breaking sea; they ran this way and that, as though the currents of an ocean had directed their course; they had the very look of motion; so that Stretton could not but remember the roaring combers of the cold North Sea as he gazed upon these silent and arrested copies. They made of that country a maze of intricate valleys. Led by a local guide commandeered from the last oasis, the companies of the Legion marched into the maze, and on the second day saw, as they came over a hill, just below them in a narrow hollow, a mud parapet built about the mouth of a well. This was Bir-el-Gharamo, and here they camped. Sentries were posted on the neighbouring crests; suddenly the darkness came, and overhead the stars rushed down towards the earth. There was no moon that night, nor was there any sound of danger heard. Three times Tavernay went the round of the sentries, at eight and at ten and at twelve. But at three o'clock, just as the dawn was breaking, a shot was heard. Tavernay sprang up from the ground, the alarm rang out clear from the bugle over the infinite waste, the companies of the Legion seized their piled rifles and fell into battle order with an incredible neatness and expedition. There was no confusion, no noise. The square was formed about the well--the camels were knee-haltered in the middle, the guns placed at the corners. But it was still dark. A few shots were fired on the dunes, and the sentries came running back.

"Steady," cried Captain Tavernay. "They are coming. Fire low!"

The first volley rang out, and immediately afterwards on every side of that doomed square the impact of the Touaregs' charge fell like the blow of some monstrous hammer. All night they had been gathering noiselessly in the surrounding valleys. Now they had charged with lance and sword from the surrounding crests. Three sides of the square held their ground. The fourth wavered, crumpled in like a piece of broken cardboard, and the Arabs were within the square, stabbing at the backs of the soldiers, loosing and stampeding the camels. And at once, where deep silence had reigned a minute ago, the air was torn with shrill cries and oaths and the clamour of weapons. The square was broken; but here a group of men stood back to back, and with cartridge and bayonet held its ground; there another formed; and about each gun the men fought desperately. Meanwhile the morning came, a grey, clear light spread over the desert. Tavernay himself was with one of the machine-guns. It was dragged clear of the _melee_ and up a slope of sand. The soldiers parted in front of it, and its charge began to sweep the Touaregs down like swathes, and to pit the sand hills like a fall of rain. About the other gun the fight still raged.