'Carter Sahib is forward--not there. There is nothing behind us.'
'There is,' said the subaltern. 'The squadron's walking on it's own
tail.'
Then the Major in command moved down to the rear swearing softly and
asking for the blood of Lieutenant Halley--the subaltern who had just
spoken.
'Look after your rearguard,' said the Major. 'Some of your infernal
thieves have got lost. They're at the head of the squadron, and
you're a several kinds of idiot.'
'Shall I tell off my men, sir?' said the subaltern sulkily, for he
was feeling wet and cold.
'Tell 'em off!' said the Major. '_Whip_ 'em off, by Gad! You're
squandering them all over the place. There's a troop behind you
_now_!'
'So I was thinking,' said the subaltern calmly. 'I have all my men
here, sir. Better speak to Carter.'
'Carter Sahib sends salaam and wants to know why the regiment is
stopping,' said a trooper to Lieutenant Halley.
'Where under heaven _is_ Carter?' said the Major.
'Forward with his troop,' was the answer.
'Are we walking in a ring, then, or are we the centre of a blessed
brigade?' said the Major.
By this time there was silence all along the column. The horses were
still; but, through the drive of the fine rain, men could hear the
feet of many horses moving over stony ground.
'We're being stalked,' said Lieutenant Halley.
'They've no horses here. Besides they'd have fired before this,' said
the Major. 'It's--it's villagers' ponies.'
'Then our horses would have neighed and spoilt the attack long ago.
They must have been near us for half an hour,' said the subaltern.
'Queer that we can't smell the horses,' said the Major, damping his
finger and rubbing it on his nose as he sniffed up wind.
'Well, it's a bad start,' said the subaltern, shaking the wet from
his overcoat. 'What shall we do, sir?'
'Get on,' said the Major. 'We shall catch it to-night.'
The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there
was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on small
stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that
would have waked the dead.
'Now we've gone and done it,' said Lieutenant Halley. 'All the
hillside awake, and all the hillside to climb in the face of
musketry-fire. This comes of trying to do night-hawk work.'
The trembling trooper picked himself up, and tried to explain that
his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of
loose stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There was no
need for reasons. The Major's big Australian charger blundered next,
and the column came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard
of little cairns all about two feet high. The man[oe]uvres of the
squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt like mounted
quadrilles without training and without the music; but at last the
horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way, walked clear of
the cairns, till every man of the squadron re-formed and drew rein a
few yards up the slope of the hill. Then, according to Lieutenant
Halley, there was another scene very like the one which has been
described. The Major and Carter insisted that all the men had not
joined rank, and that there were more of them in the rear clicking
and blundering among the dead men's cairns. Lieutenant Halley told
off his own troopers again and resigned himself to wait. Later on he
told me:--
'I didn't much know, and I didn't much care what was going on. The
row of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country,
and I would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full
regiment in the rear, and _they_ were making row enough to rouse all
Afghanistan. I sat tight, but nothing happened.'
The mysterious part of the night's work was the silence on the
hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost
huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected by the
time that the Major had sworn himself into a state of quiet that the
watchmen there would open fire. When nothing occurred, they said that
the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and
thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (a) that he
had left no one behind among the cairns, and (b) that he was not
being taken in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The
men's tempers were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were lathered and
unquiet, and one and all prayed for the daylight.
They set themselves to climb up the hill, each man leading his mount
carefully. Before they had covered the lower slopes or the
breastplates had begun to tighten, a thunderstorm came up behind,
rolling across the low hills and drowning any noise less than that of
cannon. The first flash of the lightning showed the bare ribs of the
ascent, the hill-crest standing steely blue against the black sky,
the little falling lines of the rain, and, a few yards to their left
flank, an Afghan watch-tower, two-storied, built of stone, and
entered by a ladder from the upper story. The ladder was up, and a
man with a rifle was leaning from the window. The darkness and the
thunder rolled down in an instant, and, when the lull followed, a
voice from the watch-tower cried, 'Who goes there?'
The cavalry were very quiet, but each man gripped his carbine and
stood beside his horse. Again the voice called, 'Who goes there?'
and in a louder key, 'O, brothers, give the alarm!' Now, every man in
the cavalry would have died in his long boots sooner than have asked
for quarter; but it is a fact that the answer to the second call was
a long wail of 'Marf karo! Marf karo!' which means, 'Have mercy! Have
mercy!' It came from the climbing regiment.
The cavalry stood dumbfoundered, till the big troopers had time to
whisper one to another: 'Mir Khan, was that thy voice? Abdullah,
didst _thou_ call?' Lieutenant Halley stood beside his charger and
waited. So long as no firing was going on he was content. Another
flash of lightning showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding
heads, the men, white eye-balled, glaring beside them and the stone
watch-tower to the left. This time there was no head at the window,
and the rude iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle bullet was
closed.
'Go on, men,' said the Major. 'Get up to the top at any rate.' The
squadron toiled forward, the horses wagging their tails and the men
pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside and the
sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never heard a
squadron make so much noise in his life. They scrambled up, he said,
as though each horse had eight legs and a spare horse to follow him.
Even then there was no sound from the watch-tower, and the men
stopped exhausted on the ridge that overlooked the pit of darkness in
which the village of Bersund lay. Girths were loosed, curb-chains
shifted, and saddles adjusted, and the men dropped down among the
stones. Whatever might happen now, they had the upper ground of any
attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft thick darkness
of a winter night before the dawn covered them all. Except for the
sound of falling water among the ravines below, everything was still.
They heard the shutter of the watch-tower below them thrown back with
a clang, and the voice of the watcher calling: 'Oh, Hafiz Ullah!'
The echoes took up the call, 'La-la-la!' And an answer came from the
watch-tower hidden round the curve of the hill, 'What is it, Shahbaz
Khan?'
Shahbaz Khan replied in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer:
'Hast thou seen?'