“I must have your names.”
In my agitation I gave my real one. Raffles had turned away, as though
in heart-broken contemplation of our lost loot. I saw the officer
studying his half-profile with an alarming face.
“What’s _your_ name?” he rapped out at last.
But his strange, low voice said plainly that he knew, and Raffles faced
him with the monosyllable of confession and assent. I did not count the
seconds until the next word, but it was Captain Bellingham who uttered
it at last.
“I thought you were dead.”
“Now you see I am not.”
“But you are at your old games!”
“I am not,” cried Raffles, and his tone was new to me. I have seldom
heard one more indignant. “Yes,” he continued, “this is loot, and the
wrong ’un will out. That’s what you’re thinking, Peter—I beg your
pardon—sir. But he isn’t let out in the field! We’re playing the game
as much as you are, old—sir.”
The plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous look.
“Is this the fellah who was taken when you swam for it?” he inquired,
relapsing into his drawl. Raffles said I was, and with that took a
passionate oath upon our absolute rectitude as volunteers. There could
be no doubting him; but the officer’s eyes went back at the bottles on
the stoop.
“But look at those,” said he; and as he looked himself the light eye
melted in his fiery face. “And I’ve got Sparklets in my tent,” he
sighed. “You make it in a minute!”
Not a word from Raffles, and none, you may be sure, from me. Then
suddenly Bellingham told me where his tent was, and, adding that our
case was one for serious consideration, strode in its direction without
another word until some sunlit paces separated us.
“You can bring that stuff with you,” he then flung over a
shoulder-strap, “and I advise you to put it where you had it before.”
A trooper saluted him some yards further on, and looked evilly at us as
we followed with our loot. It was Corporal Connal of ours, and the
thought of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant captain who only
that day had joined our division with the reinforcements. I could not
stand the man myself. He added soda-water to our whiskey in his tent,
and would only keep a couple of bottles when we came away. Softened by
the spirit, to which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer
was soon convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once,
and for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles
talked cricket without a break. On parting they even shook hands; that
was Long John in the captain’s head; but the snob never addressed a
syllable to me.
And now to the gallows-bird who was still corporal of our troop: it was
not long before Raffles was to have his wish and the traitor’s wicket.
We had resumed our advance, or rather our humble part in the great
surrounding movement then taking place, and were under pretty heavy
fire once more, when Connal was shot in the hand. It was a curious
casualty in more than one respect, and nobody seems to have seen it
happen. Though a flesh wound, it was a bloody one, and that may be why
the surgeon did not at once detect those features which afterwards
convinced him that the injury had been self-inflicted. It was the right
hand, and until it healed the man could be of no further use in the
firing line; nor was the case serious enough for admission to a crowded
field-hospital; and Connal himself offered his services as custodian of
a number of our horses which we were keeping out of harm’s way in a
donga. They had come there in the following manner: That morning we had
been heliographed to reinforce the C.M.R., only to find that the enemy
had the range to a nicety when we reached the spot. There were trenches
for us men, but no place of safety for our horses nearer than this long
and narrow donga which ran from within our lines towards those of the
Boers. So some of us galloped them thither, six-in-hand, amid the whine
of shrapnel and the whistle of shot. I remember the man next me being
killed by a shell with all his team, and the tangle of flying harness,
torn horseflesh, and crimson khaki, that we left behind us on the
veldt; also that a small red flag, ludicrously like those used to
indicate a putting-green, marked the single sloping entrance to the
otherwise precipitous donga, which I for one was duly thankful to reach
alive.
The same evening Connal, with a few other light casualties to assist
him, took over the charge for which he had volunteered and for which he
was so admirably fitted by his knowledge of horses and his general
experience of the country; nevertheless, he managed to lose three or
four fine chargers in the course of the first night; and, early in the
second, Raffles shook me out of a heavy slumber in the trenches where
we had been firing all day.
“I have found the spot, Bunny,” he whispered; “we ought to out him
before the night is over.”
“Connal?”
Raffles nodded.
“You know what happened to some of his horses last night? Well, he let
them go himself.”
“Never!”
“I’m as certain of it,” said Raffles, “as though I’d seen him do it;
and if he does it again I shall see him. I can even tell you how it
happened. Connal insisted on having one end of the donga to himself,
and of course his end is the one nearest the Boers. Well, then, he
tells the other fellows to go to sleep at their end—I have it direct
from one of them—and you bet they don’t need a second invitation. The
rest I hope to see to-night.”
“It seems almost incredible,” said I.
“Not more so than the Light Horseman’s dodge of poisoning the troughs;
that happened at Ladysmith before Christmas; and two kind friends did
for that blackguard what you and I are going to do for this one, and a
firing-party did the rest. Brutes! A mounted man’s worth a file on foot
in this country, and well they know it. But this beauty goes one better
than the poison; that was wilful waste; but I’ll eat my wideawake if
our loss last night wasn’t the enemy’s double gain! What we’ve got to
do, Bunny, is to catch him in the act. It may mean watching him all
night, but was ever game so well worth the candle?”
One may say in passing that, at this particular point of contact, the
enemy were in superior force, and for once in a mood as aggressive as
our own. They were led with a dash, and handled with a skill, which did
not always characterize their commanders at this stage of the war.
Their position was very similar to ours, and indeed we were to spend
the whole of next day in trying with an equal will to turn each other
out. The result will scarcely be forgotten by those who recognize the
occasion from these remarks. Meanwhile it was the eve of battle (most
evenings were), and there was that villain with the horses in the
donga, and here were we two upon his track.
Raffles’s plan was to reconnoitre the place, and then take up a
position from which we could watch our man and pounce upon him if he
gave us cause. The spot that we eventually chose and stealthily
occupied was behind some bushes through which we could see down into
the donga; there were the precious horses; and there sure enough was
our wounded corporal, sitting smoking in his cloak, some glimmering
thing in his lap.
“That’s his revolver, and it’s a Mauser,” whispered Raffles. “He shan’t
have a chance of using it on us; either we must be on him before he
knows we are anywhere near, or simply report. It’s easily proved once
we are sure; but I should like to have the taking of him too.”
There was a setting moon. Shadows were sharp and black. The man smoked
steadily, and the hungry horses did what I never saw horses do before;
they stood and nibbled at each other’s tails. I was used to sleeping in
the open, under the jewelled dome that seems so much vaster and grander
in these wide spaces of the earth. I lay listening to the horses, and
to the myriad small strange voices of the veldt, to which I cannot even
now put a name, while Raffles watched. “One head is better than two,”
he said, “when you don’t want it to be seen.” We were to take watch and
watch about, however, and the other might sleep if he could; it was not
my fault that I did nothing else; it was Raffles who could trust nobody
but himself. Nor was there any time for recriminations when he did
rouse me in the end.
But a moment ago, as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the
stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another
the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of
Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day. It was an
occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a bullet
as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame for the one bit of
detail on a blue hill-side, was an unpleasant warning that we two on
ours were a target in ourselves. But Raffles paid no attention to their
fire; he was pointing downward through the bushes to where Corporal
Connal stood with his back to us, shooing a last charger out of the
mouth of the donga towards the Boer trenches.
“That’s his third,” whispered Raffles, “but it’s the first I’ve seen
distinctly, for he waited for the blind spot before the dawn. It’s
enough to land him, I fancy, but we mustn’t lose time. Are you ready
for a creep?”
I stretched myself, and said I was; but I devoutly wished it was not
quite so early in the morning.
“Like cats, then, till he hears, and then into him for all we’re worth.
He’s stowed his iron safe away, but he mustn’t have time even to feel
for it. You take his left arm, Bunny, and hang on to that like a
ferret, and I’ll do the rest. Ready? Then now!”
And in less time than it would take to tell, we were over the lip of
the donga and had fallen upon the fellow before he could turn his head;
nevertheless, for a few instants he fought like a wild beast, striking,
kicking, and swinging me off my feet as I obeyed my instructions to the
letter, and stuck to his left like a leech. But he soon gave that up,
panting and blaspheming, demanded explanations in his hybrid tongue
that had half a brogue and half a burr. What were we doing? What had he
done? Raffles at his back, with his right wrist twisted round and
pinned into the small of it, soon told him that, and I think the words
must have been the first intimation that he had as to who his
assailants were.
“So it’s you two!” he cried, and a light broke over him. He was no
longer trying to shake us off, and now he dropped his curses also, and
stood chuckling to himself instead. “Well,” he went on, “you’re bloody
liars both, but I know something else that you are, so you’d better let
go.”
A coldness ran through me, and I never saw Raffles so taken aback. His
grip must have relaxed for a fraction of time, for our captive broke
out in a fresh and desperate struggle, but now we pinned him tighter
than ever, and soon I saw him turning green and yellow with the pain.
“You’re breaking my wrist!” he yelled at last.
“Then stand still and tell us who we are.”
And he stood still and told us our real names. But Raffles insisted on
hearing how he had found us out, and smiled as though he had known what
was coming when it came. I was dumbfounded.
The accursed hound had followed us that evening to Captain Bellingham’s
tent, and his undoubted cleverness in his own profession of spy had
done the rest.
“And now you’d better let me go,” said the master of the situation, as
I for one could not help regarding him.
“I’ll see you damned,” said Raffles, savagely.
“Then you’re damned and done for yourself, my cocky criminal. Raffles
the burglar! Raffles the society thief! Not dead after all, but ’live
and ’listed. Send him home and give him fourteen years, and won’t he
like ’em, that’s all!”
“I shall have the pleasure of hearing you shot first,” retorted
Raffles, through his teeth, “and that alone will make them bearable.
Come on, Bunny, let’s drive the swine along and get it over.”
And drive him we did, he cursing, cajoling, struggling, gloating, and
blubbering by turns. But Raffles never wavered for an instant, though
his face was tragic, and it went to my heart, where that look stays
still. I remember at the time, though I never let my hold relax, there
was a moment when I added my entreaties to those of our prisoner.
Raffles did not even reply to me. But I was thinking of him, I swear. I
was thinking of that gray set face that I never saw before or after.
“Your story will be tested,” said the commanding officer, when Connal
had been marched to the guard-tent. “Is there any truth in his?”
“It is perfectly true, sir.”
“And the notorious Raffles has been alive all these years, and you are
really he?”
“I am, sir.”
“And what are you doing at the front?”
Somehow I thought that Raffles was going to smile, but the grim set of
his mouth never altered, neither was there any change in the ashy
pallor which had come over him in the donga when Connal mouthed his
name. It was only his eyes that lighted up at the last question.
“I am fighting, sir,” said he, as simply as any subaltern in the army.
The commanding officer inclined a grizzled head perceptibly, and no
more. He was not one of any school, our General; he had his own ways,
and we loved both him and them; and I believe that he loved the rough
but gallant corps that bore his name. He once told us that he knew
something about most of us, and there were things that Raffles had done
of which he must have heard. But he only moved his grizzled head.
“Did you know he was going to give you away?” he asked at length, with
a jerk of it toward the guard-tent.
“Yes, sir.”
“But you thought it worth while, did you?”
“I thought it necessary, sir.”
The General paused, drumming on his table, making up his mind. Then his
chin came up with the decision that we loved in him.
“I shall sift all this,” said he. “An officer’s name was mentioned, and
I shall see him myself. Meanwhile you had better go on—fighting.”