There were many more causes than one that worked together to make
possible the entry of Brown and his little force into Jailpore. They
were brave men; they were more than brave and they held the ace of
trumps, as Brown had stated, in the person of the fakir known as “He.”
But luck favored them as well, and but for luck they must have perished
half a dozen times.
They marched the whole of the first afternoon, and met no one. They only
overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for
Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be
the advance-guard of a larger force. The very idiocy of marching eleven
strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their favor.
Nobody could believe that there were no more than eleven of them. Even
the English could not be such lunatics!
That night, they rested for a while, and then went on again. During the
day following they lay in a hollow between some trees and rested, and
slept by turns. They suffered agonies from the heat, and not a little
from hunger, and once or twice they were hard put to it to stop the
Rajput's charger from neighing when a native pony passed along the
nearby road. But night came again, and with it the screen of darkness
for their strange, almost defenseless caravan. Once or twice the
fakir tried to shout an alarm to passing villagers, but the quick and
energetic application of a cleaning-rod by Brown stopped him always
in the nick of time, and they came within sight of the battlements of
Jailpore without an accident.
Then, though, their problem became really serious, and it was a series
of circumstances altogether out of their control and not connected
with them that made their entry possible. The mutineers in Jailpore had
learned that Kendrick sahib was coming down on them from the north by
forced marches with thirty-five hundred men or more. They were putting
the place into a state of siege, and getting ready by all means in their
power to oppose him.
Little attention was being paid to small parties of arrivals from no man
knew or cared where. And, in a final effort to find the four who were
the lure that was bringing Kendrick down on them, the city was once
more being turned upside down and inside out, and men were even being
tortured who were thought to know of hiding-places.
With purely Eastern logic, the leaders of the rebels had decided that
the sight of the bodies of the four, writhing in their last agony on the
sun-scorched outer wall, would mightily discourage the British when they
came. So no efforts were being spared and no stones left unturned to
find them. The hooks on the wall were sharp and ready, so that they
might be impaled without loss of time in full view of their would-be
rescuers.
Almost every secret passage of the thousand odd had been explored. In
the hurry to run through them and explore the next one, doors had been
left open here and there that had been kept closed in some instances for
centuries.
One door in particular, placed cornerwise in a buttress of the outer
wall, was spotted by Juggut Khan as he circled round the city on his
charger at dusk on the day following their arrival. He brought his
charger back to where the others lay concealed, and then went on an
exploring-expedition on foot--to discover that the outer city wall
was like a sponge, a nest of honey-combed cells and passages wandering
interminably in the fifty-foot-thick brick and rubble rampart.
And while he searched amid the mazy windings of the wall, Bill Brown sat
in the forked top of a tree and studied out the ground-plan of the city.
He was imprinting landmarks in his memory for future reference, and
trying--with a brain that ached from the apparent hopelessness of the
task--to figure out a plan.
He knew by now that the four he had come to rescue were hidden
underneath the powder-magazine, and he could see the magazine itself.
But he could think of no way of rescuing them, for the city absolutely
boiled with frantic, mixed-up castes and creeds picked at random, and
thrown in at random from the whole of India. A mouse could not have
passed through the streets undetected! And yet, from a soldier's point
of view, there were certain fascinating details to be noticed about
that powder-magazine. In the first place, it had been constructed for
a granary by an emperor who never heard of Joseph, but who had the same
ideal plan for cornering the people's food-supply. And since labor had
been unlimited, and cheap, he had gone about building the thing on the
most thoroughly unpractical and most pretentious plan that he and his
architects could figure out. It was big enough to hold about ten times
as much grain as the province could grow in any one year of plenty. And,
since that was the least practical and most ungranary-like shape, he had
caused it to be built like an enormous beehive, with a tiny platform at
the top.
Winding round and round the huge stone dome, and on the outside, was a
six-foot-wide trail, which was the elevator. Up this, each with a sack
or a basket on his head, the population was to have been induced to run
in single file, dumping its hard-won corn into the granary through an
opening at the top until the granary was full.
The emperor died--by poison--before he could see his cherished project
put into execution, but he had been a very thorough calculator, and
a builder who believed in permanency. He had foreseen that when the
granary was full, and the screw-jacks were turned beneath the cost of
living, there would probably be efforts made by unwashed, untutored,
unenlightened mobs to rape his storehouse. So he had made the little
platform at the top a veritable fortress of a place, such as a handful
of men could hold against a hundred thousand.
There was no known entrance to the granary above ground, except on the
ground level, where a huge stone gateway frowned above a teak-and-iron
door. Above that door there were galleries, and fortalices and cunningly
invented battlements in miniature, from behind whose shelter a resolute
defending-party could pour out a hundred different kinds of death on a
hungry crowd. The place was naturally fire-proof and naturally cool--as
far as any building can be cool in Central India. It was a first-class,
ideal powder-magazine, if useless as a granary; and the last new
conquerors of India had hastened to adopt it as a means of storing up
the explosive medicine with which they kept their foothold.
Naturally, none but White soldiers, and a very few of the more trusted
natives, had ever been allowed to go inside the powder-magazine.
The secret passages beneath it had never been intended for public
convenience or information. They had been designed as a means of rushing
defenders secretly into the granary, and they connected with a tunnel
underneath the palace that had just been burned. They also connected
with the outer wall in such a way that defenders from the ramparts might
be rushed there too, if wanted in a hurry. But, since there never had
been corn kept in the granary, and nobody had ever had the slightest
need to force an entrance, the knowledge even of the existence of the
passages had become barely a memory, and there was not a man living in
Jailpore who knew exactly where they began or where they ended. There
was a man outside who knew, but none inside.
The point about the powder-magazine which most appealed to Brown--next
after his knowledge of its contents, mineral and human--was the fact
that the little platform at its summit overlooked the city-wall, and
that the side of the granary actually touched the wall on the side of
the city farthest from where he sat and spied it out. Ten men on that
protected platform, he thought, might suffer from the sun, but they
could hold the building and command a good-sized section of the city
ramparts against all comers.
He noticed too, though that seemed immaterial at the time, that one
well-aimed shot from heavy ordnance might crash through the upper dome
and set off the powder underneath. There was no artillery that could
be brought against the place, either with the British force or with the
mutineers, but the thought set him to wondering how much powder there
might be stored on the huge round floor below, and what would happen
should it become ignited. It was a sanguinary, interesting, subtle kind
of thought, that suited the condition of his brain exactly! He climbed
down from the tree, feeling almost good-natured.
At the bottom he met Juggut Khan, waiting for him patiently.
“What have you seen, sahib?” he asked him. “Have you formed a plan?”
“I've been wishing I was Joshua!” said Brown. “I'd like to make my men
march round the city and blow trumpets, and then see the walls fall
down. I can think of several things to do, if we could only get inside.
But I can't think how to get there.”
“I have found a way in!” said Juggut Khan. “I have cross-questioned
that fakir of ours as well, with a little assistance from a cleaning-rod
wielded by one of your men. He knows the way too. He says he is the only
man who knows it--in which he lies, since I too have discovered it. But
his knowledge may help as well.”
“What's that about a cleaning-rod?” asked Brown.
“It was used on him to help him forget his vow of silence.”
“When?”
“When you were up that tree, sahib!”
“Have you been giving my man orders?”
“Nay, sahib!”
“How did he come to beat the fakir, then?”
“We both arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment, and the
fakir received the benefit!”
“Who held him, you?”
“Nay, sahib! God forbid! I am a clean man. I listened to his
conversation. The Beluchi held him.”
“Oh! Well, I like you well enough, Juggut Khan, but there are things
about you that I don't like. You're too fond of doing things on your own
responsibility, and you're much too fond of using oaths. Y our soul
is none o' my business; you're a heathen anyhow, and no longer in the
Service. But, I'll trouble you not to use those disgraceful oaths of
yours in the presence of the men! Do you understand me?”
“I understand you, sahib. If my respect for all your other qualities
were not so profound, I would laugh at you! As it is, if your honor
should see fit to turn the bullocks loose, and tie the fakir fast
between two men and follow me, it seems to me dark enough by now, and I
know the way. Might I furthermore suggest that the ammunition-box would
make a reasonable load for another two men?”
“Hadn't we better bring our rifles too?” asked Brown sarcastically.
“Upon my honor, Juggut Khan! You're getting childish! Are your nerves
upset, or what? Lead on, man! Lead on!”
“Listen. There are two ways, sahib. One way leads from the burned-out
barracks to the cellar where the women lie hidden. That way is closed by
debris. The other way leads from the outer wall by a very winding route
to the cellar where the women are. The fakir knows that way, and I do
not, though I know of it. There is a third way, though, that leads from
the outer wall, where I have been exploring, straight almost, if you
disregard a wind or two, to the inside of the powder-magazine. It
enters the magazine through a doorway secretly contrived in an upright
pillar--or so the fakir swears. Now this is my notion, sahib. If we
go in by the lower way, we must come out that way, and run the risk of
being caught as we emerge. That risk will be greatly enhanced when
we have frightened women with us whose eyes have been blinded by the
darkness. But, if we go in by the upper way, and enter the magazine
itself, I can make the fakir show us how to lift the stone trapdoor I
spoke of--the one that I closed when I hid the women. Then I can ascend
with him, and with say four men, while you ascend to the platform at the
top with the remainder of the men, and guard our rear and our exit.
From the top, you will be able to see us as we emerge, and can cover our
retreat, and follow.”
“That sounds like a roundabout sort of plan to me!” said Brown. “Why not
go straight in by the lower route, and gather up the women, and carry
'em out, and make a bolt for it?”
“Because, sahib, we will be at the fakir's mercy.”
“Nonsense! He's at our mercy.”
“Think, sahib! There, he will be in his own bat's nest, so to speak.
These fakirs are the only men who know the windings of all the secret
passages. They are the rats of religion and intrigue. At any step he
might lead us into an ambush, and we might be overwhelmed before we knew
that we were attacked. If we go the other way, though, I can lead the
way myself, and we need only take the fakir to show us how to open the
door.”
“Very well,” said Brown. “Let's get a move on, though! I'm beginning to
think that you're a better talker than a fighter, Juggut Khan!”
“Yes, sahib? I trust there will be no fighting!” But the Rajput smiled
as he said it, and thought of a certain lance-shaft which had been
broken in the streets of Jailpore.
“Lead on! Fall in behind me, men! Walk quietly, now, and remember. Hold
your tongues! Each man keep his eye on me, and a finger on the trigger!”
The Beluchi and the fakir and Juggut Khan moved in the van, with two
men to hold the fakir. Next marched, or rather tiptoed, Sergeant Brown,
followed by the other men in single file. In that order they hastened
after Juggut Khan, through the darkness, across a dried-out moat and
round the corner of a huge stone buttress. There they disappeared inside
the wall, and a stone swung round and closed the gap behind the last of
them. There was no alarm given, and not a sign or a sound of any kind
to betoken that any one had seen them. Inside the walls the city roared
like a flood-fed maelstrom, and outside all was darkness and the silence
of the dead.