Sons of the sons of war we be,
Sabred and horsed, and whole and free;
One is the caste, and one degree,--
One law,--one code decreed us.
Who heads wolves in the dawning day?
Who leaps in when the bull's at bay?
He who dare is he who may!
Now, rede ye who shall lead us!
THE check that Ralph Cunningham's management of his police had caused,
and the subsequent resumption of night looting, served to whet the
appetites of the hungry crowd beyond the border. Those closest to
Peshawur, who had always done the looting, were not the ultimate
consignees by any means; there were other tribes who bought from
them--others yet to whom they paid tribute in the shape of stolen
rifles. Cunningham's administration had upset the whole modus vivendi of
the lower Himalayas!
Though it all began again the moment he was superseded, there had been,
none the less, a three-month interregnum, and that had to be compensated
for. The tribes at the rear were clamorous and would not listen to
argument or explanation; they had collected in hundreds, led by the
notorious Khumel Khan, preparatory to raiding in real earnest and with
sufficient force to carry all before them at the first surprise attack.
They were disappointed when the pilfering resumed, for a tribal Hillman
would generally rather fight than eat, and would always prefer his
dinner from a dead enemy's cooking-pot. They sat about for a long time,
considering whether there were not excuse enough for war in any case
and listening to the intricately detailed information brought by the
deserting watchmen. And as they discussed things, but before they had
time to decide on any plan, the Brigadier commanding the Irregulars got
wind of them.
He was a man who did not worry about the feelings of senile heads of
red-tape-bound departments; nor was he particularly hidebound by respect
for the laws of evidence. When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he
either acted or did not act, as the circumstances might dictate. And
when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of
criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in
several colored inks, on all the special forms he could get hold of. The
heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying
to get the form of the report straightened out to be able to give any
attention to the details of it; and then it would be too late. But he
was a brigadier, and what he could do with impunity and quiet amusement
would have brought down the whole Anglo-Indian Government in awful wrath
on the head of a subordinate.
He heard of the tribesmen under Khumel Khan one evening. At dawn his
tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the
green grass. The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where
the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.
The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the
Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs
as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the
squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the
half-awakened plotters of the night before.
There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early
morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill. Long lances--devils'
antennae--searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought
cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed
troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments. In an hour, or less,
there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and
a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again
for a year or two to come.
But Khumel Khan was missing. Khumel Khan, the tulwar man--he whose boast
it was that he could hew through two men's necks at one whistling sweep
of his notched, curved cimeter--had broken through with a dozen at his
back. He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of
the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the
overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.
“Mr. Cunningham! Take your troop, please, and find their chief! Hunt him
out, ride him down, and get him! Don't come back until you do!”
The real thing! The real red thing within a year! A lone
command--and that is the only thing a subaltern of spunk may pray
for!--eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the
opportunity to show their worth--lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no
commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight--as sure as God made
mountains, a fight at the other end! There are men here and there who
think that the day when they pass down a crowded aisle with Her is the
great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun. And there
are others. There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming
of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit
out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the
other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.
There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to
make the compass seem like a lie-begotten trick. There were
gorges, hewn when the Titans needed dirt to build the awful
Himalayas--shadow-darkened--sheer as the edge of Nemesis. Long-reaching,
pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them. The wind blew
through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din
which rides with armed men.
But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part
of them, they tracked and trailed--and viewed at last. Their shout gave
Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue,
and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small,
flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time. His
companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the
rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry--his was
the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan
fresh villainies. He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the
uselessness, and stood.
The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of
him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which
the man at bay could no more escape than a fire-ringed scorpion.
“Call on him to surrender!” ordered Cunningham.
A chevroned black-beard half a horse-length behind him translated the
demand into stately Pashtu, and for answer the hill chieftain mounted
his stolen horse and shook his tulwar. He had pistols at his belt, but
he did not draw them; across his shoulder swung a five-foot-long jezail,
but he loosed it and flung it to the ground.
“Is there any here dare take me single-handed?” he demanded with a grin.
Of the eight-and-eighty, there were eighty-eight who dared; but there
was an eighty-ninth, a lad of not yet twenty-two, whom Indian chivalry
desired to honor. The troop had heard but the troop had not yet seen.
“Ride in and take him!” ordered Cunningham and there was a
thoroughly well acted make-believe of fear, while every eye watched
“Cunnigan-bahadur,” and the horses, spurred and reined at once, pranced
at their bits for just so long as a good man needs to make his mind up.
And Cunningham rode in.
He rode in as a Rajput rides, with a swoop and a swinging sabre and a
silent, tight-lipped vow that he would prove himself. Green though he
was yet, he knew that the troop had found for him--had rounded up for
him--had made him his opportunity; so he took it, right under their
eyes, straight in the teeth of the stoutest tulwar man of the lower
Himalayas.
He, too, had pistols at his belt, but there was no shot fired. There
was nothing but a spur-loosed rush and a shock--a spark-lit, swirling,
slashing, stamping, snorting melee--a stallion and a mare up-ended--two
strips of lightning steel that slit the wind--and a thud, as a lifeless
border robber took the turf.
There was silence then--the grim, good silence of Mohammedan
approval--while a native officer closed up a sword-cut with his fingers
and tore ten-yard strips from his own turban to bind the youngster's
head. They rode back without boast or noise and camped without
advertisement. There was no demonstration made; only-a colonel said,
“I like things done that way, quickly, without fuss,” and a brigadier
remarked, “Hrrrumph! 'Gratulate you, Mr. Cunningham!”
Later, when they camped again outside Peshawur, a reward of three
thousand rupees that had been offered on the border outlaw's head was
paid to Cunningham in person--a very appreciable sum to a subaltern,
whose pay is barely sufficient for his mess bills. So, although no
public comment was made on the matter, it was considered “decent of him”
to contribute the whole amount to a pension fund for the dependents of
the regiment's dead.
“You know, that's your money,” said his Colonel. “You can keep every
anna of it if you choose.”
“I suppose I needn't be an officer unless I choose?” suggested
Cunningham.
“I don't know, youngster! I can't guess what your troop would do if you
tried to desert it!”
That was, of course, merely a diplomatic recognition of the fact that
Cunningham had done his duty in making his men like him, and was not
intended seriously. Nobody--not even the Brigadier--had any notion that
the troop would very shortly have to dispense with its leader's services
whether it wanted to or not.
But it so happened that one troop at a time was requisitioned to be
ornamental body-guard to such as were entitled to one in the frontier
city; and the turn arrived when Cunningham was sent. None liked the
duty. No soldier, and particularly no irregular, likes to consider
himself a pipe-clayed ornament; but Cunningham would have “gone sick”
had he had the least idea of what was in store for him.
It was bad enough to be obliged to act as body-guard to men who had
jockeyed him away because they were jealous of him. The white scar that
ran now like a chin-strap mark from the corner of his eye to the angle
of his jaw would blaze red often at some deliberately thought-out,
not fancied, insult from men who should have been too big to more than
notice him. And that, again, was nothing to the climax.
Mahommed Gunga chose to polish up his silver spurs and ride in from his
“estates” on a protracted visit to Peshawur, and with an escort that
must have included half the zemindars on the countryside as well as
his own small retinue. Glittering on his own account like a regiment of
horse, and with all but a regiment clattering behind him, he chose
the occasion to meet Cunningham when the youngster was fuming with
impatience opposite the club veranda, waiting to escort a general.
On the veranda sat a dozen men who had been at considerable pains to
put and keep the officer of the escort in his place. If the jingle and
glitter of the approaching cavalcade had not been sufficient to attract
their notice, they could have stopped their cars and yet have been
forced to hear the greeting.
“Aha! Salaam sahib! Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, bohut salaam! Thy father's
son! Sahib, I am much honored!”
The white scar blazed, but Mahommed Gunga affected not to notice the
discomfort of his victim. Many more than a hundred sabred gentlemen
pressed round to “do themselves the honor,” as they expressed it, of
paying Cunningham a compliment. They rode up like knights in armor in
the lists, and saluted like heralds bringing tribute and allegiance.
“Salaam, Chota-Cunnigan!”
“Salaam, sahib!”
“Bohut salaam, bahadur!”
The Generals, the High-Court judges, and Commissioners on the club
veranda sat unhonored, while a boy of twenty-two received obeisance from
men whose respect a king might envy. No Rajput ever lived who was not
sure that his salute was worth more than tribute; he can be polite on
all occasions, and what he thinks mere politeness would be considered
overacting in the West, but his respect and his salute he keeps for his
equals or his betters--and they must be men indeed.
The coterie of high officials sat indignation-bound for ten palpitating
minutes, until the General remembered that it was his escort that was
waiting for him. He had ordered it an hour too soon, for the express
sweet purpose of keeping Cunningham waiting in the sun, but it dawned
now on his apoplectic consciousness that his engagement was most urgent.
He descended in a pompous hurry, mounted and demanded why--by all the
gods of India--the escort was not lined up to receive him. A minute
later, after a loudly administered reprimand that was meant as much for
the swarm of Rajputs as for the indignant Cunningham, he rode off with
the escort clattering behind him.
But on the club veranda, when the Rajputs with Mahommed Gunga had
dispersed, the big wigs sat and talked the matter over very thoroughly.
“It's no use blinking matters,” said the senior man present, using a
huge handkerchief to wave the flies away from the polished dome which
rose between two side wisps of gray hair. “They're going to lionize him
while he's here, so we'd better move him on.”
“But where?”
“I've got it! There's a letter in from Everton at Abu, saying he needs
a man badly to go to Howrah and act resident there--says he hasn't heard
from the missionaries and isn't satisfied--wants a man without too much
authority to go there and keep an eye on things in general. Howrah's a
hell of a place from all accounts.”
“But that 'ud be promotion!”
“Can't be helped. No excuse for reducing him, so far as I've heard. The
trouble is the cub has done too dashed well. We've got to promote him if
we want to be rid of him.”
They talked it over for an hour, and at the end of it decided Cunningham
should go to Howrah, provided a brigadier could be induced without too
much argument to see reason.
“The Brigadier probably wants to keep him, and his Colonel will raise
all the different kinds of Cain there are!” suggested the man who had
begun the discussion.
“I've seen brigadiers before now reduced to a proper sense of their
own unimportance!” remarked another man. And he was connected with the
Treasury. He knew.
But a week later, when the papers were sent to the Brigadier for
signature, he amazed everybody by consenting without the least
objection. Nobody but he knew who his visitor had been the night before.
“How did you know about it, Mahommed Gunga?” he demanded, as the veteran
sat and faced him over the tent candle, his one lean leg swaying up and
down, as usual, above the other.
“Have club servants not got ears, sahib?”
“And you--?”
“I, too, have ears--good ones!”
The Brigadier drummed his fingers on the table, hesitating. No officer,
however high up in the service, likes to lose even a subaltern from his
command when that subaltern is worth his salt.
“Let him go, sahib! You have seen how we Rangars honor him--you may
guess what difference he might make in a crisis. Sign, sahib--let him
go!”
“But--where do you come in? What have you had to do with this?”
“First, sahib, I tested him thoroughly. I found him good. Second, I told
tales about him, making him out better than even he is. Third, I made
sure that all those in authority at Peshawur should hate him. That
would have been impossible if he had been a fool, or a weak man, or
an incompetent; but any good man can be hated easily. Fourth, sahib, I
sent, by the hand of a man of mine, a message to Everton-sahib at Abu
reporting to him that it was not in Howrah as it should be, and warning
him that a sahib should be sent there. I knew that he would listen to a
hint from me, and I knew that he had no one in his office whom he could
send. Then, sahib, I brought matters to a head by bringing every man of
merit whom I could raise to salute him and make an outrageous exhibition
of him. That is what I have done!”
“One would think you were scheming for a throne, Mahommed Gunga!”
“Nay, sahib, I am scheming for the peace of India! But there will be war
first.”
“I know there will be war,” said the Brigadier. “I only wish I could
make the other sahibs realize it.”
“Will you sign the paper, sahib?”
“Yes, I will sign the paper. But--”
“But what, sahib?”
“I'm not quite certain that I'm doing right.”
“Brigadier-sahib, when the hour comes--and that is soon--it will be time
to answer that! There lie the papers.”