Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin.
Steal from a thief, for that is easy.
Set a trap for a trickster, and catch him at the first attempt.
But beware of the man who has no axe to grind.
--Eastern Proverb
It was a musty smelling entrance, so dark that to see was scarcely
possible after the hot glare outside. Dimly King made out Rewa Gunga
mounting stairs to the left and followed him. The stairs wound backward
and forward on themselves four times, growing scarcely any lighter as
they ascended, until, when he guessed himself two stories at least above
road level, there was a sudden blaze of reflected light and he blinked
at more mirrors than he could count. They had been swung on hinges
suddenly to throw the light full in his face.
There were curtains reflected in each mirror, and little glowing lamps,
so cunningly arranged that it was not possible to guess which were
real and which were not. Rewa Gunga offered no explanation, but stood
watching with quiet amusement. He seemed to expect King to take a chance
and go forward, but if he did he reckoned without his guest. King stood
still.
Then suddenly, as if she had done it a thousand times before and
surprised a thousand people, a little nut-brown maid parted the middle
pair of curtains and said “Salaam!” smiling with teeth that were as
white as porcelain. All the other curtains parted too, so that the
whereabouts of the door might still have been in doubt had she not
spoken and so distinguished herself from her reflections. King looked
scarcely interested and not at all disturbed.
Balked of his amusement, Rewa Gunga hurried past him, thrusting the
little maid aside, and led the way. King followed him into a long room,
whose walls were hung with richer silks than any he remembered to have
seen. In a great wide window to one side some twenty women began at
once to make flute music.
Silken punkahs swung from chains, wafting back and forth a cloud of
sandalwood smoke that veiled the whole scene in mysterious, scented
mist. Through the open window came the splash of a fountain and the
chattering of birds, and the branch of a feathery tree drooped near by.
It seemed that the long white wall below was that of Yasmini's garden.
“Be welcome!” laughed Rewa Gunga; “I am to do the honors, since she is
not here. Be seated, sahib.”
King chose a divan at the room's farthest end, near tall curtains that
led into rooms beyond. He turned his back toward the reason for his
choice. On a little ivory-inlaid ebony table about ten feet away lay a
knife, that was almost the exact duplicate of the one inside his shirt.
Bronze knives of ancient date, with golden handles carved to represent a
woman dancing, are rare. The ability to seem not to notice incriminating
evidence is rarer still--rarest of all when under the eyes of a native
of India, for cats and hawks are dullards by comparison to them. But
King saw the knife, yet did not seem to see it.
There was nothing there calculated to set an Englishman at ease. In
spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt
like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and
ordinary air to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy
on every side--could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him--and began
to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he
deliberately set himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's chief
weapon.
Rewa Gunga, perfectly at home, sprawled leisurely, along a cushioned
couch with a grace that the West has not learned yet; but King did not
make the mistake of trusting him any better for his easy manners, and
his eyes sought swiftly for some unrhythmic, unplanned thing on which to
rest, that he might save himself by a sort of mental leverage.
Glancing along the wall that faced the big window, he noticed for the
first time a huge Afridi, who sat on a stool and leaned back against the
silken hangings with arms folded.
“Who is that man?” he asked.
“He? Oh, he is a savage--just a big savage,” said Rewa Gunga, looking
vaguely annoyed.
“Why is he here?”
He did not dare let go of this chance side-issue. He knew that Rewa
Gunga wished him to talk of Yasmini and to ask questions about her, and
that if he succumbed to that temptation all his self-control would be
cunningly sapped away from him until his secrets, and his very senses,
belonged to some one else.
“What is he doing here?” he insisted.
“He? Oh, he does nothing. He waits,” purred the Rangar. “He is to be
your body-servant on your journey to the North. He is nothing--nobody at
all!--except that he is to be trusted utterly because he loves Yasmini.
He is Obedience! A big obedient fool! Let him be!”
“No,” said King. “If he's to be my man I'll speak to him!”
He felt himself winning. Already the spell of the room was lifting, and
he no longer felt the cloud of sandalwood smoke like a veil across his
brain.
“Won't you tell him to come here to me?”
Rewa Gunga laughed, resting his silk turban against the wall hangings
and clasping both hands about his knee. It was as a man might laugh who
has been touched in a bout with foils.
“Oh!--Ismail!” he called, with a voice like a bell, that made King
stare.
The Afridi seemed to come out of a deep sleep and looked bewildered,
rubbing his eyes and feeling whether his turban was on straight. He
combed his beard with nervous fingers as he gazed about him and caught
Rewa Gunga's eye. Then he sprang to his feet.
“Come!” ordered Rewa Gunga.
The man obeyed.
“Did you see?” Rewa Gunga chuckled. “He rose from his place like a
buffalo, rump first and then shoulder after shoulder! Such men are safe!
Such men have no guile beyond what will help them to obey! Such men
think too slowly to invent deceit for its own sake!”
The Afridi came and towered above them, standing with gnarled hands
knotted into clubs.
“What is thy name?” King asked him.
“Ismail!” he boomed.
“Thou art to be my servant?”
“Aye! So said she. I am her man. I obey!”
“When did she say so?” King asked him blandly, asking unexpected
questions being half the art of Secret Service, although the other half
is harder to achieve.
The Hillman stroked his great beard and stood considering the question.
One could almost imagine the click of slow machinery revolving in his
mind, although King entertained a shrewd suspicion that he was not so
stupid as he chose to seem. His eyes were too hawk-bright to be a stupid
man's.
“Before she went away,” he answered at last.
“When did she go away?”
He thought again, then “Yesterday,” he said.
“Why did you wait before you answered?”
The Afridi's eyes furtively sought Rewa Gunga's and found no aid there.
Watching the Rangar less furtively, but even less obviously, King was
aware that his eyes were nearly closed, as if they were not interested.
The fingers that clasped his knee drummed on it indifferently, seeing
which King allowed himself to smile.
“Never mind,” he told Ismail. “It is no matter. It is ever well to think
twice before speaking once, for thus mistakes die stillborn. Only the
monkey-folk thrive on quick answers--is it not so? Thou art a man of
many inches--of thew and sinew--Hey, but thou art a man! If the heart
within those great ribs of thine is true as thine arms are strong I
shall be fortunate to have thee for a servant!”
“Aye!” said the Afridi. “But what are words? She has said I am thy
servant, and to hear her is to obey!”
“Then from now thou art my servant?”
“Nay, but from yesterday when she gave the order!”
“Good!” said King.
“Aye, good for thee! May Allah do more to me if I fail!”
“Then, take me a telegram!” said King.
He began to write at once on a half-sheet of paper that he tore from a
letter he had in his pocket, setting down a row of figures at the top
and transposing into cypher as he went along.
“Yasmini has gone North. Is there any reason at your end why I should
not follow her at once?”
He addressed it in plain English to his friend the general at Peshawur,
taking great care lest the Rangar read it through those sleepy,
half-closed eyes of his. Then he tore the cypher from the top, struck
a match and burned the strip of paper and handed the code telegram to
Ismail, directing him carefully to a government office where the cypher
signature would be recognized and the telegram given precedence.
Ismail stalked off with it, striding like Moses down from
Sinai--hook-nose--hawk-eye--flowing beard--dignity and all, and King
settled down to guard himself against the next attempt on his sovereign
self-command.
Now he chose to notice the knife on the ebony table as if he had not
seen it before. He got up and reached for it and brought it back,
turning it over and over in his hand.
“A strange knife,” he said.
“Yes,--from Khinjan,” said Rewa Gunga, and King eyed him as one wolf
eyes another.
“What makes you say it is from Khinjan?”
“She brought it from Khinjan Caves herself! There is another knife that
matches it, but that is not here. That bracelet you now wear, sahib, is
from Khinjan Caves too! She has the secret of the Caves!”
“I have heard that the 'Heart of the Hills' is there,” King answered.
“Is the 'Heart of the Hills' a treasure house?”
Rewa Gunga laughed.
“Ask her, sahib! Perhaps she will tell you! Perhaps she will let you
see! Who knows? She is a woman of resource and unexpectedness--Let her
women dance for you a while.”
King nodded. Then he got up and laid the knife back on the little table.
A minute or so later he noticed that at a sign from Rewa Gunga a woman
left the great window place and spirited the knife away.
“May I have a sheet of paper?” he asked, for he knew that another fight
for his self-command was due.
Rewa Gunga gave an order, and a maid brought him scented paper on a
silver tray. He drew out his own fountain pen then and made ready.
In spite of the great silken punkah that swung rhythmically across the
full breadth of the room the beat was so great that the pen slipped
round and round between his fingers. Yet he contrived to write, and
since his one object was to give his brain employment, he wrote down
a list of the names he had memorized in the train on the journey from
Peshawur, not thinking of a use for the list until he had finished.
Then, though, a real use occurred to him.
While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the
room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all
lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great
deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras
answer the charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood
poised beneath the punkah.
There they began to chant, still dreamily, and with the chant the dance
began, in and out, round and round, lazily, ever so lazily, wreathed in
buoyant gossamer that was scarcely more solid than the sandalwood smoke
they wafted into rings.
King watched them and listened to their chant until he began to
recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric
spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And
after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts
into another channel altogether. He reverted to Delhi railway station.
“The Turks can spy as well as anybody.--They know those men are going to
Kerachi to be ready for them.--Therefore, having cut his eye-teeth B.C.
several hundred, the Unspeakable Turk will take care not to misbehave
UNTIL he's ready. And I suppose our government, being ours and we being
us, will let him do it! All of which will take time.--And that again
means no trouble in the Hills--probably--until the Turks really do feel
ready to begin. They'll preach a holy war just ahead of the date. The
tribes will keep quiet because an army at Kerachi might be meant for
their benefit. Oh, yes, I'm quite sure they were entraining for Kerachi
in readiness to move on Basra.
“Trucks ready for camels--and camel drivers--and food for camels--and
Eresby, who's just come from taking a special camel course. Not a doubt
of it!--And then, Corrigan--Elwright--Doby--Gould--all on the platform
in a bunch, and all down on the Army List as Turkish interpreters! Not a
doubt left!”
“What have you written?” asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned
to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to
read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of
quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis
waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It
was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again
and saved his will for him unbound.
“Read it, won't you?” he laughed. “If you know, take this pen and mark
the names of whichever of those men are still in Delhi.”
Rewa Gunga took pen and paper and set a mark against some thirty of the
names, for King had a manner that disarmed refusal.
“Where are the others?” he asked him, after a glance at it.
“In jail, or else over the border.”
“Already?”
The Rangar nodded. “Trust Yasmini! She saw to that jolly well before she
left Delhi! She would have stayed had there been anything more to do!”
King began to watch the dance again, for it did not feel safe to look
too long into the Rangar's eyes. It was not wise just then to look too
long at anything, or to think too long on any one subject.
“Ismail is slow about returning,” said the Rangar.
“I wrote at the foot of the tar,” said King, “that they are to detain
him there until the answer comes.”
The Rangar's eyes blazed for a second and then grew cold again (as King
did not fail to observe). He knew as well as the Rangar that not many
men would have kept their will so unfettered in that room as to be able
to give independent orders. He recognized resignation, temporary at
least, in the Rangar's attitude of leaning back again to watch from
under lowered eyelids. It was like being watched by a cat.
All this while the women danced on, in time to wailing flute-music,
until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them
appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her
knees. She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a
delirium. Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above
the basket lid, and the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was
there any string, but as it rose it swayed with sickening monotony.
It was minutes before the bodies of two great king-cobras could be
made out, moving against the woman's spangled dress. The basket lid was
resting on their heads, and as the music and the chanting rose to a wild
weird shriek the lid rose too, until suddenly the woman snatched the
lid away and the snakes were revealed, with hoods raised, hissing the
cobra's hate-song that is prelude to the poison-death.
They struck at the woman, one after the other, and she leaped out of
their range, swift and as supple as they. Instantly then she joined
in the dance, with the snakes striking right and left at her. Left
and right she swayed to avoid them, far more gracefully than a matador
avoids the bull and courting a deadlier peril than he--poisonous, two to
his one. As she danced she whirled both arms above her head and cried as
the were-wolves are said to do on stormy nights.
Some unseen hand drew a blind over the great window and an eerie
green-and-golden light began to play from one end of the room, throwing
the dancers into half-relief and deepening the mystery.
Sweet strange scents were wafted in from under the silken hangings.
The room grew cooler by unguessed means. Every sense was treacherously
wooed. And ever, in the middle of the moving light among the languorous
dancers, the snakes pursued the woman!
“Do you do this often?” wondered King, in a calm aside to Rewa Gunga,
turning half toward him and taking his eyes off the dance without any
very great effort.
Rewa Gunga clapped his hands and the dance ceased. The woman spirited
her snakes away. The blind was drawn upward and in a moment all was
normal again with the punkah swinging slowly overhead, except that the
seductive smell remained, that was like the early-morning breath of all
the different flowers of India.
“If she were here,” said the Rangar, a little grimly--with a trace of
disappointment in his tone--“you would not snatch your eyes away
like that! You would have been jolly well transfixed, my friend!
These--she--that woman--they are but clumsy amateurs! If she were here,
to dance with her snakes for you, you would have been jolly well dancing
with her, if she had wished it! Perhaps you shall see her dance some
day! Ah,--here is Ismail,” he added in an altered tone of voice. He
seemed relieved at sight of the Afridi.
Bursting through the glass-bead curtains at the door, the great savage
strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if
he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail
gave it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the
envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than
wonder. A mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But
in a second he had sweated his excitement down.
“Read that, will you?” he said, passing it to Rewa Gunga. It was not in
cypher, but in plain everyday English.
“She has not gone North,” it ran. “She is still in Delhi. Suit your own
movements to your plans.”
“Can you explain?” asked King in a level voice. He was watching the
Rangar narrowly, yet he could not detect the slightest symptom of
emotion.
“Explain?” said the Rangar. “Who can explain foolishness? It means that
another fat general has made another fat mistake!”
“What makes you so certain she went North?” King asked.
Instead of answering, Rewa Gunga beckoned Ismail, who had stepped back
out of hearing. The giant came and loomed over them like the Spirit of
the Lamp of the Arabian Nights.
“Whither went she?” asked the Rangar.
“To the North!” he boomed.
“How knowest thou?”
“I saw her go!”
“When went she?”
“Yesterday, when a telegram came.”
The word “came” was the only clue to his meaning, for in the language he
used “yesterday” and “to-morrow” are the same word; such is the East's
estimate of time.
“By what route did she go?” asked Rewa Gunga.
“By the terrain from the station.”
“How knowest thou that?”
“I was there, bearing her box of jewels.”
“Didst thou see her buy the tikkut?”
“Nay, I bought it, for she ordered me.”
“For what destination was the tikkut?”
“Peshawur!” said Ismail, filling his mouth with the word as if he loved
it.
“Yet”--it was King who spoke now, pointing an accusing finger at him--“a
burra sahib sends a tar to me--this is it!--to say she is in Delhi
still! Who told thee to answer those questions with those words?”
“She!” the big man answered.
“Yasmini?”
“Aye! May Allah cover her with blessings!”
“Ah!” said King. “You have my leave to depart out of earshot.”
Then he turned on Rewa Gunga.
“Whatever the truth of all this,” he said quietly, “I suppose it means
she has done what there was to do in Delhi?”
“Sahib,--trust her! Does a tigress hunt where no watercourses are, and
where no game goes to drink? She follows the sambur!”
“You are positive she has started for the North?”
“Sahib, when she speaks it is best to believe! She told me she will go.
Therefore I am ready to lead King sahib up the Khyber to her!”
“Are you certain you can find her?”
“Aye, sahib,--in the dark!”
“There's a train leaves for the North to-night,” said King.
The Rangar nodded.
“You'll want a pass up the line. How many servants? Three--four--how
many?”
“One,” said the Rangar, and King was instantly suspicious of the modesty
of that allowance; however he wrote out a pass for Rewa Gunga and one
servant and gave it to him.
“Be there on time and see about your own reservation,” he said. “I'll
attend to Ismail's pass myself.”
He folded the list of names that the Rangar had marked and wrote
something on the back. Then he begged an envelope, and Rewa Gunga had
one brought to him. He sealed the list in the envelope, addressed it and
beckoned Ismail again.
“Take this to Saunders sahib!” he ordered. “Go first to the telegraph
office, where you were before, and the babu there will tell you where
Saunders sahib may be found. Having found him, deliver the letter to
him. Then come and find me at the Star of India Hotel and help me to
bathe and change my clothes.”
“To hear is to obey!” boomed Ismail, bowing; but his last glance was
for Rewa Gunga, and he did not turn to go until he had met the Rangar's
eyes.
When Ismail had gone striding down the room, with no glance to spare
for the whispering women in the window, and with dignity like an aura
exuding from him, King looked into the Rangar's eyes with that engaging
frankness of his that disarms so many people.
“Then you'll be on the train to-night?” he asked.
“To hear is to obey! With pleasure, sahib!”
“Then good-by until this evening.”
King bowed very civilly and walked out, rather unsteadily because his
head ached. Probably nobody else, except the Rangar, could have guessed
what an ordeal he had passed through or how near he had been to losing
self-command.
But as he felt his way down the stairs, that were dimly lighted now, he
knew he had all his senses with him, for he “spotted” and admired the
lurking places that had been designed for undoing of the unwary, or even
the overwary. Yasmini's Delhi nest was like a hundred traps in one.
“Almost like a pool table,” he reflected. “Pocket 'em at both ends and
the middle!”
In the street he found a gharry after a while and drove to his hotel.
And before Ismail came he took a stroll through a bazaar, where he made
a few strange purchases. In the hotel lobby he invested in a leather bag
with a good lock, in which to put them. Later on Ismail came and proved
himself an efficient body-servant.
That evening Ismail carried the leather bag and found his place on the
train, and that was not so difficult, because the trains running North
were nearly empty, although the platforms were all crowded. As he stood
at the carriage door with Ismail near him, a man named Saunders slipped
through the crowd and sought him out.
“Arrested 'em all!” he grinned.
“Good.”
“Seen anything of her? I recognized Yasmini's scent on your envelope.
It's peculiar to her--one of her monopolies!”
“No. I'm told she went North yesterday.”
“Not by train, she didn't! It's my business to know that!”
King did not answer; nor did he look surprised. He was watching Rewa
Gunga, followed by a servant, hurrying to a reserved compartment at the
front end of the train. The Rangar waved to him and he waved back.
“I'd know her in a million!” vowed Saunders. “I can take oath she hasn't
gone anywhere by train! Unless she has walked, or taken a carriage,
she's in Delhi!”
The engine gave a preliminary shriek and the giant Ismail nudged King's
elbow in impatient warning. There was no more sign of Rewa Gunga, who
had evidently settled down in his compartment for the night.
“Get my bag out again!” King ordered, and Ismail stared.
“Get out my bag, I said!”
“To hear is to obey!” Ismail grumbled, reaching with his long arm
through the window.
The engine shrieked again, somebody whistled, and the train began to
move.
“You've missed it!” said Saunders, amused at Ismail's frantic
disappointment. The giant was tugging at his beard. “How about your
trunk? Better wire ahead and have it spotted for you.”
“No,” said King; “it's still in the baggage room at the other station.
I didn't intend to go by this train. Came down here to see another
fellow off, that's all! Have a cigar and then let's go together and
look those prisoners over!”