The Gulab heard the shot at the Bagree camp, and Hunsa found her
trembling from apprehension.
"What has happened, Jamadar?" she cried. "Ajeet heard the beat of
iron-shod hoofs upon the road, and seeing in the moonlight the two
riders knew from the manner they sat the saddles that they were of the
Englay service; when he called to them they heeded him not. Then Ajeet
followed the two. Why was the shot, Hunsa?"
"They have killed Ajeet," Hunsa declared; "but also they are dead, and
I have the leader's leather sandals for a purpose. The shot has roused
the village, and even now our people are preparing for flight. Get you
into the cart that I may take you to safety." He took the ruby from
his turban, saying: "And here is the most beautiful ruby in Hind; the
fat pig of a Dewan wants it, but I have taken it for you."
But Bootea pushed his hand away: "I take no present from you, Hunsa."
Hunsa put the jewel back in his turban and commanded the two men, who
stood waiting, "Make fast the bullocks to the cart quickly lest we be
captured, because other soldiers are coming behind."
The two Bagrees turned to where the slim pink-and-grey coated trotting
bullocks were tethered by their short horns to a tree and leading them
to the cart made fast the bamboo yoke across their necks.
"Get into the cart, Bootea," Hunsa commanded, for the girl had not
moved.
"I will not!" she declared. "I'm going back to Ajeet; he is not
dead--it is a trick."
"He _is_ dead," Hunsa snarled, seizing her by arm.
The Gulab screamed words of denunciation. "Take your hands off me, son
of a pig, accursed man of low caste! Ajeet will kill you for this,
dog!"
At this the wife of Sookdee fled, racing back toward the camp. One of
the men darted forward to follow, but Hunsa stayed him, saying, "Let
her go--it is better; I war not upon Sookdee."
He had the Gulab now in the grasp of both his huge paws, and holding
her tight, said rapidly: "Be still you she-devil, accursed fool! You
are going to a palace to be a queen. The son of the Peshwa desires
you. True, I, also, have desire, but fear not for, by Bhowanee! it is
a life of glory, of jewels and rich attire that I take you to; so get
into the cart."
But Bootea wrenched free an arm and struck Hunsa full upon his ugly
face, screaming her rebellion.
"To be struck by a woman!" Hunsa blared; "not a woman, but the spawn of
a she-leopard! why should not I beat your beautiful face into ugliness
with one of these sandals of a dead pig!"
He lifted her bodily, calling to the man upon the ground, the other
having mounted behind the bullocks. "Put back the leather wall of the
cart that I may hurl this outcast widow of a dead Hindu within."
Bootea clawed at his face; she kicked and fought; her voice screaming a
call to Ajeet.
There was a heavy rolling thump of hoofs upon the roadway, unheard of
Hunsa because of the vociferous struggle. Then from the shimmer of
moonlight thrust the white form of a big Turcoman horse that was thrown
almost to his haunches, his breast striking the back of the decoit.
The bullocks, nervous little brutes, startled by the huge white animal,
swerved, and before the man who sat a-straddle of the one shaft
gathered tight the cord to their nostrils, whisked the cart to the
roadside where it toppled over the bank for a fall of fifteen feet into
a ravine, carrying bullocks and driver with it.
The moonlight fell full upon the face of the horseman, its light making
still whiter the face of Captain Barlow.
And Bootea recognised him. It was the face that had been in her vision
night and day since the _nautch_.
"Save me, Sahib!" she cried; "these men are thieves; save me, Sahib!"
The hunting crop in Barlow's hand crashed upon the thick head of Hunsa
in ready answer to the appeal. And as the sahib threw himself from the
saddle the jamadar, with a snarl like a wounded tiger, dropped the girl
and, whirling, grappled with the Englishman.
Barlow was strong; few men in the force, certainly none in the
officers' mess, could put him on his back; and he was lithe, supple as
a leopard; and in combat cool, his mind working like the mind of a
chess player: but he realised that the arms about him were the arms of
a gorilla, the chest against which he was being crushed was the chest
of a trained wrestler; a smaller man would have heard his bones
cracking in that clutch.
He raised a knee and drove it into the groin of the jamadar; then in
the slight slackening of the holding arms as the Bagree shrank from the
blow, he struck at the bearded chin; it was the clean, trained
short-arm jab of a boxer.
But even as the gorilla wavered staggeringly under the blow, a soft
something slipped about Barlow's throat and tightened like the coils of
a python. And behind something was pressing him to his death. The
other Bagree springing to the assistance of Hunsa had looped his
_roomal_ about the Sahib's throat with the art of a thug.
Barlow's senses were going; his brain swam; in his fancy he had been
shot from a cliff and was hurtling through space in which there was no
air--his lungs had closed; in his brain a hammer was beating him into
unconsciousness.
Then suddenly the pressure on his throat ceased, it fell away; the air
rushed to the parched lungs. With a wrench his brain cleared, and he
went down; but now with power in his arms, the arms that still clung
about the dazed Hunsa, and he was on top.
Scarce aware of the action, out of a fighting instinct, he dragged from
its holster his heavy pistol, and beat with its butt the ugly head
beneath, beat it till it was still. Then he staggered to his feet and
looked wonderingly at the form of the Bagree behind who lay sprawled on
the road, a great red splash across the white jacket on his breast.
In the Gulab's hand was still clutched the dagger she had drawn from
her girdle and driven home to save the sahib who had sat like a god in
her heart. With the other hand she held out from contact with her
limbs the muslin _sari_ that was crimsoned where the blood of the
Bagree had fountained when she drew forth her knife.
Barlow darted forward as Bootea reeled and caught her with an arm.
Close, the face, fair as that of a memsahib in the pallor of fright and
the paling moonlight, sweet, of finer mould, more spiritual than the
Mona Lisa's, puritanically simple, the mass of black hair drawn
straight back from the low broad brow--for the rich turban had fallen
in her fight for freedom--woke memory in the sahib; and as the blood
ebbed back through the girl's veins, the pale cheeks flushed with rose,
her eyelids quivered and drew back their shutters from eyes that were
like those of an antelope.
"You--you, Gulab, the giver of the red rose, the singer of the love
song!" Barlow gasped.
"Yes, Captain Sahib, you who are like a god--" Bootea checked, her head
drooped.
But Barlow putting his fingers under her chin and gently lifting the
face asked, "And what--what?"
"You came like one in a dream. Also, Sahib, I am but one who danced
before you and you have saved me."
"And, little girl, you saved my life."
He felt a shudder run through the girl's form, and then she pushed him
from her crying, "Sahib--Hunsa! Quick!"
For the jamadar, recovering his senses, had risen to his knees fumbling
at his belt groggily for his knife.
Barlow swung the pistol from its holster and rushed toward Hunsa, but
the latter, at sight of the dreaded weapon, fled, pursued for a few
paces by the Captain.
The girl saw the sandal soles lying upon the ground where Hunsa had
dropped them in the struggle, and slipped them beneath her breast-belt,
a quick thought coming to her that if the Captain saw them he might
recognise them as the footwear of the soldiers. Also Hunsa had said
they were for a purpose.
Barlow followed the fleeing shadow for a dozen strides, then his pistol
barked, and swinging on his heel he came back, saying, with a little
laugh, "That was just to frighten the beggar so he wouldn't come back."
But Bootea's eyes went wide now with a new fear; the sound of the shot
would travel faster even than the fleeing Hunsa: and if the decoits
came--for already they would be making ready for the road--this
beautiful god, with eyes like stars and a voice of music, would be
killed, would be no more than the Bagree lying on the road who was but
carrion. In her heart was a new thing. The struggle with Hunsa, the
fright, even the horribleness of the blood upon her knife, was washed
away by a hot surging flood of exquisite happiness. The Hindu name for
love--"a pain in the heart"--was veritably hers in its intensity; the
sahib's arm about her when she had closed her eyes had caused her to
feel as if she were being lifted to heaven.
She laid a hand on Barlow's arm and her eyes were lifted pleadingly to
his: "You must go, Sahib--mount your horse and go, because--"
"Because of what?"
"There are many, and you will be killed. Hunsa will bring others."
"Others--who are they?"
But the Gulab had turned from him and was listening, her eyes turned to
the road up which floated from beyond upon the hushed silence that was
about them,--that seemed deeper because of the dead man lying in the
moonlight,--the beat of Hunsa's feet on the road. Once there was the
whining note of wheels that claimed a protest from a dry axle; once
there was a clang as if steel had struck steel; and on the droning
through the night-hush was a rasping hum as if voices clamoured in the
distance. This was the bee-hive stirring of the startled village.
"What is it, Bootea?" Barlow asked.
The eyes raised to his face were full of fright, a pleading fright.
"Sahib," she answered, "do not ask--just go, because--"
"Yes, girl, why?"
"That this is dead (and her hand gestured toward the slain Bagree) and
that others are dead, is; but you,--will you mount the horse and go
back the way you came, Sahib?"
Her small fingers clutched the sleeve of the coat he wore--it was of
hunting cloth, red-and-green: "Others are dead yonder, and evil is in
the hearts of those that live. Go, Sahib--please go."
Barlow's mind was racing fast, in more materialistic grooves than the
Gulab's. There was something about it he didn't understand; something
the girl did not want to tell him; some horrible thing that she was
afraid of--her face was full of suppressed dread.
Suddenly, through no sequence of reasoning, in fact there was no data
to go upon, nothing except that a girl--the Gulab was just that--stood
there afraid--through him she had just escaped from a man who was
little more than an ape--stood quivering in the moonlight alone, except
for himself. So, suddenly, he acted as if energised by logic, as if
mental deduction made plain the way.
"You are right," he said: "we must go."
He laid a hand upon the bridle-rein of the grey, that had stood there
with the submission of a cavalry horse, saying, "Come, Bootea."
Foot in stirrup he swung to the saddle; and as the grey turned, he
reached down both hands saying: "Come, I'll take you wherever you want
to go."
But the girl drew back and shook her beautifully-modelled head,--the
delicate head with the black hair smoothed back to simplicity, and her
voice was half sob: "It can't be, Sahib, I am but--" She checked; to
speak of the decoits even, might lead to talk that would cause the
Sahib to go to their camp, and he would be killed; and she would be a
witness to testify against her own people, the slayers of the sepoys.
Barlow laughed, "Because you are a girl who dances you are not to be
saved, eh?" he said. "But listen, the Sahibs do not leave women at the
mercy of villains; you must come," and his strong sun-browned hands
were held out.
Bootea, wonderingly, as if some god had called to her, put her hands in
Barlow's, and with a twist of his strong arms she was swung across his
knees.
"Put your arms about my waist, Gulab," he said, as the grey, to the
tickle of a spur, turned to the road. "Don't lean away from me," he
said, presently, "because we have a long way to go and that tires.
That's better, girl," as her warm breast pressed against his body.
The big grey, with a deep breath, and a sniffle of satisfaction,
scenting that his head was turned homeward, paced along the ghost-strip
of roadway in long free strides. Even when a jackal, or it might have
been a honey-badger, slipped across the road in front, a drifting
shadow, the Turcoman only rattled the snaffle-bit in his teeth, cocked
his ears, and then blew a breath of disdain from his big nostrils.
In the easy swinging cradle of the horse's smooth stride the minds of
both Barlow and the Gulab relaxed into restfulness; her arms about the
strong body, Bootea felt as if she clung to a tower of strength--that
she was part of a magnetic power; and the nightmare that had been, so
short a time since, had floated into a dream of content, of glorious
peace.
Barlow was troubling over the problem of the gorilla-faced man, and
thinking how close he had been to death--all but gone out except for
that figure in his arms that was so like a lotus; and the death would
have meant not just the forfeit of his life, but that his duty, the
mission he was upon for his own people, the British government, had
been jeopardised by his participation in some native affair of strife,
something he had nothing to do with. He had ridden along that road
hoping to overtake the two riders that now lay dead in the pit with the
other victims of the thugs--of which he knew nothing. They were
bearing to him a secret message from his government, and he had ridden
to Manabad to there take it from them lest in approaching the city of
the Peshwa, full of seditious spies and cutthroats, the paper might be
stolen. But at Manabad he had learned that the two had passed, had
ridden on; and then, perhaps because of converging different roads, he
had missed them.
But most extraordinarily, just one of the curious, tangented ways of
Fate, the written order lay against his chest sewn between the double
sole of a sandal. Once or twice the hard leather caused him to turn
slightly the girl's body, and he thought it some case in which she
carried jewels.