the fire. It had been turned away from the light. Cardinegh jumped to
his feet with horror in his face.
“You’re nervous, old King-maker. Why, it’s just a little London waif I
picked up asleep in my stairway.”
“Do you suppose he has heard what I’ve said?” the old man demanded
huskily.
“You haven’t said anything yet that the world might not hear. Sit down
and smoke, Jerry. God still reigns, and we’re Home.”
Cardinegh stared at the little figure curled up before the fire,
catching his breath audibly.
“I’m all shot up,” he panted. “Say, but it’s like you, son, to pick up
the little outcast.”
Routledge smiled, because the last word had a big and new meaning.
“Perhaps our voices will bother him. I’ll put the lad in the next
room,” he said, and untangled the knotted muddy laces, placing the wet,
worn shoes evenly before the fire. As he lifted the boy in his arms,
the eyes opened sleepily, but Routledge could not see the face pressed
against his shoulder. They were drowsy, startled eyes, wise and very
shiny, like those of a mouse. Routledge laid him upon his own bed
and dropped a blanket over him. “Poor little gaffer, you smell like
Bookstalls Road,” he muttered. “I could pick you out blind among the
odors of India. Nothing short of a riot could keep you awake, but poor
old Jerry will talk easier with you here--and the door shut.”
He drew his chair close to the other, and said genially: “And now,
Jerry, tell me what is good for me to know.”
“Did you have a ghastly night, son,--your first night at Home in over a
year?”
“I prefer to call it an interesting night.”
“You are about to rise with cumulative glory. Do you remember our last
talk in the field--the bivouac at Bhurpal?”
Routledge nodded.
“And you suggested that the spies of the Russian Bear had worked down
over the hills, and looted certain startling secrets having to do with
British India?”
“It was only a suggestion. The facts are not clear to me yet. There
was a colossal derangement somewhere--the same, I take it, that hurled
England into alliance with Japan. I appear to be the only man in London
who has been denied the truth.” Routledge reached for the amber-bit of
his _nargileh_.
“They say a man is last to hear what is going on in his own house.”
“What is the parallel, Jerry?”
“I’ve got to come to that. All London does not know--except that you
are under a cloud for treachery. Forty men in London know exactly
what has happened in India. Perhaps ten of this forty were at the
reception last night. The forty believe you to be the man who turned
the monster trick in Afghanistan, well-called the Buffer State. They
are the exalted heads of Departments--Foreign, Home, Colonial, War,
and Secret-service chiefs--men who live in the shadow of the Throne.
Six, at most, of the correspondents are in the secret. The rest can’t
tell what you did, but to them, just the same, you are the ranking
Iscariot.... Routledge, how many men know the truth about Shubar Khan’s
Lotus Expedition?”
“Possibly the same forty men.”
“And the soldiers of Colonel Hammond’s regiment?”
“That is a historical mystery,” Routledge said. “Many are dead; the
rest scattered and lost. The secret was miraculously preserved. Why,
this is the masterpiece of England’s department of espionage.”
“The records of Colonel Hammond’s debauch in blood were stolen last
autumn,” Cardinegh whispered. “The whole story was stolen--Hammond’s
confession, the testimony of his court-martial, even to the disposal of
the men of his regiment--_the men who knew all_!... God! what a story
for Russia to put into the hands of the thrice ten thousand sons and
sons’ sons of Shubar Khan in Afghanistan!”
Cardinegh laughed in an uncontrolled way.
“Routledge, my son,” he went on nervously, “when the Pathans and the
Afridis turn to war, British India forgets her polo and her billiards
and her forestry.... It all dates from the Kabul massacre--you
remember, sixteen thousand white men and women and children killed.
Colonel Hammond’s father and mother were among the dead. He was but a
mite of a boy then, but it drove him mad when he became a man and was
sent back to the same service as a colonel. You are one of the forty,
Routledge. You know the story. The Khyber Hills and the same old trail
where his parents were slain started a leak in Hammond’s skull. He was
a good officer before that, or he wouldn’t have been a colonel. That
leak grew into the torrent _which washed away the mountain that fell
upon Shubar Khan’s twenty-five hundred--men, women and children--down
below in the valley_----”
“That’s a nice figure of speech,” Routledge said soothingly. “But,
Jerry, the facts, as I heard them were these: Colonel Hammond lost his
mother and father on the same trail he was leading his troops over that
night. That he had gone mad, everybody grants--from much brooding on
the old Kabul massacre. He was out after Shubar Khan with his regiment,
and just before dusk discerned the bivouac of the Pathans thousands of
feet below in a valley. Shubar Khan had fifteen hundred soldiers, and a
thousand women and children had joined their men in camp.
“Hammond’s original idea was to meet the Pathans in battle, but he
happened to see this cliff hanging precariously over the steep slope.
Now Hammond was a famed engineer. Mad as he was, he did not forget
his craft. As for the women and children whom his scouts reported
below--this only made the madman more keen. Remember, his mother had
died just there.... He looked at the slope, and saw that if he could
start the cliff, he could send an avalanche upon the crowded camp.
It wasn’t fighting. England wouldn’t have done it, but we’re dealing
with the insanity of a single leader. Hammond had dynamite. Also the
Pathans didn’t know that the English regiment was above. The cliff was
aimed at the camp. The blast worked. Falling rock dug a trench in the
mountain, gaining tons of power every foot of slide. What happened
has been kept secret by the British, but you and I know. Twenty-five
hundred Pathans--including a thousand women and children--were buried
alive. If Hammond had been able to keep his remnant of a brain, it
would never have come out, but he was raving when he brought his outfit
back to headquarters, and this started his men to thinking. A little
thinking and they understood all. The towering atrocity, no one denies,
but it was done by a madman--not by England, Jerry.”
“The Pathans thought it a natural landslide--until last autumn,”
Cardinegh remarked, and there was exultation in his eyes.
A chill swept over Routledge for an instant, as if he had been in the
presence of a human without a soul. The colossal havoc wrought decades
ago by an insane Englishman was not a thing to be talked about as
Cardinegh talked--his eyes gleaming with triumph. Even the Afghans had
never learned the truth, so perfect was the British management. They
looked upon the avalanche as a dreadful chastisement of the gods. They
had gone back to scratch their rocky fields and raise their scrawny
lambs with a growing belief that the gods wanted the English in their
land, and that gods who could turn loose mysterious landslides knew
best.
The ghosts of Shubar Khan’s twenty-five hundred--trooping through
the monster hills on the darkest nights--they could not speak. The
soldiers of the mad colonel--had they not all been divided, sent to
fill the loneliest posts and the most hazardous fore-fronts, under the
eyes of the secret-service men who see all and say nothing?... It was
not England’s fault, this work of a crazed Englishman who undertook
to avenge the massacre of the sixteen thousand. It was a thing to be
hidden deep in the hearts of a few--this grim and terrible history.
To have Russia get it now--the indisputable documents--would enable her
to start Afghanistan boiling again. The Border States and all India
would be embroiled. More than all, the British troops serving in India
would be lashed into mutiny by the story of what happened to the men
of Colonel Hammond’s regiment--the men who knew all. Yes, Russia could
build her great war upon it--the long-prophesied war--and drive her
puppets against England for the possession of northern India.
Routledge was filled with shuddering by these thoughts of war, and
by the man before him, laughing softly, insanely, and drinking raw
whiskey--another Colonel Hammond in the flesh!
“Let me get this straight, Jerry,” he said lightly. “One man steals the
documents which tell the whole truth about Shubar Khan, and puts the
story in the hands of the Russians----”
“And at what a time!” Cardinegh exclaimed passionately. “When did
Abduraman die?”
“Last October. He was a valuable man for the British,” Routledge added
thoughtfully. “He held the Pathans and the Afridis from fighting the
English, and at the same time managed to avoid angering Russia. He was
the man for the Buffer State.”
“His sons are not so valuable.” Cardinegh chuckled. “Abduraman died
of a _stroke_, as the newspapers said. It was a stroke!... When was
Cantrell, the British Agent in Kabul, murdered?”
“A month later.”
“When were we all called in from the field and Bhurpal forgotten?”
“A month later still.”
“What a God-given time it was!” the old man exclaimed.
Routledge saw the need of holding Cardinegh together until he could
get the whole story. “I can see clearly how one man might use these
documents to start war in Afghanistan,” he capitulated; “how Russia
could spread the hell all along the border, supplying powder and guns,
and getting a formidable enemy launched against England, before taking
the field herself. I can even see how all India, ‘seething with hatred
for her white child, the British foundling’--I always liked that
sentence--might arise and say, ‘This is the accepted time.’ More than
that, I can see how the story of Colonel Hammond’s lost regiment might
start a contagion of mutiny patches over the British army----”
“Some work for one man.”
“Big work, Jerry,” Routledge agreed. “I can see it all so far, but you
will have to pardon me for having a little interest left in the fact,
that I was practically ejected from the Armory last night.”
The old man fell silent and his fears whipped him again. “Don’t murder
me until I am through, son. You are supposed to be the man who gave
the story to the Russian spies.”
“Ah!” said Routledge. “I am supposed to be the man, and yet no one
consulted me upon the matter. If I were merely _supposed_ to be the
man--would I have been turned out?”
“The forty who know the story--have no doubt about you.”
Here a great light was thrown upon the recent activity of the White
Mustache. “Why am I not arrested, Jerry?”
“The Government does not dare.”
“Publicity?”
“Exactly. The truth about Afghanistan to-day is a secret guarded with
men’s lives. Arbitration is afire between here and Petersburg. If India
and Russia saw the British people aroused, the chances are that they
would be forced to strike at once. Soldiers are being rushed secretly
toward Khyber Pass. Troop-ships are embarking suddenly and without
ostentation from England this moment. To make this story public--and
this would be in danger by your arrest--would start the Indian
sympathizers around the world. The mere name of Shubar Khan brings old
England to her knees. This has been a pregnant day in the Inner Circle,
my son. No, you will not be arrested.”
“Why am I not murdered quietly?”
“The same reason, with another. I attended to that. Every one who knows
this story of Shubar Khan must be reckoned with. I told them that you
must be kept alive--that I could secure your written confession. They
believe that I am at it now.”
Routledge was throwing the whole strength of his concentrated faculties
into the eyes of the old man. Cardinegh’s face was like death.
“Where did you meet the secret agents?”
“At Naples. They had me on the carpet almost before I left ship.”
“This is the most absorbing tale I have ever encountered, Jerry. I am
to give you a written confession of how I fell in with the Russians and
gave them the documents concerning Shubar Khan, which I had stolen.
Why did you choose me to make this confession--because I am your best
friend?”
“Yes,” Cardinegh answered hoarsely; “because you are my best friend.
Not another man in the world would have carried the burden for me. They
would never have let me reach London.”
Routledge bent forward and spoke with lowered voice: “Then it was you
who fell in with the Russians----”
“Yes.”
Routledge couldn’t help it--the presence of the other put a poisoned
look into his face for an instant. The last fifteen minutes he had
endured every phase of astonishment and horror. The revelation shook
the psychic roots of his being.
“For the love of God, son--don’t look at me that way! Wait till I have
told you all. I thought you were already in London--with Noreen. I was
in Italy, and they never would have let me reach here. I never could
have seen her--or Cheer Street again.”
Pity came to Routledge. He looked down upon the wreck of Jerry
Cardinegh. He caught up his own nerve-ends and bound them together,
smiled, and placed his hand upon the old man’s knee.
“How often I have found it,” he said musingly, “that a day like
yesterday portends great events. I had the queerest sort of a day
yesterday, Jerry. Hour after hour I sat here, neglecting things which
needed doing, thinking, thinking. I have found it so before in my
life--days like yesterday preceding a crisis.... Weren’t any of the
other boys suspected, or any of the soldiers? Why was it that the
finger of the episode pointed to you or me?”
“Since October the whole occult force of the Empire has been upon the
case,” Cardinegh answered. “It was a civilian job on the face of it.
That was incontrovertible. All the other boys fell under the eyes
of the service. They didn’t know it, of course, but each day of the
past four months we have been covered, our pasts balanced. One after
another, the process of elimination vindicated them--all but you and
me. Your infernal habit of campaigning alone was against you, your
being an American, your Brahmin affiliations, your uncanny knowledge of
the Great Inside. Still, they took nothing for granted. At Naples two
agents drew me to cover, demanding what I knew. It was you or I. They
knew it, and I knew it. The bulk of suspicion leaned your way. I shaped
more evidence against you, hinted that I could secure your confession,
if they only let me alone until I could get to you.”
“Tell me again just why, Jerry.”
“Because I wanted a day--just one day! I hadn’t seen Noreen for nearly
a year. I wanted a day with her. I needed to arrange her affairs. God
help me, Routledge, I wanted her to love the old man--one more day! I
couldn’t cable you. I thought--I thought you would hold the weight one
day--for old sake’s sake!”
“And what do you propose to do, Jerry?”
“I have had my day. I am going to the War Department with the facts
this morning!”
“And then?”
“Vanish.”
“And your daughter--Miss Noreen?”
Cardinegh swallowed with difficulty. His unsteady fingers fumbled at
the place where a man in the field carries a bit of ordnance. The ghost
of a smile shook itself out on his face.
“Don’t think I am sorry,” he said. “I joggled the seats of the
mighty. It was a life’s work. I’ve got my joy for it. It’s not what I
expected--but it’s done. I can’t see the good of it clear as I did--but
it’s done. Only I wanted to look it in the face like the old Jerry
Cardinegh might have done--not sick, shaking, and half-drunk. I should
have done it when the little house in Cheer Street only meant to me a
sweet resting-place between wars. I burned out before the end, my son.”
“But Noreen----”
“In the name of God, don’t drive that home again! She’ll never know
what the forty know. She’s provided for. I have had my day--thanks
to you. They’ll let me clear from England. I’m accustomed to take
short-notice trips, and to stay long. She will hear--as she always
feared some time to hear--oh, typhoid in Madagascar, a junk murder up
the Yangtse--potted somewhere!... Blessed little Noreen. In tears she
told me what had happened to you at the Armory. Think how I felt,
son. She loves you, Routledge. What--what I’ve done doesn’t affect her
value--in your eyes?”
“Jerry, how did you get away with this thing in India?”
“Nobody knows but me. I suppose I’d better tell you. Before my last
short trip home, there was a rumor of fighting in Afghanistan. You
remember, eight or nine British correspondents gathered there,
including you and me. Cantrell and I were rather close; and old
Abduraman, I think, trusted me more than any of the others, on account
of my age and service. He was an insatiable listener, and a perfect, an
improved, double-action pump. I think it was one of the elements of his
greatness--the wily old diplomat.
“Any way, I was closeted with him many times. You would come in at
night after studying the strategic points of that devil’s land; no
doubt, from Kabul to the Pass. For once in my life, I was content with
office work. I mean Abduraman’s court and his _thoughts_. Then, too,
I was much with Cantrell, who was a sort of secret-service chief in
that district, as you well understand. From time to time the different
agents would come in for a night--the men who do the dirty work for
England.”
Cardinegh’s eyes blazed again. With a few admirable sentences,
Routledge steadied him and regained the continuity....
“It was a still night, hot as hell,” Cardinegh went on. “Kabul can be
hot when the winds die down from the mountains--but you were there
that night. You know. I was in Cantrell’s house. Three of the Nameless
who serve England with their lives, and are satisfied with a cipher
message or a whispered word of praise from some head of department----”
“I’ve studied the secret service, Jerry,” Routledge ventured mildly.
“It is interesting, but I’m more interested to know what happened.”
“We all proceeded to relax. The devil in me would not be burned by the
fieriest wines. Remember, Cantrell was a weak man, but sincere. The
other three had been studying Afghanistan against towering odds. They
knew more about the inner life of the Buffer State than any three white
men, not excepting Cantrell and yourself, between Persia and British
India. They were sure of Cantrell. As for old Jerry Cardinegh--why,
they took me for granted.
“Presently--it was very late--everybody but old Jerry had the bars down
and soaked. Then I ventured to open the question of Colonel Hammond. It
was an old story to Cantrell and to the three--not a new story to me,
but a strange one. I was fascinated by the inside talk. Here were men
who had kept the secret for years; the men--at least, two of them--who
had helped to scatter the British troops of Colonel Hammond.
“Suddenly Cantrell arose and staggered to his safe, glancing at the
shut door and the open windows of the office. He fumbled with the knob
for a long time before the big door swung open. Then with small keys
which he found inside he got into the inner compartment and drew forth
a fat envelope.
“‘Speaking of Colonel Hammond,’ Cantrell said, with a drunken smile,
‘I’ve got the whole documents here. They were never trusted to the
mails, but they trusted me. I’ve never brought them out before--but we
have fallen into the arms of our friends. Isn’t it so?’
“We all acquiesced, and then there was interesting reading. Routledge,
it was the great story I had been looking for--all that I wanted
to know about one of the most damnable military expeditions ever
transacted. I said to myself the world ought to know about this. That
was because I was a newspaper man. Then I said again, ‘The world ought
to know about this,’ and that was the humanitarian end. I was thinking
of Ireland and India.
“Two of the secret-service men were asleep finally. Cantrell moved
about and served on legs of hot wax.
“‘I’m glad you put that back in the safe, Cantrell,’ I said, when the
envelope was safely in my pocket. ‘You could do a lot of damage to
England with that just now.’
“I glanced at the secret agent who was awake, and found that he was not
in on my steal. I should have made a joke of it, if he had been. The
fact is, I did not really have the idea of stealing the papers until I
found that I had done it.... Cantrell locked the safe, and the world
was mine--all in a coat pocket!... You mind, when Cantrell was killed,
or assassinated, the safe was blown open--quite a while afterward? I
had been back to England and to Ireland with Noreen in the meantime.
“God, how I have whipped the English!... When your name was spoken last
night at the Armory, the faces about me were like a lot of blood-mad
dogs--nostrils dilated and hackles up. I had to love you, Routledge, to
turn loose upon you--the Hate of London!”
“And you had the Hammond papers all the time you were in England and
Ireland?” Routledge inquired.
“Of course. I had only a few weeks in Europe before I was called back
to the Bhurpal skirmish-stuff. You had stayed in India----”
“But when and where did you get the papers to the Russian spies, Jerry?”
“In Bhurpal--as that affair opened. It was weeks before I met you that
night of the gathering when the two British forces came together.
I stopped at the Rest House in Sarjilid, on the way by train from
Calcutta to the front. It was there I heard a Russian sentence from an
alleged Parsee. I was onto the spy in a moment, but first I want to
tell you why I turned over the papers to him. First, rather, I want
a drink of whiskey. I’m talking thick and fast, and it burns out the
energy.”
Routledge served him. “Why you gave Cantrell’s papers to the first
Russian spy you met in India is what I want to know,” he said
carelessly.
“Listen, then. The idea came to me before I went out to India on that
Bhurpalese mix-up. I told you that Noreen and I took a little trip
to Ireland. I shouldn’t have gone back to Tyrone--where her mother
bloomed--where I was a boy. I shouldn’t have gone back!”
The old man’s voice trembled, but he did not lose his point.
“As it was, my son, the thoughts of Noreen’s mother and Ireland were
burning too deep in memory.... But we went back. The sun was going down
on the little town. It was dirty, shrunken, decayed--that old stone
city--and the blithest place a youth ever met a maiden, or passed his
boyhood.... Ah, the mothers and youths and maidens and the memories of
old Tyrone always sung in my heart--when I could forget England!”
Routledge lit a cigarette over the lamp and handed it to Cardinegh
without speaking. Jerry did not continue for a moment. Then followed
the impression his birthplace made upon him--the veteran with his
daughter:
“I can’t forget our last look--the old town, shrunken and silent in
the midst of her quarries. I heard the muttering in the doorways, as
we have heard it in India. The best blood had gone to America; the
knitting-works were shut down--the remnant starving. It was like India
in plague and famine, but I could have borne that.... It was the next
morning when I saw the British garrison quartered upon the town----”
“You know how Colonel Hammond felt when something sprung a leak in his
brain,” Routledge suggested.
“You’ve hit it, boy.... There was the old town, starving at best, with
three hundred British soldiers devouring its substance! It made me
think of a fallen camel--with a red-necked vulture for every bone in
the carcass. And that’s Ireland and that’s India!”
The whiskey was bright in the old man’s eyes. “Look out, Routledge,
when you hear a snap in your brain! You said something to that
effect.... I went back to India, as you know, up from Calcutta to
Sarjilid, where I met the Russo-Parsee. I thought of Noreen and her
mother, and Tyrone, and the service of England, which I know as well as
you. I thought of India.
“What did I find in Sarjilid? There was a famine there, too, and a
garrison of red-necked vultures; sand blowing down from the windy
hills; stench from the huts; voices from the doorways; a salt-tax that
augmented the famine because the people needed but could not buy their
own product; naked brown children, fleshless as empty snake-skins--but
I won’t go on! I must go to the war-office presently.... It was at
Sarjilid that I met the Russian.... It may be that I am another Colonel
Hammond, but I gave the documents away. He was an enchanting chap--that
Russian!”