Little Lost Lambs, page 44
This chimed with Kent's inner thoughts. "Yes, may Providence or God or the devil judge between us, Captain Gerald. And may the officer of justice be whatever tool is handiest!"
Now, by one of those minute coincidences that link together the chain of life, both men started and stepped back, although they had heard no sound—were, in fact, alone in the billiard room.
Intent on each other they noticed only vaguely what seemed to be the dart of a snake out from the lattice of the open window upon the bare green table between them.
But it was not a snake. It flashed back through the lattice, leaving behind it, however, a folded square of torn, yellow paper.
On the upper side of the paper, traced in a curious, curving hand, was the name: "Kent Sahib."
THE blooming, thievin' beggar had the chit in the cleft of a stick. Pushed it in through the lattice-work, pulled back his stick and slipped down the veranda post, out into the bush before I had a fair look at him."
So said Kent, irritably, as he returned from his sally out on the upper veranda of the club. Twilight, aided by a mist of rain, had enabled the fugitive messenger to penetrate the Rawal Pindi compound unnoticed.
As the political agent deciphered the flowing Turki script on the paper, an oath came from his bearded lips.
"A dinner invitation, and a pressing one, for tonight. Also, from the worst murderer in the Hindu Kush." He jerked his thumb up over his shoulder at the lattice, behind which the curtain of rain concealed the outline of the giant foothills of the Himalayas.
Sparing of speech or motion—a trick of all old service men—Gerald took the missive up from the table where Kent had tossed it contemptuously and painstakingly read it through.
"The Kadi, Kent-Sahib, will come to the home of his unworthy servant, Jehan Khan. He will come tonight. He will be afoot, without his police. Inshallah."
"Sheer insolence," growled Kent. "Inshallah—by the will of God. I'll stay in Pindi, thank you. The Pathan, Jehan Khan, calls himself the descendant of kings, and has a nest somewhere up in the gorges that my men can't find. I might have marked it down once, but a hill native ran full into my horse at a bend of the kud—the precipice path."
The political agent was not lacking in courage. When the native had accosted him, Kent had struck the fellow with his riding crop. The blow, falling on the man's head, had knocked him down. "End over end, about a thousand feet or so," Kent was fond of saying.
He remembered it clearly, because there had been something peculiar about the eyes of the hill native. Kent did not know what it was, but from time to time he found himself thinking about those eyes——
"I am going there tonight," observed Gerald. "Fact is, I got the mate to this chit two hours ago. Only it said a woman needed my care."
"Then it's a trick! No Moslem would let you look at the face of one of his wives, let alone touch her. You don't really mean to go? You'll have a knife in your back if you do."
"Better to chance that than have a musket ball, long range, in my head if I don't. Jehan Khan invariably pays off a grudge. You see, I treated a wound of his once and said I'd do as much again." Gerald spoke lightly, while he puzzled over the duplicate messages received by himself and Kent. It seemed to be nothing more than a bit of effrontery; but long experience had taught the surgeon that nothing the Pathans did was without a distinct purpose. "Has Jehan Khan any score against you, Kent?"
The other shrugged and shook his head. Gerald's lips tightened at a sudden thought. "Has the Pathan ever threatened your wife?"
Again the hard smile came to the lips of Kent. "Ethel pretends to like the rascals that you dote on. She rides alone in the upper gorges, in spite of my warning——"
The smouldering light of suspicion was in his eyes as he watched Gerald stride away and heard him call quickly for his horse. When the Daktar Sahib rode out the compound toward Dalgai, Kent overtook him.
"Think I'll go with you," the political agent grunted, "as far as Dalgai."
"That would be best."
THEY pelted through the mud, heedless of the rain, and at the Kent bungalow in the cantonment, Gerald's sudden fear was realized. His few visits to the bungalow veranda were treasured up in memory, but this one was to endure in his thoughts so long as he lived. Ethel Kent had disappeared.
She had gone for her usual evening ride, the frightened native butler said. The mem-sahib had refused to take her groom. A half hour ago the police riders, sent out to seek her, had returned with the mem-sahib's horse, found lame by the ravine of the Panjkora River.
The Panjkora, Gerald knew, was one of Ethel's favorite haunts. He had met her there once and warned her it opened into the brigand's preserves.
The river? He knew Ethel was unhappy in her marriage with Kent. But she would not——
"Jehan Khan has carried her off," he said to Kent, who was staring at him blankly.
"The thieving dog! By God, he'll know a thing or two when I've finished with him. I'll take a company of my men, surround his eyrie——"
"Won't do, you know, Kent. You couldn't find it without guides; the Pathans would snipe off your fellows, and, don't you see, man, Jehan Khan holds your wife hostage?" Gerald unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his revolver and holster and handed it to the trembling butler. "I fancy I'll have to accept Jehan Khan's invitation, on his own terms."
Kent started. He had forgotten the note.
"He said," Gerald summed up, "to come alone and on foot. We'll ride our horses as far as the Panjkora trail and send `em back by one of your men. That is, if you are coming." He looked at the other squarely. "If you and Jehan Khan have any score to settle between you it would be better for me to go alone——"
A low laugh in the darkness answered him. Nor did Kent see fit to discard his revolver as he spurred forward.
At the cantonment entrance a shadow rose from the roadside and began to trot beside the two horses. The shadow was that of a tall Pathan in dripping finery, a long jezail over his shoulder. This did not surprise Gerald.
The Daktar Sahib was meditating on the strange turn of events. An hour since, secure among the police troopers of Rawal Pindi, an influential political officer had laughed at a Pathan's chit.
Now this same officer was hastening—in a gnawing rage and armed, but nevertheless hastening—to obey the summons of the Pathan.
JEHAN KHAN'S name signified the Lord of the World. A pretentious title, considering that Jehan Khan's domain consisted of as much hillside as he had been able to wrest from the neighboring tribes who were his foes—and the Tower.
That was the secret of Jehan Khan's power. Jehan Khan had won it in a hand-to-hand scrimmage with another chief who had been tumbled headlong to his death in the Panjkora. The Tower was ideally situated for an execution, and was inaccessible except to his own men, impregnable, and invisible.
You see, Jehan Khan was a philosopher. In the small Koran that hung from his bull neck he had written two prayers—that he would never miss his aim, and that he would never allow a wrong to go unpunished.
Gerald, who had met the Pathan chief, considered that the Lord of the World had two redeeming traits. He reverenced his aged father; he kept his word. He was of course a most gifted liar, but when he made a promise he kept it. Witness, the coming of Arthur Kent to the Tower.
WHEN the shadow of the Panjkora gorge closed in on them their Pathan guides made known that the two sahibs must dismount and send back their two horses.
Kent demurred, but Gerald dismounted and set the example of cutting his mount with a blow of the riding-crop. When the horses had disappeared, galloping homeward, the Pathans produced from somewhere two shaggy, miniature ponies and the white men mounted and carried on.
"You would better," suggested Gerald, who had been pondering the episode of the ponies versus their own mounts—nothing that a Pathan did would be without good reason—"rid yourself of that revolver. It might make more trouble for us."
"Not much," growled the burly political agent. "I may use it, and if I do it would be trouble for Jehan Khan, not for us."
Gerald said no more. He wished mildly to point out that the Pathan held Ethel Kent, beyond a doubt, and that the safety of Ethel Kent must be gained by mutual terms, not by weapon-play. And the safety of the woman was the one thing that mattered.
For this reason Gerald had discarded his own revolver. But Kent had a perfect right to keep his side-arms.
The political agent had the knack of shooting from the hip. He could, in this fashion, perhaps shoot more quickly than could Jehan Khan. But not more accurately.
Their ponies were threading up along a cliff path as broad as the extended arms of a man at the widest point. Afoot, or on plains-bred horse-flesh, they might slip on the damp stones and fall a thousand feet or so into the Panjkora in flood.
It was useless, Gerald found, to try to piece out the turns and twists of the way. The rain had ceased, but the cloud banks shrouded the moon, and the brisk wind that whipped at them seemed to come from every quarter of the compass.
They ascended, in time, beyond the timber line. The clouds enveloped them as their horses edged over a crescent-shaped rock bridge that gave the illusion of swaying above a limitless abyss. A stone was detached from the bridge and Gerald listened for its impact below in vain.
Gerald remembered that he had seen Ethel Kent once in the lower valley—a trim figure, hatless, her gray eyes intent on the hills that rose over the ravine like the buttresses of heaven itself. A flush under her eyes had told Gerald that she had been crying. He would have given an arm to have spared her that.
This love he had guarded rigorously from Ethel's eyes and the eyes of the world. She was another man's wife.
He wondered why she had come back to the spot. They had exchanged only a few words. She had smiled, wistfully as a child.
Here Gerald struck viciously at his boot and his horse shivered.
"Sahib," growled a voice, "for the love of God, take care. Not a year ago a man fell to his death from here, a holy man."
As the voice of the Pathan reached him there was a glimmer of veiled lightning and Gerald caught a glimpse of a mazar, a nativi shrine, close to the path on the near side. It was nothing but a heap of rocks ornamented with rags stuck on sticks planted in the rocks. On an outcropping of rock it overlooked the path, where, on the off-side, was a sheer drop.
Gerald saw, at the same time, the dark face of Kent peering at him. Then they passed around a bend in the cliff and halted. Gerald wondered whether his horse had been startled by the blow of the whip or whether there was an aspect of the supernatural about the spot.
He wondered, because he himself had had a distinct prescience of death at that moment, and Gerald's imagination was not usually sensitive to such impressions.
On foot again, they were led up a stony incline, passed by a sentry who challenged them in the darkness, and lifted to the shoulders of their guides. Ascending through what seemed to be a dense tamarisk thicket, they were hoisted into the aperture of a black structure that loomed abruptly out of the clouds.
"Long life to my guests!" said the Lord of the World, and he laughed as he said it. "Hast thou no fear?"
A torch revealed him to Gerald, a man broad of girth, his shoulders too big for his soiled coat. Yet the face under the gray turban was lean and hawk-like, and the fine, dark eyes were eloquent and unreadable as an animal's eyes.
What Kent noticed especially was the bandolier of cartridges over the bandit's shoulder, the heavy revolver in his belt.
"Where is thy father?" he responded in fluent Turki, scanning the array of bearded faces that clustered in the shadows of the castle hall behind the Lord of the World, "And where is the memsahib, my wife?"
Although the Pathan still smiled, his thin nostrils quivered.
"My venerable father," he explained, "is dead of the bite of a mad dog. The woman is here!" He motioned the two toward a room opening into the stone-flagged hall. "The meiman khanwn, my guest room."
It was a place that Jehan Khan had, or fancied he had, fitted up in the manner of Europeans. Three-legged chairs stood about in the most inconvenient places imaginable; a photograph of Colonel Younghusband, a bullet hole marking one eye, hung against the cheap print paper.
From the sofa under the portrait Ethel Kent rose, and her beauty was like a flower in the hideousness of the room.
"Captain Gerald!" she cried. She was tucking a strand of the bronze hair into place, and she smiled at the two men. Ethel must have expected her husband's coming, and the arrival of the Daktar Sahib surprised her.
He had noticed that she limped, and he kneeled to touch the stockinged ankle from which the riding boot had been removed.
"Not a bad sprain," she answered his unspoken question. "I merely wrenched my ankle when my horse threw me; I was riding near the mouth of the Panjkora ravine. But I could not walk and Jimmy, my horse, was lame too, poor fellow. The Pathans rode up then and made me come up here on one of their ponies."
"Didn't you offer them money to bring you back to our lines?" Kent demanded.
"They wouldn't. I can only speak a few words of Hindustani, and when I said that you would be angry and the policemen would punish them they only laughed."
Gerald, who had assured himself that the woman's hurt was no more serious than she had stated, turned in time to check the outburst that Kent was ready to launch upon their host. The taciturn Daktar Sahib had been thinking.
The messages from Jehan Khan had reached the club at Rawal Pindi in less than two hours after the seizure of Mrs. Kent. It was not accident that had brought the Pathan and his men on the scene. They must have been watching from one of the lookouts on the mountain slopes. Jehan Khan had prepared the messages before he had shown himself to Ethel Kent.
"Is this thy hospitality?" he rated the Pathan soundly. "A cold room for thy guests and no food offered?"
Jehan Khan seemed abashed. Under his directions a supper of cold mutton and chuppaties was brought, and a smoking blaze ignited in the brazier by the sofa. This done, Gerald asked him to order his followers from the room.
"Wilt thou share with us, Jehan Khan," he inquired, "the chota hazri?" (the little breakfast).
With a glance at Kent, the Pathan shook his head, his fingers playing with the thick mesh of his beard the while.
"Nay, my Daktar Sahib, the honor is too great."
At this Kent scowled and burst into long pent-up speech. "Dog and thief, dare ye hold the memsahib captive? Release us at once, and provide horses. Then come to the Sirkar to beg forgiveness for thy crimes, or thou wilt be thrown from the Tower to the vultures."
The Pathan's face darkened at the insult. It is not well to call a Moslem of rank a dog. His smile vanished in a trice and his eyes became hot coals. "I dare, Sahib!" Then he made a gesture as if putting aside an unpleasant thought. "Are any crimes written under my name in the book of the Sirkar? Nay. As for the memsahib, I knew not her speech and did but carry her to shelter for the night. Is that a crime?"
"Thou liest. The message written by thee proves it." Kent's anger beat impotently against the iron restraint of the native. "Thou hast a price; name it."
Jehan Khan smiled again. "A price for what?"
"My—our release."
"Has anyone said that thou and the other sahib and thy wife are not free to go?"
Kent was nonplussed. He had believed that the Pathan was holding Ethel for a heavy ransom, and had sent to Gerald and himself to arrange terms. He had come, with Gerald, because of the suspicions taking shape in his mind against the other.
"Thy message——" he repeated.
"It was to summon thee, Kent Sahib. Is the woman not thy wife? For whom should I have sent?" Jehan Khan enjoyed to the full the bewilderment of the massive white man. "Yet, since thou hast said it, I will take a small price for my pains as a make-weight." On the last word he hesitated briefly.
"Ah."
"A very small price: two thousand rupees."
"How much?" The exclamation broke from Gerald, who was frankly astonished. Two thousand rupees was barely the price of three reasonably good polo ponies.
"As I have said, rupees, two thousand. It will be a make-weight."
Jehan Khan repeated his words, and assented to Kent's swiftly framed conditions. The three visitors—as he insisted on calling them—were to be allowed to depart from the castle the next day; horses were to be provided; they were not to be followed.
"Good!" Kent closed the bargain, and felt in his pockets. He and Gerald had both come without such a sum on their persons. "I will give thee a signed note for the money." His bluster returned, under assurance that Jehan Khan would not dare molest them. "Well for thee, Pathan, that thou dost obey me. Otherwise, this." He tapped the butt of his revolver.
Long and curiously the Lord of the World looked at the white man and his weapon, as if trying to read the thoughts of a child. His black eyes under heavy brows were wolfish. Clapping his hands loudly he summoned a native and ordered writing materials brought.
When the brief promissory note was written he checked Kent when the latter was about to sign.
"The Daktar Sahib," he explained softly, "will write his name alone. Thus and not otherwise will I know the chit will be honored."
This was his way of returning Kent's compliment of a moment ago. A Pathan never lets an insult pass unanswered. Tucking the paper into his girdle he bowed and retired.
"His price was cheap enough," grunted Kent, who had flushed. There were certain gambling debts for which he had signed notes at the club-notes still unhonored. "Why did you ask that scoundrel to breakfast with us?"
Receiving no answer Kent sat down and attacked the mutton cutlets vigorously. He flattered himself he had handled the situation well. To tell the truth he was rather relieved. There had been something spooky about their trip to the tower hidden among the clouds, and Jehan Khan's eyes ... Had he seen those eyes before? Well, the beggar knew his place now.
