Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 1136
Of course the story reached the colonel’s ears in time. One evening he and Burnham, on shikar together, having slain their boars and dined, sat under a tent club awning and watched the rising moon. Along the foreground fifty yards away the moon and starlight cast the long shadow of Kangra Gunga, standing near the line of tethered ponies. Over beyond the horse line, where the servants’ and the beaters’ camp-fires glowed, someone was singing. Night and the Lay of Alha wrought their magic. There was intimacy in the air. The colonel, staring at Kangra Gunga, lighted a cigar and broke the long silence:
“That man. What about him?”
“Top hole with the ponies.”
“Not bad. Horse sense runs in the blood of that breed from Gaglajung. You’d have had a close squeak this morning, if he hadn’t been behind you with another spear when you broke yours. That boar nearly had you.”
“Yes,” said Burnham. “Kangra Gunga could have ditched me pretty badly. Damned if I know why he didn’t. That was a tight place. No one could have blamed him if he’d been a second late.”
“What’s this queer story I hear about you and him? You’d better tell me.”
So, for the first time, Burnham told the story of the rissaldar-major’s death, and of how, in the heat of battle, he had spoken graceless insult overheard by Kangra Gunga.
“Have you ever mentioned it to him?”
“No. I should have spoken to him at the time. My fault that I didn’t. Afterwards, it was too late.”
“Any truth, do you think, in the gossip that he’s biding his time for revenge?”
“I don’t know. He’s a thoroughbred. Steel guts. Cast-iron memory.”
“We could get rid of him.”
“If he were a badmash, yes,” said Burnham. “But he’s a good soldier. Besides, the men would see through it. It would rot morale. They’d say I funked him. Do less damage to get rid of me.”
“Have it out with him. I don’t want you killed in the night, or poisoned, or any stink of that sort.”
“What’s there to say to a man who thinks in terms of eternity?” Burnham answered. “He will stand to his code. He will never betray his own izzat by an act of treachery. To suggest that one believed he even contemplated that would be a measureless insult.”
“Take him away alone and have it out with him,” said the colonel. “Settle it once and for all, or I will do it for you.”
But it was not so simple to have it out with Kangra Gunga as to wish to do it. There was not only the man’s absolutely perfect manners, not only the racial gulf between East and West, and the barrier of reserve between rank and file. There was the fact that the regiment watched. Nothing might be said or done that could be misinterpreted by men whose discipline depended on the integrity with which their officers observed the finer points of regimental honor.
Burnham applied for short leave for a shooting trip. He took Kangra Gunga with him, in charge of camp equipment.
A visit to Gaglajung and a sight of his home, where tigers were reported to be taking too great toll of cattle, might release emotion. Where Burnham and Kangra Gunga had been born, beneath the same all-seeing stars, beside the same wild river, Kangra Gunga might find speech to relieve the strain of imprisoned hatred.
At last, when they stood alone together by the plunging Pilgreet River in the place where Burnham’s mother’s camp was pitched in the week that saw both men born, Burnham broke the long silence:
“We were playmates here. Remember? You pretended to be Arjuna. To this day there’s a scar on my scalp where you clipped me with a blunted arrow.” He removed his helmet. “Do you remember the lie we told your father, to account for the bit of a wound?”
Kangra Gunga’s dark eyes watched the forefinger parting the crisp hair. Burnham continued speaking:
“Splendid man, your father. A grand soldier. Not a scrap of meanness in him, and no vindictiveness. With his dying breath he forgave me for a thoughtless insult.”
“Yes?” said Kangra Gunga.
“There’s the old scar. Can you see it?”
“Yes.” He met Burnham’s eye. He spoke slowly. “My father thrashed me for the carelessness with bow-and-arrow. But he thrashed me twice again for the lie.”
“You may speak plainly,” said Burnham. “There are no witnesses.”
“What do you wish me to say?” asked Kangra Gunga.
“What is this resentment that you hold against me?”
“Nay, nay! Spoken words are not falcons that return to be hooded.”
He saluted. Burnham nodded and he strode away to attend to the ponies.
Three days later, a wounded tigress charged from a thicket. Kangra Gunga shot her dead within a yard of Burnham’s back. It was as plain as if his smile had said the grim words, that he would let no brute beast rob him of revenge.
That night Burnham summoned Kangra Gunga to the camp-fire. Seated by invitation, Kangra Gunga smiled when Burnham asked him point-blank:
“What is the issue between us? Let us speak of it, once and for all.”
“I will listen to whatever your honor is pleased to say,” Kangra Gunga answered.
“Why have you refused promotion? Why not follow in your father’s footsteps?”
“Is it not sufficient that I bear in mind my father’s izzat? Have I failed of a sowar’s duty?”
“Look here, now. I admit that I insulted your father. It was unintentional, and I apologized at the first possible moment. He accepted my apology.”
“He was already dead when I reached him,” said Kangra Gunga.
“You have saved my life twice. Why?”
“Was it not my duty?”
“Very well. I have nothing against you, of course, if you do your duty. Good night.”
Burnham had to tell the colonel of his failure.
“But I wish, sir, you could see your way to let it ride a bit longer. I think I’ll solve it, sooner or later.”
The colonel raised gray eyebrows. “Perhaps too late!”
“For the sake of his grand old father’s memory I’d like to see this thing through to its end,” said Burnham.
“You mean your end, don’t you? Damned ass!” said the colonel.
“If the men should think I’d funked him, that might be the end of their respect for any of us.”
“Have it your own way. But remember: slow revenge is slow fire. If he ever kills you in your sleep, don’t return from the grave to haunt me for sympathy. You won’t get it.”
Thereafter, a rumor of war obscured all minor interests. There is endemic warfare in the mountains, where the lean Afridi pray to Allah for the coming of the great jihad, when they shall plunder India’s plains.Hence, frontier regiments.
Beyond the frontier, the crops had failed. Complaining women and the yearning of their own bellies had made the young men pious. Hugging their smuggled rifles, stolen or bought for their weight in silver, they had been listening to the hot-mouthed mullahs preaching Paradise for death in battle.
Gathering lashkars had been viewed, by the Royal Air Force. They had been warned and, since they mocked at warnings, realistically bombed. The high explosives shattered a few sangars, scarred the mountains and raised roaring echoes along valley and ravine. The mocking hillmen had retorted by depositing at Peshawar Gate three severed heads that recently had graced the shoulders of the village elders of a clan that claimed British protection: one last insolence too many.
The regiment prayed to its squadrons of gods to send it first into the field.
Fretful weeks of waiting. Sudden climax. Marching orders. A delirium of joy. And then the easy, affluent outpouring as of well-trained hounds gone hunting.
A mere hill campaign. It barely made the front page, for a day, in a pause in the riot of world events. Success depended on swift and masterly attack, against ferocious marksmen, amid mountains where the droning air force rarely could discover ambush, and the cavalry bore the brunt of reconnaisance as in days gone by. Raw wind and iron rations. Plundered forage for the horses. Blind trails, mapless wilderness and midnight sniping. Staff work beyond praise but this side of perfection. Somebody blundered.
There was a retirement, due to a misread signal, amid echoing gorges, where the hillmen had prepared an ambush unseen from the air. Seven officers down. The rules of warfare downwind with the yells of the ambushed hillmen.
Burnham and twenty men, of whom one was his orderly, Kangra Gunga, were surrounded, waterless, within the wall of an abandoned sangar, unseen from the air because a gray cliff leaned between them and the sky.
There was only one thing to be done. Burnham sent Kangra Gunga galloping to ask for aid or orders, water and ammunition. He saw him ride through a hail of flanking rifle-fire and pitch head foremost from his shot horse.
“Dead!” said a sowar, staring between piled rocks. “Who next?”
There were nineteen pairs of eyes that glanced at Burnham. Nineteen silent witnesses that destiny had solved a riddle, looking to see how he liked it.
Burnham climbed a rock for a more commanding view. He saw a way of escape. Like many another one-man’s fortress in the mountains, this one had a cunningly contrived back entrance. Well hidden by tumbled rocks, along the flank of the overleaning cliff, there was a path that offered precarious foothold for a led horse. One by one the men might steal away, unseen by the enemy. They might perhaps reach safety. It was worth trying. Burnham gave his orders and the escape commenced, one man at a time, at well-timed intervals.
The remainder defended the naked slope by which the enemy must climb. They kept up a hot fire through the gaps: in the broken wall; and as they vanished one by one, the others fired the faster, dodging from rock to rock to deceive the hillmen; until only Burnham and two sowars held the sangar — and then Burnham and one. He bade the last man go. The man demurred.Burnham spoke sharply: “Obey!”
Two minutes passed. Burnham used a wounded sowar’s rifle, dodging from rock to rock, pretending to be ten men. At last he drove his horse along ahead of him, because he needed to be free to use the rifle if the hillmen should rush.
Too late. A number of hillmen had climbed for a deadlier angle of fire. Almost a machine-gun gale of bullets screamed from a ledge three hundred yards away and killed the horse. That hitherto unoccupied crag commanded the first fifty yards of the stairway trail by which the men had escaped. To attempt it now was certain death. But even from that high vantage point, the enemy could not command the space within the sangar wall. They could not see it was deserted. For the moment, Burnham was safe where he was.
Darkness at the latest would bring the hillmen swarming up the slope to use their steel. So Burnham, taking cover with a rifle on his knees, sat down to wait for darkness — and the end. It might be worse. Hundreds of men of action have had to retire and rot to death, on half pay, in an English suburb. He had got his men safely away, that was the important point. He sat wondering which of the junior officers was alive and would take his place.
He was startled when Kangra Gunga, toward evening, crawled from between two boulders, stood, saluted and came forward, offering his water bottle. Burnham wet parched lips.
“Did you get through with your message?” he demanded.
“Yes. My horse was shot. I crawled until I found a sowar scouting forward, and to him I gave the message.”
“Very well,” said Burnham. “You weren’t told to come back here. Couldn’t you have escaped?”
“Yes.”
Their eyes met in the deepening shadow. A full minute passed in silence, broken by the cat-call laughter of the hillmen, before Burnham spoke:
“We’ll be dead in a minute or two, you and I. Care to shake hands?”
“Is it a command?” asked Kangra Gunga. He stood rigid at attention, his eyes glowing.
“No,” said Burnham.
There began to be heavier firing, down below in the ravine where the impatient hillmen awaited darkness.
“Stand to,” said Burnham. “This looks like the end.”
“If you are afraid, I will hold your hand,” said Kangra Gunga.
Neither man spoke after that for several minutes. They kept up a steady rifle- fire at hillmen who were dodging up the slope from rock to rock. Below them, the ravine was thunderous. Rifle-firing echoed and reechoed amid crags that deflected the din. It was impossible to see or guess what was happening, except that for the moment the assault, up the narrow approach to the sangar, had ceased.
Burnham and Kangra Gunga faced each other again, and Burnham smiled, a little wearily.
“Have you been waiting all these years for your chance to say that?” he said slowly.
“In the presence of death I have said it,” Kangra Gunga answered.
Burnham stared at him. “This is not the first time we have looked at death together.”
“Let it be the last time, sahib! It is possible to crawl to safety by the way I crawled in. I will hold this sangar while you do it. None will ever know you ordered it, unless you tell it.”
“I understand you,” said Burnham. “You don’t believe that your father accepted my apology?”
Kangra Gunga’s eyes had changed.
They were the eyes of a man who believed he had made a mistake, but who would take the consequences standing.
“You,” said Burnham, “how dare you even think I’d lie to a companion in arms? Take this rifle and go, by the way you came. You hear me? Obey!”
Sudden and terrific squalls of rifle-fire resumed in the ravine. Then a trumpet call, equally sudden, and no mistaking it.
“Open order — advance!”
“That’s the regiment,” said Burnham.
“Find them. Tell them where I am.”
Kangra Gunga saluted. “May I speak?”
“Yes.’’
“Look! They are coming at us again! The hillmen mean to finish us before the regiment prevents. Sahib —
“Obey my order.”
“Nay, I disobey it! I will die here. Major Burnham sahib, I had no sooner spoken than I knew it was wrong. But I spoke. I can not recall it. And you answered as a good companion in arms — aye, even as my father might have answered. I am ashamed. I will die here.”
“As you were,” said Burnham. “You may stay here.Quick now, use your rifle.”
For several minutes they lay side by side, firing steadily into the shadows. It was clear now that the hillmen were in full retreat, fighting a rear-guard action. A dozen of them were making one last desperate attempt to storm the sangar. The assault checked, hesitated, dwindled, ceased. Below, the squalls of rifle-fire advanced up the ravine like a hailstorm driven by a high wind. Burnham leaned his rifle against a rock, and again he and Kangra Gunga faced each other. At last Burnham spoke:
“Anything else on your mind?”
“No, sahib.” I have said what I said. I am ashamed.”
“So I was, once,” said Burnham. “As your father said to me, it is forgotten. Now would you care to shake hands?”
BURBETON AND ALI BEG
$ I.
THE wet-and-dry-nursed turf of Meadowbrook — sun sweetened green velvet on a ground of iron — drummed to a devil’s tattoo. There were other intermittent noises. Ponies and men breathed hard. About once in every thirty seconds the packed stands creaked under the strain; twenty thousand, of a class which keeps emotion underneath the surface, would grip the seats and sway one way or the other alltogether — throat-held, hypnotized, by the game that is to all other games as wine to water.
Through drumming of the hoofs — punctuating it — the click-smack-click of mallet-nose on whitened bamboo ball came at odd moments: now once, clean-clipped And hard, to be followed by thunder as the ponies wheeled and raced; now in a hail-storm clatter, with an underswish of whips as ponies tiptoed through a scrimmage nervously. Presently the crowd would sob again in unison, remembering at last to catch its breath.
“My conscience, but those gentlemen know how to lose!” said Margaret Brunton almost to herself, and Burberton beside her came out of a dream. He, too, had been watching spell-bound, and he felt a little bit ashamed of having let emotion get the better of him.
“Any man can learn to lose,” he answered — sneering rather more than he intended. “They’ve lost. What would you have them do — lose their tempers? I vote we make a move, before the crowd starts rushing for the gate. Our men have won. There are only two more chukkers. “There’s no earthly chance that the other side can pull the game out of the fire now.”
“I’m going to stay and see them try!” said Margaret. “You go if you like: Mr. Howe will see me home.”
“I’m dammed if he will!” thought Burberton, with a sideways glance at Sammy.
Samuel Hamilton Howe — gentleman of means and quite illimitable leisure — was about the only bosom friend that Burberton owned to. Sammy was a joke; every living being seemed to love him, but no man in his senses ever dreamed of coupling Sammy’s name with that of a woman. And Norman Burberton prided himself on being in absolute possession of all his senses.
He had no illusions of any kind at all. He believed he could read human nature like a book, and he despised it in a rather good-natured, condescending way that he had inherited (without accessories) from “Old Man” Burberton, his father. Old Man Burberton had laughed, and taken what he wanted, leaving his only son more millions than were altogether good for him. Norman Burberton forgot to laugh as a rule, bought what he wanted, and grew tired of it.
He had no least notion now that Margaret Brunton could conceivably prefer Sammy Howe to himself, and jealousy in any case was the passion he despised most. He was too masterful to be jealous He had his father’s absolute self-confidence, and a very considerable share of the railway magnate’s judgment; he had decided, after calm reflection during which he indulged in no vainglorious flights of imagination, that Margaret Brunton was waiting contentedly for him to propose to her in his own good time. He admired her patience, and paid her the compliment of treating Sammy’s attentions to her as quite undangerous.
