Nightrunners of Bengal (15 page)

He stretched carefully beside her and hoped the jackal pack would not come into the garden. Back in Monghyr, in ’51, Gerry Curtiss woke up one night, heard a noise, pulled up the mosquito net to investigate, and stuck his face into a jackal’s. The jackal bit him on the nose—’50 or ’51, it was—damned lucky not to get hydrophobia—Julio. He went to sleep.

“H
UZOOR, huzoor, panchh baje, panchh baje.”

Quarter-light, Lachman’s round face, the trembly aftermath of champagne, and five o’clock it was. He picked up the cup of hot tea, his hand shaking a little, and listened to the starling-chatter of the mynahs in the trees. Life went round in circles—but this day’s work
promised more than a routine march to Kishanpur. Today he might really gallop with the fate of an empire hanging on his skill and courage. He turned and shook Joanna. She was sleepy and grumbly, as he had expected. He swung his feet out of the mosquito net, found his boots, and walked across the damp grass into the bungalow.

At five to six the squad of cavalry jingled up the road and halted outside his driveway. Boomerang stood under the carriage porch, and Rodney checked quickly that all was in order: cape and blanket rolled behind the rear arch; food for himself in the wallets; nosebag full of grain, and its mouth well secured; canvas water bucket, picketing pegs and ropes, spare horseshoes. On himself, sword, sabretache, pistol, cartridges, canteen. Money? No Englishman ever carried any in India, but he could hardly ask for food in some jungle village, eat half a dozen chupattis and a bowl of curried vegetables, and then give the man a chit redeemable thirty miles away at the Bhowani Club. He might have to buy food for the troopers too. He told Sher Dil to bring him twenty rupees in small change.

He saw, out in the road, that he knew the Native Officer in command—Jemadar Pir Baksh, a clean-shaven dark man with thin shoulders and a long body. He called the officer to one side and told him the agreed fable about dacoits. The Jemadar listened with unusual intentness, several times glancing up sharply. Rodney could not be sure that he accepted the tale at its face value, but he went on at once to work out with him on the map how far the carts could have gone. He decided to split the squad into two parties of twelve each, one under himself, the other under the jemadar, and allot areas of search to each party. At last, having fixed an afternoon rendezvous, he gathered the troopers round and explained to them the circumstances and the plan. They listened woodenly, appearing to find nothing remarkable in the story. The two parties rode off at twenty to seven in the morning, and almost at once separated to follow different paths.

The rendezvous was for four p.m. in the village of Mornauli, twenty-five miles east of Bhowani. Mornauli was a cluster of wooden huts squatted in a jungle clearing, and Rodney rode into it a few minutes after four, his troopers trotting wearily in half-sections behind him. He saw that the other party had already arrived. He had never in his life been hotter and dustier, or needed a long cold drink so badly; his throat was swollen and aching. He croaked the orders to dismount, water, feed, and rest, and flopped on his back under a tree near the village well.

Jemadar Pir Baksh walked over, stiff-legged, to report that his party had found nothing. Nor had Rodney’s; he sat up and tried to think. Where could the brutes have got to? He and his troopers had covered nearly fifty miles of jungle trail, asked at every village, and examined a hundred bullock carts even though only a handful had been four-wheelers. Pir Baksh shook his head and said grimly that he himself had done the same.

Rodney pulled out his watch. “No move before five, Jemadar-sahib. Orders in half an hour. Don’t unsaddle; loosen girths, and get some rest.”

The jemadar looked as if he were about to protest; Rodney waved him curtly away. He knew the men were exhausted and the horses foundering; all day the temperature had been about 105 in the shade—and the dwarf teak gave little shade—but the carts
must
be found. He was near dead himself, and his face was on fire. He drank from his canteen, refilled it at the well, and sat down again, leaning back against the trunk of the tree. Two naked little girls and a long-horned black buffalo came out of the village to inspect him, stopping three feet off. He threw the children an anna each, and opened a packet of curry puffs.

He must concentrate. The Dewan and his people knew that a stranger had seen the shells when the cart upset. They might therefore lie low in the jungles for a few days, and if they did he could never find them. But it was dangerous for them to hide, because sooner or later they’d have to cross
the Kishan, and pickets could reach the crossings before them. They were more likely to hurry the carts on, make all speed to get across the river into Kishanpur State. Rodney had directed the movements of his little force on that assumption, and for a minute he worried afresh as to how he and Pir Baksh could possibly have failed to connect with the carts.

He chewed furiously. He
had
failed, so now the Kishan was the best place to intercept them. He pulled the map from his sabretache, spread it on his knees, and began to calculate. The carts had left Bhowani at, say, one a.m.; they had forty-seven miles to go, and were not capable of more than two and a half miles an hour. If they made no stops, they would reach the Kishan in about nineteen hours—eight o’clock tonight. But it was physically impossible for bullocks to do that distance in this heat without rest, and water and fodder. They must stop for at least three hours, which would make it eleven o’clock before they could reach the Kishan.

He began to scribble in the margin of the map. He was in Mornauli—twenty-two or twenty-three miles to the river, depending on which route he took. With men and horses in their present state, he could not do better than six or seven miles an hour; it would be safer to calculate on four hours for the distance. If he set out at five-thirty with the troop, he’d be there at nine-thirty—perhaps a little earlier. That should be in good time to catch the carts.

The next problem: where would the carts cross the Kishan? The map showed only one ferry—on the main Bhowani-Kishanpur road—and no fords.

A memory nagged him. He stared crossly at the map and remembered. Kishan Falls: two huts opposite each other, a bullock cart creeping down a dusty track and into the river. That was a ford, unmarked; there might be others. He’d have to risk it; perhaps he could ask when he reached the river whether there were any other crossing places; the villagers here wouldn’t know. But would the carts use the ferry or the ford? The ford, tucked away in the deserted
jungles of the hunting preserve, was surely better suited to the secrecy of this affair.

He made up his mind; he would send Pir Baksh’s party to the ferry, and go to the ford himself—both parties to set out at five-thirty.

At eleven p.m. he reached the ford. Sweat and dust were caked on his skin and uniform; his head hurt, and a towering anger possessed him. Once he had lost direction and ridden a mile southward before he gathered his wits, looked at the sinking sun, and turned off on an eastward track. That was his own fault and no one else’s. But the other things—the mishaps which made the ride a bungled nightmare—those could not all have been his fault, unless the gods hated him.

It began when a trooper complained that his horse had contracted a severe girth gall; Rodney left the man behind and told the daffadar to ensure that he was put on a charge for neglect. Another trooper’s horse cast a shoe; after a little delay, Rodney left that man behind too. The same thing happened again, and he decided to wait while they cold-shoed the animal, for his party was becoming depleted and he did not know how many armed men there were with the carts. Then the daffadar’s horse threw him, and it took ten minutes to revive the daffadar and catch the horse. Rodney could not be sure, in the gloom of the jungle, but suspected that the daffadar was not so badly hurt as he pretended, and certainly no bones had been broken. Twice after dark the troopers shouted out that so-and-so was missing; the horses crashed about among the trees, the strayed man was gathered, and they rode on. Once Rodney suddenly realized he was alone, and that the whole lot of them had disappeared; after twenty minutes’ galloping he collected them. Then he lost his temper and blistered them with curses, and that did not help. Certainly the men were very tired, but that was no excuse for acting worse than a mob of recruits.

When the roar of the falls dinned in his ears, he peered at his watch—five to eleven. He rode straight to the hut
he’d sighted on this bank that distant February day. Leaning down from the saddle, he banged on the low door, and after a minute a frightened little man came out.

Rodney longed to bawl and scream, but that would only petrify the man. “Don’t be frightened, brother. We are Company’s cavalry, from Bhowani. I want to know whether a string of bullock carts have crossed the ford here, in this direction, in the last hour or two. Most of them were four-wheelers.”

He bent forward anxiously. The man’s mouth was open, and he was staring slowly round the circle of troopers. Rodney fought down an impulse to let off his pistol by the fellow’s ear, and waited. At last it came.

“Carts, sahib? Deshu from up the road crossed at sunset, with his woman. But he was coming from Kishanpur, see? The other way, see? And—yes—Parmanand a little later, with a load of straw. But he was coming from Kishanpur too, see? The other way, see? And their carts are two-wheelers; you couldn’t hardly call them a string either, could you, because they only have one each, see? And then thirteen long ‘uns just now, four-wheelers, going to Kishanpur, see? I don’t know who they are—foreigners, see? They always cross here. Then there was——”

“Thank you, brother. Here”—Rodney threw down a rupee—“and don’t tell
anyone
we came asking questions, or we’ll put you in Bhowani Gaol, see?”

He snarled the last words, but the joke died in him. That was the convoy he wanted; “foreigners” meant only that they didn’t live within walking distance of the speaker’s hut. He turned wearily away and slumped in the saddle. That was that. He hated defeat—caused by these miserable troopers too—but that was no excuse. He was in command, and he had failed. His brain would not stop.

The carts, being now in Kishanpur State territory, might turn off to some secret arsenal; nevertheless it was a better chance that they would head for the fort. He could swim his half-squad across the Kishan and intercept them on
the road—perhaps at Monkeys’ Well—but that would get Colonel Bulstrode into serious trouble. Or he could go over by himself; he was armed now, and not afraid of the Dewan or his mysterious carters. That was an idea; his tactics should be to find out exactly where the carts went, then report it to Bulstrode.

He urged Boomerang into a fast trot. An hour later he knew from the configuration of the bank that he was opposite his old riverside camp. Halting, he motioned the daffadar up alongside.

“Bivouac in here, out of sight of the river. I’m going over alone. Don’t tell anyone where I am. If I’m not back by this time tomorrow night, return to Bhowani and report direct to Colonel Bulstrode. Understood?”

He dismounted and handed over Boomerang’s reins to a trooper, took off spurs, shako, belts, and tunic. The pistol belt he refastened around the waist of his trousers, and prayed that the water would not affect the cartridges. He slipped into the river. The water was warm, but it flowed cool and wonderfully soothing across his overheated skin.

He was more tired than he thought, and at the far bank lay for a few minutes on the grass. The whiteness of his shirt worried him, so he plastered it and his face with mud. Then he walked through the strip of thin jungle, which be remembered well; his tents had been here. Ahead, the seven tall trees at Monkeys’ Well stood up dark across a field. He bent low and worked towards them on the blacker side of a thorn hedge.

Close under the trees he moved more slowly. There was no wind and no sound, and in the moonlight the ruined well seemed the shadowy altar of a vanished people. He placed his feet carefully, peering at the ground; the hamadryad ruled here. The monkeys—he’d forgotten them—set up a sudden shriek and gibber, and crashed from bough to bough. Leaves and twigs showered down from a pandemonium in the darkness overhead. He hurried the last few paces and dropped to his stomach; it was lucky no one was here.

Slowly he let the breath out of his lungs and began to relax. Water dripping from his shirt made tiny noises on the earth.

Someone was here. As a face leaps suddenly out of a puzzle picture, the figure of the Silver Guru sprang out of the trellised shadows by the well coping. Rodney half-rose, for the cold eyes looked straight at him. The chest did not seem to rise and fall; the trunk was upright, and the legs crossed. The figure was like a statue; the splashing light made leprous spots where it fell.

Rodney sank down and lay breathless. He could not believe that the Guru did not see him. Tautly concentrated, he saw nothing but the still shape opposite, until a noisy panic once again disturbed the treetops. With infinite care he turned his head. The Dewan, on horseback, trotted into the grove from the direction of Kishan Falls.

Rodney almost sighed with relief; this was better, more what he had expected. He eased the pistol forward in his hand.

The Dewan slowed to a walk and peered from side to side as he came on. He was muttering in a suppressed and angry voice, “Where are you, you damned charlatan of an Englishman? Stop playing the fool!” The horse shied violently. “
Hut!
You gave me a start; you look like a snake yourself. Fornication! These monkeys are making a filthy row.”

He dismounted, and the Guru said quietly, “They have done it several times tonight. The hamadryad is about, so mind where you put your feet. You seem excited, Excellence. What is the matter?”

“Matter! One of your compatriots, swine-drunk and capering about at midnight outside Bhowani, upset a cart and saw what was in it! They sent cavalry after us; I suppose Dellamain couldn’t prevent it. Luckily it was the——”

“Not now, Excellence. At three.”

“That’s the time, is it? I’ll be there. The carts are on their way to the lake, but the girls are making a fuss. I’ll have to
arrange for them to be moved on at once, and the other stuff. By God, I shall be happy when this is all over. I want the killing to begin. My fingers itch.”