CHAPTER IV.
A VILLAGER EARNS HIS SALT
There’s Bengal Horse behind you, man, a crisscross trail ahead;
One plan to make;
Ten paths to take;
One slip—one fault—you’re dead!
There’s hue and cry, and clank of sword; hark! hear the trumpet call!
The pennants dance
On hungry lance!
Think quickly, Gopi Lall!
COLONEL STAPLETON was not a man to inveigh against policemen and then adopt their tactics or avail himself of their assistance. Nor had he risen to the rank of Colonel in a regiment that admitted no superior on earth without being a soldier in every courtly inch of him. The Stapleton of drawing rooms and mess tables—if the truth were known, of somewhat prosy platitudes, and rather too fastidious ideas—was another person than the man who led the Tail-Twisters when their lances rippled in the open, and their chargers strained behind him and the trumpeter.
He was still courtly. A lone woman would have picked him still of all his Regiment as the right man to apply to for protection. But a general of division, too, would have picked him to lead a rally, or a quick-sent charge to turn the tide of battle in a crisis—him and his Regiment.
He led his Regiment now—at an easy canter to take full advantage of the morning cool—straight toward the hazy line of hills where Gopi Lall was currently supposed to have his lair. The District Superintendent of Police, warned of the change in the direction of affairs too late to interfere, wore out an Arab pony in pursuit of him, and brought him to a momentary halt within a mile of the ragged foothills.
“I understand, sir, that you have been placed in charge of things,” he panted, wiping off the perspiration.
“Yes sir. You have not been misinformed.”
“Then don’t you want the police to cooperate?”
“No, sir.”
“But—”
“I prefer to act independently. I won’t deprive you or your policemen of any credit that may accrue to you. If I interfered with your plans, or availed myself of your men, it might be said afterward, if your men captured him, that my Regiment had done the work.”
He started to ride on.
“But, Colonel Stapleton—”
“Well, sir?”
“You won’t be able to ride right up to him like that! Why, he’s certain to have had notice of your start already; this country’s honeycombed with spies. He’ll be miles away by the time you get to where he may have been last night.”
“At least I’ll find his buzzard’s roost,” said Colonel Stapleton, “and make it a bit too hot to hold him for some time to come! I suppose you know where his headquarters are?”
“Nobody seems to know exactly. I know about within ten miles.”
“I’m going to know exactly, and within two hours. If he bolts, look out for him and if you catch him, you do it to your own advantage. I’ll set him moving, and keep him on the run, but no man of my Regiment will claim the reward unless one of my men bags him.”
“Will you wait one hour, sir, while I ride back and telegraph? He’ll bolt toward the north, I’m sure of it. He’s probably on his way now. I’d like to get a cordon of my men in place to intercept him.”
“D’you mean to tell me that you haven’t had a cordon drawn these three weeks past?”
“Yes, but I’d like to warn the men.”
“Through a—ah—baboo telegraphist?”
“How else?”
The Colonel smiled at him.
“I’ll wait for no one, sir. Good morning!”
Before the sun was two hours up the Tail-Twisters were in among the foothills, split up troop by troop, and scouring every trail that led toward the center of the hills. And a half troop under Dost Mohammed was busily rounding up outraged, expostulating villagers. They tried on him the tactics that for months past had foiled or fooled or suited the police. But he found a way to change their attitude; lances and sabers, fierce eyes and upbrushed beards and blunt directness, warhorse-carried, did what the police had failed in signally. Soon Dost Mohammed rode with a prisoner up behind him who knew Gopi Lall’s nest and the road to it, and dared not refuse to show the way.
What threats the grim Mohammedan growled to him as they rode were never entered in the Regimental history; but they seemed to be fierce enough, and backed with enough reality nearly to scare the soul out of the wretch. For, as they rode nearer in an ever narrowing arc of troops, to where a ring of trees stood on a dome-shaped hill, the prisoner showed signs of fright such as it is not exactly good to watch.
Time and again he begged to be left behind. Over and over he swore that from now on the road was straight and easy. But to his prayers and oaths the native officer answered nothing that any save the prisoner could hear. Had the Colonel heard, he might have felt disposed to deny the statement, given on the honor of a soldier, that he, Stapleton, was infinitely worse, more cruel, more ingenious, and less amenable to reason than the bloodsome Gopi Lall himself!
After a while, though, even that inducement lost its spur. The prisoner argued that he knew from grim experience what Gopi Lall was capable of doing, whereas the Colonel’s tendencies were hearsay. He threw himself down from Dost Mohammed’s horse and lay where he fell, shuddering on the ground. He would not rise, even when they urged him with a lance butt. He swore that he preferred death there to the chance of what might happen should Gopi Lall see who had led his enemies.
So, lest Gopi Lall recognize him, they tore two eye-holes in his loin cloth and wrapped that round his head, and put him on the horse again and started on.
“The Government will pay me for my cloth?” he wailed.
“Hold, Colonel sahib!” called the native soldier. “This black fellow of the foothills is playing with us!”
“What makes you think that?”
“He is not so frightened as he seems.”
They formed a ring round the trembling prisoner; he was trembling now in earnest.
“I will more than terrify him, Colonel sahib, if I may.”
“No, Dost Mohammed!”
“Huzoor, we–”
“We are not policemen, even if we are doing policeman’s work! I’ll have no dog’s tricks here.”
At the word “dog’s tricks” the soldier glowered, for it was hovering dangerously near an insult; Mohammedans and dogs are not associable, even in metaphor.
“If he’s not afraid, why is he shamming fear?”
“I know not, Colonel sahib. A dog might smell the reason.”
The native officer had chosen the wrong moment to display resentment at imaginary insults, as he divined on the instant. If Colonel Stapleton was courtly and considerate on every possible occasion, he was a stickler, too, for deference to himself and fully capable of enforcing it. His eye alone, when he was roused, was quite enough to cow most ordinary men. The native officer changed his tune in a hurry, before the Colonel could have time to speak.
“It was but a soldier’s joke, Huzoor. Let this man hunt, as a dog hunts, quartering the ground while the Regiment waits. I will soon see what he knows. If he wishes salt let him earn it.”
That was a pun that either in English or the native language might have had several meanings; the Colonel ignored all of them. He was in a hurry to get on, and too impatient to read riddles.
“Ride on with him,” he ordered. “You and ten men.”
So Dost Mohammed rode with him, feeling in his saddle bag to make quite certain that he had what he needed. He and his ten rode over a ridge, and down into the dip beyond; and then he called halt unexpectedly, and threw the prisoner to the ground.
“Bind him!” he ordered; and without a word, or even a look of astonishment, the troopers trussed him and cross trussed him with their hobble ropes. Then Dost Mohammed reached into his saddle bag again. He did not dismount himself.
“A pinch or two will serve,” he ordered, passing a little package to the nearest trouper. Another trooper forced open the prisoner’s jaws, and the first man took the package and poured something into the gaping mouth.
“Be careful lest he swallow it too quickly, and see that he spit out none!”
They squeezed the wretch’s throat to prevent his swallowing, and one man stuck a finger on his tongue and rubbed the dose well over it.
“So! Now let him rise. Kick him up. So—now!”
He legged his horse up beside the prisoner, and watched him with blazing eyes.
“Thou hast thy salt. Now pay for it. Salt without water is payment for thy service in advance. There will be water when we reach the den of Gopi Lall.”
The troopers mounted, and for two minutes sat in a half circle, watching the varying emotions play across their prisoner’s face. Their own faces were immovable, like the masks of Fate. The prisoner looked at the trees above him, and the hills around, and at the ground between his feet. Then he began to swallow hard, and next his eyes fell on a little tinkling stream that ran winding fifty yards away. He made a dash to reach it, but a trooper spurred his horse, and a drawn saber flashed between him and the stream.
“There will be water—cool water—in the den of Gopi Lall!” said Dost Mohammed.
The man went on his knees, but no answer came from the troopers. They sat and waited for the quite inevitable. He threw his tied hands up in an attitude of piteous appeal; not daring to speak, for fear of getting more salt saliva down his throat. But the troopers waited.
“Lead us to Gopi Lall,” said Dost Mohammed.
Another minute the prisoner sought for a way out. Then he surrendered. He came to Dost Mohammed’s saddle bow, and waited to be lifted up, for he could not mount alone with his hands tied. A trooper reined in beside him and seized him under the arms and swung him up behind the officer. Then:
“Fours—right about! Trot! Canter!” ordered Dost Mohammed. Within fifteen minutes from the start they were back to where the Colonel waited.
But the punctured loin cloth was over the prisoner’s head again, and nobody could see that the wretched man was undergoing torture.
“Why is he tied?” demanded Colonel Stapleton.
“He tried to escape, Huzoor.”
“Oh. What did you discover?”
“He was acting fear, to throw us off the scent. To make us believe that we were nearing Gopi Lall’s headquarters, he pretended that he was more and more afraid. He will now show us the true road. Shall I lead on, Huzoor?”
So, extended to twenty horses’ lengths apart, the Regiment wheeled and rode back at a canter ten miles along the road by which they came. Then, at a sign from the hooded prisoner—he gave it with his leg, for he could neither move his hands nor speak—Dost Mohammed wheeled and swung uphill suddenly along a track that was cleverly concealed by scrub. No trumpet sounded; but at a sign from Colonel Stapleton the troops split up, and snooped in different directions to surround the knoll above the jungle to which the track quite evidently led. And one troop and Colonel Stapleton himself followed Dost Mohammed and his ten.
The track wound and twisted almost on itself, through blind, black jungle; it was so narrow that for nearly all the way they had to ride in single file. Half way up Dost Mohammed rode into a string stretched above the path. A blunderbuss fixed in a near-by tree burst the same instant; and although it burst from overloading, scattering the slugs and nails harmlessly, the noise it made would have been enough to alarm the Seven Sleepers.
“Ride!” roared Colonel Stapleton from behind. “Crack on the pace, Dost Mohammed!”
But the native officer had spurred and settled down to ride in deadly earnest even before the instant order came. With a crash that set the jungle thundering as if a herd of elephants were stampeding through it, the troop whirled on until it reached a clearing—checked for an instant—swung out into line—and swept forward at a gallop.
“Halt!” roared Stapleton.
Before them was a fort, or something like one, made only of thin mud walls and rough stones here and there, but pierced for rifle firing. There was no flag above it, and no sign to show whether those who held it were outlaws or peaceful citizens. Only a babel from the interior proved that panic reigned inside. A minute later crash after crash resounded from eight different directions, and from four ways at once troop after troop, torn and bleeding from the jungle thorns, broke out into the open. The fort was surrounded, and retreat cut off.
“Order them to bring out Gopi Lall.”
Dost Mohammed rode ahead, still with his prisoner up behind him, and engaged in altercation at the gate. A moment later the gate swung open, and a weird procession came out sheepishly—fifteen men, a dozen women, two children, and a skew-bald native pony, lame and saddle-galled.
“Line them up and look them over.”
There were no weapons in the whole procession, and there surely was no Gopi Lall. Dost Mohammed dropped his prisoner and let him drink deep at a spring that bubbled from the ground before the gate.
“What made that man so thirsty?” asked the Colonel.
“Fear, Huzoor.”
“Um-m-m!”
He stared very hard at Dost Mohammed for a minute, but the Rajput’s eyes did not so much as quiver.
“Well—we’re wasting time.”
He took a troop himself, and searched the whole fort thoroughly.
The troopers drove their lances or their saber points into every crack and cranny; they probed the stamped earth floor and prodded in among the beams and around the eaves. But there was neither sign of Gopi Lall nor hidden loot.
The prisoners admitted readily enough that the fort was Gopi Lall’s headquarters, and that he had slept there overnight; but more than that they would not say. Two among them were the bandit’s captives, held for ransom; but, with truly Eastern logic, they were the least communicative. They had had trouble enough, and did not intend to risk the outlaw’s vengeance by betraying anything they knew.
There was scarcely any evidence there worth preserving, and no clue whatever to Gopi Lall’s present whereabouts. A few old blunderbusses and some native swords were found in corners, but they showed no signs of recent use. The soldiers carried these into the open and stacked them and later made the prisoners carry them. But first the Colonel ordered fire set to the fort thatch.
“At least I’ll spoil his rendezvous,” he swore. “And if there’s anything we didn’t find there, he won’t have the use of it.”
When the flames had burst, and blazed, and were beginning to die down again, he called his troop commanders to him.
“Now separate,” he ordered. “Divide the whole country into sections, and scour it thoroughly. Don’t leave a single nook or cranny or hut or hiding place unsearched. And don’t trust to the police cordon to the north. In other words, don’t dally. Ride him down. The brute was here last night, so he can’t have got far. Overtake him.
“And, in case he doubles back, or hides in the jungle, keep on scouring the country until you get him. Take any food you want and give vouchers for it; I’ll cash the vouchers back at Rajabatkhowa. Send in reports to me there.”
There was no place for the Colonel of a regiment then except headquarters, with the gleeful men split up in detachments and no possibility of centralized control.
So, a little sadly, he took one half troop as an escort and for camp guard duty, rounded up his prisoners, and started back to where young Boileau was supposed to be concentrating all his powers on writing up the Regiment’s “returns.”