Told in the East

XII.

There were many more causes than one that worked together to make possible the entry of Brown and his little force into Jailpore. They were brave men; they were more than brave and they held the ace of trumps, as Brown had stated, in the person of the fakir known as “He.” But luck favored them as well, and but for luck they must have perished half a dozen times.

They marched the whole of the first afternoon, and met no one. They only overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be the advance-guard of a larger force. The very idiocy of marching eleven strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their favor. Nobody could believe that there were no more than eleven of them. Even the English could not be such lunatics!

That night, they rested for a while, and then went on again. During the day following they lay in a hollow between some trees and rested, and slept by turns. They suffered agonies from the heat, and not a little from hunger, and once or twice they were hard put to it to stop the Rajput's charger from neighing when a native pony passed along the nearby road. But night came again, and with it the screen of darkness for their strange, almost defenseless caravan. Once or twice the fakir tried to shout an alarm to passing villagers, but the quick and energetic application of a cleaning-rod by Brown stopped him always in the nick of time, and they came within sight of the battlements of Jailpore without an accident.

Then, though, their problem became really serious, and it was a series of circumstances altogether out of their control and not connected with them that made their entry possible. The mutineers in Jailpore had learned that Kendrick sahib was coming down on them from the north by forced marches with thirty-five hundred men or more. They were putting the place into a state of siege, and getting ready by all means in their power to oppose him.

Little attention was being paid to small parties of arrivals from no man knew or cared where. And, in a final effort to find the four who were the lure that was bringing Kendrick down on them, the city was once more being turned upside down and inside out, and men were even being tortured who were thought to know of hiding-places.

With purely Eastern logic, the leaders of the rebels had decided that the sight of the bodies of the four, writhing in their last agony on the sun-scorched outer wall, would mightily discourage the British when they came. So no efforts were being spared and no stones left unturned to find them. The hooks on the wall were sharp and ready, so that they might be impaled without loss of time in full view of their would-be rescuers.

Almost every secret passage of the thousand odd had been explored. In the hurry to run through them and explore the next one, doors had been left open here and there that had been kept closed in some instances for centuries.

One door in particular, placed cornerwise in a buttress of the outer wall, was spotted by Juggut Khan as he circled round the city on his charger at dusk on the day following their arrival. He brought his charger back to where the others lay concealed, and then went on an exploring-expedition on foot—to discover that the outer city wall was like a sponge, a nest of honey-combed cells and passages wandering interminably in the fifty-foot-thick brick and rubble rampart.

And while he searched amid the mazy windings of the wall, Bill Brown sat in the forked top of a tree and studied out the ground-plan of the city. He was imprinting landmarks in his memory for future reference, and trying—with a brain that ached from the apparent hopelessness of the task—to figure out a plan.

He knew by now that the four he had come to rescue were hidden underneath the powder-magazine, and he could see the magazine itself. But he could think of no way of rescuing them, for the city absolutely boiled with frantic, mixed-up castes and creeds picked at random, and thrown in at random from the whole of India. A mouse could not have passed through the streets undetected! And yet, from a soldier's point of view, there were certain fascinating details to be noticed about that powder-magazine. In the first place, it had been constructed for a granary by an emperor who never heard of Joseph, but who had the same ideal plan for cornering the people's food-supply. And since labor had been unlimited, and cheap, he had gone about building the thing on the most thoroughly unpractical and most pretentious plan that he and his architects could figure out. It was big enough to hold about ten times as much grain as the province could grow in any one year of plenty. And, since that was the least practical and most ungranary-like shape, he had caused it to be built like an enormous beehive, with a tiny platform at the top.

Winding round and round the huge stone dome, and on the outside, was a six-foot-wide trail, which was the elevator. Up this, each with a sack or a basket on his head, the population was to have been induced to run in single file, dumping its hard-won corn into the granary through an opening at the top until the granary was full.

The emperor died—by poison—before he could see his cherished project put into execution, but he had been a very thorough calculator, and a builder who believed in permanency. He had foreseen that when the granary was full, and the screw-jacks were turned beneath the cost of living, there would probably be efforts made by unwashed, untutored, unenlightened mobs to rape his storehouse. So he had made the little platform at the top a veritable fortress of a place, such as a handful of men could hold against a hundred thousand.

There was no known entrance to the granary above ground, except on the ground level, where a huge stone gateway frowned above a teak-and-iron door. Above that door there were galleries, and fortalices and cunningly invented battlements in miniature, from behind whose shelter a resolute defending-party could pour out a hundred different kinds of death on a hungry crowd. The place was naturally fire-proof and naturally cool—as far as any building can be cool in Central India. It was a first-class, ideal powder-magazine, if useless as a granary; and the last new conquerors of India had hastened to adopt it as a means of storing up the explosive medicine with which they kept their foothold.

Naturally, none but White soldiers, and a very few of the more trusted natives, had ever been allowed to go inside the powder-magazine. The secret passages beneath it had never been intended for public convenience or information. They had been designed as a means of rushing defenders secretly into the granary, and they connected with a tunnel underneath the palace that had just been burned. They also connected with the outer wall in such a way that defenders from the ramparts might be rushed there too, if wanted in a hurry. But, since there never had been corn kept in the granary, and nobody had ever had the slightest need to force an entrance, the knowledge even of the existence of the passages had become barely a memory, and there was not a man living in Jailpore who knew exactly where they began or where they ended. There was a man outside who knew, but none inside.

The point about the powder-magazine which most appealed to Brown—next after his knowledge of its contents, mineral and human—was the fact that the little platform at its summit overlooked the city-wall, and that the side of the granary actually touched the wall on the side of the city farthest from where he sat and spied it out. Ten men on that protected platform, he thought, might suffer from the sun, but they could hold the building and command a good-sized section of the city ramparts against all comers.

He noticed too, though that seemed immaterial at the time, that one well-aimed shot from heavy ordnance might crash through the upper dome and set off the powder underneath. There was no artillery that could be brought against the place, either with the British force or with the mutineers, but the thought set him to wondering how much powder there might be stored on the huge round floor below, and what would happen should it become ignited. It was a sanguinary, interesting, subtle kind of thought, that suited the condition of his brain exactly! He climbed down from the tree, feeling almost good-natured.

At the bottom he met Juggut Khan, waiting for him patiently.

“What have you seen, sahib?” he asked him. “Have you formed a plan?”

“I've been wishing I was Joshua!” said Brown. “I'd like to make my men march round the city and blow trumpets, and then see the walls fall down. I can think of several things to do, if we could only get inside. But I can't think how to get there.”

“I have found a way in!” said Juggut Khan. “I have cross-questioned that fakir of ours as well, with a little assistance from a cleaning-rod wielded by one of your men. He knows the way too. He says he is the only man who knows it—in which he lies, since I too have discovered it. But his knowledge may help as well.”

“What's that about a cleaning-rod?” asked Brown.

“It was used on him to help him forget his vow of silence.”

“When?”

“When you were up that tree, sahib!”

“Have you been giving my man orders?”

“Nay, sahib!”

“How did he come to beat the fakir, then?”

“We both arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment, and the fakir received the benefit!”

“Who held him, you?”

“Nay, sahib! God forbid! I am a clean man. I listened to his conversation. The Beluchi held him.”

“Oh! Well, I like you well enough, Juggut Khan, but there are things about you that I don't like. You're too fond of doing things on your own responsibility, and you're much too fond of using oaths. Y our soul is none o' my business; you're a heathen anyhow, and no longer in the Service. But, I'll trouble you not to use those disgraceful oaths of yours in the presence of the men! Do you understand me?”

“I understand you, sahib. If my respect for all your other qualities were not so profound, I would laugh at you! As it is, if your honor should see fit to turn the bullocks loose, and tie the fakir fast between two men and follow me, it seems to me dark enough by now, and I know the way. Might I furthermore suggest that the ammunition-box would make a reasonable load for another two men?”

“Hadn't we better bring our rifles too?” asked Brown sarcastically. “Upon my honor, Juggut Khan! You're getting childish! Are your nerves upset, or what? Lead on, man! Lead on!”

“Listen. There are two ways, sahib. One way leads from the burned-out barracks to the cellar where the women lie hidden. That way is closed by debris. The other way leads from the outer wall by a very winding route to the cellar where the women are. The fakir knows that way, and I do not, though I know of it. There is a third way, though, that leads from the outer wall, where I have been exploring, straight almost, if you disregard a wind or two, to the inside of the powder-magazine. It enters the magazine through a doorway secretly contrived in an upright pillar—or so the fakir swears. Now this is my notion, sahib. If we go in by the lower way, we must come out that way, and run the risk of being caught as we emerge. That risk will be greatly enhanced when we have frightened women with us whose eyes have been blinded by the darkness. But, if we go in by the upper way, and enter the magazine itself, I can make the fakir show us how to lift the stone trapdoor I spoke of—the one that I closed when I hid the women. Then I can ascend with him, and with say four men, while you ascend to the platform at the top with the remainder of the men, and guard our rear and our exit. From the top, you will be able to see us as we emerge, and can cover our retreat, and follow.”

“That sounds like a roundabout sort of plan to me!” said Brown. “Why not go straight in by the lower route, and gather up the women, and carry 'em out, and make a bolt for it?”

“Because, sahib, we will be at the fakir's mercy.”

“Nonsense! He's at our mercy.”

“Think, sahib! There, he will be in his own bat's nest, so to speak. These fakirs are the only men who know the windings of all the secret passages. They are the rats of religion and intrigue. At any step he might lead us into an ambush, and we might be overwhelmed before we knew that we were attacked. If we go the other way, though, I can lead the way myself, and we need only take the fakir to show us how to open the door.”

“Very well,” said Brown. “Let's get a move on, though! I'm beginning to think that you're a better talker than a fighter, Juggut Khan!”

“Yes, sahib? I trust there will be no fighting!” But the Rajput smiled as he said it, and thought of a certain lance-shaft which had been broken in the streets of Jailpore.

“Lead on! Fall in behind me, men! Walk quietly, now, and remember. Hold your tongues! Each man keep his eye on me, and a finger on the trigger!”

The Beluchi and the fakir and Juggut Khan moved in the van, with two men to hold the fakir. Next marched, or rather tiptoed, Sergeant Brown, followed by the other men in single file. In that order they hastened after Juggut Khan, through the darkness, across a dried-out moat and round the corner of a huge stone buttress. There they disappeared inside the wall, and a stone swung round and closed the gap behind the last of them. There was no alarm given, and not a sign or a sound of any kind to betoken that any one had seen them. Inside the walls the city roared like a flood-fed maelstrom, and outside all was darkness and the silence of the dead.