Told in the East

IX.

The blazing roof of the guardroom lit up even the crossroads for a while, and Brown and his men could see that for the present there was a good wide open space between them and the enemy. The firelight showed a tree not far from the crossroads, and since anything is cover to men who are surrounded and outnumbered, they made for that tree with one accord, and without a word from Brown.

“We've all the luck,” said Brown. “There's not a detachment of any other army in the world would walk straight on to a find like this!”

He held up one frayed end of a manila rope, that was wound around the tree-trunk. Some tethered ox had rendered them that service.

“Fifty feet of good manila, and a fakir that needs hanging! Anybody see the connection?”

There was a chorus of ready laughter, and the two men who had the unenviable task of carrying the fakir picked him up and tossed him to the tree-trunk. The roof of the guardhouse was blazing fiercely, and now they had fired the other roofs. The fakir, the tree and the little bunch of men who held him prisoner were as plainly visible as though it had been daytime. A bullet pinged past Brown's ear, and buried itself in the tree-trunk with a thud.

“Let him feel that bayonet again!” said Brown.

A rifleman obeyed, and the fakir howled aloud. An answering howl from somewhere beyond the dancing shadows told that the fakir had been understood.

“And now,” said Brown, paraphrasing the well-remembered wording of the drill-book, in another effort to get his men to laughing again, “when hanging a fakir by numbers—at the word one, place the noose smartly round the fakir's neck. At the word two, the right-hand man takes the bight of the rope in the hollow of his left hand, and climbs the tree, waiting on the first branch suitable for the last sound of the word three. At the last sound of the word three, he slips the rope smartly over the bough of the tree and descends smartly to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet and coming to attention. At the word four, the remainder seize the loose end of the rope, being careful to hold it in such a way that the fakir has a chance to breathe. And at the last sound of the word five, you haul all together, lifting the fakir off the ground, and keeping him so until ordered to release. Now—one!”

He had tied a noose while he was speaking, and the fakir had watched him with eyes that blazed with hate. A soldier seized the noose, and slipped it over the fakir's head.

“Two!”

The tree was an easy one to climb. “Two” and “three” were the work of not more than a minute.

“Four!” commanded Brown, and the rope drew tight across the bough. The fakir had to strain his chin upward in order to draw his breath.

“Steady, now!”

The men were lined out in single file, each with his two hands on the rope. Not half of them were really needed to lift such a wizened load as the fakir, but Brown was doing nothing without thought, and wasting not an effort. He wanted each man to be occupied, and even amused. He wanted the audience, whom he could not see, but who he knew were all around him in the shadows, to get a full view of what was happening. They might not have seen so clearly, had he allowed one-half of the men to be lookers-on.

“Steady!” he repeated. “Be sure and let him breathe, until I give the word.” Then he seized the cowering Beluchi by the neck, and dragged him up close beside the fakir. “Translate, you!” he ordered. “To the crowd out yonder first. Shout to 'em, and be careful to make no mistakes.”

“Speak, then, sahib! What shall I say?”

“Say this. This most sacred person here is our prisoner. He will die the moment any one attempts to rescue him.”

The Beluchi translated, and repeated word for word.

“I will now talk with him, and he himself will talk with you, and thus we will come to an arrangement!”'

There was a commotion in the shadows, and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty men appeared, keeping at a safe distance still, but evidently anxious to get nearer.

“Now talk to the fakir, and not so loudly! Ask him 'Are you a sacred person?' Ask him softly, now!”

“He says 'Yes,' sahib, 'I am sacred!”'

“Do you want to die?”

“All men must die!”

The answer made an opening for an interminable discussion, of the kind that fakirs and their kindred love. But Brown was not bent just then on dissertation. He changed his tactics.

“Do you want to die, a little slowly, before all those obedient worshipers of yours, and in such a way that they will see and understand that you can not help yourself, and therefore are a fraud?”

The Beluchi repeated the question in the guttural tongue that apparently the fakir best understood. In the fitful light cast by the burning roofs, it was evident that the fakir had been touched in the one weak spot of his armor.

There can scarcely be more than one reason why a man should torture himself and starve himself and maim and desecrate and horribly defile himself. At first sight, the reason sounds improbable, but consideration will confirm it. It is vanity, of an iron-bound kind, that makes the wandering fakir.

“Ask him again!” said Brown.

But again the fakir did not answer.

“Tell him that I'm going to let him save his face, provided he saves mine. Explain that I, too, have men who think I am something more than human!”

The Beluchi interpreted, and Brown thought that the fakir's eyes gleamed with something rather more than their ordinary baleful light. It might have been the dancing flames that lit them, but Brown thought he saw the dawn of reason.

“Say that if I let my men kill him, my men will believe me superhuman, and his men will know that he is only a man with a withered arm! But tell him this: He's got the best chance he ever had to perform a miracle, and have the whole of this province believe in him forevermore.”

Again the fakir's eyes took on a keener than usual glare, as he listened to the Beluchi. He did not nod, though, and he made no other sign, beyond the involuntary evidence of understanding that his eyes betrayed.

“His men can see that noose round his neck, tell him. And his men know me, more or less, and British methods anyhow. They believe now, they're sure, they're positive that his neck's got about as much chance of escaping from that noose as a blind cow has of running from a tiger. Now then! Tell him this. Let him come the heavy fakir all he likes. Tell him to tell his gang that he's going to give an order. Let him tell them that when he says 'Hookum hai!' my men'll loose his neck straight away, and fall down flat. Only, first of all he's got to tell them that he needs us for the present. Let him say that he's got an extra-special awful death in store for us by and by, and that he's going to keep us by him until he's ready to work the miracle. Meantime, nobody's to touch us, or come near us, except to bring him and us food!”

The fakir listened, and said nothing. At a sign from Brown the rope tightened just a little. The fakir raised his chin.

“And tell him that, if he doesn't do what I say, and exactly what I say, and do it now, he's got just so long to live as it takes a man to choke his soul out!”

The fakir answered nothing.

“Just ever such a wee bit tighter, men!”

The fakir lost his balance, and had to scramble to his feet and stand there swaying on his heels, clutching at the rope above him with his one uninjured hand, and sawing upward with his head for air. There came a murmur from the shadows, and a dozen breech-bolts clicked. There seemed no disposition to lie idle while the holiest thing in a temple-ridden province dangled in mid-air.

“In case of a rush,” said Brown quietly, “all but two of you let go! The remainder seize your rifles and fire independently. The two men on the rope, haul taut, and make fast to the tree-trunk. This tree's as good a place to die as anywhere, but he dies first! Understand?”

The fakir rolled his eyes, and tried to make some sort of signal with his free arm.

“Just a wee shade tighter!” ordered Brown. “I'm not sure, but I think he's seeing reason!”

The fakir gurgled. No one but a native, and he a wise one, could have recognized a meaning in the guttural gasp that he let escape him.

“He says 'All right! sahib!'” translated the Beluchi.

“Good!” said Brown. “Ease away on the rope; men! And now! You all heard what I told him. If he says 'Hookum hai!' you all let go the rope, and fall flat. But keep hold of your rifles!”

The fakir's voice, rose in a high-pitched, nasal wail, and from the darkness all around them there came an answering murmur that was like the whispering of wind through trees. By the sound, there must have been a crowd of more than a hundred there, and either the crowd was sneaking around them to surround them at close quarters, or else the crowd was growing.

“Keep awake, men!” cautioned Brown.

“Aye, aye, sir! All awake, sir!”

“Listen, now! And if he says one word except what I told him he might say, tip me the wink at once.”

Brown swung the Beluchi out in front of him where he could hear the fakir better.

“I'll hang you, remember, after I've hanged him, if anything goes wrong!”

“He is saying, sahib, exactly what you said.”

“He'd better! Listen now! Listen carefully! Look out for tricks!”

The fakir paused a second from his high-pitched monologue, and a murmur from the darkness answered him.

“Stand by to haul tight, you men!”

“All ready, sir!”

The rope tightened just a little—just sufficiently to keep the fakir cognizant of its position. The fakir howled out a sort of singsong dirge, which plainly had imperatives in every line of it. At each short pause for breath he added something in an undertone that made the Beluchi strain his ears.

“He says, sahib, that they understand. He says, 'Now is the time!' He says now he will order 'Hookum hai!' He says, 'Are you ready?' He says, sahib,—he says it, sahib,—not I—he says, 'Thou art a fool to stare thus! Thou and thy men are fools! Stare, instead, as men who are bewitched!'”

“Try to look like boiled owls, to oblige his Highness, men!” said Brown. “Now, that's better; watch for the word! Easy on the rope a little!”

The men did their best to pose for the part of semimesmerized victims of a superhuman power. The flame from the burning roofs was dying down already, for the thatch burned fast, and the glowing gloom was deep enough to hide indifferent acting. With their lives at stake, though, men act better than they might at other times.

The fakir spun round on his heels and, clutching with his whole hand at the rope, began to execute a sort of dance—a weird, fantastic, horrible affair of quivering limbs and rolling eyeballs, topped by a withered arm that pointed upward, and a tortured fingernail-pierced fist that nodded on a dried-out-wrist-joint.

“Hookum hai!” he screamed suddenly, waving his sound hand upward, and bringing it down suddenly with a jerk, as though by sheer force he was blasting them.

“Down with you!” ordered Brown, and all except Brown and the Beluchi tumbled over backward.

“Keep hold of your rifles!” ordered Brown.

The fakir's wailing continued for a while. With his own hand he took the noose from his neck and, now that the flames had died away to nothing but spasmodic spurts above a dull red underglow, there was no one in the watching ring who could see Brown's sword-point. Only Brown and the fakir knew that it was scratching at the skin between the fakir's shoulder-blades.

“It is done!” said the fakir presently. “Now take me back to my dais again!” And the Beluchi translated.

“I'd like to hear their trigger-springs released,” suggested Brown. “This has all been a shade too slick for me. I've got my doubts yet about it's being done. Tell him to order them to uncock their rifles, so that I can hear them do it.”

“He says that they are gone already!” translated the Beluchi.

“Tell him I don't believe it!” answered Brown, whose eyes were straining to pierce the darkness, which was blacker than the pit again by now.

The fakir raised his voice into a howl—a long, low, ululating howl like that he had uttered when they found him on his dais. From the distance, beyond the range of rifles, came a hundred answering howls. The fakir waited, and a minute later a hundred howls were raised again, this time from an even greater distance.

Then he spoke.

“He says that they are gone,” translated the Beluchi. “He says he will go back to his dais again.”

“'Tshun!” ordered Brown. “Now, men, just because we've saved our skins so far is no reason why we should neglect precautions. We're going to put this imitation angel back on his throne again, so the same two carry him that brought him here. There's no sense in giving two more men the itch, and all the other ailments the brute suffers from! Form up round him, the rest. Take open order—say two paces—and go slow. Feel your way with your fixed bayonet, and don't take a step in the dark until you're sure where it will lead you. Forward-march! One of you bring that rope along.”

The weird procession crawled and crept and sidled back to where it had started from not so long before—jumping at every sound, and at every shadow that showed deeper than the coal-black night around them. It took them fifteen minutes to recross a hundred yards. But when they reached the earthen throne again at last, and had hoisted the fakir back in position on it, there had been no casualties, and the morale of the men in Sergeant Brown's command was as good again as the breech-mechanism of the rifles in his charge.

They were scarcely visible to him or one another in the blackness, but he sensed the change in them, and changed his own tune to fit the changed condition.

His voice had nothing in it but the abrupt military explosion when he gave his orders now—no argument, no underlying sympathy. He was no longer herding a flock of frightened children. He was ordering trained, grown men, and he knew it and they knew it. The orders ripped out, like the crack of a drover's whip.

“Fall in, now, properly! 'Tshun! Right dress! To two paces—open order—from the center—extend! Now, then! Left and right wings—last three at each end forward—right wheel—halt. That's it. 'Bout face. Now each man keep two eyes lifting till the morning. If anything shows up, or any of you hear a sound, shoot first and challenge afterward!”

They were standing so when the pale sun greeted them, in hollow square, with their backs toward the fakir, who was squatting, staring straight in front of him, on his dais, with his back turned to the tree and his withered arm still pointing up to heaven like a dead man's calling to the gods for vengeance.

A little later, Brown made each alternate man lie down and get what sleep he could just where he was, with a comrade standing over him. He himself slept so for a little while. But one of the men heard something move among the hanging tendrils of the baobab, investigated with his bayonet-point, and managed to transfix a twelve-foot python. After that there was, not so much desire for sleep. The fakir either slept with his eyes open or else dispensed with sleep. No one seemed able to determine which.

When the day grew hotter, and the utterly remorseless Indian sun bore down on them, and on the aching desolation of the plain and the burnt-out guardhouse, the fakir still sat unblinking, gazing straight out in front of him, with eyes that hated but did nothing else. He seemed to have no time nor thought nor care for anything but hate and the expression of it.

At noon, three little children came to him, and brought him water in a small brass bowl, and cooked-up vegetables wrapped in some kind of leaf. Brown let him have theirs, and bribed the frightened children to go and bring water for the men and himself. He gave them the unheard-of wealth of one rupee between them, and they went off with it—and did not come back.

Meanwhile the fakir had drunk his water, and had poured out what was left. He had also eaten what the children had brought him, and suddenly, from vacant, implacable hatred, he woke up and began to be amused.

“Ha-ha!” he laughed at them. “Ho-ho!” And then he launched out with a string of eloquence that Brown called on the Beluchi to translate.

“Who said there would be thirst, and the sound of water! Is there a thirst? Who spoke of an anthill and of hungry ants and raw red openings in the flesh for the little ants to run in and out more easily?”

The Beluchi translated faithfully, and the men all listened.

“Tell him to hold his tongue!” growled Brown at last.

“Ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho!” laughed the fakir. “The heat grows great, and the tongues grow dry, and none bring water! Ho-ho! But I told them that I needed these for a deadlier death than any they devised! Ho-ho-ho-ho! Look at the little crows, how they wait in the branches! Ha-ha-ha-ha! See how the kites come! Where are the vultures? Wait! What speck sails in the sky there? Even the vultures come! Ho-ho-ho-ho!”

“I hear a horse, sir!” said one of the men who watched.

“I heard it more than a minute ago,” said Brown.

The fakir stopped his mockery, and even he listened.

“Ask him,” said Brown, “where are the men who set fire to the guardroom?”

“He says they are in the village, waiting till he sends for them!” said the Beluchi.

“Keep an eye lifting, you men,” ordered Brown. “This'll be a messenger from Bholat, ten to one. Mind they don't ambush him! Watch every way at once, and shoot at anything that moves!”

“Clippety-clippety-clippety-cloppety—”

The sound of a galloping horse grew nearer; a horse hard-ridden, that was none the less sure-footed still, and going strong in spite of sun and heat. Suddenly a foam-flecked black mare swung round a bend between two banks, and the sun shone on a polished saber-hilt. A turbaned Rajput rose in his stirrups, gazed left and right and then in front of him—from the burned-out guardhouse to the baobab—drew rein to a walk and waved his hand.

“By all that's good and great and wonderful,” said Brown aloud, “if here's not Juggut Khan again!”