Told in the East, Talbot Mundy [crime books to read .txt] 📗

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.