Rung Ho! A Novel, Talbot Mundy [free ebook reader for ipad .txt] 📗

CHAPTER XXIII Quoth little red jackal, famishing, “Lo, Yonder a priest and a soldier go; You can see farthest, and you ought to know,— Which shall I wander with, carrion crow?” The crow cawed back at him, “Ignorant beast! Soldiers get glory, but none of the feast; Soldiers work hardest, and snaffle the least. Take my advice on it—Follow the priest!”

IT was two hours after sunrise on the second day that followed Cunningham's desertion of his party when he and Mahommed Gunga first caught sight of a blue, baked rock rising sheer out of a fringe of green on the dazzling horizon. It was a freak of nature—a point pushed through the level crust of bone-dry earth, and left to glitter there alone.

“That is my cousin Alwa's place!” exclaimed Mahommed Gunga, and he seemed to draw a world of consolation from the fact.

The sight loosed his tongue at last; he rode by Cunningham, and deigned an explanation now, at least, of what had led to what might happen. He wasted little breath on prophecy, but he was eloquent in building up a basis from which Cunningham might draw his own deductions. They had ridden through the cool of the night in easy stages, and should have camped at dawn; but Mahommed Gunga had insisted that the tired animals could carry them for three hours longer.

“A soldier's horse must rest at the other end sahib,” he had laughed. “Who knows that they have not sent from Abu to arrest both thee and me?” And he had not vouchsafed another word until, over the desert glare, his cousin's aerie had blazed out, beating back the molten sun-rays.

“It looks hotter than the horns of hell!” said Cunningham.

“The horns of hell, sahib, are what we leave behind us! They grow hot now! Thy countrymen—the men who hated thee so easily—heated them and sit now between them for their folly!”

“How d'you mean? 'Pon my soul and honor, Risaldar, you talk more riddles in five minutes than I ever heard before in all my life!”

“There be many riddles I have not told yet—riddles of which I do not know the answer. Read me this one. Why did the British Government annex the state of Oudh? All the best native soldiers came from Oudh, or nearly all. They were loyal once; but can a man be fairly asked to side against his own? If Oudh should rise in rebellion, what would the soldiers do?”

“Dunno, I'm sure,” said Cunningham.

“Read me this one, then. By pacifying both Mohammedan and Hindoo and by letting both keep their religion, by sometimes playing one against the other and by being just, the British Government has become supreme from the Himalayas to the ocean. Can you tell me why they now issue cartridges for the new rifles that are soaked in the fat of cows and pigs, thus insulting both Mohammedan and Hindoo?”

“I didn't know it was so.”

“Sahib, it is! These damned new cartridges and this new drill-sahib, I—I who am loyal to the marrow of my bones—would no more touch those cartridges—nor bite them, as the drill decrees—than I would betray thee! Pig's fat! Ugh!”

He spat with Mohammedan eloquence and wiped his lips on his tunic sleeve before resuming.

“Then, like a flint and steel, to light the train that they have laid, they loose these missionaries, in a swarm, from one end of India to the other. Why? What say one and all? Mohammedan and Hindoo both say it is a plot, first to make them lose their own religion by defilement, then to make Christians of them! Foolishness to talk thus? Nay! It was foolishness to act thus!

“Sahib, peace follows in the wake of soldiers, as we know. Time and time again the peace of India has been ripped asunder at the whim of priests! These padre people, preaching new damnation everywhere, are the flint and steel for the tinder of the cartridge fat!”

“I never knew you to croak before, Mahommed Gunga.”

“Nor am I croaking. I am praising Allah, who has sent thee now to the place whence the wind will come to fan the hell flames that presently will burn. The wind will blow hot or cold—for or against the government—according as you and I and certain others act when opportunity arrives! See yonder!”

They had been seen, evidently, for horsemen—looking like black ants on the desert—seemed to have crawled from the bowels of the living rock and were galloping in their direction.

“Friends?” asked Cunningham.

“Friends, indeed! But they have yet to discover whether we are friends. They set me thinking, sahib. Alwa is well known on this country-side and none dare raid his place; few would waste time trying. Therefore, it is all one to him who passes along this road; and he takes no trouble, as a rule, to send his men out in skirmishing order when a party comes in view. Why, then, does he trouble now?”

“Couldn't say. I don't know Alwa.”

“I am thinking, sahib, that the cloud has burst at last! A blood-red cloud! Alwa is neither scare-monger nor robber; when he sends out armed men to inspect strangers on the sky-line, there is war! Sahib, I grow young again! Had people listened to me—had they