King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure, Talbot Mundy [ebook smartphone TXT] 📗

swim to the light!” droned Ismail. “Moths fly to the light! Who is a man that he should know less than they?”

He turned again and stared at the light. Dimly, very vaguely be could make out that a causeway led downward from almost where he stood. He was convinced that should he try to climb back Ismail would merely reach out a hand and shove him down again, and there was no sense in being put to that indignity. He decided to go forward, for there was even less sense in standing still.

“Come with me! Come along, Ismail!” he called.

“Allah! Hear him! Nay, nay, nay! Who was it said a little while ago, 'There is no such thing as fear!' I am afraid, but thou and I are two men! Go thou alone!”

Reason is a man's only dependable faculty. Reason told him that at a word from Yasmini he would have been flung into “Earth's Drink” hours ago. Therefore, added reason, why should she forego that spectacular opportunity when his death would have amused Khinjan's thousands, only to kill him now in the dark alone? He had treated a few dozen sick men, surely she had not been afraid to offend them. Had she not dared forbid the sick coming to him altogether? “Forward!” says Cocker, in at least a dozen places. “Go forward and find out! Better a bed in hell than a seat on the horns of a dilemma! Forward!”

There was no sound now anywhere. He stretched a leg downward and felt a rock two or three feet lower down, and the sound of his slipper sole touching it, being the only noise, made the short hair rise on the back of his neck. Then he took himself, so to speak, by the hand and went forward and downward, for action is the only curb imagination knows.

He forgot to count his pulse and judge how long it took him to descend that causeway in the dark. It was not so very rough, nor so very dangerous, but of course he only knew that fact afterward. He had to grope his way inch by inch, trusting to sense of touch and the British army's everlasting luck, with an eye all the while on a red light that was something like the glow through hell's keyhole.

When he reached bottom, after perhaps twenty minutes, and stood at last on comparatively level rock, his legs were trembling from tension, and he had to sit down while he stretched them out and rested. The light still looked a quarter of a mile away, although that was guesswork. It made scarcely more impression on the surrounding darkness than one coal glowing in a cellar. The silence began to make his head ache.

He got up and started forward, but just as he did that he thought he heard a footstep. He suspected Ismail might be following after all.

“Ismail!” he called, trying to peer through the dark.

But all the darkness had its home there. He could not even see his own hand stretched out. His own voice made him jump; after a second's pause it began to crack and rattle from wall to wall and from roof to floor, until at last the echoing word became one again and died with a hiss somewhere in the bowels of the world--Mbisssss!--like the sound of hot iron being plunged into a blacksmith's trough with a little after-murmur of complaining water.

But then he was sure he heard a footstep! He faced about; and now there were two red lights where there had been only one. They seemed rather nearer, perhaps because there were two of them.

“Hullo, King sahib!” said a voice he recognized; and he choked. He felt that if he had coughed his heart would have lain on the floor!

“Are you afraid, King sahib?” said the Rangar Rewa Gunga's voice, and he took a step forward to be closer to his questioner. He found himself beside a rock, looking up at the Rangar's turban, that peered over the top of it. He could dimly make out the Rangar's dark eyes.

“I would be afraid if I were you!”

Rewa Gunga flashed a little electric torch into his eyes, but after a few seconds he shifted it so that both their faces could be seen, although the Rangar's only very faintly.

“I have come to warn you!”

“Very good of you, I'm sure!” said King.

“If she knew I were here, she would jolly well have my liver nailed to a wall! I come to advise you to go back!”

“Have they taken Ali Masjid Fort?” King asked him.

“Never mind, sahib, but listen! I have brought her bracelet! I stole it! She stole it from you, and I stole it back! Take it! Put it on and wear it! Use it as a passport out of Khinjan Caves--for no man dare touch you while you wear it--and as a passport down the Khyber into India! Go back to India and stay there! Take it and go! Quick! Take it!”

“No, thanks!” said King.

The Rangar laughed mirthlessly, shifting the light a little as King stepped aside to get a better view of him. He held the torch more cunningly than a Spanish lady holds a fan.

“All Englishmen are fools--most of them stiff-necked fools,” he asserted. “Bah! Do you think I do not know? Do you think anything is hidden from her? I know--and she knows--that you think you have a surprise in store for her! You think you will go to her, and she will say, 'King sahib, why did you throw that head into the river, and put me in danger from my men?' And you will say, will you not, 'Princess, that was my brother's head!'? Was that not what you intended? Is it not true? Does she not know it? She knows more than you know, King sahib! Because you showed me certain little courtesies, I have come to warn you to run away!”

“Do you suppose she knows you are here?” King asked, and the Rangar laughed.

“If she knows so much, and is able to read my mind from a distance, where does she suppose you are?” King insisted.

The Rangar laughed again, leaning his chin on both fists and switching out the light.

“Perhaps she sent me to warn you!”

“Well,” said King, “my brother commanded at Ali Masjid Fort. There are things I must ask her. How did she know that head was my brother's? What part had she in taking it from his shoulders? What did she mean by that song of hers?”

The Rangar chuckled softly.

“There are no fools in the world like Englishmen! Listen! You are being offered life and liberty! Here is the key to both!”

He made the gold bracelet ring on the rock by way of explanation.

“Take the key and go!”

“No!” said King.

“Very well, sahib! Hear the other side of it! Beyond those two red lights there is a curtain. This side of that curtain you are Athelstan King of the Khyber Rifles,