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

he lacked imagination, and I was caught in Delhi when war broke and the English closed the Khyber Pass. Yet I had to come up the Khyber, to reach Khinjan.

“So it was fortunate that I knew of a German plot that I could spoil at the last minute. I fooled the Germans by letting the Sikh whom I had watched discover it. The Germans still believe me their accomplice--and the sirkar was so pleased that I think if I had asked for an English peerage they would have answered me soberly. A million dynamite bombs was a big haul for the sirkar! My offer to go to Khinjan and keep the 'Hills' quiet was accepted that same day!

“But what are a million dynamite bombs! Dynamite bombs have been coming into Khinjan month by month these three years! Bombs and rifles and cartridges! Muhammad Anim's men, whom he trusts because he must, hid it all in a cave I showed them, that they think, and he thinks, has only one entrance to it. Muhammad Anim sealed it, and he has the key. But I have the ammunition!

“There was another way out of that cave, although there is none now, for I have blocked it. My men, whom I trust because I know them, carried everything out by the back way, and I have it all. I will show it to you presently.

“I know all Muhammad Anim's plans. Bull-with-a-beard believes himself a statesman, yet he told me all he knows! He has told me how Germany plans to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim a jihad. As if I did not know it first, almost before the Germans knew it! Fools! The jihad will recoil on them! It will be like a cobra, striking whoever stirs it! A typhoon, smiting right and left! Christianity is doomed, and the Germans call themselves Christians! Fools! Rome called herself Christian--and where is Rome?

“But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany and gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East roars in the flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head of that jihad, and the East and the world is ours!”

King smiled at her.

“The East isn't very well armed,” he objected. “Mere numbers--”

“Numbers?” She laughed at him. “The West has the West by the throat! It is tearing itself! They will drag in America! There will be no armed nation with its hands free--and while those wolves fight, other wolves shall come and steal the meat! The old gods, who built these caverns in the 'Hills,' are laughing! They are getting ready! Thou and I--”

As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the changed expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that even the best-trained man can not control.

“I know!” she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream to face facts as their master. She looked more lovely now than ever, although twice as dangerous. “You are thinking of your brother--of his head! That I am a murderess who can never be your friend! Is that not so?”

He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for she looked as if he had struck her. Leaning forward, she held the gold-hilted dagger out to him, hilt first.

“Take it and stab me!” she ordered. “Stab--if you blame me for your brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come on him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a book! I would never have killed him!”

Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she held the knife toward him with the other hand.

“Take it and stab!”

“No,” he said.

“No!” she laughed. “No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved! You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab me than the gods would forget me!”

Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.

“Strength!” she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him, almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. “Courage! Simplicity! Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my mind is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no directness--no simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my sending from the gods! I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much, these many years! And now that you have come you want to hate me because you think I killed your brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know about your brother.”'

Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are times when no proof is needed.

“Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment.

“Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men to steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear to you--I swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that I first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the Cavern of Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's head!”

“Why bid me throw it to them, then?” he asked her, and he was aware of her scorn before the words had left his lips.

She leaned back again and looked at him through lowered eyes, as if she must study him all anew. She seemed to find it hard to believe that he really thought so in the commonplace.

“What is a head to me, or to you--a head with no life in it--carrion!--compared to what shall be? Would you have known it was his head if you had thrown it to them when I ordered you?”

He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.

“A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival,” says the East, out of world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the East itself.

“Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother's head!” she said with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. “At present we need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the right time. After that he will be in the way! You shall name his death--Earth's Drink--slow torture--fire! Will that content you?”

“No,” he said, with a dry laugh.

“What more can you ask?”

“Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn't ask more. Let Bull-with-a-beard alone.”

She