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

the spaced-out glow of their bonfires came ever and again the spurt of cannon-flame.

“Speak, Govind Singh!”

“Sahib, we have no artillery with which to answer them. We have no food; and the supply of ammunition wanes. Shall we die here like cattle in a slaughter-house?”

“This is as good as any other place” said Byng.

“Nay, sahib!” “How, then?”

“In their lines is a better place! Here is nothing better than a shambles, with none but our men falling. They know that our food is giving out—they know that we lose heavily—they wait. They will wait for days yet before they close in to finish what their guns have but begun, and—then—how many will there be to die desperately, as is fitting?”

“We might get reinforcements in the morning, Govind Singh.”

“And again, we might not, sahib!”

“I sent a number of messengers before we were shut in.”

“Yes, sahib—and to whom? To men who would ask you to reinforce them if they could get word to you! Tomorrow our rear will be surrounded, too; they have laid planks across the little streams behind us, and are preparing to drag guns to that side, too. Now, sahib, we have fire left in us. We can smite yet, and do damage while we die. Tomorrow night may find us decimated and without heart for the finish. I advise you to advance at dawn, sahib!”

That advice came as a great relief to Byng-bahadur. He had been the first to see the hopelessness of the position, and every instinct that he had told him to finish matters, not in the last reeking ditch, but ahead, where the enemy would suffer fearfully while a desperate charge roared into them, to peter out when the last man went down fighting. Surrender was unthinkable, and in any event would have been no good, for the mutineers would be sure to butcher all their prisoners; his only other chance had been to hold out until relief came, and that hope was now forlorn.

A Mohammedan stepped out of blackness and saluted him—a native officer, in charge of a handful of irregular cavalry, whose horses had all been shot.

“Well—what is it?”

“This, sahib. Do we die here? I and my men would prefer to die yonder, where a mutineer or two would pay the price!”

A Ghoorka officer—small as a Japanese and sturdy-looking came up next. The whole thing was evidently preconcerted.

“My men ask leave to show the way into the ranks ahead, General-sahib! They are overweary of this shambles!”

“We will advance at dawn!” said Byng. “Egan—” He turned to a British officer, who was very nearly all the staff he had. “Drag that table up. Let's have some paper here and a pencil, and we'll work out the best plan possible.”

He sent for the commanding officers of the British regiments—both of them captains, but the seniors surviving—and a weird scene followed round the lamp set on the tiny table. British, Sikh, Mohammedan, and Ghoorka clustered close to him, and watched as his pencil traced the different positions and showed the movement that was to make the morrow's finish, their faces outlined in the lamp's yellow glow and their breath coming deep and slow as they agreed on how the greatest damage could be done the enemy before the last man died.

As he finished, and assigned each leader to his share in the last assault that any one of them would take a part in, a streak of light blazed suddenly across the sky. A shooting-star swept in a wide parabola to the horizon. A murmur went up from the wakeful lines, and the silence of the graveyard followed.

“There is our sign, sahib!” laughed the Mohammedan. The old Sikh nodded and the Ghoorka grinned. “It is the end!” he said, without a trace of discouragement.

“Nonsense!” said Byng, his face, too, turned upward.

“What, then, does it mean, sahib?”

“That—it means that God Almighty has relieved a picket! We're the picket. We're relieved! We advance at dawn, and we'll get through somehow! Join your commands, gentlemen, and explain the details carefully to your men—let's have no misunderstandings.”

The dawn rose gold and beautiful upon a sleepless camp that reeked and steamed with hell-hot suffering. It showed the rebels stationary, still in swarming lines, but scouts reported several thousand of them moving in a body from the flank toward the British rear.

“What proportion of the rebel force?” asked Byng. “New arrivals, or some of the old ones taking up a new position?”

“The same crowd, sir. They're just moving round to hem us in completely.”

“So much the better for us, then! That leaves fewer for us to deal with in front.”

As he spoke another man came running to report the arrival of five gallopers, coming hell-bent-for leather, one by one and scattered, with the evident purpose of allowing one man to get through, whatever happened.

“That'll be relief at last!” said Byng-bahadur. And, instead of ordering the advance immediately, he waited, scouring the sky-line with his glasses.

“Yes—dust—lance-heads—one—two—three divisions, coming in a hurry.”

Being on rising ground, he saw the distant relieving force much sooner than the rebels did, and he knew that it was help for him on the way some time before the first of the five gallopers careered into the camp, and shouted:

“Cunnigan-bahadur comes with fifteen hundred!”

“Fifteen hundred,” muttered Byng. “That merely serves to postpone the finish by an hour or two!”

But he waited; and presently the rebel scouts brought word, and their leaders, too, became aware of reinforcements on the way for somebody. They made the mistake, though, of refusing to believe that any help could be coming for the British, and by the time that messengers had hurried from the direction of the British rear, to tell of gallopers who had ridden past them and been swallowed by the shouting British lines, three squadrons on fresh horses were close enough to be reckoned dangerous.

“Is that a gun they've got with them?” wondered Byng. “By the lord Harry, no,—it's a coach and six! They're flogging it along like a twelve-pounder! And what the devil's in those wagons?”

But he had no time for guesswork. The desultory thunder of the rebel ordnance ceased, and the whole mass that hemmed him in began to revolve within itself, and present a new front to the approaching cavalry.

“Caught on the hop, by God! The whole line will advance! Trumpeter!”

One trumpet-call blared out and a dozen echoed it. In a second more a roar went up that is only heard on battle-fields. It has none of the exultant shout of joy or of the rage that a mob throws up to heaven; it is not even anger, as the