Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman, E. W. Hornung [free e reader .TXT] 📗

saw horses do before; they stood and nibbled at each other’s tails. I was used to sleeping in the open, under the jewelled dome that seems so much vaster and grander in these wide spaces of the earth. I lay listening to the horses, and to the myriad small strange voices of the veldt, to which I cannot even now put a name, while Raffles watched. “One head is better than two,” he said, “when you don’t want it to be seen.” We were to take watch and watch about, however, and the other might sleep if he could; it was not my fault that I did nothing else; it was Raffles who could trust nobody but himself. Nor was there any time for recriminations when he did rouse me in the end.

But a moment ago, as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day. It was an occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a bullet as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame for the one bit of detail on a blue hill-side, was an unpleasant warning that we two on ours were a target in ourselves. But Raffles paid no attention to their fire; he was pointing downward through the bushes to where Corporal Connal stood with his back to us, shooing a last charger out of the mouth of the donga towards the Boer trenches.

“That’s his third,” whispered Raffles, “but it’s the first I’ve seen distinctly, for he waited for the blind spot before the dawn. It’s enough to land him, I fancy, but we mustn’t lose time. Are you ready for a creep?”

I stretched myself, and said I was; but I devoutly wished it was not quite so early in the morning.

“Like cats, then, till he hears, and then into him for all we’re worth. He’s stowed his iron safe away, but he mustn’t have time even to feel for it. You take his left arm, Bunny, and hang on to that like a ferret, and I’ll do the rest. Ready? Then now!”

And in less time than it would take to tell, we were over the lip of the donga and had fallen upon the fellow before he could turn his head; nevertheless, for a few instants he fought like a wild beast, striking, kicking, and swinging me off my feet as I obeyed my instructions to the letter, and stuck to his left like a leech. But he soon gave that up, panting and blaspheming, demanded explanations in his hybrid tongue that had half a brogue and half a burr. What were we doing? What had he done? Raffles at his back, with his right wrist twisted round and pinned into the small of it, soon told him that, and I think the words must have been the first intimation that he had as to who his assailants were.

“So it’s you two!” he cried, and a light broke over him. He was no longer trying to shake us off, and now he dropped his curses also, and stood chuckling to himself instead. “Well,” he went on, “you’re bloody liars both, but I know something else that you are, so you’d better let go.”

A coldness ran through me, and I never saw Raffles so taken aback. His grip must have relaxed for a fraction of time, for our captive broke out in a fresh and desperate struggle, but now we pinned him tighter than ever, and soon I saw him turning green and yellow with the pain.

“You’re breaking my wrist!” he yelled at last.

“Then stand still and tell us who we are.”

And he stood still and told us our real names. But Raffles insisted on hearing how he had found us out, and smiled as though he had known what was coming when it came. I was dumbfounded.

The accursed hound had followed us that evening to Captain Bellingham’s tent, and his undoubted cleverness in his own profession of spy had done the rest.

“And now you’d better let me go,” said the master of the situation, as I for one could not help regarding him.

“I’ll see you damned,” said Raffles, savagely.

“Then you’re damned and done for yourself, my cocky criminal. Raffles the burglar! Raffles the society thief! Not dead after all, but ’live and ’listed. Send him home and give him fourteen years, and won’t he like ’em, that’s all!”

“I shall have the pleasure of hearing you shot first,” retorted Raffles, through his teeth, “and that alone will make them bearable. Come on, Bunny, let’s drive the swine along and get it over.”

And drive him we did, he cursing, cajoling, struggling, gloating, and blubbering by turns. But Raffles never wavered for an instant, though his face was tragic, and it went to my heart, where that look stays still. I remember at the time, though I never let my hold relax, there was a moment when I added my entreaties to those of our prisoner. Raffles did not even reply to me. But I was thinking of him, I swear. I was thinking of that gray set face that I never saw before or after.

“Your story will be tested,” said the commanding officer, when Connal had been marched to the guard-tent. “Is there any truth in his?”

“It is perfectly true, sir.”

“And the notorious Raffles has been alive all these years, and you are really he?”

“I am, sir.”

“And what are you doing at the front?”

Somehow I thought that Raffles was going to smile, but the grim set of his mouth never altered, neither was there any change in the ashy pallor which had come over him in the donga when Connal mouthed his name. It was only his eyes that lighted up at the last question.

“I am fighting, sir,” said he, as simply as any subaltern in the army.

The commanding officer inclined a grizzled head perceptibly, and no more. He was not one of any school, our General; he had his own ways, and we loved both him and them; and I believe that he loved the rough but gallant corps that bore his name. He once told us that he knew something about most of us, and there were things that Raffles had done of which he must have heard. But he only moved his grizzled head.

“Did you know he was going to give you away?” he asked at length, with a jerk of it toward the guard-tent.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you thought it worth while, did you?”

“I thought it necessary, sir.”

The General paused, drumming on his table, making up his mind. Then his chin came up with the decision that we loved in him.

“I shall sift all this,” said he. “An officer’s name was mentioned, and I shall see him myself. Meanwhile you had better go on—fighting.”

IV

Corporal Connal paid the penalty of his crime before the sun was far above the hill held by the enemy. There was abundance of circumstantial evidence against him, besides the direct testimony of Raffles and myself, and the wretch was shot at last with little ceremony and less shrift. And that was the one good thing that happened on the day that broke upon us hiding behind the bushes overlooking the donga; by noon it was my own turn.

I have avoided speaking of my wound before I need, and from the preceding pages you would not gather that I am more or less lame for life. You will soon see now why I was in no hurry to recall the incident. I used to think of a wound received in one’s country’s service as the proudest trophy a man could acquire. But the sight of mine depresses me every morning of my life; it was due for one thing to my own slow eye for cover, in taking which (to aggravate my case) our hardy little corps happened to excel.

The bullet went clean through my thigh, drilling the bone, but happily missing the sciatic nerve; thus the mere pain was less than it might have been, but of course I went over in a light-brown heap. We were advancing on our stomachs to take the hill, and thus extend our position, and it was at this point that the fire became too heavy for us, so that for hours (in the event) we moved neither forward nor back. But it was not a minute before Raffles came to me through the whistling scud, and in another I was on my back behind a shallow rock, with him kneeling over me and unrolling my bandage in the teeth of that murderous fire. It was on the knees of the gods, he said, when I begged him to bend lower, but for the moment I thought his tone as changed as his face had been earlier in the morning. To oblige me, however, he took more care; and, when he had done all that one comrade could for another, he did avail himself of the cover he had found for me. So there we lay together on the veldt, under blinding sun and withering fire, and I suppose it is the veldt that I should describe, as it swims and flickers before wounded eyes. I shut mine to bring it back, but all that comes is the keen brown face of Raffles, still a shade paler than its wont; now bending to sight and fire; now peering to see results, brows raised, eyes widened; anon turning to me with the word to set my tight lips grinning. He was talking all the time, but for my sake, and I knew it. Can you wonder that I could not see an inch beyond him? He was the battle to me then; he is the whole war to me as I look back now.

“Feel equal to a cigarette? It will buck you up, Bunny. No, that one in the silver paper, I’ve hoarded it for this. Here’s a light; and so Bunny takes the Sullivan! All honor to the sporting rabbit!”

“At least I went over like one,” said I, sending the only clouds into the blue, and chiefly wishing for their longer endurance. I was as hot as a cinder from my head to one foot; the other leg was ceasing to belong to me.

“Wait a bit,” says Raffles, puckering; “there’s a gray felt hat at deep long-on, and I want to add it to the bag for vengeance.... Wait—yes—no, no luck! I must pitch ’em up a bit more. Hallo! Magazine empty. How goes the Sullivan, Bunny? Rum to be smoking one on the veldt with a hole in your leg!”

“It’s doing me good,” I said, and I believe it was. But Raffles lay looking at me as he lightened his bandolier.

“Do you remember,” he said softly, “the day we first began to think about the war? I can see the pink, misty river light, and feel the first bite there was in the air when one stood about; don’t you wish we had either here! ‘Orful slorter, orful slorter;’ that fellow’s face, I see it too; and here we have the thing he cried. Can you believe it’s only six months ago?”

“Yes,” I sighed, enjoying the thought of that afternoon less than he did; “yes, we were slow to catch fire at first.”

“Too slow,” he said quickly.

“But when we did catch,” I went on, wishing we never had, “we soon burnt up.”

“And then went out,” laughed Raffles gayly. He was loaded up again. “Another over at the gray felt hat,” said he; “by Jove, though, I believe he’s having an over at me!”

“I wish you’d be careful,” I urged. “I heard it too.”

“My dear Bunny, it’s on the knees you wot of. If anything’s down in the specifications surely that is. Besides—that was nearer!”

“To you?”

“No, to him. Poor devil, he has his specifications too; it’s comforting to think that.... I can’t see where that one pitched; it may have been a wide; and it’s very nearly the end of the over again. Feeling worse, Bunny?”

“No, I’ve only closed my eyes. Go on talking.”

“It was I who let you in for this,” he said, at his bandolier again.

“No, I’m glad I came out.”

And I believe I still was, in a way; for it was rather fine to be wounded, just then, with the pain growing less; but the sensation was not to last me many minutes, and I can truthfully say that I have never felt it since.

“Ah, but you haven’t had such a good time as I have!”

“Perhaps not.”

Had his voice vibrated, or had I imagined it? Pain-waves and loss