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Roy Glashan's Library
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Adventure, January 1915, with "Disowned!"
HOTTER than the roof of Tophet, dazzling like diamonds, and cut up into short horizons by a haze of hot air hurrying upward, the plains to southward of the Caspian lay as they did when Xerxes made his millions ready to invade the West, or when Alexander of Macedon prepared a more successful journey in the opposite direction. Only a few carrion crows (for they are climate-proof), some sleepy kites, and here or there an eagle, showed any sign of life or of interest in the hot earth where the jackals slept in shadow and the bones of men and animals had rest from the splintering teeth.
But above, where a mountain trail ran in and out between the rocks and trees and a current of cool air crept downward from the mountain tops, a few more than four hundred men galloped behind Richard Anthony—away from Astrabad—full pelt westward. They were solemn Moslems armed with plundered rifles, and Cossack sabers clattered by their saddles as they rode.
Dick rode ahead of them, as he ever did, like an arrow on its way. His horse seemed part of him, born at one creation when the best were fashioned, clean bone and steel-spring muscles responding to his brain. His left hand, low and still, seemed to hold the reins carelessly, and yet the horse answered to his instant thought. His extraordinary eyes, whose color no man ever seemed to know, swept the trail ahead and missed no detail of it. He seemed to be living in the near future; the impression was that he had thrown his heart away ahead of him and was galloping to get it, and there was only one person in the squadron thundering at his back who betrayed less eagerness than he.
Not very far behind him—preceded by some fifty men, and with a closed-up guard on either hand—there rode two women; and a Scotsman, six feet five or more in height and built on the Samson plan, rode outside the guard, clinging to his horse with both hands and swearing savagely whenever he was jolted more than usual.
The women were in single file, not side by side, and neither of them seemed to care to look, ahead. The Princess of Russia who rode first, astride of a high Cossack saddle, grudged each inch of the journey; ever and again she turned to look wildly, speculatively, in the faces of the nearest men, only to look away again. Sometimes two and sometimes four abreast, every now and then in single file when the trail narrowed to a track, the horsemen rode with the confidence that only comes of following such leaders as Dick Anthony; she read no pity in their faces—no symptom of doubt or hesitation—no hint of anything but utter loyalty to Dick. She knew that at a word from Dick they would have tossed her living from the sheerest crag without thought of Russia or of consequences, and that without his leave they would not dare molest her. So much had Persia and the Persians changed already, under the hand of a free man unafraid!
The maid who rode behind her was less of a horsewoman, and in her case to the dust from two hundred hoofs was added the discomfort of bouncing on a Cossack saddle, as a dry pea dances on a drum. She clung with both hands and suffered; but she smiled, for her eyes were for Andry Macdougal on the Sank, who was suffering as she did. She cared nothing, and for nothing, so that Andry was only near her; and he, good loyal clansman that he was, regarded her as one more arrow in Dick's quiver. He was Dick's man, and would be until death; therefore it was right, and the only thing imaginable, that his sweetheart should be Dick's servant. To his Scots way of thinking it was logical, and therefore not remarkable, that Marie Mouquin should be riding where she was; and if Dick had seen fit to carry off a Princess to act chaperon, that was only one more proof of Dick's worthiness to lead.
From time to time Andry glanced at the two women, for they were his charge; but no one except Marie Mouquin could have guessed which of them might be his sweetheart, and as a matter of fact it was the Princess who drew the first response from him. She had been thinking—swiftly— savagely. She caught his eye and signed to him; and since she was Dick's enemy, and the maid a friend, he gave the enemy attention.
He steered his horse as if it were a boat, with the rudder at the wrong end, and the immediate result was that he crashed into four Persians and upset the formation of a troop. There was a lot of Persian swearing that was checked by a sharp Scots oath and a blow from a Highland fist that could have felled an ox; then Andry Macdougal, still holding to the saddle, closed in by the Princess and looked at her sideways, inquiringly.
"What ar-r-re ye wantin' noo?" he asked her in a voice that was full of curiosity, but lacked reverence.
"Tell Mr. Anthony—"
"Mebbe ye tak' me f'r a messenger? Mebbe ye think I'm ordered to wait on ye? Then, let me assure ye that ye're wrang!"
But Andry was dealing with a woman whose business had ever been to understand and mold strong men. At twenty-three she was reckoned the cleverest woman in the Russian empire, and though she was beaten now, defeated and made prisoner, she still had too much wit about her to be worsted by a man of Andry's caliber. She recognized the Calvinistic temperament, that must tell her of her faults or burst; so she gave him all the opportunity he needed, and reserved her fire.
"Is it no part of your duty to oblige a lady?" she asked him, in English that was soft and seductive.
"Leddy?" he demanded. "Leddy?" ' His horse lurched suddenly as the track grew narrow and a big rock barred the way. For a moment there was none of him visible except his leg and arm, as he hung down on the off side, struggling to regain his seat. A Persian galloped up, laughing, to help haul him back into position, and the good horse groaned relief when the weight was balanced again in the middle of his back.
"Was Jezebel a leddy?" he demanded then, wrinkling his face into a gargoyle grin, to hide his temper.
"Jezebel had servants," said the Princess.
"Aye! An' they threw her doon fra' an upper window!"
She looked away, to hide a smile, for she had fenced with this man before; she knew well that the real Andry Macdougal would proceed to show himself, now that the outer crust of critical effrontery had peeled away. She gave him a full minute to look hard at her, in which he might contrast her beauty with her plight; and then she looked back at him with eyes that seemed liquid—eyes that expressed all the sweet sorrow in the world.
"What was the wor-r-rdin' o' y'r message?" he demanded.
"That I wish to speak to Mr. Anthony."
"I hae ma doots—I hae ma doots!" clucked Andry, glancing forward to where Dick's red head showed through the dust.
He looked again at the Princess—once back at the French maid galloping behind her—and then down at his horse. Then Princess, maid, the other guards, and Andry's horse were all at once in fresh formation, for when Andry rode horseback the rules of the road had all to be suspended for his benefit. As where the guns go every thing makes room, so where Andry went great gaps yawned wide ahead of him. He had a notion that spurs are meant for insertion in a horse's stomach, so the big steel weapons he had taken from a Cossack's boots began to reach for the horse's vitals, and the poor beast plunged.
He shot through a living, scattering passage-way to Dick, overhauling him before his great weight brought the horse back to a trot.
"She wants to speak wi' ye!" said Andry. "Who?" asked Dick, still looking ahead of him.
"Who? Yon Jezebel—the Princess Karageorgovich."
"Walk, march!" Dick ordered, leaning back in the saddle and throwing up an arm. It was time to ease the horses in any event.
"Send her to me," he ordered; and Andry let his horse stand until the leading troop had overtaken him.
"Ye may go speak wi' him," he said offhandedly; and then, since the enemy was now for Dick to deal with, he paid more attention to his friend.
His huge arm reached out, and a hand that could have wrenched a fair-sized tree out by the roots was laid on Marie Mouquin's. In another moment he was off his horse and walking beside hers, with his tremendous arm around her waist and his whole, huge manhood all aglow with rapture.
"Lassie," he asked her, "what's the French f'r bein' i' love?"
So she began to teach him— "J'aime, tu aimes, il aime...."
THE Princess Olga Karageorgovich trotted her horse until she was abreast of Dick; then, riding beside him, for two minutes she said nothing. Times without number she had said too much, and Dick had usually won the trick from her by keeping silence while she squandered words. As usual, she wanted him to speak first; as ever, hatless, red-headed, resolute, he sat his horse like a gentleman in armor and gave her speech precedence.
"What will you do with me, monsieur le prince des brigands?" she inquired.
Her smile would have dazzled any ordinary man,, as it was meant to dazzle Dick. But he seemed all dignity, and his eyes, after one swift glance at her, were busy with the trail ahead.
"Make use of you," he said.
In an instant, then, her plan was ready. Her trade was to snatch advantage between two seconds, and to read unintended meanings, or chance-dropped meanings, into words. She told herself that she hated and despised Dick Anthony; only an hour or two ago she had flung a knife at him and missed him by an inch; but she knew, deep down in her she-tiger heart, that she could love him as no woman ever loved a man if he would let her! There was truth—more than a little truth—between the words of her soft answer.
"I am a proud woman, Mr. Anthony. You could not make use of me without my leave, prisoner or not. But—I regret a recent incident. How may I make amends?"
"Which incident?" asked Dick.
It was her opinion that he was not even thinking of her; she believed his thoughts away in the foothills ahead, where she knew there must be two Russian regiments, and where at least three thousand of Dick's Persians were probably at grips with them. It seemed to her that there could be only one incident, since she had only, ever, thrown one knife at him. It did not occur to her that there had been a thousand— that she had been his Nemesis from the day when they first met by the Nile—that he had a right to blame her for every subsequent event that had cut him farther off from home and income and fair repute.
His shirt was in rags already, and his boots were cracked; but she did not blame herself for either fact. He was an outlaw, who had been heir to the estates and good name of the Anthonys; but she did not consider it was all her doing. She thought only that it might be well to evade mention of the knife, since his thoughts were wandering, and to direct the conversation into much more fruitful channels.
"Do you understand—quite—what it means to hold me prisoner?" she asked.
Dick looked sharply at her, and then away again ahead. If he answered her at all his words were drowned by the jingle of the squadron, the drumming hoofs, and the loud talk of four hundred men. His lips moved, but she was not sure whether he spoke or not.
"Has not your head been turned, my friend?"
She paused, but he did not speak or look at her. She knew he was listening now, for his eyes were alight, and his attitude had changed, although a less acute observer might have thought him still daydreaming.
"Perhaps you think that all the luck in the world is yours since a storm blew and helped you smash the Caspian fleet? Eh? You err, my friend! Russia has a long arm, and a deep purse! In the end, Russia is always luckiest!"
Dick stooped to do something to his stirrup leather, and she mistook his movement for a symptom of distress, for observation had taught her long ago that men have very childlike ways of hiding what they feel from women. She felt bolder instantly.
"You know a little about me. You have felt a little—more than a little of my influence. You must have learned that I am part of Russia's secret government. I said secret government. Do you suppose, my friend, that the Okhrana—and that is the secret government—will leave me, who know all its secrets, long in your keeping? It would rather leave me dead!"
She spoke the truth now, for the first time in her dealings with Dick Anthony. Once the sword held over her head by the Okhrana had been the threat of marriage and exile on a wild Siberian estate; now she doubted whether less than her death would satisfy the huge political machine that holds Russia in its grip. The Okhrana had given her leave to use Dick Anthony in her campaign of penetration into northern Persia. She had loved and lost him. Now she was his prisoner. Russia's long arm— poison, dagger, bullet—would be sure to reach her before she could tell her captor many secrets; but even so she did not mean to tell much, unless for full value in return.
Dick's eyes still watched the trail ahead, and now and then when they rounded some crag and the hot plain came into view be swept the horizon carefully with his binoculars; but now, after a moment, he closed the glasses and looked down at her.
"I see what you mean," he said. "They'll think I'll make you talk."
"Bah!" she laughed back at him, and when she chose to seem scornful she looked more lovely than at any other time. "I would tell you nothing unless I wished!"
"But they won't believe that."
He was looking down at her again, and she could tell now that he was thinking swiftly about her and what she said. His eyes seemed to look straight through her.
"And of course they won't believe that I won't torture you."
She laughed deliriously. Had Dick Anthony not been gentleman by creed and deed he would have succumbed ever so long ago to one or other of the offers she had made him. Had he been less than gentleman, it was conceivable he would not be in Persia. She was afraid of him at any time only because she knew his naked honesty was too strong for her subterfuge.
"It's awkward," he said. "I brought you to chaperon your maid. Andry loves her, and she seems to love him. There's no means of marrying them in this part of the world; and—you'll excuse my mentioning it—I've seen the black and blue marks on the woman's arms."
"Well?" asked the Princess unguardedly.
"Couldn't leave her with you."
"Am I called in question for punishing my maid?" she demanded through lips that seemed thinner all at once and less delicious.
From Dick's point of view he had said enough, but since she asked it he vouchsafed some further explanation.
"Couldn't leave her with you. Couldn't take her without another woman, to help observe the decencies. Took you. Have to keep you until we've got 'em safely married, or else found somebody to take your place."
"Then, you mean—"
"Exactly that!" said Dick, patting his charger's neck.
"What will you do with me when you've found this other woman?"
"Let you go."
As usual, the disconcerting unexpected! Of all the possibilities on her horizon, the one she liked least, and was ready to tight hardest to prevent, was the risk of being loosed and left to her own devices to protect herself from the Okhrana. She had failed because Dick had been too strong and too original for her; but she had entered into the campaign for love of Dick; so now she vowed that Dick himself should save her, or else that the two of them should make their exit from the world in one grim holocaust.
She was desperate—utterly without any hope but Dick, so she chose for the moment to appear different to him. As his captive she was safer and more free than she was ever likely to be again should he release her; for the least that the Okhrana would do to her would be to give her in marriage to a man whose very photograph had made her scream the first time that she saw it. So she summoned all the art she knew to aid her, and pretended she was pleased.
If she had had the sense, that minute, to be honest with Dick Anthony, she very likely might have struck some bargain with him that would have given her the upper hand again, for Dick's heart was as kind as his honor was unsullied. He would have died, and would have let Andry die beside him, rather than take too great advantage of a defenseless woman, however mean an enemy she might have been. But she could not be honest; she still thought it best to pretend that her power with the Okhrana would be as great as ever.
"Then, remember," she said, smiling triumphantly, "I have made no bargain with you! When you set me free, I am free to—"
"To go where, do what, and say anything you please," said Dick.
She bit her Up. Already she was wishing she had told the truth, but pride prevented her; she must cling now to the shadow of her power at all costs.
"You are most gallant. I don't like to accept my freedom on those terms. The minute I am free I shall be required to help hunt you—to use my knowledge of your whereabouts against you. Mr. Anthony— Dick—in spite of—in spite of everything, I have a regard for you that—that—is not easy to forget. Look at me—Dick Anthony! Look into my eyes!"
He was unafraid; he looked, and it was she who had the worst of the encounter. Somewhere, surely, in the world there was a woman who would some day look into Dick's eyes and read there that she had him conquered; but she would be a woman whose honor was as clean as his, and whose love was tender, sweet and true. Dick had not met the woman yet whose eyes could make his head swim, or whose arguments could budge him from the path he thought was right.
"What do you see in my eyes? Do you think I hate you?"
"I don't think you know what hate is," answered Dick, "any more than a fish knows what water is. You merely swim in it,"
"Then, you mean to—get rid of me?"
"At the first chance!"
"Dick!"
He frowned. There had been only ten people who had dared to call him Dick without a prefix of some kind. She laid a hand on his. Instantly he spurred his horse; it was the merest touch on the off side, but the horse lurched sideways and her hand rested on the empty air. She lost her self-control then, or else threw it to the winds. She seized his rein, and swung her own horse around until he and she faced each other, knee to knee, and whether he would or not he had to see that she was lovely. Her parted lips, disordered hair, and flashing eyes became her; and the tears, art-summoned, that glistened on the brim softened the hearts of even the leading files of the squadron that were obliged to halt and watch.
"Puir lassie!" muttered Andry, pressing forward through the crowding ranks in case Dick needed him. He had already forgotten that a little while ago he called her "Jezebel," and that his sweetheart's arms bore bruises.
"Are you a gentleman, Dick Anthony of Arran, or are you the impostor—the pretender people say you are?"
Dick did not answer, and for the first time in her knowledge of him she could see that he was disconcerted. She thought swiftly, and in a flash the reason came to her; she knew at last that she had found the weak place in his armor. Like a torrent the hot, salt tears welled out and streamed down her cheeks, while she leaned forward on her horse's neck and sobbed as if her heart were breaking.
Dick moved his charger until he was beside her again. Then he laid his right hand on her shoulder, very gently.
"What is it you want?" he asked. "What is it you expect of me?"
"Can't you understand?" she sobbed. "Can't you see? I betrayed Russia for you! I betrayed the Okhrana!"
"I did not ask you to."
"Does that make any difference? They call me traitress! Will you—will you—have the heart to send me back to them to—to—face the—co-co-consequences?"
"No," said Dick, "not if you don't want to go."
She sat up on her horse as if the weight of half the world had just been taken ,from her shoulders. Dick rose up in his stirrups and looked round.
"Squadron!" he shouted. "Ter-r-rot!— March!"
The Princess Olga Karageorgovich had won her way; but the upper hand, the mastery, was still Dick Anthony's.
BEFORE he rode away to invade Russia with four hundred men, Dick's orders to Usbeg Ali Khan had been peremptory. Two Russian regiments were entrenched at bay, and they were to be held there; but there was to be no waste of life or effort. To make things doubly sure Dick had insisted he would be best pleased on his return to find them still at bay. Usbeg Ali's business was merely to cut them off from all communication and to prevent them from marching on Astrabad.
But Afghans are a touchy breed of men, as well as vainglorious, given half an opportunity. A force three thousand strong, enthusiastic as a consequence of two quick victories and swollen almost hourly by additions hurrying in from two rebel provinces— six captured field guns and a machine-gun, ammunition enough and to spare—combined into a chance that Usbeg Ali Khan could not induce himself to miss.
It was myrrh and frankincense to his martial soul that Dick had trusted him to stay and bridle nine-tenths of the little army, but it was gall and vinegar to have been bidden wait on Dick's return before attacking. To a hair he knew Dick's notions about discipline; but Dick's back had scarcely disappeared in a cloud of dust kicked up by his galloping squadron before Usbeg Ali's brain was busy with a plan for seeming to obey while disobeying.
If only the Russian commander could be nagged or tempted into sallying, not even Dick would be able to find fault with an answering attack, particularly should the move succeed; and Usbeg Ali meant it should be so resolute that failure would be impossible.
The Russians were entrenched on a commanding height, with water in abundance and provisions that would very likely last a month. The two regiments were not at full war strength, but the scouts brought word of at least three thousand, including camp-followers and supernumeraries; and against three thousand trained soldiers Usbeg Ali had but four thousand less than half-trained rebels. Yet he did not hesitate.
He knew that the Russians would suppose Dick Anthony to be with the attacking force; otherwise they surely would not wait behind their hastily raised earthworks. Dick's name was as sure by this time to strike terror into Russian hearts as it was to encourage. Persian, and though he yearned for the credit of a victory to his own account, Usbeg Ali had no intention of enlightening the Russians as to Dick's absence, or of doing any other foolish thing that would put heart into them; he meant to take advantage of every point, imaginary or otherwise, that" chanced to come his way.
He judged that surely, too, the Russians must suppose him stronger than he really was, and at once he set about making dispositions of his men that would confirm the supposition. Better than that, though, he knew that the Russians were not yet aware of Dick's capture of a battery, and that six of their own guns were ready to be used against them.
Six guns, under the direction of a true commander, were enough to tum the scale in favor of the untrained besieging force, and Usbeg Ali meant to use them with a generalship that would outweigh the bad shooting of scratch gunners. But to have used all six with which to start things would have been flat disobedience of Dick's orders.
One was enough to play the overture, and he had a right, with one gun, to search out the enemy's defenses, for that was a proceeding no commander worthy of the name would dare neglect.
So he told off one of his seven personal followers, who had been a lieutenant in Abdur Rahman's artillery, to take one gun to the top of a natural earth redoubt and make as good shooting as he could at the Russian camp.
The shooting was unutterably vile, for the officer was years-long out of practise and his day-old crew were afraid of the belching monster they were called upon to serve; shot after shot went whining in the distance, missing the Russian camp by hundreds of feet and bursting in the forest three-quarters of a mile beyond. But Usbeg Ali's purpose was well served.
The Russians were apprised unpleasantly of a battery's disaster, for only from one source could Dick have obtained artillery. That took half the sting out of their training, and brought them down, so far as temper was concerned, to a lower level than their untrained enemy. And their attention was kept fixed on one point, while Usbeg Ali made a new surprise ready for them in a different direction.
Usbeg Ali was no amateur; be had studied soldiering with close attention from the day when he was given his first commission in the grim, efficient army of Afghanistan; he knew that the only way in ¦which to silence an enemy's artillery is to attack it and that therefore, since the Russians had no guns with which to answer, they would certainly attack on foot, in force, and probably before the amateur gunners found the range. So he concentrated nearly half his force in a position to defend the one gun, and named an Afghan second-in-command whom he could trust to fight desperately.
Then, before any Russian plan could have time to be thought of or develop, he took command of the most important and far the most difficult work himself. He meant to have a true tale for Dick Anthony, and not a patched-up, lame excuse. He meant to have the five remaining guns where no efforts on the Russian part would be able to recapture them, and at the same time where they would be able to produce the most effect; and he meant that Dick Anthony, looking over the battle-field afterward with those all-understanding eyes of his, should be able to see for himself how the play had all been conceived for safety's sake.
Shrewd judge of men, yet Eastern of the East and therefore never able to divorce himself from indirect ideas, he had flung his whole weight, all his ambition, and his last ounce of loyalty into the scale with Dick; and he realized that Dick's good opinion was more worth winning than red gold. Yet he could not bring himself to do what Dick would have done in his shoes—obey implicitly!
He made a bold, brave bid to win before Dick could get back. He did the next best thing to obeying strictly, and picked the next best plan to waiting for Dick's personal leadership. He took five hundred men and set them to dragging the five guns up-hill, through a wild maze of ax-resisting forest, to a point a mile away that overlooked the Russian camp. The guns would be safe there, yet from that point they could lob shells into their midst and make the Russians break for the open. To Dick, on his return, he intended it should look as if the Russians had tried to recapture their artillery; to the Russians it would look like a plan of Dick's to force the fighting, as his way always was; to his own men it would look like Dick's orders being carried out resolutely. To Usbeg All himself the plan spelled action, and the chance to prove himself a worthy second-in-command to Dick.
"Forward!" he shouted. "Haiah! Engage the enemy more closely!" aping Dick, even in the phrases that he flung to his men in half a dozen languages.
IT was a Herculean task that be had chosen—a march of a mile that would have sapped the courage of a fanatic, that would have undermined the patience of a mule. . He argued that Dick Anthony would not be back for ten days at the least, for he knew nothing of Dick's plan to hurry and whelm the Russian Caspian fleet; he supposed Dick on his way to gallop into Russia, not to steam in on a stolen Russian ship, and even his Afghan imagination could not suggest a means of raiding over the border and being back again in much less than two weeks.
Yet he set himself to beat these Cossacks in two or three days, taking an adage from Dick's mouth that "he wins twice who does it quickly." He used Dick's method, and he took Dick's name in vain twenty times each hour. He swore that Dick had ordered the attack—that Dick had promised huge rewards if the guns were dragged to the summit in a given time—that Dick was hurrying back to praise them, should they succeed.
He was hardly ever still for a moment, ever and again careering back to the main body of his men and riding the rounds of spaced-out companies who watched lest the Russians try to break through to their rear. Like Dick, he seemed ever at the crucial point, yet never in the way, ever ready with his praise, yet never overlooking a mistake or failing to detect laziness. His black beard could never take the' place of Dick's clean-shaven chin, nor his turban that of Dick's bare red head; but he made the most of his Mohammedan appeal, and there at least he had an advantage over Dick, for he was surely a true-believer, and what Dick's religion might be no one seemed to know or dared to ask.
"Forward, Moslems!" Usbeg Ali kept urging them. "In the name of Allah! The Russians are all unbelievers! Forward, then, and rid the earth of them!"
Dick never could have urged that claim, whatever other charm he had to make them fight. It was that pluck on the religious string that saved the day, day after day, for Usbeg Ali Khan, keeping his men in such fierce mood that the Cossacks were spiritless compared to them.
Moslems like Usbeg Ali's men, who are mainly rank back-sliders and only in name adherents to the creed, can be whipped into a froth of brave fanaticism and kept so by shrewd flattery and fiery quotations from the Koran; and though Usbeg Ali Khan did not know the Koran all by heart, as many Mohammedans claim to do, he knew at least the vitriolic verses. And he could flatter like a courtier, though with manlier phrases and deadlier results.
DAY after day the five guns crept nearer to the hill-top on a trail torn and hacked through jungle that the Cossacks counted on as part of their defense. The wild beasts could not creep through it; centuries had heaped deep piles of knotted debris underfoot until twenty-foot-thick trees stood waist-high in impenetrable tangle; climate had kept the maze so green it would not bum, and nature had seized on the opportunity to raise her slower-growing, tougher sorts of thorn and creeper. Yet it was through that jungle that Usbeg All chose to haul his guns; and Dick Anthony had taught him that where a true commander wants to go, his men must clear a way; it is all a matter of good leading.
Again and again the Russians made a sortie from their height and tried to reach the one active gun to silence it; but Yussuf Ali, the second-in-command, proved worthy of Usbeg Ali's choice, as be had done once before of Dick's, and sturdily repulsed men whose mere name but a month ago had been enough to make all Persia tremble. The gun still made awfully wild shooting and not more than one shot in a dozen fell near enough to the Russian earthworks to be troublesome; but the shooting did not cease, and the Russians did not dare ignore it, any more than they could fight their way out into the open and bolt for Astrabad.
The fact that only one gun was being used against them led them to the false conclusion that Dick Anthony had captured only one; from that they deduced that the rest of the battery had made good its escape, and it followed logically that within a day or two there would be a strong force coming from Astrabad to their relief. They judged that all they had to do was to hold out; and that seemed easy.
Their commander sent more than one note under cover of a white flag, addressed to Richard Anthony; but Usbeg Ali Khan suspected a ruse to kill Dick, or else to spy out the strength of the attacking force. He was right in both guesses; with Dick dead the Russians would have had little need to fear a force of Persians, and they would not have hesitated to shoot him under cover of a white flag, since there could be nobody to bring the crime home to them afterward. Usbeg Ali read the messages, tore them up, spat—and made the bearers prisoner.
"They ask an armistice!" he laughed. "An armistice—an armistice that would be a half-hour's respite for the Iamb when the wolves are hungry! The lamb bleats for the wolves to wait until the shepherds come! Forward, my Moslems! Forward, my true-believers! In the name of Allah the Compassionate, forward with the guns!"
It was splendid. He put the military fire into the hearts of men whose habit was rather to wrangle with interminable words, and he made them do what would have been impossible without it. Yet there was something lacking; and though they all could see the logic of his plan and could appreciate the glory of accomplishment, the meanest of them (and there were many very mean men) knew the difference between his authority and Dick's.
They knew they did not dare refuse obedience to either man. They knew that Usbeg Ali Khan was doing his best for them, and they believed him acting in obedience to Dick. And it was not that they missed the music of Andry's bagpipes, though that would have been even more encouraging than Usbeg Ali's shouts. There was something utterly intangible, and to them unexplainable, that proved a greater obstacle to success than even the tough jungle-wood.
Dick himself could not have told them what the difference was, although his mere presence with them would have proved it. With Dick to lead them, there would have been just that extra amount of sting and energy behind their movements to have changed impossibility into actual fact; for Dick led always for the sake of what was right, unselfishly, whereas Usbeg Ali Khan's main motive now was self-aggrandizement.
They were three totally different men, Dick, Usbeg Ali Khan, and Andry. Each knew it; but, whereas Andry was content to give his best to Dick and to serve humbly, knowing Dick the incomparably better man, Usbeg Ali Khan's ambition made him try to steal feathers from Dick's cap and be, if he could, another Richard Anthony.
There was only room in the world for one Dick Anthony, though Dick made no such claim. There was only one man in Persia at that minute who could have taken those four thousand half-trained men and led them to victory over three thousand Russians, drilled, well-officered, and trenched on a steep hill. That one man, at that minute, happened to have rid the Caspian of Russian ships and to be landing again on the southern Caspian shore.
ON the fourth day of Usbeg Ali's nearly superhuman effort, Dick was already hurrying to help him, thinking only of how soon he might cover the distance, and, between arguments with the Princess, studying a plan of attack that would reduce the Russians in a minimum of time. He more than half believed that Usbeg Ali would obey him and content himself with hemming in the Russians; yet he rather feared the opposite.
Should it prove that Usbeg Ali had obeyed, and that the Cossacks were growing weary of confinement, he decided he would send a note to the Russian commandant under cover of a white flag, explaining all that had happened and the hopelessness of the position. He had never yet shed blood, or caused it to be shed, without doing his best first to avoid the necessity for fighting.
So he hurried, and the horses of his squadron streamed sweat that took on a deep coat of dust and made them seem all one color.
So the women who rode with him had to call on all their reserve of strength.. So Andry, clinging to his saddle and swearing Gaelic oaths, reeled and rolled in efforts to adjust his sore anatomy to less excruciating angles.
So, too, belly-to-the-earth, a big Australian mare of the Indian Army type thundered and sobbed beneath a Rajput sowar in her efforts to catch up.
The sowar rode from Teheran, and as a man rides whose honor hangs in the balance of accomplishment. The end of his turban was between his teeth, to keep the dust out of his throat; his heavy saber lay across the pommel, held in both bands to prevent it banging on the horse's flank. He was up in the stirrups, leaning forward, riding as few but Rajputs can; and, as the way of that fierce fighting race is always, he had managed to communicate his own mood to the animal he rode.
As if Hell and its angels were behind him, instead of a mere task in front, he came like the hot wind, riding light, and gaining two for one.
He was stopped, of course, by the rearguard. A bullet, since the courtesies of peace had been suspended, kicked up the dust within eight inches of his horse's feet, and he reined in with a grin, throwing his weight back in the saddle and looking now like the sole proprietor of all the honor in a prideful world.
He did not speak when they demanded why he rode in such a hurry, but he showed a letter, and a letter, all through the East, is an infinitely better key than argument. They took his saber; a man on either side of him seized a rein, and in a moment they were guiding his leg-weary horse full-pelt past the squadron to the front, where Dick rode.
"Halt!" commanded Dick, throwing up an arm the moment he was overtaken, and the horses dropped their heads all together, blowing like a school of porpoises.
"Give him his saber back!" he ordered, frowning.
The Rajput took his saber in silence, but saluted Dick. Then he held his letter out, and Dick tore it open, trembling a little as he saw that the envelope was stamped from the British Ministry at Teheran. His emotion was excitement, undiluted. This, he told himself, would be recognition at last. This would be some statement to the effect that word had come from home, and that he might surrender at the British Legation and be heard in self-defense. Before he read a line of the letter he thanked God that he had done nothing unworthy of the Anthonys of Arran, but the reverse, untiringly.
This time the letter was addressed to Mr. Richard Anthony, and Dick's eyes laughed, for a former letter from the same source had been unaddressed, and had commenced with "My dear man." But that was all the comfort that it held for Dick, and the watching Rajput noticed that the color of his eyes appeared to change three times while he read on. The Rajput noticed too that Dick's knuckles whitened from the strain of tightening fingers. The letter ran:
Dear Mr. Anthony:
Since you prefer to call yourself, and be addressed, by that name.
"Damn!" Dick muttered.
In a letter addressed to the British Minister here, you made claim to be a British subject, and to the right to surrender at this Legation, to be heard in your own defense on the various charges made against you by the Russian Government. Since the authorities at home have notified us, in reply to our inquiry, of the death of Richard Anthony of Arran, it is not possible to admit your claim either in fact or by implication; but your letter seems to prove sincere affection for your country, and there seems no doubt at all of your nationality, whatever your real name may be.
You are therefore notified that Great Britain, France, and Russia, as allies, are at war with Germany and Austria.
You are invited to consider what the duty is of each and every Englishman under the circumstances.
You are reminded that the further continuance of your ill-advised campaign against Russia most in the nature of things to some extent at least interfere with the employment of all Russia's available strength against England's enemies.
The following guarantee is therefore made to you in absolute good faith, and with the connivance of the Russian Government:
Should you discontinue your efforts against Russia, and report at this Legation immediately after receipt of this communication, you are promised a free passage out of Persia in any direction you care to take, except toward Russia. No efforts will be made, either by the British or Russian Governments, to bring you to trial, nor will any further steps be taken to bring you to account.
In the event of your wishing to discuss this offer in person, before availing yourself of it, a period of one week is allowed you, during which the Russian Minister has given assurance that no steps will be taken against you, unless of a defensive nature made necessary by action on your part. At any time during the week which follows your receipt of this letter you will be met at any point you may decide on outside of Teheran, and an official verbal assurance will be added to this written one.
But, should you continue on your present course, you are hereby notified that, as the ally and friend of Russia, the British Government will use its best effort to bring you to account.
An attempt to approach Teheran with a considerable armed force would be interpreted as an act of enmity on your part.
In the hope that your good sense and your loyalty to England will combine to induce you to take advantage of an opportunity which otherwise could never be available, I have the honor to be, sir. Your obedient servant,
H.J. Ommoney, Assist. Secretary of Legation.
Dick's lips grew thin and his cheeks white beneath the tan, as he read what was virtually his excommunication. Until now he had not doubted for an instant his ultimate ability to prove his real identity; he had felt sure, too, that sooner or later he would be able to establish his innocence. He had dealt savagely with Russia, but from motives and with excuse that were in every instance unassailable. The guilty party had been always Russia.
Now, in the teeth of the amazing, unexpected fact of European war, with Russia and England hand-in-hand in an unnatural alliance, he saw—as a man sees Fate's finger writing on a wall—his doom to utter outlawry and endless unrecognition. Even the offer to explain at greater length was not from the British Minister, who might have recognized him, but from an underling, who would be too full of self-importance and self-righteousness to understand more than the gulf now fixed between them.
His strange eyes glowed, and all the pride of all the Anthonys surged through his veins to sing, in his head and bid bun send back hot defiance. He would not have been the first Anthony, by many and many a man, to be a thorn in England's side; more than one Anthony had ridden into England under more than one Pretender, and had left his mark on British history before he died.
But, being Richard Anthony—last and least passionate, though noblest of the clan ¦—he thought of the Persians who had chosen him to lead them, and of the blood that they would have to shed should he let hot temper lead him now. It seemed to him that there might be another, middle course, by which Persia might be free in any event. If he could rid Persia of the Russian yoke, be would ride away content, and die anywhere Fate chose, in anonymous oblivion.
"Ride back!" he ordered the Rajput. "Say, I'll come and talk it over!"
"A letter, sahib! Give me a letter to take!"
"No! Tell 'em I'll come! Tell 'em to meet me. Let the password be 'Is it peace, Jehu?' I'll answer 'Peace!'—"
"That is no message, sahib, to take to a Legation!" said the Rajput truculently.
"It is all I send!" said Dick. "Squadron! Ter-r-r-r-r-ot—March!"
Four hundred horses jingled on the instant in his wake, and the Rajput sat in their dust, staring at Dick's back.
"That is the voice, and the eye, and the manner of a Man!" he muttered.
He sat his tired horse, muttering to himself, until all Dick's dusty squadron had clattered past him and the jeers of the last few files, who thought Dick's manner evidence of the Rajput's meanness, had died away. Then suddenly he seemed to recollect his senses and his duty. As suddenly his mare's trembling legs drew taut again. As if man and beast were actuated by the selfsame thought, and that thought instant, he was all at once off in a thundering stride, hell-pelting after Dick and elbowing out of the way the supernumeraries who cantered on the flank.
He caught Dick in ten minutes of hard riding, and Dick turned to look at him with growing interest. His born ability to recognize a good man told him he had treated this sowar a bit too cavalierly, and had visited disappointment on the man who least deserved ill treatment.
"Halt!" he ordered, flinging up his hand; and again the squadron thundered to a standstill. Again he and the Rajput eyed each other as one lion eyes another across a kill.
"I, too, am a man," said the Rajput slowly, speaking Persian. Dick nodded. "I brought a letter."
Niggard of spoken words, Dick nodded again.
"I have a right to proof that I delivered it."
"A soldier's word should be worth more than written evidence," said Dick, for he was interested. An uncle of his, an Anthony, had fought in Rajputana, and had brought home tales of Rajput derring-do and pride that all unintentionally had formed a most important part of Richard's education; it is the tales a boy remembers, and not the school-taught ritual, that mold the man who is to be.
"A soldier's promise to bring back an answer—is that worth nothing?" asked the Rajput, eying Dick's basket-hilted sword and its beryl flashing in the sun. "I will fight you for a written answer!"
"You shall have one," answered Dick, feeling in his pocket for something to write with. He had nothing of the kind, but the Rajput handed him a fountain pen and paper.
Dick wrote, resting the paper on a rifle butt that a front file laid across his saddle:
Would to God there were one man in authority at your Legation who had half this Rajput's sense! Then there might be somebody to recognize me when I come! I shall come, by the main road from the west, as soon as I have relieved two Russian regiments, now surrounded. I shall come in a hurry, with a few men. Meet me anywhere along the road. Let the password be "Is it peace, Jehu?" and the answer "Peace!" I have an offer I will make, so let the man who meets me have full authority to accept or decline.
Dick Anthony.
The Rajput, seeing he had finished writing, held his hand out.
"Give me an envelope," said Dick.
The sowar shook his bead. "I am no village letter-writer, summoned from the shade of a baobab," he laughed. "I have neither envelope nor stamp."
Dick folded up the letter and passed it to him.
"The contents are for the eyes of the Secretary of Legation," he said quietly.
"He shall be the first to read it," said the sowar, thrusting the letter into a pocket inside his tunic.
Then Dick did what he should have done before, and what he was ashamed of not having done. He offered the sowar the pick of all the horses in the squadron. But the sowar shook his head.
"There is no horse in the world that I would take in exchange for this mare of mine!" he answered.
"Who said exchange?" asked Dick.
So the sowar eyed the squadron horses, and selected one that seemed less travel-weary than the rest. Dick made the man who rode it mount behind another man, and the sowar changed the saddle over from his mare. He mounted, saluted Dick, and then rode back along his way on a horse that bore the brand of the Russian Government and a Cossack regiment, leading his Waler mare.
"One thousand men like that one," muttered Dick, "and I think I could make Asia hold her head up and be free!"
AS he led his squadron on again along the road toward the mountains, looking back once or twice at the Rajput sowar whom a few days of rough traveling would reintroduce to ordered decorum and social levels rigidly defined, Dick's feelings were too mixed and his emotions too intense to bear definition. All that that sowar would enjoy, of dignity and recognition, would not amount to the hundredth part of what were Dick's, by right of birth and honest effort; yet the last of the Anthonys was an outlaw, and seemed likely to remain, one!
The full, tremendous meaning of the message sent him dawned on him gradually, as he recalled what he had done to Russia and that that sovereign power was willing to forego revenge. From the day when he had forced the captain of a Russian ship to do his bidding down to this minute his every encounter with Russian authority had begun with defiance on his part, and had ended in Russia's worsting.
In Russia itself he had cut his way through the ranks of a regiment. He had crossed the Caspian in a stolen Russian boat. Here in Persia he had cut up a regiment; later, he had forced it to surrender, and had sent it back weaponless, in shame, to Astrabad. He had burst into Astrabad, and at his bidding the inhabitants had burned the Russian barracks. He had burst open a Russian jail and had set the prisoner free. He had captured a battery of Russian guns. And now, backed by the very elements, he had swept the Caspian clear of Russian ships. Yet Russia was ready to forget, if not forgive!
Truly, this must be a war! Russia must be in dire straits before—
He found himself arguing against himself, unable to believe that any straits would make the Russian bear guileless. His thought took another line. England must be in dire straits before she would let her Minister consent, even through his assistant secretary, to such an offer as had just been made him! But England and Russia were allies, and at war with Germany. He could not make himself believe that Germany, with Austria to help, could worry England, France and Russia into making such a compact after what could have been at most but a week or two of war. The Princess Olga Karageorgovich had had no news of war, for he asked her, and she had been in communication with Petersburg within the week.
"War in Europe would be Asia's opportunity!" he told himself; and that thought brought others.
The Princess, laughing at the guards who shouted to her to keep between them, spurred forward beside Dick, and looked up at him with an expression on her face that was the quintessence of confidential comradeship. She all but took him off his guard; but in time—in the nick of time— he remembered that a she-leopard is always a she-leopard, though her spots seem beautiful. He had to tell himself three times that she was his enemy, before he could forget her loveliness and what seemed love-light in her violet eyes.
"May I know the news?" she asked him in a voice that would have disarmed a scorpion.
"No," he said curtly; so she drew back to her place again amid her muttering guards.
Once a she-leopard, always one! How, then, about a bear? Was the Russian bear become trustworthy all at once because of an alliance and a common cause with England? Had Russia ever ceased, even in time of war, to scheme and plan and trick?
Had nations grown less selfish, because Germany had shown her hand at last and had begun to use the saber she had rattled so often? It seemed to Dick, hurrying his squadron through the foothills, that the guile of Tartar counsels underlay that plea that sought to seduce him out of Persia.
Had he not promised the Persians he would lead them, and that he would stay with them until they were free of the Russian yoke, or he were dead? Was that promise canceled because Germany and England were at war? Back came his thoughts again to that initial °ne> that "war in Europe might be Asia's opportunity!" And, if Asia's, Russia's! For Russia overlies the whole of Asia, and considers Asia little else than Russia's destiny!
He began to wonder whither destiny was leading him, Dick Anthony, who had always prayed to be a soldier, and who had been denied. For the first time now it began to dawn on him that he was more of a soldier, in more absolute command, than ever any Anthony had been. It had been denied him to lead his father's kilted regiment or to take his father's place in his nation's counsels; but here was another nation he might serve, and it began to look to him as if destiny, perhaps, were making him its savior.
Dick's modesty was of the enduring sort that only let such personal deductions reach him last of all, when all the other explanations of a fact had been tried in turn and found no good. Yet his courage was of the undiluted and unblinking type that made him face his own conclusions and admit them and their consequences.
It seemed to him, as he led at his usual reckless speed across an untamed countryside with four hundred men behind him who were foreigners by birth, creed, training, habit, and ideals, that it had been no scheming of his that had set him where he was, nor any choice of his; therefore—the conclusion grew more definite each minute—he had a right to make the utmost and the utmost best for himself and all concerned out of the situation. And what was right was all he ever cared about.
Soon conclusion was conviction. Soon his most extraordinary eyes were blazing with the light of a new understanding and a new determination. Then, as always when he had his basic fact to build on, he began searching swiftly in his mind for ways and means of using what he had to hand for what he had to do.
He had men and horses. He had captured Russian guns. And he had Andry. Andry Macdougal was a godsend, neither more nor less, though likely to be rendered less efficient by the presence of his sweetheart; Andry was the essence of all loyalty, and an excellent, tremendous fighting man. Andry was more than a mere asset: he was part and parcel of the game itself.
It was the Princess who puzzled him. What use could he make of a woman who had betrayed him, over and again, that she might have him for her own; who did not dare go back to Russia, because she had betrayed the Russian secret government; who was likely to betray him again, and Russia again, and certainly herself at the first chance-given opportunity to wet her tigerish desire; who was young, beautiful, and gifted, and so well taught in the art of deceiving men that enemy and friend alike were likely to be fooled by her, and any plan that included her was likely to be spoiled by her treacherous arts? Unless he used her, and remorselessly, she would almost certainly use him. What could he do with her?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of cannonading far ahead, and the very distant rattle of small-arms firing independently. Once, against the dark of distant trees, he caught sight of a cannon's flash, and then he heard the answering hell-stutter of two machine-guns.
"I might have known that Usbeg Ali could not wait!" he muttered. "Damn the man!"
Then he leaned back in the saddle, and his voice, that had no music in it but a whole story full of wonderful appeal, rang long and loud, so that the last man of the trotting squadron heard it and awoke from reverie.
"Squadron—wake up, now! Gather your horses together! Form twos! Like the devil, now! Gallop!"
They answered him like men awaking from a dream, and in a moment the long line was streaming out behind him, up and down hill, over water-courses, in and out around huge rocks and dodging under trees, no longer thundering with an ordered squadron's din but sweeping along as a hailstorm goes, and sparing neither horse nor rider in their hurry to help Usbeg Ali Khan.
SO A Cossack look-out in the top branches of a walnut-tree spied the glint of sun on steel and mistook Dick Anthony's oncoming squadron for the vanguard of a relieving force. He shouted the good news down to his commander, and Colonel Ivanoff sent two more men up into the tree-tops, lending one of them his own binoculars.
Dick's horses were Russian; the rifles were Russian; and under Dick's leadership the men rode at least as recklessly as Cossacks. The look-outs had excuse for confirming the first man's report; the man with the glasses shouted down that he could see two women riding with the force, and that was enough to assure the Colonel that the new arrivals were from Astrabad, and Russian. Who else but the Princess Olga Karageorgovich could the woman be? And did she ever go anywhere without her maid?
Unlike the great majority of Russia's officers along her far-spread frontiers, Colonel Ivanoff was not a mere incompetent sent off to escape his creditors, nor yet an undesirable whose crimes had been too insignificant and mean to call for serious notice. He happened to be a man who took his profession seriously and who judged every situation from a military point of view.
Horsemen, coming at a gallop, could be but the advance guard of a relieving force, he argued; and he remembered that there were not very many cavalry in Astrabad; the horsemen must be few. But he judged that the approach of Cossacks would be just as disconcerting to his Persian enemy, and to Dick Anthony whom he still supposed in command of the attacking force, as it was reassuring to himself, and he proposed to take immediate advantage of consternation in the Persian ranks.
He heard the shouts of the besiegers as they, too, got word of the arrivals. Drawn on a rough map in front of him, he had a chart that showed exactly how far Usbeg Ali's men had dragged the five guns, for men posted in other tree-tops had reported to him yard by yard the progress made, and he had heard for himself the noise of axes and the shouting. What he did not know was that there were five guns there, and he only supposed that they were making a trail for the one gun, which was meanwhile belching occasional ill-directed shots at his position.
It was quite clear to him that should that one gun ever reach the hill-top toward which Usbeg Ali's efforts aimed, shooting with it would be almost infinitely easier, and his position would become untenable or nearly so. Also, it was gall and wormwood to him that any relieving force should find him being pounded by one of the guns be had originally been supposed to escort.
He decided at once to sally in force. He laid his finger on the chart, called half a dozen of his subordinates, and pointed out his plan to them.
"There must be several hundred men up that road they are cutting," he explained. "They can only get out of it by the way that they went in, for the jungle is too thick for any other course. If we can strike at this point—here—we shall cut the force in halves, one half up their jungle trail and the other outside it. Our move will bottle up however many men they have got in the jungle and, with them corked in, the rest will be that much easier to deal with. Get our machine-guns here, cover our advance with them in the direction of that cannon. Call in our men from the rear. Concentrate on this point, and in this direction. Now! Hear them shouting? Now is the time! Now, hurry!"
THERE was nothing desultory about the sudden Russian change of front and charge. They came, when they did come, like an avalanche, spring-loosed from their hill-top, and within five minutes of the start they had thrust themselves between Usbeg Ali, with his guns and his five hundred, and his main body who were drawn up to defend the other gun. It was then, for the first time, that the Russians became aware of the other five guns, and then that the fancy seized them to recapture all six guns, instead of merely one, before what they thought was their relief could reach them.
Bugles and hoarse shouts told of an altered plan. Crashing undergrowth proclaimed a changing front. In a matter of seconds Usbeg Ali Khan-was shut in at the far end of a path that he had cut, and impenetrable jungle hedged him in tight.
"Surrender!" yelled the Cossacks, from the open end.
"Stand by the guns in the name of Allah!" thundered Usbeg Ali.
"Charge! Charge in and get them!" roared a Russian officer.
In a moment ail hell was loose, and Usbeg Ali Khan was putting into practise lessons in true leadership that he had learned from Richard Anthony. Somehow, by dint of awful effort and a self-control that is the only key to the control of men, he contrived to get his men crouched behind the guns and hidden down the sides of his rough-hewn jungle glade, so that the volley sent whistling at them by kneeling Cossacks spattered and rattled on the guns but did little serious harm. And it was answered by an independent fire that sent the Russians reeling back for shelter.
Then, instead of facing two ways to defend themselves from the Russian charge and the attack of new arrivals, the main body of Dick's Persians recognized Dick's red head and Andry's rolling seat on a horse. They let loose a cheer that crashed through the jungle like the Last Trump; and like a gaining tide they surged forward at the Russians.
It was the Russians then who faced two ways at once and the Russians who lost courage.
In his glade Usbeg Ali Khan fought like a black rat in a hole. One gun he managed to get faced about and aimed at the Russians. With a last-ditch wit that is the heritage of fighting men, he found amid his crowd a man who knew enough to load the gun, and with his own hands he got the limber open and a charge of grape ready.
The grape went whining down the glade, at a range that precluded missing, and a ghastly crimson gap lay open through the Russian midst. Then with a roar of defiance the Cossacks formed again and surged down the glade at the charge before the amateurs could possibly reload. As many Cossacks as could crowd into the jungle lane were at hand-grips with Usbeg Ali's men when Dick's newcomers joined the main body and Dick himself sought high ground somewhere, anywhere, from which to sum up the situation and take charge of it. He tried a tree, but could see nothing from the top of it. He tried a ridge that ran through the jungle east and west, but there was no hole through the thicket that a jackal could have used. There were only three roads—one that Usbeg Ali Khan had cut, and in which he fought now like the king of hell at bay; one down which the Russians came in force; and one up which his own main body surged. They all three met together, and at the junction of them, in a natural forest clearing less than two acres in extent, they were having it out at hand-grips, to the tune of two machine-guns that were "browning" all concerned with bloody impartiality.
"Andry!" roared Dick, and the Scotsman laid a hand on his shoulder; he was in his place where he ought to be, one yard behind.
"Get your pipes out—get 'em going—any tune!"
There was no need to run and get the pipes; Andry had them ready. In a moment Cock o' the North was screaming through the trees, and Usbeg Ali, down in his death-trap, knew that Dick had come.
"Hey, Persians!" he shouted. "Another of Allah's sendings! Dee-k-Anthonee! Dee-k-Anthonee is here! The battle is ours! Forward, in the name of Allah! Charge!"
DICK forced his way through the swarm of the main body, and the Russians reeled away in front of him. Where Dick was, with his bare red head and that two-edged sword that had been his ancestor's, there was a spirit, too, that flowed through his men's veins and made warriors of weaklings. And where he went strode Andry, the gigantic, making music of a kind that mocks at fear. Section by section the Russians yielded and gave ground; and since they were commanded by a soldier who was worth his keep they fell back stolidly, in order enough to be ugly. There was only one line open along which they could retreat, and so they took it, up the hill behind them to the trenched camp they had left.
Soon their machine-guns ceased stuttering for fear of decimating their own men. Soon the main body of them had been driven past the entrance to Usbeg Ali's trap and, the pressure gone from behind them, those up the trap were driven headlong back out of it in front of Usbeg Ali's furious charge.
Sullenly, then, but in decent order, the Cossacks retreated up their hill, leaving behind them twenty or more per cent, of their number dead and dying or else wounded too seriously to drag themselves along. Behind them, up the hill, there crawled a line of wounded, belly-downward, who preferred the agony of movement to the chance of Persian mercy or the risk of being left to the attention of the jungle-ants.
"You came in the nick of time, bahadur?" said the voice of Usbeg Ali Khan, and his white teeth smiled between his black mustache and beard as Dick looked round at him.
"Who started the fight?" asked Dick.
"Bahadur, I—"
"That'll do!" said Dick. He could detect the shadow of a coming lie before it came, and Usbeg Ali lowered his eyes, for Dick's were as he had never seen them yet. They did not blaze, nor were they cold; they seemed blended of pity, disappointment; understanding, all in one', and to a man who. knew himself at fault they were not good to gaze into.
"Lay out the dead and wounded!" ordered Dick.
Glad of an excuse to break away, Usbeg Ali ran to busy himself about a duty he would never have soiled his hands with otherwise. He liked the fighting and the leadership, but not the shambles afterward.
IT was an hour before the tale was told in full and the lines of dead and wounded lay beneath the trees in the clearing where the three tracks met.
"Have you counted them?" asked Dick.
"Which? The dead or the wounded?"
"Dead—wounded—Persian—Russian —all of them. How many?"
"Bahadur, there lie five hundred and nine Russian dead and wounded, two hundred and ninety-seven of our men—all told, both together—"
"Eight hundred and six!" said Dick. "And my order when I left you was 'let there be no fighting!'"
Usbeg Ali did not answer him. When it came to the point it seemed never any use to lie to Dick.
"Now go. Take a white flag. Climb that hill and tell the Russian commandant that he may go free, with the honors of war!"
"Bahadur!"
"Do as I say!"
"Bahadur—he will ask me why!"
"Tell him Russia, France and England are at war with Germany and Austria. Tell him I will not fight England's friends! Do as I order you! Go!"
Dazed, like a drunken man, and much less than half convinced, Usbeg Ali Khan attached a torn shirt to a stick and staggered up the hill.
NEEDLESS to say, the Russian commandant smelled more than one rat; he smelled half a dozen of them. He did not believe, in the first place, that there was any European war, for he had had no news of even the likelihood of one when he left Astrabad only a few days before. He did believe that he was likely soon to be relieved, and he was sure that he needed only hold out where he was for a day or two until troops could hurry to his aid from over the Caspian.
He knew nothing of Dick's clean sweep that had changed the Caspian from a Russian lake to any man's sea again. And he did believe in Russia's long, strong arm. He believed firmly, implicitly, beyond chance of contradiction, that Dick Anthony had news of a relief force coming; and he laughed aloud at the idea of going free. He meant he would hold Dick Anthony engaged until the relief force came, and meanwhile he decided to make use of argument
"This is no war," he answered arrogantly. "There are no honors of war I can recognize that an outlaw has to offer! Tell your master to give me back those stolen guns, if be wants to treat with me. Go, tell him that!"
"I dare not!" answered Usbeg Ali Khan,
"Tell him, then, that when I come out of here it will be without his leave!"
"Bismillah!" answered Usbeg Ali, flashing his white teeth and thrusting his sword-hilt forward. "There was no Dee-k-Anthonee here until a while ago, yet we all but routed you. Now, with him here, and his leave to use those guns against you, I promise you the treatment that a ringed wolf gets! Allah the Compassionate has made my master offer you his charity. Take it or leave it. Take leave to go or leave to lie here and be cracked up by the jackals! Bismillah—what should we care!"
"Tell him to send those guns up here, and I will treat with him," the Colonel answered, turning on his heel. And, since a company of Cossacks covered him with rifles and made ready to fire a volley at the word, Usbeg Ali spun on his heel with the haughtiness that few know so well as Afghans how to assume and started down the hill.
To his amazement, Dick did not order the resumption of hostilities at once. Instead, he made another white flag, gave it to a Persian, sent the man with it ahead of him uphill, and followed alone, on horseback. The commandant came out to meet him, and the two men eyed each other for a minute, under the eyes of thousands—Cossacks peering over earthworks from above and, from below, Persians staring wide-eyed from between the trunks and limbs of trees.
"What is it?" asked the commandant at last, strangely at a loss for words in the presence of this outlaw whom he had affected to despise.
"I have news, direct from the British Minister at Teheran," said Dick, "of a European war in which England, France and Russia are allies against Austria and Germany. As an Englishman, I offer you undisputed right of way back into Russia."
"I don't believe a word of it!"
"Oh, yes you do!" said Dick.
They were speaking English, for most educated Russians can converse in that and several other tongues; and Dick did not choose to have it known that he knew Russian.
"I need proof of it!"
Dick had a letter in his pocket that would have proved his assertion to the hilt, but it was not his way to lay bare to an enemy the secrets that lay nearest to his heart. Non-recognition of his true claim to be Dick Anthony of Arran was black shame, to him if not to other people, of a kind he would wipe out before he spoke of it. So he let the letter lie where it was, in an inside pocket of a torn shirt.
"You mean you want proof that I'm not afraid to fight?"
"Bah!" said the Russian. "Your rabble could not take my position in a hundred years! But give me those six guns back, and I'll grant your request!"
"What request?" asked Dick.
"Your request for a truce."
Dick smiled, and it was evident to Colonel Ivanoff that he had chosen the wrong line. Generally, with a young man such as Dick, and when the young man makes the first advances, the upper hand is the better one to take and the more impudently the young man is browbeaten the sooner he will yield; for he will either lose his temper or lose courage, and in either case is damned.
"Let's fight and get it over, then!" said Dick, so quietly and so casually that the Russian gasped. "Come and get your guns! I'm going to train them on you from that gap. Hoist a white flag when you've had enough of it. Good-by,"
THE Russian did not answer. Nor did he speak. Usbeg Ali's subsequent contention that the Colonel was author of the crime, as well as to blame for it, was due like many another of the Afghan's errors to a wild imagination. What did happen was that the Colonel turned on his heel and hurried back toward the nearest earthwork, and the men lined up behind it took his gesture for an order.
"Fire!" yelled an officer in Russian.
A volley burst out in a livid line of flame from over the earth redout. Dick's charger reared, up-ended—leaped into the air in a convulsive death spasm—and fell backward on the top of Dick, spurting blood from twenty places.
"Fire!" yelled an officer again.
A second volley plunked into the horse. The beast quivered and was still. Dick writhed. And then a yell that rent the forest burst from the Persian lines below, and through the yell there danced and lifted suddenly a tune to which hordes have hurried many a hundred time to the relief.
"The Campbells are comin', Oho, Oho!" played Andry.
"Ye have seen!" yelled Usbeg Ali Khan.
"Blood!"
It was a sudden, awful sound that burst unprompted from four thousand throats together. It was like the bursting, prisoned wrath of Asia, detonated by the sight of treachery to the man who had taught a new way of winning freedom. And the wave, the hurricane, the rising, upward flowing, scorching blast that came next from the woods seemed to the waiting Russians like the wrath of God let go.
"Allah! In the name of Allah!"
Nobody thought any longer of the guns, nor of any other thing than how to cross the space between him and the enemy in shortest time and glut, with steel in yielding flesh, his savage hunger for revenge. For they thought Dick dead. In that second they knew, as none of them had known yet, what Dick had been to them and what of hope, and unity, and new, unselfish plan his life and leadership had meant.
The madness, that has gripped whole nations before now, of blood-guilt intent on justifying murder, seized the Russians and they surged across their earthwork in a wave that met the Persian wave half-way. Unbitted, uncontrolled, unreasoning, they lost all sense of discipline or drill, and fought with fixed bayonets, teeth, sabers, hands and feet, for what was supposed to be Dick's carcass.
Russians dragged the horse away from him, Persians lifted him. It was Andry's rifle, clubbed, that scattered a way through Persian and Russian alike, whirling and beating, brain-beastly, to be flung at last like a thunderbolt into the Russian ranks while the huge man seized Dick in his arms and hugged him, sobbing "Laddie, laddie! What hae they done to ye?"
IT was in Andry's iron arms that his breath came back to Dick, and his brain, stunned by the fall, recovered consciousness. And then, since he was weak still and could scarcely shout or stand, it was hoisted on Andry's shoulders that Dick led his Persians on, up the hill, and over the Russian trenches. Andry carried him with the strength of a horse and the care of a Scots nurse for a babe in arms; and he set him down on the summit of the hill, to feel him over with huge, searching bands for bullet wounds.
"Have they killed ye? Have they hur-r-rt ye? Ar-r-re ye live an' weel? Laddie—speak me a piece! Say that ye're no sae verra sairly woundit!"
The giant was on his knees beside Dick, groping with his hands inside Dick's shirt, feeling him rib by rib, and growing more excited every second as it dawned on him that a miracle had happened and Dick was not hurt at all, but only a little stunned and shaken.
"Stop the fighting if you can!" Dick panted; and the big man got up on his feet, to look around him and, if he might, obey. Dick's voice had not come back to him—the crashing, piercing voice that had no note of music in it but could ring through the raging of a battle and be beard.
Borne off their feet and carried backward by the weight of Persian wrath, the Cossacks were at bay, surrounded, cut up into small detachments, giving ground, and fighting with the wild-eyed fear that knows no hope of quarter. The hill-top was a shambles, slippery with blood, and the din was the noise of bell, that drowned all orders and all efforts to command.
'Laddie, ye might stop steers that had sniffed the smell o' bluid—but yon's no' a stampede—yon's a lan'slide!"
But Dick had recovered. Clean living of a life long, exercise, and open air had told, and the elasticity of youth won out against the effect of shock. As suddenly as it had left him all his self-command returned, and with it came again his almost superhuman power to grip men's minds and bend them to the line of his own choosing.
Now his voice went ringing through the din. Now his strength was back, and he was here, there, everywhere, wherever the fight raged fiercest; and strangely enough his sword, that had led the Persians so often to swift victory, was busy now fighting for the Russians. He beat his own men with the flat of it. He beat them to their knees. Guarded from behind by Andry, he attacked them when they would not listen, and forced them to give ground in front of him, sparring sullenly in self-defense.
And then, as the fight died down, and only small sporadic skirmishes at distant points continued like the waning embers of a scattered fire, Usbeg Ali and a dozen men came struggling toward Dick, carrying Colonel Ivanoff legs upward, fighting for sheer blasphemous disgust with his loss of dignity. His face was on the earth, but his arms and his legs were busy dealing desperately with his captors.
Bleeding, they up-ended him, holding his arms and giving him no chance to wipe away the bloody mud that smeared his face.
"Can you gather your men?" Dick asked him; but he did not answer.
"Loose him!" ordered Dick; and to every one's amazement the Colonel stood still, helpless, utterly unable to speak, move, or think apparently, now that he was loosed, although the men who loosed him each could show the marks of his iron fingers.
"Gather your wounded and go!" said Dick.
"Give me my guns!"
Dick did not smile. He drove his two-edged sword home into its scabbard, and turned aside to think what he should do or say to a man crazed by defeat and shame. And as he turned he heard Andry swear a deep Scots oath behind him. His eyes sought Andry's—followed their line—and saw the French maid, Marie Mouquin, running uphill, dodging dead bodies and the arms of wounded men stretched out to clutch her skirts. Andry stepped out to start toward her, but Dick held out a restraining hand.
"Let her come," he ordered; and they both stood still, wondering.
"She has gone!" said the maid. "She has taken a horse! She has ridden away!"
"Who?"
Both men voiced the question, though both knew who the only woman in the world was who could make trouble for them in that moment.
"The Princess! She! Olga Karageorgovich!"
"Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho!" laughed Colonel Ivanoff. The news revived his fainting wits; he had forgotten that his look-out in the tree-top had reported Olga Karageorgovich in the arriving force. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho!" He held his sides. He sat down on the end of an earth redout, and stretched his legs in front of him to enjoy better the revulsion of sensation that swept over him.
"The baa-lamb caught the she-wolf, but forgot to hold her. Ho-ho-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ho! Now for the last chapter! She can bear more malice than a pig has lice!"
He did not know how utterly the Princess had already damned herself in the suspicious eyes of Russia, for he was not one of the men in touch with the secret government. He had only laughed a hundred times, in common with a hundred officers, at the notorious passion of the Princess Olga Karageorgovich for Dick—had guessed a hundred times at what would be the outcome— and roared now at the thought of the emotions that would rankle in her mind while she rode like the hot wind back to Astrabad, and the humor of it took the sting out of defeat, and left him tractable.
DICK had no more difficulty with him. The Persians made stretchers out of boughs and laid the Russian wounded on them; the Cossacks lifted them, and with the Colonel at their head on his own horse they trudged down to the plain and to the track leading eastward for Astrabad. Dick kept back no plunder, but even let them take away their two machine-guns.
The Russians held a burying of dead on the plain, and the whine of Cossack hymns wound back with the East wind through the trees to where Dick stood bareheaded at the end of a long trench, counting his Persian dead who lay with faces toward Mecca. The trench had been dug for another purpose by a Russian enemy, and Andry's bagpipes were the orchestra that played their requiem. After the final volleys, while the sods were being tossed into the trench, "Lochaber No More" wailed over them, like a thread of silver running through the thoughts of East and West alike, knitting them into one mutual understanding and regard.
"Up to the hills!" Dick ordered then.
Half of the men had left their possessions cached in Dick's mountain aerie, where the campaign for Persia's freedom had been given its initial impetus. There was room in that amphitheater for seven or eight thousand men, and water in the middle of it; held by five hundred men, not twenty thousand with artillery could ever have taken it, unless by slow starvation, for there were no crags that commanded it, nor any positions from which guns could search it out. The approaches were narrow, steep and few; they could be swept as with hail by converging rifle-fire.
It suited Dick, in that minute when his fate and most of Persia's seemed hanging in the balance, to do the opposite to what would be expected of him, and gather his clans together in that first sky-nestling camp. Now, if there was anything in all this news of war, of Russia's anxiety to call off her troops, and of England's so dire need that she must offer to treat with a proclaimed outlaw, was the time when a man would strike swiftly and smite hard, thought Usbeg Ali Khan, already speculating on the nature and extent of the loot in Teheran bazaars.
But Dick preferred to weld his force together, and to lead it to the place where it could be of least immediate use to anybody but itself. Newcomers were flocking hourly to him, all undrilled, though nearly all of them well armed; and all the newcomers were burdened with unwarlike luggage. His losses, of drilled men seasoned under fire, had been terrific, especially in this last bungling engagement, and to make those losses good would mean not merely numbers but tireless teaching of new men. It seemed very good to Dick to -hurry his growing swarm into the hills before it grew too unwieldy, to give his wounded the benefit of mountain air, and to let his new men cache their belongings in a place that would give them a sense of headquarters in common.
A WEAKER, unwiser man would have led a rabble forward, and have let it plunder on its way, to create panic and excuse for more exacting terms. But the only weak joint in all Dick's armor was his quixotic regard for women.
He answered no questions, though a thousand were put to him by men who thought their service gave them the right to ask truculently. In Asia the men who do not care to presume on service rendered are few, and to be feared, though Asiatics generally fear the other kind. Before he had gone five miles the atmosphere of discontent and the growing murmur, of a kind that even Alexander the Great had been obliged to heed, forced itself on Dick, and made him show his strength again.
He did not try to ignore. Facts to him were stern things, to be handled savagely, as facts. He halted the column. True to his usual course, he cut straight at the heart of trouble and left its makers wondering what it had been and who had imagined it.
"Those who come with me must be satisfied with explanations when I give them!" he said simply. "But nobody need come! Fall out, those who wish to march the other way!"
Not a man fell out, so he rode along the line, repeating his words exactly to the following companies one by one. Faced with the blunt alternative of following or going free, there was not one who cared to lose Dick's leadership; the newcomers were eager to win glory, and the veterans—for so they were beginning to regard themselves—were jealous of the new arrivals as well as confident in Dick; like Alexander's men, they had wanted to dictate which way he ought to lead, but they had met a bigger man than Alexander.
"Forward!" Dick ordered, riding on again; and as every Eastern always does, each man in the sprawling line scanned his face eagerly. It was plain as daylight to them that he had forgotten the incident already; not only did he bear them no resentment or cumber his mind with memory of an incident that had no longer weight, but his mental habit was so fixed and definite that strangers could read it instantly. It was a habit that produced more respectful confidence than a thousand promises or even a thousand acts could ever have done; and his men tramped uphill behind him now, or sat their horses, with an air of going on their chosen way.
THERE was one thing left that worried Dick, and it was not of the sort that generally worries generals in the field. There was a woman with his force, of a sort that does not settle down as a rule to roughing it, a woman of the rather pampered, very imaginative, city-loving type, who was in love with Andry, and so far gone in love with him that convention and its claims sat lightly on her. A French lady's-maid, educated in intrigue, was not exactly likely to be useful; yet Andry loved the woman, and Dick loved Andry as one good man may love another, with a loyalty that passes mere expression or mere words. He owed it to Andry to preserve the maid's good name, yet he dared not, for the sake of human charity, send the maid back to be bullied, tortured, even perhaps killed by her erstwhile mistress.
"Where's your girl?" he demanded at the evening halt, when the watch-fires were beginning to leap brightly in the gloom, and the patient wounded lay waiting for supper and the rough attentions of rough men. Andry went off in search of her, and Dick turned to Usbeg Ali Khan who, with a meekness that was somewhat new to him, had ridden up for orders.
"Any women with the new arrivals?" Dick demanded.
"I will see, bahadur.
"You ought to have known!" said Dick, and almost for the first time Usbeg Ali accepted the reproof without answering; there was the making of a most amazingly good soldier in the Afghan, and Dick, more than any living man, knew how to uncover the gold that surely lay beneath the outer dross of brag and jealousy. Usbeg Ali rode through the gloom wondering at himself, but almost worshipful of Dick.
Andry brought Marie Mouquin, and stood her before Dick, but Dick did not speak to her. He was sitting on a tree-root, staring into a fire, at which a Persian cooked skewered scraps of bird-meat for him. Soon, timidly and one by one, twenty women followed Usbeg Ali out of blackness and grouped themselves in a semicircle to Dick's right. They were veiled, and behind them in the shadows lurked their menkind, ever watchful.
"Bring the men into the firelight!" commanded Dick.
Unwillingly the men came forward, evidently suspicious, and as evidently thoughtful of the Cossack treatment of their womenkind.
"Are those your wives?" demanded Dick.
No Moslem likes to talk about his women, particularly to an "unbeliever," but they gave assent reluctantly.
"Why are they here?" asked Dick.
"At whose mercy would they be, had we left them behind?" blurted out a young man, whose fiery glances were for Dick and a young woman at the end alternately.
"At whose mercy would they be if I sent them away?" asked Dick. And no one answered.
"Let each man claim his woman!"
In the dancing firelight and hobgoblin shadows it was difficult to tell one woman from another or from the night, but within two seconds there was a man beside each of them, and their silence was proof that they were rightly paired.
"I know the Moslem law," Dick said then. "I have no quarrel with the law, nor any wish to break it. But—"
The men leaned forward, and particularly the younger man who had been the only one to answer Dick. The law of women and their veil is almost the greatest problem of the East.
"—This is an army, in a state of war; and there is only one use for women with an army!"
The men drew in their breath, and even the shadows seemed to listen in suspense. In the East, as everywhere, women with an army have been the undoing of more generals than one. The young man clutched his sword.
"They must serve the wounded."
There was a gasp of breath let out again.
"There is a woman here, a Feringee, who must know something of the art of aiding wounded. Marie Mouquin!"
THE maid stood forward, glancing around for Andry, yet too fascinated by Dick Anthony to look away from him for more than a fraction of a second at a time. Dick sat still, motionless except that he scribbled in the dust with the ferrule of his scabbard.
"This woman has no husband. She is a prisoner. I mean that her honor shall be strictly guarded. So I give her into the keeping of these twenty women, and them into her keeping. They are to obey her, as soldiers obey an officer, yet they are never to allow her out of sight or out of reach. She is to instruct them in the matter of the wounded, and any attempt—by any man— to molest a woman in any way at all is to be reported at once to me. I—will—deal— with the—man! Any woman who prefers it may go away—now—this minute— with her man. Those who wish logo, go!"
No one moved, and no one spoke. Unknowingly, and yet unerringly because he held the key to any problem under that red thatch of his, Dick had touched a secret spring whose flow will surely change the face of Asia. Of two courses there is always one more honest than the other; of ten courses one at least is always absolutely honest; with Dick it was a habit, fixed as the act of breathing, to seek instantly for that honest course and hold it. So, because honesty is the key-note of the universe, on which God built it, he was ever finding new resources, without actually seeking them, since the universe is infinite.
Not even the Persians realize how strong nor how determined is their women's movement, that has spread in spite of Russia, and of Moslem law, and of ignorance, through Persia from end to end. In its wake it has brought ambition, and a new dream of what a woman's life may mean and her tasks may be. Dick, over his camp-fire, tugged at the veil of custom-ridden ages, and showed a score of women an opening for the pent flood-water of their energy.
They knew no French. Marie Mouquin knew no Persian, or so little that they might be said to have no tongue in common. Yet, in a minute, since their new cause was in common, they had reached the beginning of an understanding, and they went away singing, clustered round Marie Mouquin and awake to the fact that, like their menfolk, they were active in the vanguard of a fight for freedom.
Not only the wounded were the gainers by it. The whole force was aware that the steel chains of convention had been snapped somewhere, somehow. Men, who would submit to torture rather than admit one article of Moslem custom out of date or void, stood by and stared through the torch-lit gloom at women of the better class bathing and bandaging wounded, unrelated men. There was no voice raised in protest. There was no attempt to interfere. There were even men, who would have cursed at the mere suggestion an hour before, who carried water now at the bidding of strange women, and where thrilled at the thought of doing good in new ways.
THERE was no trouble on the march next day, for the women walked beside the wounded, and no man thrust himself too near. Marie Mouquin made her reports to Dick direct, and he did not allow even Andry to have a word with her so long as she was answerable for and to the other women. There were no favors, no exceptions.
So a feeling grew up in the little army that was new to Asia, and a new confidence was born between these women and the men who marched ahead of them; and so it happened that when Dick reached his mountain aerie, out of sight and sound of the troubled plains, he was able to leave Marie Mouquin behind him and to ride on an errand of his own, confident that all would be well with her and the other women.
He formed his Persians up in hollow square, drilled and undrilled packed together in a dense, deep mass.
"Are we one in our fight for Persia?" he demanded. i
"Aye!" was the answer.
"Have we any other cause that we put first?"
"Nay!"
"Wait here, then, and drill, while I ride to Teheran and back!"
There was murmuring at that, and a hundred voices were raised in angry protest.
"We could have marched on Teheran before! Are we slaves? Are we little children, to be treated so?"
"Silence!" thundered Dick, and before his voice had done reverberating from wall to wall of the vast amphitheater one might have heard a twig drop; even the breathing was subdued.
"In this place, on this spot, about a month ago, I pledged my word. I accepted your leadership. So, now, in the same spot, I offer you my resignation. Take it if you have any mercy, for I am weary of leading men who are not mine, in a cause that is not mine!"
The moonlight streamed on him, as it had done when they met him first, bathing him in silver and making his great claymore shimmer like a silver strip. There seemed to be a halo round him; and the agony of loneliness that had been eating at his soul these months long lent his face a look of sorrow that appealed to the poetry latent in every Persian heart.
"Nay!" came the answer, thousands strong. "Lead us! Lead us! We obey!"
"Zindabad Dee-k-Anthonee shah!" yelled Usbeg Ali from somewhere at hand behind him, and for the second time within five weeks that amphitheater echoed and reechoed to the crashing thunder of that shout. They left no doubt about their choice, nor of their confidence; and so that night he counted them into companies again, giving each new company a strong proportion of seasoned men. Between them, he and Usbeg Ali Khan picked out new officers, and at last, an hour or two before dawn, Dick gave his final directions about drill while he would be away.
As it had been when he first made use of that high amphitheater, it was to be almost ceaseless from dawn until dark; be even arranged for lectures after dark from a few of the officers, Afghans mostly, who had had experience in the art and theory of war. Two hours before dawn he lay down to sleep. At dawn he was up again, watching Andry girth two chargers, and giving final orders to Usbeg Ali Khan.
"Remember, Usbeg Ah*, be resolute! Punish the first breach of discipline, then there won't be a second one to fear. Above all, keep them busy! Work them until they fall asleep!"
"Aye, bahadur! They shall surely sweat!"
The thousands were awake to watch Dick go, and his wish to slip off quietly was not gratified; the forest crashed to the thunder of their cheering as he rode through the gap at the lower end beside the watercourse, and it was minutes before Andry, riding along behind, could make his voice heard above the din. But at last Dick realized that he was being spoken to, and turned his head.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I'm skeert o' leavin' Marie!"
"Why?"
Andry raised his eyebrows, and then grinned until his face became a sea of twisted wrinkles.
"For a body o' discernment ye can ask the most redeeculous questions of ony man I iver knew," said Andry. "Why? For she's a wumman, an' gude-lookin', an' belongs tae me—an' yon are black men— Perrrsians. I hae ma doots!"
"About her?"
"Na-na! O' the Perrrsians. A black skin an' a black hearrrt gang aye taegither tae my way o' reckonin'!"
"Don't you trust her?"
"Aye!"
"Then, come on! Trot, March!" answered Dick, and he started downhill at a pace that jolted Andry so that his jaw shook and he had to keep from speaking lest he bite his tongue.
THEY rode all that day in silence, watering the horses at chance-met streams, and eating together under some huge tree but saying nothing. Andry knew better than to question Dick on matters that Dick chose to keep to himself, and he was too busy thinking of his girl to be very curious or very interested about their object or direction.
They slept the first night out, many miles beyond the column's last camp on the homeward march, for two men traveling light can move, on foot or horseback, almost twice as fast as any army. They slept turn about, four hours at a stretch, with a saddle for a pillow, and they were off again before the first peep of dawn.
It did Andry good, for it shook him down on to his saddle, and he learned more horsemanship in that hard ride with Dick than he had picked up yet. To keep his mind from dwelling on the crisis and so losing proportion and the priceless ability to form swift judgments, Dick spent the long hours teaching Mm, riding close beside him instead of ahead, until the huge man began to lose his awkwardness and the horse he rode began to suffer less and less.
They skirted Astrabad by twilight, slept within ten miles of the city, and were off again at dawn on the road to Teheran before there was any risk of being seen; and later in the day they were mistaken over and over again for Russians, so that travelers coming toward them on the same road pulled out and rode wide or hid.
It was evident enough that Russia had lost her grip of late, although the countryside was not yet sure enough to dare be openly rebellious. At wayside villages where they stopped to ask for food they were met with scowls, and sometimes with refusals; it needed always a little hectoring on Dick's part, and sometimes a little show of force from Andry to procure a meal, even for payment. Once or twice stones were hurled at them as they rode out of villages, and more and more, with each mile of the journey, Dick realized that a spark would fire the ready magazine.
Less than a day out from Astrabad along the road to Teheran he knew he need only proclaim his identity to have an army at his back stronger, at least numerically, than that now drilling in the mountains. Yet, he held his tongue and hand.
It was a little after dawn on the second . day after passing Astrabad that they were overtaken by two Afghans, with a note written in Persian from Usbeg Ali Khan. The men had ridden hard, for their horses dripped sweat and trembled at the knees. The note was short and to the point:
Sahib bahadur, these are my two best personal followers, whose honor is my honor, and whose blood and breath are my blood and breath. It is not good to ride so far as to Teheran with but one man. Thou, I and Andry would have been enough. These two take my place, just as I take thy place here. Salaam. Usbeg Ali Khan.
Dick said nothing, although Andry looked relieved and welcomed the two Afghan officers in broad Scots that was as Greek to them. After a half-hour halt that gave the two weary horses a chance to recover wind but not time enough to stiffen, Dick led the way on again, and it was not until dawn of the next day, after a long sleep in the open and a careful examination of their mounts, that Dick made any use or took much notice of his uninvited escort.
"Do you know the way to Teheran?" he asked them as they mounted.
"Surely we do, bahadur. Beyond Teheran lies the road that leads to Kabul. We could find it, as a bat flies homeward, in the dark!"
"Ride on," said Dick. "Keep a mile ahead of me, and one of you ride back to warn me of anything suspicious."
He could not have told, had anybody asked him, why he felt nervous; but nervousness was so foreign to him that he took it seriously. He knew himself in sound health, and he knew that more than once in his career an intuition he did not understand had proved quite accurate; he rode all that day anticipating trouble of some kind at every other stride, and ready for it. It was not until evening, when neither of his Afghans had seen fit to ride back and caution him, that he lost his sense of dread and rode once more with a care-free swing that reassured his horse and Andry.
At dusk he expected to overtake the Afghans and to find them getting supper or busy with their horses. Mile after mile he rode with his eyes on the track in front, and it was when the night shut down with no signs of his advance-guard that the uncomfortable feeling of foreboding came back, making him loose the sword in his scabbard and finger his pistols.
THE road was villainous, as all the roads in Persia are; there were ruts across it that could have hidden twenty men apiece in ambush, and great boulders strewn along the way from behind which a sniper could have picked his target leisurely; there were grades where the marks of handspikes showed how wheeled traffic had to be helped up, and landslides over which no human traffic could have passed at all; at each of the latter a side-track to the right or left had to be picked perilously through the dark until the road could be reached again beyond.
It was near a landslide that a voice said, "Ees eet peace, Jehu?" in an accent that was utterly un-English, and Dick knew himself betrayed. Instantly his mind flew back to the Rajput, who had brought a letter to him and to whom he had given a written answer. This voice, that spoke out of black darkness with greasy foreign accent, was not the Rajput's, but the words were those that Dick had given for a password.
For the fiftieth fraction of a second, while his courage and his self-command came back to him, suspicion flashed across his brain that the Rajput had sold him. But even before his hand had reached his pistol, or Andry's horse shot past him riderless, he remembered what his first impression of the Rajput had been; and he had learned to trust first impressions absolutely.
So, since that left his mind free to search afield, a second thought and action came simultaneously. As the hammer of an automatic clicked beneath the pressure of his thumb he knew who the enemy must be. He recalled that he had given the password aloud to the Rajput before consenting to write his answer, and that the Princess could not well have helped overhearing it
"War!" he answered, following his pistol's click.
A rope whirled through the dark, and missed him because a bullet from his pistol drove through the thrower's skull. The flash showed him two men kneeling, aiming at him; a bullet whizzed past him; but two more pistol shots replied, and the flash of a third unnecessary shot showed him three men lying in the track. He thought they looked like Russians.
Then a voice he could have recognized among a thousand called to him from behind a rock.
"King Dick! Will monsieur the king confer on me the favor of a minute's conversation?"
"Andry! Where are you, man?" Dick shouted.
"Is monsieur le roi at last afraid? Fie, Dick Anthony! Afraid of me, of a woman, in the dark?"
"Andry!"
There was no answer from behind him. In front Dick could see the dark form of Andry's horse looming. From somewhere near the horse the woman's voice began again, sweet, silvery, mocking.
"There were two men to account for him! They may not show themselves or speak, since monsieur le roi appears to be able to drill a hole through the middle of a word. But two men pulled him from his horse and he should be strangled by this time. Now, monsieur le roi, if you will promise not to shoot I will show myself; we can speak better face to face, you and I."
Dick did not speak. Logic assured him that unless this ambuscade had all but failed—had there been many more men to try conclusions with him—there would have been more action now, and less talk. He judged that he had only the Princess in front of him to deal with, though he could not guess how many, or how few, might be behind. He dismounted, since a horseman is usually at a disadvantage in the dark and against men on foot.
"Is that my signal to advance?" the Princess asked.
Dick did not say a word. He was wondering whether he would really shoot her, should she show herself and try new tricks with him. He stood behind his horse's shoulder on the far side from her, giving her as little target as he could and listening with live ears for so much as a twig-snap or a pebble-movement from his rear.
"I am coming now!" said the Princess; and then Dick knew that he would not shoot her, whatever of justice or of sane precaution there might have been in the act. The fundamental fact that he was man and she woman was too much for him.
SHE stepped out, making more noise than Dick judged necessary. She seemed nearer to him than her voice had sounded, and he thought he heard something click, either in her hand or close beside her. He got the impression that she was deliberately making noise enough to cover somebody else's movement, but his own shift of position to get better cover behind the horse's neck prevented him from hearing two slight footfalls, one on either hand. Suddenly she flashed an electric torch at him full in his eyes, and he was too dazed by the light to wonder even whence she had it. She held it absolutely steady, and straight at him.
"Lower it or I'll shoot!" he ordered; and since she knew for a certainty that he would keep his word, whatever he promised, she lowered it until it played on his horse's legs. He could judge then where her hand was, and he took very careful aim at her, wondering whether he could hit the torch and whether he dared try. He did not hear two stealthy footfalls drawing nearer, nor a third, not quite so stealthy, from behind.
Suddenly she switched the light out, and Dick strained his cars for sound of movement in her direction. But she laughed, and he judged by her voice that she stood still.
"Monsieur le roi, I want you to come with me. I want you in Russia—alive! I want you to explain how it was, and why I failed to make proper use of you. You have ruined me, my friend, but if you come with me to Russia I think you may be made to save the day for me yet! You are caught, my friend; you can not get away. You may shoot me if you wish, and I will thank you; but I do not think you will; and unless you shoot me you must come with me!"
She seemed to Dick to be speaking purposely so low that it was difficult to catch her meaning. He caught himself straining both ears to catch her words, and too late he realized that ears can be fooled as well as eyes. It was not until they were each within a yard of him and his horse shied at them that he heard two men; and then they were rushing at him with a rope and it was too late to move his pistol-arm or reach his sword.
A rope went round his neck and another snared his legs. The nooses tightened, and a man's full weight swung against each to throw him. He felt the blood surging to his temples and his knees begin to give.
He heard the Princess laugh that silvery, sweet, devilish laugh of hers that always went with triumph. He fought against the ropes, struggling with all his spun-steel might and will to burst them, until the night seemed a sea of crimson flame that whirled around his head and his ears were caves for all the winds of the world to whistle in.
Then, with no wanting and no sound, two huge arms came from the depth of night behind him, like arms of an octopus. Each wound itself around a Russian's waist. The tension was relaxed on the ropes, and a second later the men who held them screamed, writhed, bent backward struggling, and were still.
Then a giant arose from the dark night, and seized one Russian with both hands. Speechless, he raised him, poised him, tried his weight, and hurled him with a grunt. The Russian seemed to hit nothing, but night swallowed him as if he had been a shadow.
Before Dick could get the blood out of his head and ears, the huge man stooped and seized the other rope-man. He whirled him by the legs, and sent him down the landslide after the first, with a second grunt that was like a grampus breathing.
"Awa' wi' ye!" said the voice of Andry. "Takin' me f'r a bigger fule 'an y'r ain sel's!"
A pistol-shot spat through the night, and the flash proved who had fired it; but she missed the horse and Dick.
"You throw a knife better!" Dick taunted her. "Are you hurt, Andry?" he inquired,
"Na-na, but f'r a shakin' what wi' fa'in fra a horse, an' the strain o' killin' four men wi' ma fingers I'm feelin' fine!"
The Princess fired again, and missed again.
"I'd shoot yon Jezebel," said Andry. "Put a hole through her heid, Mr. Dicky."
But even before Dick could answer him her pistol came spinning through the night and took Andry on the shoulder. She followed it, leisurely enough and yet too quickly to be stopped by mere word of command. She was by Dick's horse before his order to stand where she was had left his lips.
"As you say, I'm better with a knife!" she smiled, and her hand went to her bosom. Her other hand was motionless behind her.
It was a sudden, unexpected move of Andry's that deprived her of the torch she held at her back. She had thought him behind Dick and the horse, but the giant could move as silently and swiftly as the shadows, and his fingers would have cracked her wrist unless she had let go. He flashed the torch full on her, and a clasp-knife shimmered in its rays as she aimed it at Dick's face. Andry spun her, and the knife went whirring through the dark.
"Kill me!" she said, laying a hand on Dick.
He stepped back, and her hand fell slackly to her side. In the torchlight she looked more ethereally lovely, more desirable, more frail and pitiable than Dick had ever seen her. She had found new clothes somewhere, perhaps in Astrabad, and she was dressed as if for a gala, except for hat; her hair hung over her ears in great loose coils, threatening to fall, and the torchlight made it glow like phosphorescent gold.
"Will you kill me, please?"
"Where are my Afghans—my advance-guard?" Dick asked.
"Dead!" she answered.
"Where?"
"Ahead here on the road. They would not surrender when they were ordered. Won't you kill me, please?"
"Of course not!" answered Dick.
"Dick! Rather than anything I would like to die in your two arms, with the breath crushed out of me! Won't you kill me, Dick? You have ruined me. Be merciful and kill me!"
Dick meant to turn aside and put the horse between her and him; but before he could move she had flung herself into his arms, and clung there sobbing. Dick tried to free himself, but her fingers clutched his shirt and her head was buried in his bosom.
It was Andry again, flashing the torch, who proved too canny for her. He stepped around behind her, and again his fingers seized her wrist; he wrenched a second knife from them and held it out for Dick to see.
"She's a pairfect leddy!" said the big man. "Wull ye gie me leave tae wring her neck?"
"No," said Dick. There was need of an answer, for Andry's fingers twitched.
"Dick, I have shot my last bolt! I surrender!" Both hands were hold of him again. "These Russians you have killed were the last men I could get to rally to me. Now there are no friends left anywhere—no servants—no money, influence—no anything! Take me, Dick! Take me on your own terms!"
"No," said Dick.
"What will you do to me?"
"Nothing. Why should I?"
"Will you leave me here?"
"Certainly! Get your horse, Andry."
"Dick, I'll kill myself if you leave me here!"
"Have you caught him? Mount, then flash that torch—ride on slowly, straight ahead!"
Andry did as he was told, and Dick, swinging to the saddle, called back to the Princess standing in the middle of the track.
"We'll leave your torch burning on the grave of my Afghans, if we find them!" he said.
"Dick!" she called through the dark; but he did not answer her.
THE two Afghans were not dead, nor were their horses. The horses stood snorting over them, and with the aid of the torch Dick made out that one was merely stunned and the other bleeding fast from a bullet-wound close by his jugular. A little camp-fire surgery and cold water from a near-by stream were enough to make eventual recovery sure, so Dick took one man and Andry the other on the saddle in front of him, and with two led horses they resumed the march until they came to a village where food and shelter could be had. They were more than half-way to Teheran by this time. Persian police, with Russian orders what to do, patroled the roads and terrorized the villages more than bandits had done all down the warring centuries. The impression seemed to be that a bandit's ¦word was sometimes good, but a policeman's never.
As usual, Dick and Andry were mistaken for Russians. Unquestioned, they were led through the gate of a mud-walled village; their horses were taken off and stabled; men stood around awkwardly, wondering what next to do.
"Shall we lock up the prisoners?" asked somebody in Persian; and then Dick understood.
"No," he answered, doing his best to imitate a Russian accent. "The prisoners are important. We must be alone with them."
The "third degree" is better understood in Persia since Russian rule began to usurp the northern provinces than ever it was in the less imaginative days of unpretending despotism. It was perfectly obvious to these village Persians that Dick was a Russian police officer, and Andry his subordinate, who chose to put prisoners to the torture under cover of the night and wring confessions from them before deciding what to do next. They were shown into a square hut with a heavy-timbered roof. Cords were brought them, a pot of hot charcoal, and an iron.
"Shall we bring the other prisoner?" asked the village headman, and Dick was taken so unawares that it was on his lips to ask "which other one?" But he contrived to nod naturally after a moment's pause that might be construed into serious deliberation.
"How long has the other been here?" he asked.
"A week. There was a reward for him. All the villages are warned to look out for all Afghans, as well as for Dee-k-Anthonee the Feringee. Alive or dead there is a great reward for either. This man swears he is no Afghan, neither Usbeg Ali Khan by name, nor yet knowing Usbeg Ali Khan; yet we believe otherwise. He came here at night with two horses, and demanded food. We seized him."
"Bring him!" commanded Dick.
"The reward? We get the reward?"
"You shall get your due," Dick answered grimly.
Five minutes later, cursing and growling threats, there was led in the Rajput sowar who should have presented Dick's letter at the Teheran Legation days ago. At sight of Dick his jaw chapped. Then—for a soldier's wit is a ready sense, and his was sharpened by desperation—he read the unexpressed command and the news of clear galloping ahead in Dick's eye and attitude. He said nothing, but dropped his head and waited.
"Leave us!" commanded Dick.
"He is dangerous!" said the headman. "He has hurt three men seriously. He springs suddenly, and tears at a man's throat with his fingers!"
For form's sake Dick drew his pistols and examined them before studying the knotted ropes that bound the Rajput's arms.
"Where are his weapons?" he demanded. "Bring them!"
The headman brought a saber and two pistols, and at a sign from Dick laid them in a corner of the room.
"His horses?"
"Are stabled near your excellency's," said the headman. "Get them ready."
"They are worth a price. We captured them and him. We—I—"
Dick used an oath in Persian that is untranslatable but that he knew to be a favorite among Russian officers. He made a sudden move toward the headman; for in his part of Russian officer his fists had to be as ready, and as unfair, as his speech. The headman stammered, and ran for the door,
"Have those horses ready in ten minutes!" ordered Dick. "Get food for us and something for these prisoners. Bring it with the horses, and wait outside until I'm ready!"
He picked up the cord and pushed the iron into the red-hot charcoal. The headman was satisfied. Surely, truly, indisputably, here was Russian rule being asserted, and be shivered for his own skin as he slammed the door and ran to do Dick's bidding.
Then, in the light of a smoking, stinking, dim grease lamp, Dick and the Rajput eyed each other until Dick laughed.
"You'd better scream," said Dick in English. "Scream like a man in pain."
A tortured horse, faced with the fear of death, can scream more evilly than any other living thing except that Rajput. He let out a yell that curdled Dick's and Andry's blood—an ululating howl of agony that rose into a screech and died down at last in a sob that would have drawn compassion from a deep-sea shark.
"Will that do?" he asked almost casually.
"Do it again," said Dick.
Andry helped out matters by beating the floor with a cord and dancing. Any one who listened from the outside and did not believe a man was being tortured would have disbelieved in the ability of fire to burn or of cords to cut and twist.
"Such torture must be very exhausting," Dick suggested, and the Rajput threw himself to the floor with another screech that sounded like a ghoul's death agony.
Then Dick strode to the door and opened it.
"Horses there?" he asked.
The horses stood in a row, six all told.
"Food ready?"
The headman brought it—meat, and native bread, with curdled milk. Dick put the food into his saddle-bag, took in the curdled milk for his wounded men and the Rajput, and then ordered Andry to carry the Rajput out. The Afghans had recovered consciousness, and could stagger out, but Andry lifted the sowar, and Dick strapped him over a saddle like a sack of oats.
"Slowly, sahib, ride slowly!" the Rajput whispered. "Slowly, lest I jerk myself in two!"
Dick ordered the two Afghans on one horse, and Andry tied their wrists together and their legs under the horse's belly.
"The reward, excellency?" said the headman as Dick mounted. "The reward was promised by the government!"
"This man denies his identity," said Dick, "but I will see about it. I will return along this road. Look out for me. When I come again you shall have what is due you."
The headman bowed low, and Dick led his "prisoners" out through the gate in one-horse file, brought up by Andry. He rode at a walk, for fear of the Rajput's muscles and his stomach laid on a high-built saddle, and be did not stop until the village ceased to be a shadow in the gloom or even a black ridge on a black horizon.
But when the bark of ,a village pariah had died down in the distance he drew rein. Then Andry drew his knife and cut the lashings in a hurry. Then the Rajput laughed again at last, and Dick handed him a full half of the bread and meat.
"No time to talk!" said Dick. "Eat as you go, and go like the night wind! Have you your letter yet?"
"Aye! They could not find it—may Allah's vengeance spoil their sleep and rot the substance of their children's children!"
"Ride on, then, and deliver it. Tell 'em I'm on the way. Tell 'em to meet me outside Teheran."
"At the tomb of Shamran Mirza, sahib."
"Where is that?"
"On the road—in view of the road. A man will ride out and give the challenge agreed on."
"Good," said Dick. "Good-by. Good luck to you!"
"And you, bahadur! May God give you understanding and a strong right arm! I have another service, or I would throw my weight into the scale. If we should prove to be on opposite sides, bahadur—"
"Then we'll each do our best!" laughed Dick. "Good-by!"
The Rajput saluted him and wheeled his horse. Then, without so much as one glance back across his shoulder, the sowar settled down to ride, and the hoofs of his cantering horse did a drum-beat that died out of recognition in the distance.
"We can take it easy now," said Dick, walking his horse closer to the Afghans and examining them again by the light of the torch he had thought to leave above their grave. They were recovering fast, with the elasticity that comes of hard, clean living. Dick ordered them on a horse apiece, one beside Andry and one by himself. The fifth horse, that the Rajput had left behind, Dick turned into a pack-horse, loading him with all the saddle-bags to relieve the others. So, with a loose horse jogging along between them, Dick first and Andry last, they started off again in no hurry at all, but each with an arm wound round an Afghan to support him in the saddle and each gnawing at the native bread and meat provided by the village headman.
THEY were too near Teheran now to ride too openly, and Dick, mistrusting Russian promises of any kind but particularly promises made at second-hand, chose to lie up all day and move by night. The British Legation might be acting in good faith, and very likely was, in promising him a free road to Teheran; but he did not choose to enter Teheran just yet on the strength of anybody's promise, nor to believe Russia committed until he saw with his own eyes the force that could compel her ministers to keep their written or their spoken word. Diplomatists affect sometimes to believe the Russian Government; but Dick was not a diplomatist, nor anything except a gentleman of some acute experience, of the world in general but of Russia in particular.
The Afghan who had been no more than stunned suffered now only from a sore head, and Dick sent him at intervals to spy out the road from the nearest eminence, so that when they started off at dusk each evening they generally knew the nature of the trail and its direction, as well as what sort of travelers they were likely to overtake. They had to take a chance on who would meet them coming from the opposite direction, and Dick rode perfectly prepared to fight any Russian he might meet at the least dropped hint of a lame excuse.
But as it happened they rode unquestioned. There was something brewing, of which all the countryside was conscious, and yet of which no man dared to speak. There was a mystery that underlay the speech and movements of the peasantry, and a constant unexplainable swift drain of individuals from north and west to south and east. There were men who rode like Dick and Andry in the dark, giving no more excuse. There were men who stopped at each village to ask a multitude of questions and write down the answers to them—questions about corn and cows and sheep, water, and men. There were other men who rode in a hurry, and seemed to know everything already, or else not to care for anything but speed.
Almost nobody came back along the road from Teheran, and those who did were evidently merchants, or else peasant proprietors on their way back from selling cattle. Those whom Dick questioned reported a strong demand for all they had to sell, at almost famine prices.
"Any news of war?" asked Dick, fifty times if once.
"War? What war?" they answered; and they would pass on laughing at him, as if he were a demented man or else a man with a weird sense of humor.
The challenge, when it came at last, proved unexpected. A man rode down through the gathering gloom, spurring as though at a tent-peg.
"Is it peace, Jehu?" he laughed.
"Peace!" said Dick, and the man reined in. Though the light was dim Dick recognized an Englishman—English seat in the saddle, English clothes, English reins bunched up in an English riding-glove, and a saddle made in London just as surely as the horse was bred in Turkestan.
"Are these all you brought with you?" the man asked, eying Andry and the two Afghans, one of whom still had to cling to the saddle with his hand.
"Yes," said Dick.
"Can you identify yourself?"
"As whom?" asked Dick, and the man laughed again.
"Well—identify yourself!" he answered.
"I have a letter addressed to me from the British Legation at Teheran."
"Signed by whom?"
"H.J. Ommoney."
"Show it."
Dick drew out the letter and held it up in the waning light. He knew, without knowing why he knew, that the man would snatch at it, so both horses answered to a spur-touch at the same instant and both sprang together in the same direction.
"What frightened 'em, I wonder?" said the man.
"Couldn't say," smiled Dick.
"I'm H. J. Ommoney."
"I'm Richard Anthony of Arran."
"Ride this way."
Without another word he wheeled and led the way up a side-path to a tomb, domed and dignified even in its ruin, that stood like a watch-tower overlooking the road from a height some half a mile away. As he followed him Dick folded up the letter very small and, checking his horse for a second, passed it back to Andry. Andry stuffed it down his boot, not knowing what it was and not caring in the least, but understanding fully that he was to hide it.
The ruined entrance to the tomb yawned dark and wide in front of them and the man who had said he was Ommoney dismounted. Dick followed suit.
"I'll talk to you alone," said Ommoney.
"I'll bring one man," said Dick.
"No!" said Ommoney.
"Yes!" said Dick.
Ommoney's eyes met Dick's and followed their line. Dick was looking at a Wafer mare, that bore an Indian military saddle on her back. Ommoney swore beneath his breath, and Dick knew by that, as certainly as he knew the contents of his pocket, that the Rajput sowar was inside the tomb.
"He hid the horse all right," said Dick, "but didn't tether him tight enough!"
Ommoney said nothing, but led the way in, and Andry followed Dick, looming above him like an exaggerated shadow. At the same second Dick and Andry both caught sight of the sowar's eyes, so his voice that boomed "Salaam, bahadur!" was not a surprise.
"Glad to meet you again," said Dick, turning to face Ommoney who leaned with his back against the rifled brickwork of the tomb proper that rose from the center of the building.
"You may name your own price for that letter," said Ommoney with both hands in his pockets. "We want it back."
"We? You mean yourself or the Legation?"
"The Legation. We. You'll understand that it was a most unusual letter for a Legation to write to any man. We admit that. Name your own price."
"Recognition!"
"How d'ye mean? Recognition as whom or what?"
"Official recognition as Dick Anthony of Arran!"
Ommoney shook his head.
"We couldn't do it. Man, you don't seem to grasp the facts! When we first heard of you and of your claim to be Dick Anthony of Arran, we cabled home to ask about you. The home Government replied at once in detail, giving dates and all that kind of thing, that Richard Anthony of Arran had been drowned at sea, from a ship called, I think, the Themistokles—had been picked up and identified by a passing Russian ship—and was buried at sea. Papers found on the dead body were sent back to England by the Russian Government. There was no doubt about the case at all. Your claim won't bold water for a second, Mr.—ah—Anthony."
"The British Government got all that information from the Russians," answered Dick.
"Certainly."
"Every word of it was a lie!"
"But they sent proof."
"Piffle!" answered Dick. "The Russian Government is engaged on a campaign for snaffling northern Persia. To that end I was kidnapped and, being a likely looking fighting-man, was driven into hiding in the mountains, to be egged and nagged into committing acts of brigandage that would give excuse enough for Russian occupation of the country with an army corps. Those are the facts. Russia is hoodwinking England all along the line"
"Nothing of the sort!" said Ommoney. "Russia and Great Britain are allies in a European war! And that brings us to the point at issue. I'll revert to the letter later when I've told you more of the facts. I'm going to appeal to you as an Englishman to give that letter back—or to sell it—just as we're appealing to you to leave Persia, for patriotic reasons."
"I've named my terms for the surrender of the letter," answered Dick.
"I wouldn't dare the British Government if I were you!" said Ommoney.
Dick tapped his breeches pocket, as if to infer that the letter was in it and would stay there, but said nothing. A moment later he sat down on a pile of bricks with his back to the dark and his face toward Ommoney, who sat on a fallen piece of stone. The Rajput sowar lit a candle, sheltering it between his hands, and set it cautiously in a niche where it could not be blown out by stray gusts. Its light seemed to make the shadows move, and outlined Dick's face and Ommoney's, but the rest of the darkness seemed only darker by the contrast.
"THIS war has been sudden," said Ommoney; "amazingly sudden! Fourteen days ago we hadn't an idea that there was even a chance of war. At least we in Teheran hadn't. Then news of it came in over the wire, and lots of definite instructions. It came like a thunderbolt! It seems like a general show-down. All Europe and half Asia has been called upon to show its hand. England, France and Russia came out strong for each other; Germany and Austria stood together. So far, Italy stands out. Servia started it—"
"And that means Russia!" interjected Dick.
Ommoney took no notice of the interruption; he was too intent on marshaling what he believed to be the facts, or else too sure of his case.
"Germany struck first, being able to mobilize most quickly. Germany has rushed at the throat of France, to try and strangle her before Russia can begin. Belgian neutrality has been violated, and that dragged England in. The point is now to hold back Germany all along the line until Russia can invade Germany from behind in force enough to really help. To do that Russia needs every man-Jack of her standing army to hurry to the front while the reserves are being called up. It seems that one of the largest Russian camps lies to the north of here—"
"It certainly does!" said Dick. "I've plans of it, and details of its intended line of march!"
"Where did you get it?"
"I got it," said Dick, "and that's enough."
"Well, Russia wants to march those troops away, but daren't as long as you're at large in the Elburz Mountains."
"I'm sure of that!" said Dick. "Russia wants to march 'em south, not north—into Persia, not away from it! Without bragging, I'm entitled to say that I've started a considerable opposition in these parts."
"You are invited by our Government to leave Persia, give up your personal ambitions, and go free, so that Russia may be free to use every available man—"
"With whom to take advantage of Great Britain!" answered Dick. "No. Certainly not!"
They eyed each other in silence for a minute then, for they seemed to have reached an ultimatum. One or the other would have to yield before progress could be made. Dick felt what he judged to be a snake, that crept behind him gently, just touching him. Ommoney's eyes were fixed on Dick's, or Dick would have suspected something else, but those eyes seemed steady and intent; they saw nothing beyond Dick's. So, since the safest thing to do with a snake is to let it crawl its course and not to frighten it, Dick sat absolutely still.
It was the snake's attempt to get into his pocket that enlightened Dick. He moved a little, to make the job easier. The quick movement covered a sideways glance at Andry, and was enough to show that the big man saw what was going on. A flash of mutual understanding passed between them before Dick resumed his steady gaze.
The snake was a human hand that sneaked into his pocket and searched deep, but found it empty. It searched deeper still, while Dick marveled at the breathlessness and silence of its owner. Then Dick moved his leg in such a way, and so suddenly, that the arm was gripped by the stout cloth. At the same second Andry pounced. A man screamed. Andry dragged a nearly naked Persian out into the candle-light, with his wrist held now in Dick's iron fingers and his hand still deep in the pocket. Dick turned about, so that the man could be dragged into the middle.
"Wrong pocket, though," said Dick. "Friend of yours, by any chance?"
"Never saw him in my life," said Ommoney.
"Well," said Dick, "for a legate of the British Government, you lie handsomely. I should judge you are in practise. I've come a long way to see you, on the strength of a written promise that I hold, and I'm not going back until I've made an offer to the British Minister and have had his answer. You may take my message if you like. If you prefer it, though, I'll find another messenger."
"Better let that man go," said Ommoney, nodding at the wretched Persian who trembled in Dick's grip. With a smile of contempt Dick loosed him, and the man ran through the ragged opening out into the night.
"D'you want to hear what I've got to say?" asked Dick, and, whatever the rest of Ommoney's plan had been, he realized from the tone in Dick's voice and his attitude that he must play Dick's game or not at all. There were times when Dick could be too good-natured or too indifferent to care what friend or enemy might do; with women be could always stretch Quixotism to the most exaggerated limit; but there were other times when his antagonist could not help but recognize steel resolution and indifference to all side issues.
"I'll listen," said Ommoney, for even the third assistant secretary of Legation, appointed for family reasons, may have some perspicuity.
"If this story of a war is true," said Dick, "it is I who hold trumps. I'll play them. I have an army of four thousand men, and it is growing. I even have some guns. Considering that Persian sentiment is with me, I have enough men to keep the peace of northern Persia. You may tell the Russian Minister at Teheran, through the British Minister, that he may withdraw every Russian soldier from Persia and from the frontier, and I will guarantee both England and him that Persia will give nobody any trouble!" Ommoney laughed.
"You mean you want opportunity to get your claws in tight, eh? Brigandage would be a profitable business without Russia to interfere!"
Dick moved restlessly, and Andry clucked as he always did when impatience burned his marrow-bones.
"I'm giving you a message for the British Minister," said Dick, "not arguing. I'm no bandit. I'm Richard Anthony of Arran, that's to say of better family and better right to be beard than you, or any other man who doesn't know how to play on-side. The Russian Government, through its spy, tricked me and drove me into Persia; and since the British Government saw fit to believe the Russians and to disbelieve me, I considered myself free to pledge my word to the Persians who are in the field for Persian independence. Persia is no part of Russia, nor ever will be if we can prevent it. Now, here is the point at issue."
The sowar stepped to the crumbling doorway, as if he heard or else expected somebody; Andry was after him like a flash, thrusting him aside and staring through the darkness in every direction with sailor's eyes that could see things which even the Rajput would have missed. But it was only the Rajput's horse, that nibbled grass around the building.
"It's a' richt, Mr. Dicky," said Andry, coming back. "Oar twa Afghans are on the look-out, hidin' in the shadows. Speak y'r mind i' full."
"As I have said several times, and as I can eventually prove, I am Dick Anthony of Arran, heir to the Anthony estates near Lamlash, and I have done nothing of which any Englishman need be ashamed. If the British Government cares to recognize me, and my position as leader of the Persian patriotic party, I will reciprocate to the limit of my power. To prove myself disinterested, I am prepared to guarantee to leave Persia whenever a properly elected Persian Government sees fit to notify the world at large that Persian independence is established. If England recognizes me, I dare come at once to Teheran and take service under the Persian Government. When this European war is over, I dare guarantee that Persia will be strong enough to resist encroachments without my aid. Meanwhile, I am in the field against Russia and for Persia. I know what Russia's intentions are, and I mean to thwart them. Recognize me and my claim, notify Russia she may draw off all her troops, and all's well. Refuse to recognize me, let Russia play her game, and I'll play mine, and Persia's! Also, the minute I get the chance I'll appeal to the world at large!"
"The world at large is much too busy with the European war to bother about you, Mr.—ah—Anthony."
Ommoney smiled savagely. He had expected to be able to hector and domineer it over a suppliant for peace.
"The world at large can be made to listen!" answered Dick. "However, you have got my message."
"There would be no sense in my riding back to Teheran with nonsense of that sort. The terms offered you are a free passage to the sea and transportation anywhere, provided you give back that letter."
"I refuse the terms," said Dick.
"Understand," said Ommoney, "if you refuse, the British as -well as the Russian Government will be against you. We shall help Russia in every way we can."
"Are you going to take my message?" asked Dick.
"No," said Ommoney. "My instructions were to accept your surrender, to bring you in to Teheran, to smuggle you out again, to provide you with some money in case you happen to need it, and to see you safely on board ship from some point on the coast."
"Then I'll have to find a messenger," said Dick.
"Will you wait here, if I take your message in?" asked Ommoney.
"Certainly not. I've done more than my share. I have ridden for days to meet you on the understanding that you would have full power to treat with me. Now, whoever wants to strike a bargain with me will have to come and find me.'
Their eyes glowed through the dark, and the flickering candle-light showed each man strained in an attitude of guardedness that verged on sheer distrust. They rose, both at the same instant, and the sowar, seeming to think the interview was over, stepped outside, followed by Andry. Outside, the sowar searched for the two Afghans, found them, and talked to them in a language Andry did not understand.
"On second thought," said Dick, "I'll send no other messenger. You are bound to report what I have said, and if you lie about it the British Government must take the consequences. The Minister should send a gentleman."
"What d'ye mean?" demanded Ommoney.
"You heard me rightly," answered Dick.
NOW it is a strange peculiarity of war that it makes men mad. The greater the war, the worse and less logical the madness. In time of peace Ommoney was a man who paid his card debts conscientiously, and whose word of honor carried as far, and justly so, as that of any other gentleman in the service of his king. But, like every other Englishman outside the immediate sphere of action, Ommoney had been deeply affected by the news of war—stirred to the lees of his weak being by it—yet had no responsibility thrust on him that would serve to keep his selfish little mind from looking inward. Then, unexpectedly, had come this order to ride out and interview Dick Anthony, and to Ommoney it had looked like an opportunity to serve his country.
He meant to take advantage of it. And, to men of the mental weight of Ommoney and others like him, to serve one's country is to serve one's self. Because he thought he would be gainer by bringing back Dick Anthony to Teheran, he thought he would be loser should Dick Anthony refuse to come with him. Therefore—so urged the minor music of a minor mind—he would lose still more, in his own esteem and the Legation's, should Dick Anthony ride back by the way be had come to his inaccessible hills. And, if he, Ommoney, would lose, England would lose. And he wanted to serve England.
Then there came to his mind an age-old, poisonous, abominable adage, that says "all is fair in love and war." Like all lies, it is a two-edged blade without a hilt, that cuts deepest the hand that uses it. To the mind that entertains that adage for a second, equivocation looks like truth, and trickery looks like honor.
Yet some relic of the rule they taught him at his public school still lingered in his mind, and Ommoney could not resist the promptings of the code that calls for warning of one's adversary. As certain Powers have done, he issued an ultimatum for the sake of form after he was ready, and too late to give his enemy a chance to arm.
"Of course," he said, "you understand the safe-conduct expires at once. If you come with me, you ride on my responsibility and I'll protect you. But I have no authority to guarantee you a safe road back again!"
Dick laughed. He was big enough and clear-eyed enough to see through Ommoney in the dark and understand the meanness of him. He was sorry for him, rather than contemptuous.
"This side of Teheran is mine, son," he said quietly. "But I'll be generous. If you hurry, you may have safe-conduct back. If I catch you outside Teheran again, I'll give you a lesson in deportment, though, that you won't forget! Remember what they used to do at school to boys who couldn't play on-side? Hurry! Catch your horse, and go! Lie about my message if you dare!"
Ommoney fingered at a pistol, and looked into Dick's strange eyes. He knew that the eyes were laughing at him. He knew that Dick's hands were both behind his back; and he was thinking that just at that moment there were no witnesses. A dead Dick Anthony would have seemed to Ommoney to be a blow struck hard for England. Yet he dared not draw, although he knew he had Dick at his mercy.
"You understand, your safe-conduct ceases from the minute you leave me?" he said, trying with one and the same thought to justify himself and yet excuse himself. He told himself he ought to shoot and was not afraid to shoot, yet that perhaps the letter of the code might call for a start to be allowed Dick on the way home.
"I understand," said Dick, "that the British Government disowns me, and has sent a pup to tell me so. If a dog had barked at me, I might have felt less mean, but to be warned off by a puppy is disheartening. However, I accept the fact that I'm disowned, and I'm going to take full advantage of it. Get out of here! Get out ahead of me! Get out before I kick you out!"
The voice had changed. What had been a rather weary, half-humorous, half-plaintive, wholly pleasing tone became at once the cracking of terrific whips that brought fear in their wake and understanding of the strength that they expressed. Never had Ommoney heard such might expressed in a human voice, nor felt such terror as propelled him out into the night.
He ran, forgetting dignity, pistols, everything except the one ambition to get out of Dick's long reach and away to where his knees would leave off trembling. He found his horse, but could not mount it for a maddening minute, for the animal could sense his terror and would not stand still.
At last he forced the horse backward against the wall of the tomb, sprang into the saddle, and was off full-pelt. The last Dick saw of him was a retreating shadow, followed at full gallop by a Rajput sowar, and all the dignity, all the self-respect, all the majesty of British rule was worn by the dark-skinned gentleman who rode behind. The cad in front knew himself a disgrace to any empire—knew, too, that vengeance would taste sweet, and might be had.
"What did the sowar say?" asked Dick, walking out to the Afghans and signing to Andry to bring the horses. When one real man meets another each knows by instinct what the other one will do, and Dick did not even stop to wonder whether the Rajput had left any warning. He knew he had. He knew that Rajput for a gentleman.
"He bade us ride cautiously. He said the sahib is a soorke butcha, born in pig-mire, thinking like a pig. He said there are Russians in the road between Teheran and here. He said the soor-sahib will almost surely warn the Russians. He said there is no other sahib such a soor between here and Feringistan, unless he be a Russian, for all Russians are soorke butchas, being so designed by Allah in His wisdom Who wished the faithful to have flesh and blood on which to try their sabers. So said the sowar, sahib."
"Oh," said Dick. "Ready Andry? Ready all? Mount! Walk, march! Right wheel!"
THE sowar was exactly right in his prediction, though the consequences were other than either he or the "soor-sahib" or the British Legation could guess (not that the British Legation had anything to do with Ommoney's treachery). Ommoney did meet with Russians. They chanced to be political officers, one of whom he personally knew. They exchanged information— war news from the Russian, since the wires all led from Russia and the Russians had first gleaning; local news from Ommoney.
"Dick Anthony, the man they call 'King Dick,' is down the road. Can't be more than ten or fifteen miles away."
"How do you know?" asked the Russian, and Ommoney told him.
"I've no reason to keep silence," he explained. "We made the man an offer, and he refused it. It's no secret that we'll do all in our power to help you round him up."
"So," said the Russian, cursing softly to himself because the nearest telegraph operator was in Teheran and he had no instrument with him for tapping wires. "Did he hurry away, or might one overhaul him?"
"Couldn't say, I'm sure," said Ommoney.
So the Russian, who had three others with him, sent two men galloping back to Teheran to notify Russia, and Astrabad, and every other point that could be reached by telegraph. He himself, with the fourth man and the two best horses, plunged forward into the night in the hope of catching Dick, and a long stern chase began that could end only one way unless the Russians met with accident.
For Dick was in no hurry. He had claimed all Persia "this side of Teheran" as his, and he meant to prove it. He threw off all pretense of secrecy and proclaimed himself wherever there were men to listen.
"I am Deek Anthonee," he told them. "This is my sword of which you have heard." And he showed the great two-edged claymore with the beryl set in its basket-hilt.
As once before he had come out of the dawn on Persia and had dazed her by his unexpectedness, so now he rode out of the night with a giant on a horse behind him and was accepted without question. He seemed supernatural. His claim, that he had come to deliver Persia from her enemies, was too timely and too altruistic to be disbelieved.
The East is the home of visionaries, where the matter-of-fact is fiction and the things men dream about are true. This man with a voice like shaken brass, with bare red head, with eyes whose color none could recognize, who rode and spoke with such authority, fitted too well into the fabulous imaginative tales that they had heard about Dee-k-Anthonee to be disbelieved. He seemed too good to be otherwise than true, and they flocked to him, flocked after him, and blocked his road waiting for him.
The two Russians overtook him at a village where he sat with a thousand at his feet and told them what he expected of them if they hoped to be his men. For Dick was Persia's now, and Persia his; who was for him was his brother, and who against him would be likely, like Russia, soon to feel the weight of his attack.
"I will ride on, but I will come back with an army," he assured them. "Only a few may travel with me now—a few from each village and no more. Let the rest hold the roads and villages and wait for me. No harbor and no peace for any Russian! Refuse them food! Refuse them information! Drive them over their own border, and be ready to rise behind me when I come!"
The two Russian political officers were dragged down from their horses and stood in front of Dick for sentence, and Dick laughed aloud when the senior of them told his rank in the expectation of immediate respect from Dick.
"I rode with an offer for you," said, the Russian.
"Tell me about it," answered Dick, with a dry smile that in some way seemed to take the starch out of the Russian's bluster.
The Russian spoke in English, so that only Dick and Andry understood him, and Andry's face, all wrinkled into gargoyle patterns while he listened, was enough to assure the villagers that no tide was being turned by the Russian argument. Disgust is an expression that the Scots are masters of, and Andry did not bridle his emotion.
"We know about the offer made you by the British Legation. It was made after a consultation with us."
"It sounded that way!" answered Dick.
"We were sure you would never accept it. We were ready with our alternative. I rode out to meet the man who brought you the offer, and hurried after you the minute he let me know that I was free to offer mine."
Dick heard him out in silence, disbelieving nearly every word he said and grimly resolved to believe no promises. All he was positive about was that this man and Ommoney had met.
"It is useless to deny your hold on these two Northern Provinces. We admit—Russia admits—that you have done wonders and that your grip is firm. You are a man to be reckoned with. But you must admit that the full strength of Russia is too great for you. Eventually—perhaps sooner than you think, perhaps not so soon as we think —the weight of Russia would crush you out of existence. Do you see the point?"
"I'm listening," said Dick.
"Well, we'll bargain with you. England has disowned you. Become a Russian! Take a Russian wife! As a Russian we will let you do in Persia what we dare not let you do otherwise! Think!"
"I have thought," answered Dick. He was looking hard at the other Russian, studying him, and seeming to have lost all interest in the spokesman or what he said.
"You're about my weight and height," said Dick addressing the second man, and the man did not answer since he did not know what Dick meant.
The first man understood by now that he might as well argue with a mountain as try to tempt Dick farther. It was clear that Dick intended to rejoin his army, and, after that, Russia's chance of a peaceful entry into Persia would be nil.
"Will you wait here," he asked Dick, "while I send a messenger to our Legation to bring you back an offer in writing?"
"No," said Dick. "But you may go back. You, not the other man—I need him. Yes, I'll send some Persians with you to see you're not molested on the way. Tell your Legation from me that there isn't room for a single Russian south of the Atrak River. Tell 'em I'm not English, for England has disowned me. I'm Persian, and Persia's fight for freedom has begun!"
Spluttering and fulminating, the Russian was sent back to Teheran with a Persian guard that in itself spelled ignominy. For a Russian to need protection at the hands of Persian peasants was a reversal of the usual condition that roused his Russian gorge and would have made him shed tears had he not been too angry.
Spluttering even more, his erstwhile companion was led off between two files of an ever-swelling horde of Persian irregulars who rode with Dick. The man could not guess what Dick's intentions were, and none of the escort, nor even Andry, could enlighten him, for when Dick had a plan laid out ahead he liked to keep it to himself and get its details all perfected in his own head before entrusting it to others.
HE rode no more at night now. Since he had declared himself his progress was a march of triumph. At the village where he had found the sowar, the headman beat his forehead in the dust, and Dick gave him his promised dues in the form of a levy of food, men and horses. That village had to provide a pack-train for the host, with the headman in person to lead it.
It was from then on that Dick kept hearing tidings of a force that' waited for him near Astrabad, to cut him off from his army in the hills. The wires had worked, and word had gone from Teheran. There were enough men in Astrabad to rid the earth of an undrilled mob such as rode with Dick, and Dick knew it well.
He sent ahead man after man to let himself be captured and to boast of Dick's intentions. He boasted he would take Astrabad on his way to the hills, and give it to his host to plunder, and before long be learned that the Russians had made an ambush ready for him. Then, for the first time, he really began to show his hand. He whispered to his Afghans as he rode, and after a while they whispered in turn to some of the Persians whom they judged worth confidence.
Nobody seemed to know who put the notion into the head of the village headman whom Dick had made provide a pack-train, but at night he started a campaign of treason, and made amazingly swift headway. It was astonishing how swiftly, even for Persia, the feeling for Dick gave way to a distrust of him, and how soon the thought followed after that of the advisability of making peace with Russia in the surest, swiftest way.
It was only two hours after dusk the next night when a man rode out of the camp and raced like the night wind for Astrabad, where the Russian outposts rounded him up. He assured them that all Dick's men would bolt incontinently on the next night, when he camped in sight of the city; the Russians might come and pounce on him, and would be certain to surprise him if they crept up quietly.
A bargain was struck. The Cossacks were not to shoot, and every living Persian should go free and be forgiven. Dick was to be handed over, or rather left for the Russians to ride down on and do with as they pleased.
So, to make things doubly sure, the Russians drew their men across a line ten miles long, that extended left and right between Dick and the hills. They sent scouts to report his corning, and it was not until he was within an hour's ride of the place where he would camp that they let the line draw in and form a semicircle to enclose him.
Night came, and Dick's Russian prisoner slept. Pretending they did not trust him, they had set him on a hillock and be nodded in the moonlight with his chin resting on his knees. Midnight came, and he awoke to find himself alone. His guard was gone. The native tents were struck. There was a feeling and a taste in his mouth suggesting opium. He stood up to stretch himself and recollect. In the dark he looked astonishingly like Dick Anthony.
There was a sudden shout—a sudden order to surrender, and a rush! A log was thrown at him; its middle took him in the chest and pinned him down.
Ten men pounced on him, and hurried fingers searched him for weapons. His wrists were tied. Then he was set on his feet and dragged to a man who waited on horseback at the bottom of the rise.
"So-ho, Dick Anthony!" said the man on the horse.
"My name is Donojouski!" said the prisoner.
Away in the distance, racing in a wide-flung are for the foot-hills of the Elburz range, rode first two Afghans, one of whom was none too certain of his seat in the saddle. Behind them rode Andry Macdougal, on a horse that groaned beneath his weight. And last rode Dick, widest awake of all of them. He rode last to make certain that he was not followed, either by Russians or by Persians; for he rode to bring his army, and he had charged the Persians to keep open for him the road that led to Teheran.
The dam was down at last. Dick Anthony was free! Disowned by England, scornful of Russia, free to fight for whom he would and for what he would. And the cause he chose was Persia's!
Roy Glashan's Library
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