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Roy Glashan's Library
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Adventure, October 1914, with "Go Tell the Czar"
DAY dawned on the Caspian. The reeds of Astrabad Bay ringed the blue mist and a million birds rose out of them noisily, to settle again in silence that was measured into spaces by the lapping of a ground-swell. In the distance a sounder of wild pig squealed and grunted.
On a tongue of land that stretched out through the marsh to make the only landing-place two men fought savagely, with tearing fingers—hot-hissing, face-to-face. Interested kites wheeled lazily above them.
From out of the mist to seaward came the unexpected, deadened thump of oars, but the two fought on. A man spoke continually—encouragingly—in Persian; then he changed to English, and an order rang out of the mist—not loud, but with distinctness that arrests attention, and with that distinction that conveys authority. The voice was unmusical, and carried far; but the two men paid no attention to it, they were of Asia, locked tight in an Asiatic hate, obsessed, unrousable.
A sail developed out of the immeasurable haze. It swayed, and grew nearer, silent, slack-draped, shadowy. Another splash was added to the noise of oars, as a specter jerked spasmodically and a sounding-lead struck water, to be drawn out with a suck.
"A quarter less 'an twa fathom, Mr. Dicky—an' lessenin'. Starboard a wee!"
The second voice sounded like a coast fog-warning. A rudder gurgled as an angle changed. But the two on shore lay locked in their hate-hold—deaf, dumb— oblivious except to blood-lust.
"A fathom—but a fathom noo, Mr. Dicky! Reeds ahead!" A hull grew out of mist beneath the shadowy sail. "Easy all!" said the first voice, and the thump of unskilled rowing ceased.
"Lan', sir!' I see lan'! Yonder there's a bit sticks oot an' might do verra weel f'r a landin'. Can ye no' see?"
The helm gurgled a quick answer, and the low hull swung.
"Weigh, bow!" said the first voice. "Weigh, all!"
The creaking of weary oars began again, and a heavy-beamed unpainted native craft crept shoreward, head-on, to the slow flap of an unfilled sail. The bow swept through reeds with a swish and rustle, touched bottom with a bump, and rested. But neither that nor the clatter of oars along the thwarts put a stop to the fight twenty yards away.
A giant leaped from the bows, as the Vikings leaped on England in the dawn of history, face-forward, ready for happenings. He caught the hellish rasp of breath, fought for between clenched fingers, and leaned forward with one hand to his ear.
"They'll be fechtin', Mr. Dicky, close at han'!"
"Make fast then, and wait for me!"
"Aye, aye!"
The giant dragged the anchor overboard, and plunged it into clay with one sweep of his tremendous arms. The action was instant, but he had not finished before another man stood beside him, who surely seemed lord of all he looked at; surely man, in every inch of every clean-drawn fiber of his being, tawny-headed, neatly knit; a man who sprang from the bow, and stood and looked as never Viking did—for the Vikings were slaves to superstition, and this man, Dick Anthony, was free. He had a strange old claymore hung to his side, that helped him seem to step out of a page of history.
He, too, caught the sound of strangling breath. He started instantly in its direction, and the big man followed him too closely for an enemy to slip between. Dick stopped, and stooped to look closer into a patch of trampled grass. Andry Macdougal crouched behind him like a well-trained hound in leash. Dick seized a human leg and tugged at it; but there was no response.
"Tweak it!" advised Andry in his ear.
"No. Grab the other man, and pull!"
Andry moved and chose another leg from out the tangle. He pulled as if he were helping get an anchor up, and the two men held as if they were pitbull-terriers fighting for a purse. The new strain put on them would have burst steel shackles, and no flesh and blood could have withstood it; but the instant they were wrenched apart each turned on his rescuer; and—numb, dumb, breathless—they had spite enough remaining to be dangerous. Dick had to kneel on his man and squeeze the fight out of him.
Andry carried his half-throttled savage to the water's edge and ducked him until he was too weak to remonstrate; then he laid him on the grass.
"See yon!" he grinned, pointing.
DICK followed the direction of his finger, stooped where the grass had been trampled by the fighting, and picked up a little leather bag. He shook it, and it jingled; so he opened it. Then he slipped it in his pocket quickly, for the two men moved. A little breeze was blowing up, and the mist melted in front of it; all four could see other each plainly.
At the same instant, at sight of the same small bag in Dick's hands, the men who had fought to a stalemate recovered breath, will, reason, or at least instinct. Instinctively Dick and Andry glanced, each to make sure that the other was alert. They glanced back, and there was nothing where the two had been; they had vanished like frightened animals.
"Did the bag have a deal o' siller in it?" wondered Andry.
"Gold!" said Dick.
"Gowd! Huh!" Andry looked like a graven image—huge, heavy, humorous; some Rodin, with a taste for the terrific and grotesque, might have carved him from granite and left him there to mark a boundary. "Did ye never see twa burdies fecht-in' for a wum, an' a bigger burdie tak' it awa' fra baith o' 'em? Findin's keepin's, Mr. Dicky! Keep it in y'r pooch!"
Dick laughed, and the unmusical note was uncannily appropriate to a man who stepped thus out of Caspian mist, with a jeweled claymore swinging at his waist. Andry recognized the note, caught his eye, and followed its direction.
From the boat that had borne them out of unexpectedness the rowers and their chief—eight men in turbans—were pitching their belongings to the shore in hurried silence, and there was not detectable among the eight of them one single symptom of regret at leaving. Dick strode toward them with the half-humorous, quite deferential air of a man who knows his mind, but sees no need for speaking it—as yet.
"Do you happen to recognize this place, Usbeg Ali Khan?" he asked.
"Nay, sahib! But I recognize dry land, and know that Allah made it!"
"Would you care to sail farther, and try for a better landing?"
"God forbid, sahib!" The Afghan stepped ashore, and bowed his stateliest "Thou art a wonder of a man, and thy handling of a ship gives confidence. No other man in all the world could have made my horsemen row! It was good, sahib! But Allah rested when the world was made, and made no more world; now, we too would rest, and do no more rowing."
"Didn't like it, eh?"
"We are horsemen, sahib! That ship" (he turned and spat; each of his seven followed suit) "has made my belly ache and my bowels yearn for home as never fight did yet, and I have fought many fights! If there be nothing worse ashore than hell and devils, lead on, Bahadur!"
"And the boat—how about it?"
Dick had made his mind up. But one could tell, too, that he was strong enough to dare let other men have their say first.
"May devils rot the boat and Russians ride in it!" swore Usbeg AH Khan.
"Russian gunboats are scouring the Caspian now for sight of it," said Dick.
Andry pricked his ears; Usbeg Ali Khan stroked his black beard, and his seven waited silently in line, as became the henchmen of a warrior. Dick looked at the neat-enough native craft that had helped give the slip to Russia by weathering a Caspian southeaster; and, seamanlike, his heart went out to it. He, who once had learned to know himself by dint of fighting the Atlantic, could set its true worth on a stout ship, and be reverent.
"We'll burn it," he said quietly, and Andry grinned.
"Wad we were burnin' Roosia!" said the big man; but the eyes of all eight Afghans opened wide.
"Iskander!" muttered Usbeg Ali Khan. "The sword, the man, and now the manner of the man! Sahib," he said, and he looked Dick square between the eyes, "we have a legend that the Great Iskander burned a fleet of ships, when disaster lay behind him and the unknown lay ahead. Thou art strangely like that same Iskander!"
Dick—niggard of words, as always—did not see fit to answer him; he was watching Andry, who had climbed aboard and was bringing off the solitary bag that held all the remaining worldly goods of both.
"He is Iskander!" vowed Usbeg Ali Khan, nodding to his seven with an air of absolute conviction. He had done more than a little, more than once, to help confuse those two legends—of an Alexander who had conquered all the world, and another Alexander, of Scotland, who had given a sword to an old-time Anthony. He had begun by deliberately lying, but now he much more than half believed the tale himself. "Dress by the right!" he ordered suddenly, "Eyes front!"
"Burn the boat, Andry!" ordered Dick.
A moment later, smoke came from the half-decked-over afterpart. Two minutes more, and a tongue of flame licked up. Then the red flames crackled skyward, and the frightened birds raced in thousands from the smoke, while ten men of two different nations stood by their few belongings and looked on. Seven stood in line, with one in front of them. They all looked grim, each in his own way; and they looked almost childlike, in another, more appealing way as they watched the link between them and their recent past go up in fire. They watched until a Caspian ripple lapped over sizzling bulwarks like the lip of Nemesis, and there was nothing left but embers, staining the smooth sea.
DICK turned then to see eight Afghans with their hilts thrust out toward him. At a word from Usbeg Ali Khan they drew. Eight blades shot upward, shimmering in the morning sun. Eight pairs of level, Asiatic eyes looked into Dick's.
And so, in the cool of a Trans-Caspian morning, the last of all the Anthonys took his first steel-tipped salute, and answered it. The claymore's jeweled hilt went to his own lips, and he knew then that he and these eight men stood pledged in the bond unbreakable—the soldier's. There is a time in every strong man's life when he knows in the marrow of him that he and Fate are running on the wind together in front of a gaining tide. Dick knew it that minute. From the day when they had met first, Usbeg Ali Khan had never doubted it.
It was Andry who broke the spell. "What's yon?" he asked, pointing. The last of the smoke had gone with the mist, and the salt-deposits were scintillating in the sun; a man had to look through half-closed eyes.
"A horse!" said Dick. "A horse grazing!"
"Bismillah!" swore eight Afghans with one breath, for theirs is a nation that is born on horseback, weaned in stables, and taught in its youth that a man's legs are to ride with; the main part of their luggage was the saddles they had piled up in a heap.
"Aye, a horse," said Andry with less than a twentieth of the enthusiasm. His six feet five—two hundred-weight and odd—went better, and felt better, on his own two legs.
Eight of the ten had been war-taught in the trick of looking quickly; Andry had learned in the Army and at sea; yet Dick was quickest. Centering from a horse that grazed with an empty saddle on his back, all eyes searched out the plain in widening rings. In a moment Dick was off, running head forward, with drawn sword, and the others—not yet knowing why they ran—were streaming after him, Andry last.
One of the Afghans stopped and shouted, "Hold, sahib!" laughing at the notion that a stray horse could be caught that way. The horse laid his ears back, kicked, and galloped away; but Dick held on his course. Then they all saw what Dick had seen at once, and yelled in chorus.
But no yells ever scared a pricked pig from his quarry. Gray, red-eyed, foaming at the mouth, squealing and grunting indignation, the great-great-grandfather of all the boars was squandering the minutes, trying to turn a man over and so gore his stomach. The boar bled where a lance had touched him, the man where the four-inch tushes had ripped through his clothing in a dozen places to the skin. But the man still lived, and still had wit and strength enough to shield his face.
The gray boar was too busy at his worry to heed warning shouts, and it was not until Dick Anthony—running as if there were thirty men behind him and a Rugby-goal in front—had reached within ten yards that the brute looked up at him, blinked twice, and charged.
They met head-on, sinewy wrist and straight-held steel—leather hide, tush-guarded. The boar was the heavier; Dick had the benefit of reach. The boar was the savager, and more determined, for now that the other man was safe for the moment Dick's desire to kill had waned. Dick had the better weapon at the first, point-distant impact; but the boar, lone hero of a hundred fights, had all the experience; the boar had fought for and won the secret that close quarters was his vantage-ground; Dick should have known that his sword-length was the smallest measure of his safety. But Dick, too, was a believer in close quarters. And Dick still thought of pigs as pigs; he had seen them driven to market by old women, and he remembered.
The point of the claymore pierced perhaps a half-inch through the thick hide-armor that a wild pig. wears, and slid down the shoulder far enough to spur the brute's last absolute extreme of fighting dander. Dick leaped aside in time to feel the wind of a right-left-right, tush worry-stroke that missed his thigh by the fraction of an inch. The pig charged on, far enough to free himself from the irritating sword, blinked suddenly, blinked with red, hell-angry eyes and came on again at twenty-five-foot range.
Andry saved the day. The pig would have gone through Dick's guard as he had charged through a horse's legs many a time. The Afghans had stopped to watch, for Usbeg Ali bade them see how a man, who was verily a man, would slay a monster; it would never have entered his courteous, illogical Afghan head to interfere between his hero and the prey.
But Andry had a generous meed of mother-instinct underneath his muscle-hefty breast, and not any hunting-courtesy. The watching Afghans reeled as he burst between them like a charge of chain-shot; and, as the boar rose on his hind legs to reach up-and-sideways for Dick's stomach, Andry's huge arms wrapped the brute as a bear's arms crunch a sheep, and the two went to earth together in a wonder-whirl of grunts and squeals and Scots profanity. (Andry was a hard swearer when he was not saying prayers.)
The great, grim Scotsman put forth all his strength and gathered the boar in to him, hugging, crushing, reaching for the hind legs, as wrestlers reach for a toe-hold without loosening their grip. The gray boar screamed its agony, and Andry's great sinews cracked. There was an awful, quivering, shuddering minute while the gamest fighting-beast in Asia fought for room to use its weapons—and then Andry labored to his feet. The veins were knotted on his temples, and his ugly, freckled face was like a gargoyle; but his smile and the eye-gleam told of victory. He gave such a yell of exultation as England's troopers listened to in Killiecrankie Pass, and then with a terrific heave he swung the boar by the hind legs, whirled it twice, and laid it full length with a thud, belly upward, on the grass.
"Stick him, Mr. Dicky, sir!" he panted.
So the gray boar died, as its pampered European cousins are more apt to do, on its back, crying to the god of fighting-pigs to come and see its ignominy. The sword-blade went in like a streak of light and came out reeking crimson; and the Afghans, struggling between amazement and loathing of the unclean touch of pig, wondered whether they should envy Andry or despise him. They had stood to see a hunting; they had seen a killing, which is different.
"IS that good fellow hurt?" said a voice.
They all turned together to face a one-eyed man in a battered sun-helmet and a muddied Vandyke beard. His clothes were nearly ripped from him; one long riding-boot was cut from knee to heel as if it had been paper, and he was bleeding here and there, though in no place badly; His cuts had been accidental; the boar had striven for the stomach, despising lesser opportunities.
"They'd pay you big money in the stockyards," he said, smiling and holding out his hand.
"Money's not a' that's big!" growled Andry, keeping his right hand behind him.
The man's action had been a gentleman's, the proffered hand of gratitude from the rescued to the rescuer; there seemed no excuse for Andry's attitude. But Dick interpreted.
"Show me your right hand, Andry!" he demanded.
"It's a' recht," said Andry, holding out the left one.
"Show me the other!"
Very unwillingly, with a face like that of a small boy caught with stolen apples, Andry did as he was told and showed a fist that dripped crimson. Above it the forearm gushed dark blood from a severed artery.
"'Tis no' seerious at a'," he apologized.
Dick tore the sleeve from his own shirt and twisted it into a tourniquet, using his sword as a lever to turn it until the flow ceased altogether.
"Water!" he said then, and at a sign from Usbeg Ali the seven Afghans raced to be first to bring it. They found brackish water in a hollow of the ground, and two of them busied themselves sluicing it over the wound from their water-gourds until Andry ground his teeth and cursed all Asia and all pigs for the sting of it. Dick watched the wound, opening it with his thumbs to satisfy himself that it was clean; then, still holding Andry's forearm, he found time to speak to the man behind him.
"Your horse?" he asked.
"Yes." The man was more interested in Andry's wound than in his own troubles. He was watching over Dick's shoulder.
"Camp near?"
"A mile away."
"Servants?"
"Two. Cook-bearer and groom."
"Any money in the camp?" asked Dick.
"Yes. Some. Why?"
On frontiers, where king's writs do not run, strangers today ask no more questions than they used to yesterday; it is not safe. The one-eyed man raised his eyebrows as he answered.
"How much money, contained in what?" asked Dick.
The man stared harder yet, and looked uncomfortable. Dick, with that strange following and even stranger sword, saddles in a heap but no horses, turbans and uniforms but no tents, might be almost anything except a law-abiding gentleman. True, he spoke with authority and was obeyed, but that was additional evidence against him.
"I keep my money in a leather bag with my initials on it."
"Gold, by any chance?" asked Dick, still intent on the sluicing out of Andry's wound.
"English gold," said the one-eyed man. He was satisfied by this time that Dick meant to rob him, and in consideration of the rescue he chose to surrender with good grace. So much was entirely evident.
"What are the initials on the bag?" asked Dick.
"R.L.," The man was speculating again, wildly now, and Dick looked hard at Andry's wound to hide a smile. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out the little leather bag.
"Count 'em!" he said, holding it out.
The man chose not to count. He slipped the bag into his pocket, and his face expressed astonishment, apology, bewilderment in turn. Dick interpreted each instantly. That way he had of watching and using none except necessary words cost him no friends in the long run, although it unveiled him many enemies, for few men can keep silent and yet fewer understand a strong man's reticence. This one-eyed man was able now to sense a little of Dick's strength, but when he tried to apply reason to it he was all at sea at once.
"May I reward your men?" he asked. "Perhaps you'd see to the distribution for me?"
He held out the bag that Dick had given him, and for once in his life Dick did not understand. He had not lived in Persia, where every action, every promise, every favor has its price in cash, and he had not realized quite yet that this man classified him as the leader of a robber band. He actually blushed. Andry forgot the sharp pain in his arms and grinned—not that the Scots are unappreciative of money; no nation values money more, unless it be the Afghans. Yet all eight Afghans bared their teeth. The stranger, feeling very much a stranger, wilted.
"I beg pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I've made an ass of myself. D'you mind putting it down to the shaking I've had?"
It was plain that he still did not quite believe his senses.
"Won't you catch his horse?" said Dick, for most of the Afghans were clustering close to listen.
"My own servants ought to be somewhere near," said the one-eyed man uneasily. Then he touched his pocket, and stammered at the thought of the recovered gold. "I don't understand any of this," he said. "Perhaps you know where my servants are?"
"Blowed if I do!" laughed Dick, "but there's your horse for you."
Two of Usbeg Ali's men led the horse up at a walk, and held it while its owner climbed into the saddle clumsily; his hurts were stiffening.
"I'd like to do more than just say, 'Thank you'," he said, looking from Dick to Andry and then back again. "My name's Lancaster—Robert Lancaster."
"You might have mentioned that before," said Dick. "I'm Richard Anthony."
"Of Arran?"
"Yes."
A new world of understanding and a dozen mixed emotions swept across the man's face. He started to dismount, but thought better of it.
"If that's who you are, I can be of service," he said emphatically. "Will you come over to my tent? I've an emergency outfit there, and you can bandage your man properly. After that I'll be happy to give you some information."
It was Dick's turn to stare hard now, and the incisiveness of his gaze was disconcerting. "Information about what?" he asked.
"About the Okhrana."
"Never heard of it."
"Ever hear of the Princess Olga Karageorgovich?"
"Yes," said Dick, frowning.
"She's the paw of the Okhrana. Will you come?"
Dick nodded. "Ride on," he said, "and I'll follow you."
"I can offer you a stirrup, and your man a tail," said Robert Lancaster.
"Thanks, but there are ten of us, all told," said Dick.
"I have met sahibs," muttered Usbeg Ali Khan, "who would have accepted first my service, and then that stirrup and that tail. We could have followed, with our baggage! Bahadur," he said aloud, "let my men wait here and guard the baggage. Thou and I and that giant of thine will walk beside the horse, and learn this information!"
"Very well," said Dick; "lead on, Mr. Lancaster, if that suits you."
So a strange procession started for two tents, about a mile away.
THERE is a great gulf fixed between the "man with a grievance" and the man who has been wronged and knows it. Dick Anthony was carrying just then no load of gratitude to Fate, yet the one-eyed man who rode and kept looking down at him could see no sign of melancholy or misanthropy. Robert Lancaster prided himself on his ability to read character, and some of what he read was so obvious that he could not but be right; for instance, Dick strode like a man in armor; fear was not in his nature. But mistakes are easiest to make and riskiest concerning what is in a man; what is not there does not matter.
They talked little as they went, for Dick's answers were monosyllabic. Conversation was not easy, crossing that hummocky coarse-grass country and jumping the bad places; but, aside from the need to watch the footing, Dick Anthony had been promised information, and there was therefore nothing in the world more certain than that he would be silent until he had listened to it. The man on the horse did not know that, but he tried to analyze the silence, and once or twice to break it up with deft questions. He failed signally.
Dick could seldom tolerate a hat, and he had not learned yet to dread the Eastern sun nor to wear the sun-helmet, bought in Baku, with any degree of comfort. So Lancaster looked down at a tawny head that shone golden where the sun-rays touched it, and from the saddle's vantage-point he had opportunity to study character, assuming, as he did, that it is stamped indelibly on men's exteriors for any one to read.
He judged Dick to be visionary as well as fearless, impatient of control, hot-tempered, and intolerant. The very way Dick swiped at the flies with his helmet was eloquent to Lancaster of recklessness that might be played upon.
From time to time, in their efforts to cross water with dry feet, Andry and Usbeg Ali Khan would jump into his half-horizon. He set down Andry then as a great good-natured hound of a man, who might not be bought on any terms, but who certainly could be fooled. Usbeg Ali Khan seemed to him an adventurer pure and simple, out for the money and the plunder—a man to be persuaded, bought, or blackmailed; he had seen too many wandering Afghans to doubt his own judgment now of one of them. So by the time they reached the two white tents that glistened only one degree less than the myriad salt-deposits, he had formed about as many false conclusions as one man well may within an hour.
He offered breakfast—offered to cook it himself; but Dick had come for surgical necessities and information. The emergency outfit proved excellent; within ten minutes Andry's arm was as comfortable as it could be, and some extra bandages had been transferred to Usbeg All's haversack. Next Dick attended to his host's hurts, which, except for the effects of a vicious shaking-up, were superficial.
Then they all took seats on chairs and boxes in the larger of the two tents, and Robert Lancaster at once thrust out his muddy little beard, as he found himself at a terrific disadvantage. Three pairs of calm, unfrightened eyes were leveled at him. He felt them read him to the marrow. And he only had one eye to answer back.
"I wish I knew where my servants are, and how you recovered my money," he said, breaking the silence nervously. "I missed the men before dawn, saw smoke and fire by the shore a little later, and rode off to see what it meant. Half suspected a religious ceremony—always running foul of superstition in this country. Took a spear with me, on the off-chance of meeting pig. Met pig. That brings us to the introduction. Who's going to talk first, you or I?"
"You are," said Dick; and Robert Lancaster, nearly closing his one eye, became aware that what Dick said was so. He did not change his opinion of Dick exactly, but he added to it the conviction that this was a man who should be humored.
"Well," he said, twisting mud out of his beard with nervous fingers and watching Dick's extraordinary eyes, "first I'll tell you who and what I am exactly."
There was a table in the tent; Dick had one elbow on it. Lancaster fished inside an inner pocket, which had escaped ripping by a miracle; he produced a card-case drew out a clean card, and laid it in front of Dick as if it were the ace of trumps. Dick picked up the card and recognized the name of a financial house that is nearly as well known as some nations are. Robert Lancaster's name was in a bottom corner.
"I am their representative in Persia," he said.
"A banker, eh?"
"I call myself a banker when I am in Teheran."
He waited to be questioned further; but Dick preferred to listen to him, and knew how and when to wait; he seemed interested, but made no comment; and the other two knew better than to interrupt. So Lancaster, whose business had schooled him too in the use of silences, found himself compelled against his will to take up the thread again where he had left it. He was suffering from the shaking he had undergone, but he pulled himself together gamely and continued.
"Banker is what I have called myself in Teheran for twenty years. Agent is what I am. That includes a host of things. It includes, for example, the cultivation, by means at my discretion, of intimate relations with certain of the telegraph people, and others. I know what is going on, what has happened, what will happen. My people base their decisions on what I report."
His one eye was watching keenly for signs of some effect on his audience. It gave him a very furtive look, as it roved from one to the other of them, and Usbeg Ali Khan saw fit to answer him.
"I always knew bankers to be surreptitious men," said the Afghan calmly, translating an Asiatic thought literally into English.
Robert Lancaster tried to stare him down, but failed; so he made a fresh start and a new effort to impress.
"I know all your recent history, Mr. Anthony!"
HE paused again, to let the words sink in. But Dick, who was aware of having played his hand consistently, exactly as a gentleman, showed no emotion. On the other hand, Andry and Usbeg Ali Khan were full of pride that they had fought behind Dick in his hour of peril; they were glad indeed if this man knew enough to be appreciative and so have a point in common with them. They looked what they felt, and vaguely Robert Lancaster divined their attitude.
"For instance," he said, "I know that you were offered the command of the ex-Shah's army, in a third attempt he wants to make on the throne of Persia. You refused. You broke through the ranks of a Cossack regiment that tried to arrest you, and put to sea in the teeth of a storm through which not even the gunboats dared follow you. I was at Astrabad when the account came over the wire, and but for that boar having knocked nearly all the wits out of me I should have recognized you from the description. Am I correct, as far as I've gone?"
"So far," said Dick.
"Then, believe me, Mr. Anthony, I am correct too when I say that your description has been telegraphed to every point around the Caspian, and every avenue for escape has been cut off. You are certain of arrest should you try to move in any direction!"
He pointed a finger at Dick, and looked along it with his one eye, as a man squints down a rifle-barrel. Dick did not blench or answer.
"Before we met, when in possession of those and other facts about you, but with a quite different impression of you in my mind, I decided I would like to be your friend, and to make you certain advantageous offers. It did not seem possible to intercept you, and I regretted it. I came here to hunt pig while waiting for answers to letters I have sent to Europe. The thought I had uppermost was one of deep regret that you should be caught in some one of the hundred traps that have been laid for you. Yet here you are!"
"Kismet!" said Usbeg Ali Khan. '"Ii was the will of God! Who can read God's ways in advance?"
Lancaster paused to let the Afghan's suggestion sink home and because he needed to husband his shaken strength. He understood by this time that Dick would not talk unless or until he finished; but that left him the field clear, and he proposed to take full advantage of it. He hoped to reduce Dick to pliability, either from excitement, nervousness or anger, so he took his time, and chose his words deliberately.
"The Princess Olga Karageorgovich—I understood you to say you know who she is—has telegraphed to all points the offer of a reward of five thousand rubles for your capture alive."
Dick looked interested, but was not moved to comment.
"Money will accomplish practically anything in Persia, Mr. Anthony!"
Dick did not answer.
"Under all the circumstances, our meeting is the most fortunate thing that could have happened, and not to you only. I flatter myself that many, very many, will benefit by it later on. But for the present, Mr. Anthony, I am sure I am the only considerable man in Persia who dare be your friend!"
"Hoots!" exclaimed Andry. "Hark!" He sat bolt upright, and the wrinkles on his weather-beaten face assumed new patterns. "I ken twa fr'en's o' his recht weel, an' there are seven more not a mile awa'. I'm a verra conseederable mon masel'—so's him on ma recht here. We baith ha' proovit what we are! Heh! Ye'd find yon peg that was worryin' ye easier to treat wi' condescension than oor Mr. Dicky! Dinna be too cocky, mon! We're a verra close corporation!"
"Shut up!" commanded Dick, and Andry, having had his say, lapsed into triumphant silence.
"The point I'm driving at," said Lancaster, "is this. From all accounts, you are a man worth while. If you had seemed an easy man to frighten or make use of, you would have been no use to me. But a man who can break through Russia's hold as you did is the very man I have been looking for—is a man, Mr. Anthony, who can set me to sending cablegrams in code!"
HE sat back and looked away, as if he expected Dick to arise and answer him; but Dick sat still; so after a minute he continued.
"Reasoning along the line that the Okhrana would not make such frantic efforts to capture a nonentity, I decided before ever I met you to befriend you if I could, as a matter of business policy; and I have met you now under circumstances that add gratitude to my other reasons. The business policy remains, but a very strong element of personal regard is added to the motive for the offer I will make."
He might have been addressing three Supreme Court Judges. All three looked interested, and Dick by no means least of them; but Lancaster felt like the pleader for a weak cause, instead of what he was actually—a man of influence, with influence to offer, at a price. Not one of the three was inattentive or indifferent. Yet no three men he had ever met had looked so noncommittal.
"I mentioned the Okhrana," he continued, since some one had to break the silence and Dick would not. His respect for Dick was growing as he found how difficult Dick was to disturb, and yet how carefully he listened. It was he, not Dick, who forgot his hurts and began to grow excited as he stared into Dick's strange, strong eyes and gave his thoughts rein.
"You said you have never heard of the Okhrana. It is the Secret Police of Russia—the vilest monster, the most heartless tyranny, the deadliest, most damnable organized conspiracy this side of hell! The Okhrana is the Devil, busy about building hell—and the hell is here, in Persia, Mr. Anthony!"
Dick sat a little straighter, but said nothing. Usbeg Ali Khan nodded as if he recognized the truth; and Andry scowled, for to his dogmatic mind it was little less than blasphemy to take the Devil's name in vain.
"I invite you to wage war on this Devil, Mr. Anthony—you, with whatever followers you have as yet!"
"Is the invitation your own?"
"No, sir; my firm's. It shall be confirmed."
"And on whose behalf am I asked to fight?"
"Persia's."
"Sounds like a dream!" said Dick, and the heavy breathing of the other two, who sat with, lips parted and drank in the words, almost confirmed him.
"It is a nightmare!" Lancaster was worked up now and in his stride. He held the table in a grip that nearly broke it, and Usbeg Ali Khan played second to him, gripping his saber-hilt with both hands; the name of war and the life of Usbeg Ali Khan were one. "Russia is not all to blame, Mr. Anthony. The Okhrana no more represents Russia than the Camorra represents Italy. In some respects they are similar, but the Camorra is a children's game compared to the Russian System—a pure, peaceful, decent thing compared to it! Once the Okhrana was a detective force, under control and useful. It grew like a vile disease, until it controls instead! Its tentacles reach everywhere. It has corrupted the nobility, the Army, Navy, Administration, Courts, trade, everything that it can reach! It owns the police, the press, the Church, the jails; it has its secret grip on foreign countries, and it molds, devises, blackmails, murders, buys, to one sole end—the propagation of itself! Russia and all neighboring countries are the board; the Czar is a pawn in the game! The king-piece, and the game itself, is the Okhrana!"
"So, I suppose," said Dick with a dry smile, "that your firm is the Cromwell and you are the Colonel Pride who will purge Russia? Is that it?"
Innocent of business knowledge and of modern politics, as nearly all young British gentleman are bound to be, Dick had none the less heard of "High Finance;" and the name of this man's firm was a synonym, even among schoolboys, for shrewd scheming.
"We will be thoroughly content to purge these three northern provinces of Persia, Mr. Anthony. It is you who are offered the part of Colonel Pride. I am no more than a go-between."
"Explain," said Dick.
Robert Lancaster—having not yet quite discarded all his false conclusions—saw fit to pave the way a little better before broaching details; he thought Dick Anthony might possibly imagine yet that there was more than one course to choose from, and he thought that he knew better.
"First consider your position, Mr. Anthony," he cautioned, holding out that forefinger again. "You dare not go home, even supposing that you could escape. There is a warrant out for you on account of the part you played in Egypt. You are a British officer. You would be arrested—court-martialed—disgraced—and probably imprisoned! Ha-ha! You see, my information is complete about you—my telegraphic tentacles reach far and wide!"
"Here goes the first lie in your teeth!" said Usbeg Ali Khan, arising and rattling his saber, "I fling it—I, who reported the whole of that affair in Alexandria to the authorities! There is no warrant for him, and there will be none! I told how he fought, and then fled from men who would have killed him because he knew too much, yet would not be one of them! I proved my identity, and then my record. I swore, then, on my honor as a soldier and a good Mohammedan, that I—who had listened to treason and looked on—was guiltier than he, who fought at the first mention of it! They answered that my word was good. It is good now, and by the Beard of God's Prophet I swear I will ride anywhither with him, and bear him witness in any court in any land. And I will fight beside him with this saber, wherever and against whom he sees fit to lead. My word is given. I am Usbeg Ali Khan!"
He sat down again, his white teeth showing in a fierce, thin line between his black beard and moustache, and his very whiskers bristling with fight.
"I wish you had mentioned that before," said Dick. "I've been all this time imagining the British and Egyptian Governments were both after me."
"Sahib," said the Afghan proudly, "oblige me and reconsider! First, as a soldier it fits scantly with mine honor to come bragging of the service I have done. Second, I have not had opportunity till now. You rejected my advances until the minute before leaving Russia; and on that devil-shaken ship you steered through hurricanes I was too busy keeping my insides within me to make conversation. Have I not spoken, now that there is need?"
"Thanks," said Dick.
"Salaam, sahib!"
"Ye're a mon, although ye're black!" said Andry seriously. If Afghans as a race detest one thing, it is to be accused of being black; but these two were beginning to understand each other. Usbeg Ali actually smiled.
ROBERT LANCASTER, watching like a ferret with his one eye, and possessed of sense enough to toss aside conclusions as he found them wrong, decided that Dick Anthony was not a man to frighten into doing things. His plan had been to threaten Dick next with a synopsis of the Cossack plans to capture him; he could have guessed at what he did not know for certain. But it was too obvious that, since Dick need not fear his own Government, he need not fear Russia yet; arrested, he need only claim a hearing, and whatever the Russians would do to a mere unknown civilian, Dick could demand that they respect the King's commission, held by an Anthony of Arran. Dick, he felt sure, would have nerve enough to dare all the Cossack officers on earth, now that he knew his own honor to be safe.
"I suppose you'll go home, then, Mr. Anthony?" he said.
"I have three years' leave of absence," answered Dick.
"Then may I ask what you propose to do?"
"To listen. Weren't you making me an offer?"
"Yes. I was asking you to help Persia. I was asking you to help rid these suffering provinces of the worst burden—the most dastardly imposition—that ever a land groaned under."
"But why should you ask, on behalf of Persia?" Dick demanded. "I wouldn't object to service under the Persian Government, given proper guarantees and permission from the War Office; but what have you or your firm got to do with it?"
"We have many millions, Mr. Anthony, invested in northern Persia. If the Okhrana makes good its footing—in other words, if it succeeds in following up the thin end of the wedge with the thick end—we stand to lose those millions, for the Okhrana shares nothing with anybody; it is above the law, and it sucks clean to the dry bone! We are ready and willing to spend more millions to defend what we have spent already. We can not get the British Government to help us, though God knows we have tried. We will not, if we can help it, stand by and see Russia—nose-led by organized conspiracy—penetrate, and occupy, and keep, as she is doing in defiance of all promises and treaties." He leaned forward, and again the long forefinger pointed straight at Dick. "We have been waiting for a man—for the man!"
"To do what?"
"To lead!"
"To lead whom?"
"Persia!"
"As a British officer," said Dick, "I couldn't take part in any revolution even if I cared to." His words were prompt and uncompromising; but there might have been an undernote of disappointment or regret.
"You are not invited to take part in any revolution. The Persian Government is making the most heroic efforts in all Persian history to throw off this cruel Russian yoke. If the Persians win, they will observe their financial engagements, as Russia would never do should she win; Russia pays her own debts, but she would pay Persia's never—never, my friend! That is why my firm and other financiers are so emphatically on Persia's side! That is why we are willing to finance a strong man, who dares, and who can, take command of the patriots who are now in hiding. You are asked to fight for Persia, not against her—to strengthen Persia, not lead a revolution! Man, service under the Persian Government in the way you mean, with permission of the War Office, wouldn't be the slightest use. The Russians have their clutch on everything in Teheran. The police, the troops, the politicians, are in Russia's pay. If you weren't shot you would be poisoned within a month, and Russia would make that an excuse for sending yet more Cossacks!"
"Then what do you mean?" asked Dick.
"I mean, Mr. Anthony, that the patriots, the few good, loyal men who love Persia and would fight for her, dare not show themselves for fear of Russia. Most of them are in hiding in the mountains—many of them not very far from here. Take command of those men, drive the Cossacks out of northern Persia by quick, stern action, and within two weeks you will have the whole of Persia at your back, and the Great Powers (goaded, remember, by Finance) behind Persia! All that is needed is the courage, and the initial heroic effort!"
"It's tempting enough," laughed Dick, "supposing, of course, that you could prove your authority for making promises. Your firm, I suppose, would ship arms and ammunition, and I haven't a doubt they could be smuggled. I'd like the adventure. But I must refuse as a British officer, if for no other reason."
Robert Lancaster detected a movement of Usbeg Ali's eye that gave him unexplained encouragement. He looked at Andry and read disappointment on the big man's face. It was plain that Dick would not lack backing from his own contingent, could he but be persuaded; and evidently Usbeg Ali Khan did not yet believe that the argument was closed. Finance is never at the end of its tether; so long as it remains at all, it is a power; and its servants emulate it. So long as he could speak, Robert Lancaster could voice an argument.
"Will you talk to these patriots, Mr. Anthony, and say a few words to encourage them? Will you hear the story straight from them?"
"Certainly," said Dick. "I'd be glad to talk to them."
"Then the sooner the better!"
"First, though," said Dick, "I need food for my men, horses and transportation."
"I was coming to that," said Lancaster. He turned to Usbeg Ali Khan. "You," he said, "are the least likely of the party to be recognized. Will you be good enough to take my horse and a message I will write to a place about ten miles away from here? My signature under a requisition will be enough to produce everything needed."
"I take my orders from Anthony Sahib!" said the Afghan.
"Go, please," said Dick. "I'll give you money to pay for things."
"I beg your pardon," said Lancaster. "You have accepted my invitation to hear the case of Persia at first hand. You are therefore the guest of my firm until your trip is over. I pay for everything—horses, food, tents, and transportation."
"Oh, very well," said Dick. "We'll go outside while you write the letter."
Some twenty minutes later Robert Lancaster gave Usbeg Ali Khan repeated, definite directions, and the Afghan drove his heels in. The horse leaped forward like a shaft, bow-driven. He was a shaft, if they all had known it, out of the bow of Fate—a shaft that bore a message of the coming of deliverance to Persia.
"Ma spine tickles!" said Andry, looking into Dick's eyes.
"Scratch it, then!" said Dick.
"Na, na, let it tickle—it means fechtin'!"
IF Dick Anthony supposed that by escaping out of Russia into Persia he had shaken off the Princess Olga Karageorgovich, that was clear proof of his ignorance of women. He was wilfully, deliberately ignorant of any but the type his mother had been, and she had died so long ago that he had canonized her memory. To think ill of the sex she had adorned would have been sacrilege and, since he detested sacrilege, he avoided women carefully and ran no risks.
He was boy enough to expect women to avoid him in return. There was no "one woman" whom he loved; therefore it did not enter his dreams that "one woman" might love him and make a hero of him. To himself, he was a man who did his fighting best to be a gentleman and not a hero in the very least degree.
There had been one or two—good women—who had seen, had heard, had smiled at the contagion of his smile, had thanked the God who made good men for not-yet-vanished chivalry, and then had understood and passed out of his life with women only know what bitter sorrow. Such incidents had strengthened his belief in the inherent goodness of the rest.
So by the time he met the Princess Olga Karageorgovich, he had learned to show too-attentive women very gently how he could be chivalrous and yet not lovesick; he had learned to expect that they would take their own leave of him then, and if there were heart-burnings he saw none, and was too modest to suspect their possibility. The Princess Olga had taken leave of him, a little ostentatiously, on the deck of a Russian tramp at Trebizond; and, though he had been certain that it was her voice whispering orders through a hole in a wall at Baku, he felt quite sure now that pride must have come to her aid and have made her see the impropriety of following him farther. Decent, gallant, gentlemanly, foolish Dick Anthony!
She loved him more she-tigerishly each time that he broke away from her. She had lost him at each attempt yet, because he was too honest, too direct and strong, to be taken in any but a Samson-snare; but she learned her lesson and grew doubly dangerous; and each time he escaped her the hot fires in her glowed anew, until passion was love at last, and she who had always laughed at love was now alight with it.
Fate piled the odds a hundred high against Dick Anthony when Olga Karageorgovich, Princess of Russia, and arch-decoy for Russia's underworld—whose power was the strength of the Okhrana, whose youth and beauty were twin foils for her ambition, loveliest, most versatile, least squeamish of all women—set her heart on him.
But the Princess Olga Karageorgovich had recognized a greatness such as none of the men in her swaggering class could show, nor any in her other underworld of plots and practising. Her main claim to usefulness was her ability to read what lay behind men's outer bluff, and for the first time in her life she had met a man who had no bluff about him, but was true. And, having met, she wanted.
While Cossack officers still cursed the stern of a boat that disappeared into a Caspian hurricane, she was already sending telegrams. Questions and replies, orders and acknowledgments, Dick's minute description, even to his scars, flashed back and forth through a whole storm-shrieking night. Then, having satisfied herself that unless he drowned—and she did not believe he could drown—there would be no slightest chance of his escaping from her net, she went to bed and slept a whole day, contented. Then she sent more telegrams.
FIVE evenings later she and her maid applied their united genius to the task of dressing her so cunningly that Innocence herself would have wondered at such sweet simplicity. Jeweled and orchid-decked, she attended a ball that was all but quite official; there were very few men there who were not in uniform; the dowager, who lent the social countenance which even she, the least convention-bound of women, dared not dispense with, was the wife of a lieutenant-governor; and only Russia could have staged the scene, the gaiety, the pace, the daring, and the grim, deep-lying, ever-conscious discipline.
She danced with a dozen men whose breasts were a blaze of decorations, and her talk was inane to the last degree of up-to-the-minute asininity. But she found her way at last to a sitting-out place between half-tropical ferns and flowers on the arm of a man who wore no decorations, but who carried himself in his black dress-suit as if all the responsibility for all Russia rested on him.
"Well?" he asked, when he had satisfied himself that none could overhear. "Is this to be another Egypt? More millions of rubles, more promises, still less result?"
"I have done my utmost in each instance," said the Princess, divining that she stood on the verge of danger.
"Certain other precautions have been taken this time," he said. "Anthony meets with approval—the very firebrand for the business!—but your plan goes into the discard. Yes, we have a better plan."
"Have I a part in it?" she asked, with as little display of interest as she dared show.
"Yes, once again," he added darkly. "There is a telegram this evening. Lancaster of Teheran, who has been a joke to us so many times, went hunting on the shore of Hassan Kuli Bay. His servants deserted—with his loose change, I expect— and were caught by Cossacks looking out for Anthony; they report that Anthony and his men landed and burned their boat within a mile of Lancaster's camp. What do you know of Lancaster?"
"Nothing," said the Princess, and the man beside her raised his eyebrows.
"Lancaster calls himself a banker, and is agent for big financial interests. He has missed no opportunity for the last three years of trying to find a leader for the so-called 'Patriotic Party' in northern Persia, and he offers financial backing to every likely man who comes his way. Scouts report Anthony in his tent. The conclusion is obvious."
He waited for about two minutes, to see whether the Princess would not leap to the conclusion; but she kept silence.
"He will offer Anthony what amounts to a kingdom. Being a British officer, Anthony will probably decline, although he may accept, in which case our game is won. But let us suppose that be declines. The plan is then thoroughly to insult him and force him to reprisals; I understand he is not the man to swallow an insult readily."
The Princess chuckled. "He will fight!" she asserted.
"He will be forced into a fight, if there is any fight in him, and then driven to the mountains, where he will find a crowd of fellow fugitives, and will no doubt recall Lancaster's offer of financial backing."
"Well?" said the Princess.
"Being a British officer, he will make things very inconvenient for his own people. Great Britain will not ask questions, nor endeavor to protect him. That gives us an entirely free hand. Anthony is to be harried from pillar to post, but never killed or caught until he has given us excuse enough for occupying northern Persia with two or even three army corps. Under the Anglo- Russian Convention of 1907 we may do nothing prejudicial to the autonomy of Persia; but the presence of an outlaw of his type in the mountains would be very prejudicial to it, and we would have a right to act for Persia's protection. Having acted, of course, northern Persia would be in our possession. Possession is nine points of the law, and—"
"And Richard Anthony is then mine!" said the Princess unguardedly.
"No," said the grim man at her side, decisively. "By that time Mr. Anthony will have ceased to be useful and will have grown dangerous. You shall choose his tombstone if you wish!"
She opened her lips to say something, but he cut short the discussion by offering his arm, and led her back to the din and glitter of the dancing-floor.
"In the meantime we can make use of your talents," he said quietly in her ear, He bowed frigidly to a man who came to claim her. "There will be a cachet of instructions for you in a day or two," he whispered. Then he walked away.
She whirled with a medaled partner into the glittering maelstrom, and he betook himself to a card-room, where other men in uniform were gambling for very heavy stakes.
AT the end of ten miles of savagely bad going Usbeg All's thoughts were interrupted by sight of a battered caravansary whose walls bore traces of more than one Cossack visitation in the shape of bullet-marks. The gate was shut, but he shouted, and the man in charge came out to parley, only to be kept waiting while the Afghan made a keen-eyed survey of the ground. Then it did not sweeten Usbeg Ali's humor in the least that a Cossack officer should swagger out beneath the gate, look him over with studied insolence, read the letter, and nod contemptuous permission before he was admitted.
"I smelled Cossacks from two miles away!" he vowed, riding in. "Phaugh!"
But the officer went out of sight, and no amount of cavalierly swearing or loud-voiced Eastern innuendo could bring him back again. Moreover, the Russian's leave seemed to have included more than it might have done; the keeper of the caravansary came down from the heights of arrogant suspicion to the deeps of groveling servility, and the stables were thrown open that Usbeg Ali might make choice.
The horses, except for three of them, were a sorry bunch of crocks, and the men who lined up to go in charge of them were sorrier-looking yet. Their groveling servility did no more than help arouse the suspicion latent in Usbeg Ali's Oriental mind and to put him, soldierwise, on the offensive.
"The letter called for men, not monkeys," he asserted; "horses, not Cossack food!"
"The prince is pleased to jest," said the Persian, cringing low. "These are the post-horses of the Government post-service "
"Aye! Fed like the Government on Russian promises!" swore Usbeg Ali. Then he pointed with a gesture of scorn to the ragged line of men. "These be thy sons and grandsons, probably?"
The Persian scowled. "These men go with the horses, and will bring them back," he answered.
"So, father of a flock of billy-goats! Thy offspring do thee a great credit; they stink and look like the true old stock!"
He continued to heap ridicule on them, and to think of and suggest unspeakable relationships, until a more than usually acid jest produced a loud laugh from a room above the gate and betrayed the whereabouts of the Cossack officer.
"Who has his orders?" roared Usbeg Ali instantly. "Step forward—march!"
He signified the hidden officer with a movement of his thumb, and at once, browbeaten and bereft of half their senses, twelve of the men took a pace toward him.
"Ha!" he laughed. "Then I take the others! To Jehannum with you twelve, or to Russia (the two are one)! Line up, the rest! About turn! Ten of you are enough; take each two horses—twenty horses in all—so! Are there no Cossacks who will come with me?" he shouted derisively. "I would dearly love to teach a dozen Cossacks discipline!"
But the Russian in the room above the gate gave not another sign of his existence, although Usbeg Ali took good care that his voice should carry; nor did he give the signal from the wall above that would have brought a half squadron thundering down from a mile-off hill to avenge his hurt feelings. He behaved as no Cossack officer would dream of doing excepting when under orders.
But Usbeg Ali, however he chose to seem, was no mere loud-mouthed brawler. The taunts he flung and his atrocious insults may have seemed gratuitous, but good reason underlaid his insolence. As he rode in he had seen the fresh dung and the boot-marks of two or three troops at least. He was quite sure they would not have left their unattended officer far behind, or for any length of time. Therefore this was a plan, and possibly a trap.
He had proved to his satisfaction that no reprisals were to be allowed just yet, whatever he did or said. And well he knew his Asia. Full well he knew that first impressions should be rubbed in hard; and he, too, had a plan, quick-plucked out of uncertainty. He took all Cossacks' and all Russia's name in vain at the top of his lungs, impressing on the Persians his own fearlessness and the Cossack officer's unusual lack of arrogance—to put the least construction on it.
"Do you feed that Cossack double-headed eagle in the cage up there on worms or pig-meat?" he jeered.
"Why is there no answer?" wondered the stable-hands. "Why is he not arrested or shot down? Is the officer afraid?"
And while the Cossack up in his hiding-place swore between set teeth and the others wondered, Usbeg Ali satisfied himself on certain points to the degree of absolute conviction.
"So the Russians back in Baku know that we have landed, eh?" he reasoned, "For me—an Afghan—there would be no orders to hold hard. The Cossacks would have leave to work their sweet will on me and my seven. They know Dee-k-Antonee has landed, and they have learned by telegraph a description of him and of his prowess that has turned their bones to water! So far, so good!"
But his war-trained brain assured him there had been a trap laid. Orders given in advance to stable-hands, and troops of cavalry that galloped out of sight when one man came, were proof to him of preconcerted plan.
"Perhaps," he argued to himself, "they have heard how Dee-k-Antonee slit a road for the rest of us through the Cossack ranks in Baku, and they wait this time for a regiment or two! But nay, that can not be! By the tracks I saw I know they are more than a hundred, and we be ten men, and they know it! Nay! A hundred are not afraid of ten! It is the woman! It is that Princess woman who is after him! She has given orders he must not be slain—she wants him alive! So-ho, there has been a trap laid, eh? So that is why the Cossacks dare not answer insults? Insults, eh? Allah prod my memory!"
WHILE the men packed provisions on three of the horses, he sat his horse below the gateway and sang a Persian song that some humorist composed a hundred years ago who had designs on Russia's fame. Line after line and verse after verse punned around the theory that Russia's name and infamy are one. The mere mention of its title, as a rule, is cause enough to set Cossacks shouting a knout; yet the man in uniform in the little four-square room above the gate kept silent.
So, with a final cat-call of derision and a last peppery jest, that included all Russia and all Cossacks, horse, infantry, and guns, in one atrocious summary, Usbeg Ali marshaled his little party and set it clattering through the gate in the direction of the camp. He waited under the gate, where he was reasonably safe, for two or three minutes, listening for the sound of a breech-block or of revolver mechanism; but he heard no suggestion of reprisals.
So he galloped on as hard as his horse could scamper, making a difficult target of himself as a matter of principle. (Soldiers, he believed, are killed oftenest and made prisoners oftenest when overconfident.)
"Are we all Mohammedans?" he asked at the top of his lungs as he caught up. He laid calculated emphasis on the unexpected "we."
"Aye—aye—aye!" came the ready answers; for even in Persia, where religion, as well as every other virtuous thing, has been corrupted and debauched by Russia's agents, a hint at the unity of Islam is even still the surest bridge to common ground.
"And that louse-bound Cossack officer, skulking up yonder in his chamber to save his skin, what might he be? Pig-fed, by any chance? Aye—the pig-lice crawl on him! His saddle and his boots are pig-skin, and he smears the pig-grease in his hair!"
Not much of the indictment was even approximately true, but that did not prevent a grin and a murmur of applause; for Usbeg AH had lit shrewdly on the only prejudice all Persia holds in common. The meanest atheist eschews the thought of pig—and some Cossacks eat pig, or anything.
"Ho! Followers of Islam!" He flattered them at the limit of his soldier-lungs, well knowing that not one of the ragged ten deserved the title. "I lead you now to see a man of men, to see a warrior, to see a king, who landed in the morning mist with a sword hung at his side that once Iskander wore—Iskander!—the sword of him who conquered all the world!"
He waited to let the name of Alexander the Great sink in and work on their sleepy minds.
"Ho! But ye are favored!" he began again. "Ho! But ye are fortunate, since Allah chose ye to be first to see Iskander come again—the same Iskander, the Great Iskander, bearing a new name—now called Dee-k-Antonee. Ye will be the first to see him—great, golden-headed—tended by his giant, and girded with a two-edged sword, sharp for the slaying!"
They were all ears now, for in Persia all the warring sects, and unbelievers as well, unite to almost deify Alexander of Macedon. There is no tale too wild to tell about him, no prophecy about him too far-fetched to win belief. He has become a myth, and all the fairy-tales and fabulous adventures have been added to his actual accomplishments; and, as should be, his failings have been relegated to oblivion or his enemies.
USBEG ALI, pulling out and riding a little to the right that he might keep the line in something like military order, saw with his watchful soldier-eye that he had their whole attention. So then he began to sing a song to them, that he composed in Persian as he rode, to a wild, appealing tune that got its birth where ice-winds rip down from the Himalayas—a tune to curdle a man's marrow, and yet make him ache for more.
He sang of the dawn of history, and mixed his facts and dates until he had Mohammed, Allah's Prophet, and Iskander both together in one blast of conquest. And they believed the song, where words in unimaginative prose would very likely have set them to disputing. How could poetry be otherwise than true? Did not Allah make all poetry?
He sang about the Great Iskander's sword that the Prophet gave him, with the charge to establish Islam—the two-edged sword with a beryl in the hilt, "than which no greater beryl, nor a bluer, nor a stone more strangely cut, had yet been seen by living man." He made up a veritable saga on the sword's account, more than half believing it himself before the words had left his lips, and ready to believe it quite and swear to it on the Koran within a week.
He told how, when the conquest of the earth was finished and Iskander stood, alone in prayer, on a Himalayan summit, where the roots of heaven rested, he stretched up the sword, hilt first, to heaven, saying he had done what he set out to do. And an eagle came, sang Usbeg Ali—a white eagle with green eyes, who bore the sword away between his talons.
He sang then how the eagle flew with the sword forever back and forth between the earth and sun until, in Allah's hour, another Great Iskander—this time King of Scotland, in Faranghistan, but according to Usbeg Ali none the less a good Mohammedan, needed aid against his enemies.
Then, so ran the rambling saga, the eagle flew at Allah's bidding and, giving the sword to this new Iskander, bade him choose a man to wield it in the fight. He chose a man among his chieftains who was known as Antonee and—that, he sang, meant golden-headed, fearless one—giving him the sword, as ordered, and sending him to lead the van. Then, lo! the enemy was vanquished. Then the fleets of foreign tyrants were wide-scattered on the sea. Then came the eagle with another prophesy that now, even now, that minute, near the Caspian, was ripening to be fulfilled.
Father to son, eldest-born to eldest-born, the clan of Antonee should have that sword in keeping, until there should be born into the line a king with golden hair, whose name would be Dee-k-Antonee. "For does not Dee in the language of Faranghistan mean He will conquer?" Dee-k-Antonee should prove to be none other than the Great Iskander come to life again, and he should take the sword down from its resting-place and bear it over-sea until he reached the Caspian. There, screamed at by the eagle, he should step out of the morning mist, to conquer where he led of old time. "He has come!" Usbeg Ali ended in a gorgeous flight of fancy. "The eagle screamed! A mist split open! He has come! Dee-k-Antonee has come!"
He neglected to invent a reason why this new Iskander should not seem to be Mohammedan. Perhaps he thought it better not to call attention yet to the delinquency. Surely the shrewd, imaginative soldier did not dream that Dick could be induced to stomach Islam!
To call Dick's tawny, close-cropped hair golden was but poetic license; he incurred no risk of disappointing them, for after that song of his they were ready to imagine anything, given the least excuse. Red and gold were near enough! So was the legend near enough! There had been once an Alexander who was king of Scotland; there had been an Anthony who fought for him at Largs, to whom he gave a sword after the fight as a token of distinction. The descendant of that Anthony, with what was said to be that sword, had landed that morning on the Caspian shore! Many and many a national saga, that men would rather die for than disbelieve, is grounded on a lesser truth than that!
AND the luck was all with Usbeg Ali, as it usually is with men whose eyes are skinned and whose wit plays second to their pluck. Dick, who would have been mad-angry had he guessed a fragment of the Afghan's game, and who would never under any circumstances have agreed to it, was all unwittingly setting the stage to rights and getting ready for a perfect climax.
Bored, as he always was when there was nothing strenuous and difficult to do, he had pulled his bagpipes and Andry's out of their joint traveling-bag. He played a tune or two, and Andry tried as well, but was prevented by his injured arm. So Lancaster took Andry's pipes, and Dick gave him a lesson, with Andry lying down, looking on.
Lancaster, who had not a note of music in his soul, nor any ethics other than his loyalty to High Finance, failed utterly to coax the semblance of a tune out of the thing. But he was childishly, sillily amused with the weird discords he could make, and chose to lie on his camp-bed after a while and send excruciating cries through the chanter at uncertain intervals. So Dick put his own pipes away and, because to do nothing was the hardest work he knew, bethought him of the boar's blood on his claymore. Usually Andry cleaned the sword and kept it brighter than a mirror; now Dick busied himself about the polishing and took his time doing the job thoroughly.
And while Dick polished, Usbeg Ali's active brain was busy, at the canter, contriving new details of his plan. Well he understood by this time Dick's danger and the probable impossibility of making Dick believe in the extent of it. With a soldier's ready wit he had seized instantly on the opportunity to create support for Dick of a kind that would be likely to act first and argue afterward. Like the Russian Government, Usbeg Ali wanted Dick committed to a course. Unlike the Russian Government, he wanted that course to be along the road to Kabul, and he prayed, as did Russia, for an insurrection in the hills, in order that Dick might be driven in the right direction. But he did not trouble to look very far ahead. First, support; then, the fighting; after that Allah would attend to things, and none knew Allah's plans!
He wanted this rabble of a post-horse party to be Dick's advance-guard, the messengers of rumor, sowing rumor. It suited him better that they were not fighting-men, but the meanest of the mean along that frontier; their very meanness would give them access where men who dared have high chins would be shot at sight. He did not try to stir their martial courage, supposing that they had any; he even took care to quench whatever sparks of it his saga might have stirred. But he worked on their imaginations to the limit of his power and of their credulity.
"Listen," he shouted, "followers of Islam!" And they loved him while they listened, because he accorded them a title to which none of them had any right; to a man they were rank backsliders. "First, we will canter to the seashore where will be seven men of my race. So ran the prophecy! There will be seven Afghans waiting by the sea, with saddles but no horses, with baggage but no transport, with no sign of a ship that brought them, and yet with new, unsoiled shoes in proof that they did not march! Them we will take with us!"
"Witchcraft!" murmured one man to another, and Usbeg Ali heard him. For a little while longer he saw fit to sing Dick's praises and work up their curiosity until it was irresistible; but he did not say or sing a word to undermine the witchcraft notion; he always accepted any luck that Allah sent him! He merely did his best to keep their nerves unstartled for the present, and to build up the makings of a stampede when the time should come.
ONCE the party did stop on the way. The inevitable self-appointed spokesman for the crowd argued that such miserable men as they were no fit men to greet the Great Iskander. He would be angry. Then what would their advantage be? Where was the profit in beholding greatness, if the greatness slew them?
So Usbeg Ali laughed and sang, and warned them they must look and run.
"Deliver ye the horses, gaze, and run for your lives then, True Believers! What are these ye bring? Horses? Fit horses, these, for the great Dee-k-Antonee? Such galls! Such sore-backs! Such spavins! Such empty bellies and lean ribs! Nay, look ye once and run! Wait not for his wrath! Run then to the mountains and win merit by proclaiming who has come! Bid them get better horses! Bid them prepare a welcome! Whither would ye run now—to the Cossacks? Ye were there—ye heard what I said! Ye may guess what a friendship the Cossack officer will feel for underlings who listened to the talk I gave him! Ye listened, and then came with me! Think what the Cossacks will do if ye return! Nay, ye had better ride ahead, where I will befriend you, and then run to the hills where no Cossacks are!"
He convinced them partly with jeers, partly with argument, and most of all by stirring their insensate curiosity. Within ten minutes he had them cantering on again, close-huddled in a little timid pack, conveying a sense of nervous expectancy to the horses down the sinews of their trembling legs.
They cantered in sight of the two white tents and swerved for the seashore instantly. For a mile or two then Usbeg Ali made strange signals as he rode; he assured them that he waved his arms to guard against witchcraft and powers unseen, and they grew less timid as they saw no seven Afghans, though their eyes could search the whole plain down to the seashore reeds.
But Usbeg Ali left off signaling. And suddenly seven armed men in turbans leaped from the long, coarse grass and leveled automatic pistols at them in grim silence. Usbeg Ali gave curt orders in a tongue they did not understand, and the seven mounted. After that there was no chance of escape, for each of the seven had a dagger at his belt and a hand that twitched to use it. In silence, most unwillingly, the Persians rode the mile that lay between them and the tents, noting with fear-widened eyes a pile of baggage that was left behind, that there was no sign of a ship, and that the seven wore new shoes!
An eagle soared overhead, following the cortège with uncanny persistence. True, this eagle was not white, but they had forgotten by this time that the eagle of Usbeg Ali's saga was u white one; and who could tell whether this bird had green eyes or not? He looked big enough to hold a saber in his talons, and they would have sworn on the Koran that he did so hold a saber had Usbeg Ali asked them to. They would have sworn to anything. It took the ceaseless vigilance of all of Usbeg Ali's men and many a hint in gesture to prevent them from stampeding, particularly when there came, surely from the eagle overhead (they were ready to swear to that, too), a weird, wild, disconcerting note that set the goose-flesh rising and the terror crawling up and down their backbones. An eagle who made a noise like that most positively had green eyes!
But a word in a tongue they did not know brought the daggers out of the belts of Usbeg Ali's men; and a death that is close beside is worse than a death not yet discernible; they chose the lesser of two dangers, and rode on. They rode very slowly, very grudgingly, but the mile rolled up, and the two while tents drew near, and a man, with a drawn sword in his hand, arose from between the Lents to look at them.
They halted then. They were beyond the zone of argument. They would rather die, and they would have died rather than ride on another yard.
True to Usbeg Ali's most minute description of him, with the Caspian sun-rays glinting golden from his bare red head, a man stood as kings ought to stand, and smiled as a man should who is unafraid and quite uncovetous. He spoke in a strong, strange voice that carried far, and a giant arose beside him from the grass. Then the eagle screamed again; from nowhere, unless from the sky above, where the eagle turned in widening circles, came a thrice-repeated, thirty-three-times-awful hell-squawk. Usbeg Ali broke the spell with an Afghan oath, that called Allah too to listen to it, and the Persians broke and fled. Over the cruppers, sidewise, forward, anyhow that they could leave the horses, they decamped in a wild stampede, headed for the foothills, that showed low and blue on the very far horizon.
"What did you say to frighten them?" asked Dick. "And why aren't they headed straight for home?"
"Nay, sahib, it was none of my doing!" answered Usbeg Ali. "They fear Cossacks behind them. And as we came they talked of an eagle, and of a man with golden hair, and of bloody war. There is an eagle overhead," he added, looking up.
"Why didn't you bring your baggage along?" asked Dick. "You'd better go for it, and we'll see how far we can travel before night. The mountains tempt me much more than the plain."
"Ma spine still itches!" muttered Andry, reaching around his undamaged arm to scratch. "Unless I'm lousy—an' I'm not—that means fechtin', verra sune!"
THERE was no pause in the game the Okhrana played, although there did seem a few days of peace while Lancaster led Dick and his party up over the spurs of the Elburz Mountains, traveling far more slowly than the "banker" wished because Dick would not overtax the poor, leg-weary horses. They had no means of knowing that a Cossack regiment had taken advantage of their dallying to make a ring around them and precede them to the hills; their chief anxiety was the minor one of how to keep Andry from falling off a horse and how to pick, in turns, the horses that were strong enough to carry him.
But while they laughed at Andry, and Andry swore venomously at the pain in his arm and the hardness of the native saddle, while they camped in the open under Usbeg Ali's blankets, and not even Lancaster troubled to have the tents pitched, there was a trick played in which laughter did not enter, back in Baku, where the Princess awaited orders.
She had gone to Egypt trusted to the limit by the secret power that trusts only when its control is absolute; and it had been one thing then to help bribe Egypt's politicians, to pick Dick Anthony from out a swarm of lesser men, and to try to use both for the Okhrana's ends. England's empire was fair enough game, and Dick Anthony a pawn.
But it was another, vastly other thing to sit now and be told that she must trap the man she loved. She had learned to love as only women of her type ever do—so fiercely, so passionately, yet so enduringly that they die unless their energies have rein. She loved like a caged she-tiger; and she looked like a calm, sweet wisp of femininity—something girlish, altogether innocent, as she sat and waited for the man who had promised he would write, but changed his mind and sent word he would come.
But a month or two ago this man would have been taking orders from herself. But she had come back from Egypt having failed, and the Okhrana never overlooks; she knew well that she was more than usually fortunate to have one opportunity to reinstate herself.
Partly impelled by pride, partly by anxiety to save Dick's life, and partly because in the last resort her wish was master of her thought, she had allowed the supposition to gain credence that Dick was her lover as much as she was his. The theory of a lover's quarrel served to save her face, while she contrived a means of making Dick see sense as she saw it; and she would not have been the first woman, by a very long way, to tame her lover in Siberia; her effort to have him arrested needed little explanation.
"WE believe this love-affair of yours has undermined your loyalty," said the stooped, gray-headed man who called on her. For a moment her look was wild, as the extent of her downfall was borne in on her.
He spoke like a family physician diagnosing a disease, regretting that it should be so, but facing facts. And it was characteristic of the self-propagation of the ever-spreading evil he represented that his accusation, leveled at her then, should be the seed of future double-dealing. Until that minute she had never dreamed, even in her wildest hour, of playing the Okhrana false; but his suggestion of the possibility showed her in a flash a new way to new freedom.
"Do you expect me to waste words denying what you have decided to believe?" she asked.
"No, hardly that. You are advised to listen. We believe that, without exactly knowing it, you have forgotten whom you serve, and have played for your own hand; you are invited to remember that as one of us you are personally altogether unimportant. In that connection, you would do well to remember Stolypin and Plehve, each of whom considered himself greater than the power that raised him."
"Do you think I am afraid of death?" she asked unguardedly. Her cue was to be silent, but even she was not always quite under control.
"There are varieties of death," he smiled, stroking his little gray mustache. "And there are marriages that lead to death through annoying overtures. Now, if your aim should happen to be personal aggrandizement, I recommend a suitable marriage as the proper course."
She shuddered, and he grinned at her for at least a minute. Well she knew that no such punishment as clumsy murder would be necessary in her case.
A word from the Okhrana (and no one knows how high the Okhrana does not reach in Russia), a word from the Czar (and his word, whoever prompts it, is final), and she would be married with terrific ceremony to a man whose rank made him her "equal," whose estates, about the size of Belgium, were a far, forgotten relic of a feudal past—far from society, forgotten by progress, buried beyond the reach of liberty or law.
The Duke, who would be her master then in lieu of the Okhrana, had not enough attractions on his own account to win him a wife without the Czar's assistance.
"THIS Anthony is likely to be very useful to us—very," said her caller, watching the expression of her face minutely in the full-length mirror opposite. He judged that she had had all the whip it would be good to give her. "Spirited mares should be whipped and shown the road," he told himself.
"Is there no credit due to me for having picked him out, and brought him to Russia and called attention to him?"
"Certainly," he said. "I was coming to that point." He laid a confidential, gloved hand on her knee, and she shuddered again, so he withdrew it. "You chose him, certainly. And however ill you may have managed him in Egypt and elsewhere, it is none the less evident that he is most unmanageable, and that you know him better than anybody else does. It happens, too, that there is no other woman with your natural abilities who could be used in northern Persia; there are no roads, no railways, no civilized conveniences—it will not be a picnic!"
Again she shuddered; and again he smiled.
"Then what am I required to do?" she asked in a voice that would have aroused the envy of the greatest actress. She contrived to express submission, the intention to behave, self-abnegation, half-humorous apology, loathing of the thought of Persia, all in one short sentence. There was not a hint of triumph in her note; she was all humility, and even her wonderful eyes looked tamed. So his voice changed too as lie grew off his guard. He did not pity her, for the Okhrana pities nobody; but he was convinced.
"Ride. Get in touch with Anthony, and keep in touch with him. It is all-important that somebody we trust should be in touch with him and us, and should keep us posted while at the same time egging him on to the point where we can really advertise him as an insurrection. We want no more 'brigands in being'; the press of Europe and America has seen through that game, and of all the brigands we have subsidized there has not been one who was man enough to amount to anything; it has been like turning one steer at a time into a bull-ring. Some of them robbed a few foreigners, and the foreign Governments complained enough for us to send down a few more sotnias, but we want an army there, and nothing less. As excuse for a real army, we want somebody bigger than a brigand. Do you follow me?"
She nodded, and her eyes had taken on the look of dreamy, distant innocence they always wore when she was thinking fastest and most dangerously. Truly she followed him! She followed him, and went a distance farther!
"What excuse will there be, to give him, and to give the world, for my presence in northern Persia?" she asked.
"Concessions—title-deeds!" he answered promptly. "Your father, of sainted memory—" he smiled sardonically, and she eyed him sidewise with a glance that was untranslatable—"bought, for a consideration, certain lands in the Elburz Mountain Range, with all the mineral-rights. As his heiress you have the undoubted right to travel and inspect those lands. As a princess of Russia, it is only proper that a sotnia of Cossacks, at the least, should go with you for your protection, or should at least be at your disposal. Is that not so?"
"The title-deeds?" she asked.
"We have them—here—in this." He touched a small portfolio.
"Genuine or forged?"
"There always was sufficient doubt about the doings of your—ah—sainted father to— ah—lend obscurity to the related facts," he answered. "In this instance, my idea is that there might be ground for a dispute, in the course of which, perhaps, the Persian Government might do something ill-advised, and—ah—we seem, in fact, forearmed against all contingencies."
"Then I am to claim possession of mineral-lands?"
"Yes. No need, though, to send in an official claim at once. Explain all you like, but write little. For our part, we will see to a very keen censorship on everything coming out of Persia; no news will come through without our editing, and very little news, if any, will reach the British Minister in Teheran. We will semi down rifles and ammunition for Anthony to capture, immediately you give the word; and if you let us know that Lancaster's friends want to run some guns to him, we'll see to it that the guns get through. Get in touch with Anthony as quickly as you can. Encourage him. Play the traitress. To the world, you are traveling to inspect your late father's property. To Anthony, you are there only to help him, and you will do well to pretend to help him against Russia. And mind you help him! Help him to the point where he is big enough to justify an army corps against him! Do you understand?"
"Quite," she said quietly.
"Your prerogatives are not curtailed in any way. You indent for what you want. You draw for what money you may need, on whatever bank may be convenient. The details of your movements may be of your own devising; in fact, you are not hampered in any way. But on this occasion you are invited to succeed! No more millions of rubles, please, without result to us! The Okhrana does not give—it buys!"
They talked on and on, but always the tenor of his argument amounted to the same. "You have a free hand; you will work behind closed doors; you may draw upon unlimited reserves; the wires are yours, the troops, and the police; you are above the law. But—don't fail this time!" He gave her a new code-book, whose key had to be memorized, and a map or two to show the distances and means of communication. Then he left her to her own devices, to undertake a "campaign" from whose difficulties and discomforts ninety per cent of grown men would have flinched.
He left her, chuckling to himself at the thought of Persian "roads" and caravansaries and "bite-the-stranger" bugs, chuckling at the cruelty to be inflicted on her and the awful difficulty of her task. But she engaged her passage over the Caspian and set out smiling. She set out happier than she had been since the midnight when she nestled in Dick's arms on the deck of the stricken Greek steamer and he had fought like a bull at bay for her life.
And, to show what her magnetism was and how complete her charm, her maid—a cosmopolitan, typical lady's maid—refused to be left behind, but grumbling bitterly at the destination and doubling all its horrors in her own imagination, made ready to share the road. The same maid would have seen any other mistress dead before she would have budged a mile away from trains and taxicabs. The same maid bore scars on her body that the Princess had inflicted before they came to understand each other quite so well.
ONLY one law runs in northern Persia—a totally illegal one of Russia's imposition, giving leave to Russia's agents to arrest on mere suspicion of being a Russian subject. Arrest means imprisonment without trial; and imprisonment, under Russian auspices, implies every horror, describable and indescribable, that can take place behind closed doors.
So the Persians who had fled at the sight of Dick and the scream of the bagpipes played by Lancaster gave them more than ordinary haste. Provided there is fear to drive them or lust to draw, Easterns of their type can travel faster across country than most cavalry can move, and until they reached the foothills these fled like blown dust, for fear whispered to them while they ran that one Cossack with but half an eye could see and shoot them all across the level land. But once in the foothills, where one army could have hidden from another, Eastern lethargy regained its rule, and while they dawdled a regiment of Cossacks overtook them, passed them while they hid, and apparently cared nothing about any presence but its own.
For sake of appearances, the Russian Commandant had written orders with him that bade him hunt "brodyagi" in the Elburz Mountains; the orders were a sample of the cunning that underlies all Russia's moves. Brodyagi is the generic name for fugitives from Siberia; and very few of those reach any frontier, for the trails are fierce and the countryside is armed against them; the orders, though, implied almost a traffic in brodyagi into northern Persia, assumed a right to hunt across the border for them, and implied that Persia would not or else could not do the work herself. There was not a word mentioned in the writing about Dick Anthony, who was the real, and only real, reason for the Cossacks' march.
At a point where three hill-spurs coincided at a ridge and the only passage to the mountain-range beyond was a neck of land, well-wooded, that narrowed gradually to a notch of fifty feet between two cliffs, to open again into a natural walled amphitheater, the Russians bivouacked. And there, one by one, eight of the straggling, leg-weary victims of Usbeg Ali Khan's imagination strolled into the trap and were made prisoners; they were recognized instantly and flogged by Russian Cossacks for having deserted a Persian service. It was the crack of a knout and a victim's scream that warned the last two in time; they turned aside, climbed the unclimbable, preferring nearly certain death to the chance of Cossack mercy, and hurried to the mountains by a jackal-trail. They reached a camp of refugees in a valley of the next range half dead and wholly convincing because they had been so thoroughly convinced themselves.
"Dee-k-Antonee has come!" they insisted. "He has come with his sword, and his giant, and his eagle, and his eight Afghans, to conquer all the world and drive the Russians off it! Even now there is a regiment of Cossacks in a trap, and Dee-k-Antonee is on his way to massacre them!"
THEY were telling their story for the twentieth time to a swarm of fierce, bearded men who listened with cocked rifles on their knees and cursed at each mention of the name of Russia, when Dick Anthony, blissfully unconscious of impending trouble, breasted the rise before the Russians' gap, riding at the head of his little party.
There was no secret about Dick's coming, nor any about the way he felt. He was happy to be living in the open, happy to have men behind him whom he trusted, much too happy to be troubled by Lancaster's incessant grumbling. The world seemed very pleasant to him; he had four hundred pounds a year to his name that was piling up at home; he had the best part of three years yet in which to wander where he chose; and he was being useful in the meantime; he was riding now to put new heart in men who needed it, and to promise them that the British public should be made aware of their predicament.
Over and again he thanked Providence, devoutly and reverently, that he should be an Anthony of Arran and that therefore men at home would listen to him and believe when he told what he had seen. His whole nature thrilled at the thought of serving an all-but-lost cause and stirring a forlorn hope; even the poor old horse he rode, which was recovering under decent treatment from the rigors of Persian post-service, gathered new spirit and cavorted as it sensed the thrill. Dick was still bareheaded—still satisfied that the hair God gave him was enough for all purposes. The old two-edged sword with its jeweled basket-hilt still hung from an old Sam Brown belt at his hip; and his mood as he rode was advertised by the tune he played, for the rocks to echo back. He had his precious bagpipes out, and over his shoulder the beribboned drones were monotoning their fierce accompaniment to "Scots Wha Hae!"
"HALT!" rang a sudden order, and Dick halted. A Cossack outpost brought his rifle to the challenge, and the music ceased.
"Put your hands up!"
The soldier spoke in Russian, but Dick understood him.
"Shoot, if you feel that way!" he said in English; then he legged his horse forward, feeling nearly certain that the Russian would not dare, but in a mood to run the risk for the sake of the opportunity of advertising Russia's method. He was riding to encourage men who thought about Russia much as he did, and he was in no mood to admit a Russian's right to challenge him in Persian territory.
At the sound of voices his whole party, except Lancaster and the baggage-train, came cantering up, and Andry, throwing himself out of a saddle that he liked and trusted less than a volcano-top, came close beside him on the two legs he could trust anywhere, under any circumstances. Then a Cossack officer showed himself in the middle of the gap and said something in a quiet voice to the man who had challenged; for answer, the rifle-butt went to the ground again.
"Have a care, sahib!" whispered Usbeg Ali. "See the smoke of twenty fires beyond the rise! They be many and we but ten, for Lancaster sahib is no fighter—he hides already among the baggage-animals!"
"I'll stan' between ye an' yon man there, Mr. Dicky!" said Andry. "I see twa pistols!"
He pressed past, to cover Dick with his great breadth; but Dick seized his shoulder in a grip that hurt and hurled him behind again.
"How long will it take you to learn your place?" he asked savagely. Then his voice changed to its ordinary, confidence-inspiring note as he turned to Usbeg Ali Khan on his other hand; he seemed instantly to have forgotten Andry's interruption, to have put it out of mind before the next words left his lips.
"Are you certain we're in Persia?" he asked.
"Surely, Bahadur."
"Quite sure these mountains are not Russian territory?"
"Sahib, they were Persia's since the world began!"
Dick's strange eyes blazed, and had the Russian had the luck to see him once or twice in a fighting mood, as Andry had and Usbeg Ali Khan, he would have called up his regiment there and then and finished the trouble before it could properly begin. But he made the mistake of thinking Dick an ordinary man; and he had his orders, which gave him very little latitude.
"For the love o' Scotland, give me a weapon, somebody!" said Andry in fierce undertones, and Usbeg Ali Khan slipped him a dagger. The rest loosened their sabers in the scabbards and looked to their automatic pistols when they judged the Russian's eye was not on them. Without another word to anybody Dick rode on and they pressed in a cluster after him.
"Halt!" cried the Russian officer.
"For whom?" demanded Dick, still advancing. "Who are you?" He spoke English, for it did not suit his purpose yet, or at any time, to admit that he knew Russian, and he could keep his own counsel more consistently than any man on that frontier. He was in the stiff, guarded, uncompromising, stubborn frame of mind now that has put so many Scotsmen where they are in the councils of the world. But the Russian could not be expected to recognize his master in a mere Scots gentleman with one spare shirt and a bagpipes to his name.
"I am Commandant," he answered, "of this regiment of Cossacks, and at present I blockade this pass!"
He answered in English, and spoke fairly well, although without much fluency.
"On whose behalf?" asked Dick, advancing closer yet. Question and answer all but struck sparks, and the hillsides seemed to listen for the coming outburst. The Russian had grown straight-lipped under his mustache, but it was only Dick's level voice that betrayed emotion; his attitude was one of little more than interest.
"On Persia's behalf," said the Cossack officer.
"Then show me your authority!" said Dick, still advancing. He had satisfied himself by now that the Russian challenge was a bluff, and he hated and despised bluff. Personally he might not appear dangerous, for he had only the claymore in the Sam Brown at his side; but behind him were Usbeg Ali and seven others, with lethal weapons enough to arm twice their number. Had the Russian meant fight, either he would have fired already or would have summoned enough men to make good his boast of a blockade; but instead the officer turned on his heel and, with a motion of his arm that was more than half contemptuous, led the way through the gap.
"Here is my authority!" he smiled.
DOWN two sides of the natural amphitheater a regiment stood by its arms; a little farther off, amid the trees, the horses grazed at the end of picket-ropes, saddled and ready.
"There is no road this way!" sneered the officer, doing his best to pick a quarrel on the first, directest line that offered. "We don't allow Britishers or Afghans or robbers of any kind!"
He could have offered that kind of insult for a week without arousing more than Dick's pity or amusement; but there was a better cue than that, a first-class fighting-cue, all ready for use, that he had staged unwittingly. One of the Persian prisoners left the rest, who were huddled together under the overhanging shelter of a rock, and rushed toward Dick, flinging himself face-downward.
"Get up!" ordered Dick in Persian. But the man lay there, alternately clutching at the horse's forefeet and beating the earth with flat, open palms. There was something hideously pitiful about his attitude and voice, and his words ran into one another like the ravings of a madman.
"Mighty Prince, mighty Prince, O, mighty Prince!" he kept babbling, and presently, his eyes sharpened by suspicion of the Cossack officer's grin, Dick noticed something underneath the man's torn shirt. So he passed his pipes to Andry and dismounted, opening the shirt before the Russian could move to prevent him.
"Did you do that?" he asked, looking straight into the Russian's eyes; and the Russian looked uneasy, for Dick's eyes were the windows of a strong man's strength, and strength is not measured by numbers, cartridges, or cutlery.
"I ordered it!" he grinned.
"You skunk!"
The poor, shivering wretch's back was laced and cross-laced with bloody seams where a Cossack knout had cut the flesh in strips but a day or two before. The wounds were half washed and festering in places.
"Is he a Russian subject?" demanded Dick.
"God forbid!" said the officer, realizing that he had his quarrel made, and proceeding to bring matters to a head.
"Hurry back and get the emergency-kit from Mr. Lancaster!" Dick ordered savagely, and an Afghan galloped off; but he had no sooner started than the Cossack officer gave orders of his own, and a series of incidents took place too quickly to be stopped by question, act, or argument.
"I'll call you to account for this as surely as I stand on Persian soil!" vowed Dick, all unaware how soon his words would be fulfilled. He had in mind long letters to the Times and to the Foreign Office, and questions to be asked in Parliament and in the House of Lords. It was the Russian who took action that withdrew the settlement from diplomatic channels.
TWO dozen Cossacks doubled at his bidding and took position, in two lines facing, in the middle of the amphitheater. Four more men seized the wretched Persian almost from under Dick's feet, and ran with him; they laid him face downward between the two lines, and another man—a non-commissioned officer— stepped forward, armed with a knotted knout. He whirled the lash above his head and cracked it until the poor wretch on the ground shrieked in anticipation.
"I will show you," said the officer, addressing Dick, "what insolent and disobedient people may expect at my hands!" He had not moved; he was standing between Dick and the victim, and for one minute Dick was spell-bound. He had read and he had heard, but he had never believed that such brutality was possible. "This man was ordered to lie yonder with the others; he has disobeyed; now watch what he gets for disobedience!—Begin!" he ordered, signing to the sergeant.
Crack! came the whip. The suffering Persian moaned and writhed as blood welled out anew across his quivering back. Thud! went a fist—Dick Anthony's—and the Cossack officer reeled backward, staggered, fell
"You bloody fiend!"
The dam was down now, and the law of nations melted into supposititious nothing, together with all theories of odds. Dick, with eight behind him, did not choose to run, nor yet to stand and see iniquity. Dick's sword was out; no word passed, but a whole regiment could read his offer to finish matters there and then. And behind Dick, Usbeg Ali and six Afghans dismounted, sent their horses galloping back the way they came in proof that there would be no flinching, and drew too. Only Andry had no weapon that was worth a giant's while; but he had what was better. His injured right arm would have spoiled his sword-play, but it was supple enough by now to let his fingers dance along a chanter.
Before the Russian officer could stagger to his feet, and before any other officer could gather wits enough to shout an order, the drones were dirging over Andry's shoulder and the leather bag was filling fast. An instant later the mountain echoed to the strains of "Cock o' the North!" Lilting, laughing, dare-the-devil music shrieked defiance, and to the tune of it—to the swinging, swaying, swaggering quick-step time— Dick led his nine men forward, straight down the middle of the pass between two armed halves of a regiment, and took a new stand by the tortured Persian.
"As a British officer in the territory of a friendly power, I take this man under my protection!" he declared.
It was the devil of a predicament for the Russians, because their orders not to kill Dick Anthony were strict. But there were no orders about his men; and at that instant the Afghan who had gone for bandages came galloping back; it occurred to the Russian officer that to shoot this man would be blood for blood, as well as a lesson to Dick Anthony. His lips were too smashed up from Dick's blow to make speech easy, so he took aim himself. Instantly a shot from Usbeg Ali Khan's Colt automatic knocked the pistol from the Russian's hand; and at that the flood took charge. The Cossacks broke rank and closed in, to shouts in Russian of: "Don't kill him! Take him alive and beat him first, then drive him to the mountains!" No shots were fired; they came on with cold steel, and some men ran for picket-ropes; but the bagpipes shrieked their taunting tune, and the quarry stood at bay with the mien and attitude of practised swordsmen. Another horse went galloping back to the baggage-animals, and now there were nine long, skilfully held swords, not one of which would fail to kill at least one man, to say nothing of two automatic pistols in each Afghan's belt. At close range, the thing was not good enough!
The momentary lull in their enthusiasm was turned into a check and then a halt by shouts from the Russian rear and the sound of shooting. Outposts galloped in from beyond the neck leading to the mountains, and a lot of shouting was followed by a quick return of discipline. Half of the Cossacks formed and wheeled to fight on the defensive, for the mountain refugees had come in force to test for themselves the truth of the tale about Dee-k-Antonee. Andry's bagpipe-music had laughed away their disbelief with its first three bars, and now they were hurrying to help massacre the Russians! They were reported to be coming, too, in more force and with greater determination than could easily be dealt with by one regiment with another quarrel on its hands as well. Shouts from the Russian officers told that, orders or no orders to the contrary, Dick was to be finished off in a hurry, that the whole regiment might face and fight one way.
But Dick, too, had reached a sudden resolution, and before the Russian plan was changed his was in action and gaining speed. A leader who can lead by dint of being is all that ten good fighters lack to give them the advantage over numbers.
"Forward!" Dick shouted. And the cheeks of the giant Andry swelled and grew purple with his effort as the little party extended into line and swept forward.
It was not luck that won for them, nor Russian cowardice, for Russians can be brave when their cause is fit for bravery. A dozen facts combined to make the otherwise impossible the only thing that could happen in this instance, and perhaps the least important was that the Russians, coming on from two sides, dared not shoot.
"Fire!" yelled the officers; but a Cossack is no more willing than any other soldier to shoot down his own.
THE main thing was Dick's knowledge that he stood in Persia and his indomitable, stubborn will to champion the under-dog. The justice of his attitude gave him swiftness of decision that the Russians lacked. To him the Russians were outlaws, raiding in foreign territory—the Persian refugees were patriots. The Russians had done damnable iniquity and were contemplating more; they had attacked him; and they had given him no option but to choose between death at their hands or else active cooperation with the Persians. It never entered his tawny, high-held head to run away, as perhaps he might have done now that the Russians were occupied at front and rear.
"Forward!" he shouted, and the cold steel cut a wide swath through the Russian ranks in the direction least expected. The Russians had expected in another minute to be shooting down the pass at ever-lengthening range, for it was fair to guess that Dick would retreat and try to get his party once more mounted. Their guess proved right, but in one way only; Dick charged like a sudden whirlwind for their horses and not his.
It was the football field again, the unexpected dash at an unexpected angle, by a resolute, swift runner well backed up, and then, again, the unexpected. Each had a horse—even Andry had a horse—before the Russians were quite sure what the move meant; and then the Russians knelt to receive cavalry, loaded and waiting for a charge that did not come. They held the road, and there was no escape except through or over them; they thought it wise to hold their fire. But Dick led his men the other way, on, not back again.
Silent, except for drumming hoofs, hard-breathing, without the lilt of bagpipe-music now (for Andry needed both hands to hold on by, and the pipes rode precariously underneath his arm), the ten swept down a forest glade; and this time the pursuers dared not fire for fear of hitting the remaining horses that were squealing at their picket-ropes.
If Dick looked like a king when he walked, he rode like a war-god, and only those who have seen it understand the difference between mere horsemanship, such as soldiers learn, and the sort that is born and bred in a man. Horses recognize it in an instant, and brutes that were unmanageable show their paces for a man like Dick. The Persians, sniping from between the boulders, saw burst around a corner into view a ten-man party that, like the Duke of Wellington, would have been worth as many thousand to any side. They roared a welcome to them.
In a moment the rocks gave up their snipers, and a horde of savage riflemen swept down the hillsides, yelling, "Zindabad Dee-k-Antonee Shah!" In another minute Dick was riding in the midst of a surging mob that, mob or not, was sweeping the Cossacks back to where they came from; it was no longer a question of whether to retreat or not; the Russians were caught napping, outnumbered, and intent on getting away. Within five minutes they had lost their commanding officer and fifty men.
At the head of a rabble, that was fired by such new hope as to change it into stuff for making armies, Dick swept back through the amphitheater, driving the Cossacks through it at the lower end; he reached the narrow gap himself in hot pursuit in time to see a woman gallop up, riding astride on a Cossack horse. He knew her instantly, and she knew him. She waved to him, and he did not answer.
He watched her gesticulating. He saw her rally the retreating Cossacks and get them to line up again. And then he saw her send one Cossack forward with a white flag. So he waved a handkerchief in answer and busied himself at once in getting his rabble to cease fire; he managed it at last by sending each one of his Afghans to take command of a different cluster of the riflemen. He had his crowd in hand when the Cossack with the white flag rode in through the gap, followed by none other than the Princess Olga Karageorgovich.
"Bon jour, monsieur le bandit!" she laughed at him. "I have come to ask you for our Cossack wounded, and to offer you your baggage. Will you exchange? It seems we have no prisoners."
"Send my things and my men's along with Mr. Lancaster," said Dick, "and I'll have your wounded carried through the gap."
She sent the flag-bearer galloping back for Dick's belongings.
"Mr. Lancaster won't come," she said. "He sends you this instead."
She passed Dick a note, written on a torn-off piece of paper, and laughed aloud as she watched the contempt on Dick's face as he read. It ran:
Now that you have started things, I imagine I can help you better from Teheran. I will send you a message later. R.L.
"Yes," she laughed, "that's all the backing-up you get from High Finance! He's off as fast as a horse can gallop! You had better join partnership with me!"
Dick watched the Cossacks lower down driving his pack-horses in a little timid bunch toward him, and then for nearly a minute looked at the Princess, seeming almost to scorch her with his calm, strong eyes. She felt him read her inner secrets, and loved him the more for it.
"Dick!" she said. "Let us play this game together!"
"So it's your doing again, is it?" he answered.
"No; this time it is my Government. This time my Government has made an outlaw of you, and I offer to help you against my Government. Be too big for them, Dick Anthony! Go on, from big to bigger things—conquer Persia—Asia—the world: I can help you!"
"You can do this," said Dick. "You can go back whence you came and tell your master, the Okhrana, that I am not its tool or fool. Tell whoever it is who owns it, the Czar if need be, that I will be the worst thorn ever Russia had in her side, and Persia is free! I am an outlaw, am I? I will be one with a vengeance!"
"Dick! Dick Anthony!"
She made as if to put her arms out, but he answered with a grim salute and rode away.
"Now, if she were an honest lassie! murmured Andry, running forward to receive charge of the baggage-horses...
Twenty minutes later Dick, with a bodyguard of nine, was riding toward higher, wilder mountains. And the fight for Persia's independence, though DicK not know it yet, was on.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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