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- Author: Talbot Mundy
Book online «Told in the East by Talbot Mundy (best fiction books to read TXT) 📖». Author Talbot Mundy
A lantern waved wildly from the British camp, and Brown seized his own lantern and signaled an answer.
“See that? That's to say, you glassy-eyed horror you, that our mutual friend Juggut Khan has been seen emerging like a rat from a hole in the wall. I'll give him and his party one more minute to get clear. Then there's going to be a holocaust, my friend!”
He cocked his rifle, and examined the breech-bolt and the foresight carefully. The fakir shuddered, evidently thinking that the charge was intended for himself.
“No! It won't be that way. I know a better! I'm taking a leaf from your book and doing harm by wholesale!”
Brown leaned down into the opening of the dome, and brought the rifle to his shoulder. There was a chorus of yells from the prisoners, and a noise like a wounded horse's scream from the fakir. The rest were bound, but the fakir rose and writhed toward him on his heels, with his sound arm stretched up in an attitude of despair beside the withered one.
A chorus of bugles burst out from the British camp, and a volley ripped through the blackness.
“All right! Here goes!” said Brown. And he aimed down into the shadowy powder-magazine, and pulled the trigger.
Ten minutes later, an army three thousand and five hundred strong marched in through the gap made in the outer wall by a granary that had spread itself through—and not over—what was in its way. There were seventeen tons of powder that responded to the invitation of Brown's bullet.
XIV.
Explosions are among the few things—or the many things, whichever way you like to look at it!—that science can not undertake to harness or account for. When a gun blows up, or a powder-magazine, the shock kills whom it kills, as when a shell bursts in a dense-packed firing-line. You can not kill any man before his time comes, even if a thousand tons of solid masonry combine with you to whelm him, and go hurtling through the air with him to absolutely obvious destruction.
The fakir's time had come, and the prisoners' time had come. But Sergeant William Brown's had not.
They found him, blackened by powder, and with every stitch of clothing blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond. There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton of broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof that he had come belched out of a holocaust. The men who came on him had given their officer the slip, and were bent on a private looting-expedition of their own. But by the time that they had dragged him from the water, and he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe himself, their thoughts of plunder had departed from them. Brown had a way of quite monopolizing people's thoughts!
There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all through the morning and the afternoon that followed. He held them together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered and compelled them through the hell-tumult of the ghastliest thing there is beneath the dome of heaven—house-to-house fighting in an Eastern city. And at the end of it, when the bugles blew at last “Cease fire,” and many of the men were marched away by companies to put out the conflagrations that were blazing here and there, he led them outside the city-wall, stood them at ease in their own line and saluted their commanding-officer.
“Twenty men of yours, sir. Present and correct.”
“Which twenty?”
“Of Mr. Blair's half-company.”
“Where's Mr. Blair?”
“Dunno, sir!”
“Since when have you had charge of them?”
“Since they broke into the city yesterday, sir.”
“And you haven't lost a man?”
“Had lots of luck, sir!”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“I'm Sergeant Brown, sir.”
“Of the Rifles?”
“Of the Rifles, sir.”
“Were you the man who signaled to us from the magazine and blew it up and made the breach in the wall for us to enter by?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you alive, or dead? Man or ghost?”
“I'm pretty much alive, sir, thank you!”
“D'you realize that you made the taking of Jailpore possible? That but for you we'd have been trying still to storm the walls without artillery?”
“I had the chance, sir, and I only did what any other man would ha' done under like circumstances.”
“Go and tell that to the Horse Marines—or, rather, tell it to Colonel Kendrick! Go and report to him at once. Possibly he'll see it through your eyes!”
So Brown marched off to report himself, and he found Colonel Kendrick nursing a badly wounded arm before a torn and mud-stained tent.
“Who are you?” said the colonel, as Brown saluted him.
“I'm Sergeant Brown, sir.”
“Not Bill Brown of the Rifles?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You lie! He was blown up on the roof of the powder-magazine! I suppose every man who's gone mad from the heat will be saying that he's Brown!”
“I'm Brown, sir! I had written orders from General Baines to enter Jailpore and rescue three women and a child.”
“Where are your orders?”
“Lost 'em, sir, in the explosion.”
“For a madman, you're a circumstantial liar! What happened to the women?”
The colonel sat back, and smothered an exclamation of agony as the nerves in his injured arm tortured him afresh. He had asked a question which should settle once and for all this man's pretentions, and he waited for the answer with an air of certainty. It was on his lips to call the guard to take the lunatic away.
“Juggut Khan, the Rajput, took them, with nine of my
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