King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

Chapter X Are jackals a tiger's friends because they flatter him and eat his leavings? Choose, ye with stripes and proud whiskers, choose between friend and enemy.--Native Proverb

They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path. King went to the cave entrance, to look the new man over; but because he was in Khinjan, and Khinjan in the “Hills,” where indirectness is the key to information, he stood for a while at gaze, listening to the thunder of tumbling water and looking at the cliff-edge six feet away that was laid like a knife in the ascending mist.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the new man was a Mahsudi--no sweeter to look at and no less treacherous for the fact. Also, that he had boils all over the back of his neck. He was not likely to be better tempered because of that fact, either. But it is an ill wind that blows no good to the Secret Service.

“There is an end to everything,” he remarked presently, addressing the world at large, or as much as he could see of it through the cave mouth. “A hill is so high, a pool so deep, a river so wide. How long, for instance, must thy watch be?”

“What is that to thee?” the fellow growled.

“There is an end to pain!” said King, adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles. “I lanced a man's boils last night, and it hurt him, but he must be well to-day.”

“Get in!” growled the guard. “She says it is sorcery! She says none are to let thee touch them!”

Plainly, he was in no receptive mood; orders had been spat into his hairy ear too recently.

“Get in!” he growled, lifting his rifle-butt as if to enforce the order.

“I can heal boils!” said King, retiring into the cave. Then, from a safe distance down the passage, he added a word or two to sink in as the hours went by.

“It is good to be able to bend the neck without pain and to rest easily at night! It is good not to flinch at another's touch. Boils are bad! Healing is easy and good!”

Then, since a quarrel was the very last thing he was looking for, he retired into his own gloomy quarters at the rear, taking care to sit so that he could see and overhear what passed at the entrance. Among other things in the course of the day he noticed that the watch was changed every four hours and that there were only three men in the guard, for the same man was back again that evening.

At intervals throughout the day Yasmini sent him food by silent messengers; so he ate, for “the thing to do,” says Cocker, “is the first that comes to hand, and the thing not to do is worry.” It is not easy to worry and eat heartily at one and the same time. Having eaten, he rolled up his sleeves and native-made cotton trousers and proceeded to clean the cave. After that he overhauled his stock of drugs and instruments, repacking them and making ready against opportunity.

“As I told that heathen with a gun out there, there's an end to everything!” he reflected. “May this come soon!”

When they changed the guard that afternoon he had grown weary of his own company and of fruitless speculation and was pacing up and down. The second guard proved even less communicative than the first, up to the point when, to lessen his ennui, King began to whistle. Because a Secret Service man must be consistent, the tune was not English, but a weird minor one to which the “Hills” have set their favorite love song (that is, all about hate in the concrete!).

The echo of the waterfall within the cave was like the roaring in a shell held to the ear, but each time he came near the entrance the new guard could catch a few bars of the tune. After a little while the hook-nosed ruffian began to sing the words to it, in a voice like a forgotten dog's.

So he stopped at the entrance and changed the tune. And the guard sang the words of the new tune, too. After that he came out into the light of day (direct sunlight was cut off by the huge height of the cliffs all around) and leaned in the entrance, smiling.

“Allah preserve thee, brother!” he remarked. “Thine is a voice like a warrior's--bold and big! Thou art a true son of the Prophet!”

“Aye!” said the fellow, “that I am! Allah preserve thee, for thou hast more need of it than I, although I guard thee just at present. Whistle me another one!”

So King whistled the refrain of a song that boasts of an Afghan invasion of India, and of the loot that came of it, and the prisoners, and the women--particularly the women, mentioning more than a few of them by name, and their charms in detail. It was a song to warm the very cockles of a Hillman's heart. Nothing could have been better chosen for that setting, of a cave mouth half-way down the side of a gash in earth's wildest mountains, with the blue sky resting on a jagged rim a mile above.

“Good!” said the bearded jailer. “Now begin again and I will sing!”

He threw his head back and howled until the mountain walls rang with the song, and other men in far-off caves took it up and howled it back at him.