The Siege of Sar

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I

"Have you heard, Captain Terrington?" cried the girl gaily. "There's to be a Durbar after all! So you were wrong. It's to be in the Palace too, that you were so set against, and Lewis and Mr. Langford are going with Sir Colvin, and just the littlest guard of honour for the look of the thing. Sir Colvin says the great thing with these sort of people is to show you're not afraid, and I'm perfectly certain he's right."

She sat upon the table, all in white; her hat slung upon her arm, her feet swinging to and fro amid the muslin fulness of her skirt, pointing her remarks with the tips of their gilded slippers.

The man who had just entered the bungalow in khaki riding kit stood a straight six feet. His face, strong and silent, was as brown as his jacket, and his spare figure had an air of tempered energy. The only break in its entire brownness was the faded strip of ribands on his left breast. At the sight of Mrs. Chantry he had checked the stride with which he entered, lifted his helmet, and pushed back from his forehead its damp brown lock of hair.

As he stood staring at her with a frown, she set her wrists on the edge of the table, and rocked her body gently in time with her feet.

"Well!" she exclaimed with a laugh as he stopped before her; "what did I tell you? I said if you'd only leave Sar for a week I'd get the Durbar, and I've got it in three days!"

She ceased her swinging, and looked up at him with an excited triumph in her eyes. "Well?" she repeated provocatively, leaning back and putting the tip of a tiny tongue between her lips.

He drew a wicker chair from the wall and threw himself into it with a sigh.

"I only hope it isn't true," he said.

She leaned forward over the table, gripping its edge, her face thrust out, like a figure on a ship's prow.

"Honest Injun!" she cried, sparkling. "Every word. Durbar to-morrow. Khan's guard and tom-toms round at eleven, and off we march at noon. Oh! don't you wish you were going?"

"Not at all," he said drily. "I've never wished to die like a trapped mouse."

She drew herself up resentfully.

"How dare you say that," she cried; "when you know Lewis will be there!"

"All right," he said, too tired to argue; "I'll try to see its good points. How did this happen?"

She was a flouting pouting bird again at once.

"I did it," she declared.

"Oh, did you," he replied without conviction. "When?"

"The moment you started foraging. You're the only man in Sar who doesn't care a da—— a fig for what I think, so I had to wait till you were gone. The others!"

She gave a shrug to her pretty shoulders.

"Well?" enquired Terrington.

"Well, a woman's only got to let a man see she thinks he's afraid of anything to put him at it. I let 'em all see," she said, smiling.

He looked at her hard.

"You think I couldn't?" she challenged.

"I've never thought of anything you couldn't," he said simply.

She looked at him, laughing softly. Then, raising herself on her wrists, poised her dainty figure above the table, letting it swing between her arms, while she met with the fluttering twist of a smile the intent displeasure in his eyes.

"What did you do it for?" he asked.

She pushed herself back along the polished table till her knees and knuckles were side by side.

"What does a woman ever do anything for?" she retorted, leaning over her perch with her elbows upon her knees. "To show she can," she added, as he offered no solution. "I was going to let you see you weren't the king of Sar."

"Good God," he groaned in weary bewilderment. "Where's Sir Colvin?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling, from side to side.

"Don' know, don' know, don' know!" she babbled. "What did you get?"

He took no notice of the question.

"And your husband?" he said.

"Lewis is with Sir Colvin. May be anywhere. Probably messing up my room. They're preparing for the Durbar," she drawled with soft malice.

His preoccupation paid no heed to it; and she went on:

"It's wonderful the hours we do things at here. Just decent breakfast-time and we've had half a day. When did your Majesty breakfast?" she asked.

"Some time yesterday," he said indifferently. "Has Gale written?"

But she was on her feet at once.

"Oh, I say!" she cried. "How horrid of you not to tell me!"

The tatties on the anteroom entrance had closed behind her, like reeds behind a snowy pheasant, ere she finished speaking, and Terrington could hear the "Kitmatgar, O Kitmatgar!" of her lifted childish voice ring along the empty mess-room.

II

As Rose Chantry left the room the light went out of Terrington's face, and an irresistible lassitude crept like a gray smoke across it. He had been for three days in the saddle, with but a couple of his own guides, in a country cut by torrents from precipitous stone, among a silent and lurking people who were only waiting the word to murder him, and for the last day and night he had been living on food snatched from a holster as he rode.

There was no one in Sar to whom he could delegate the duty; no one acquainted as he with the country and the people; no one who knew so intimately their private avarices and animosities; no one who could utilize their tribal treacheries and pretensions, to extract from them the grain they had a mind to keep. They had known him five years before, while Sar was as yet unembroiled of its neighbours, and still admitted British influence and rupees, when his shooting feats had won him the nickname by which everywhere he was known, and the friendship of the men who were waiting now, without breach of friendliness, to put an end to him.

It was on account of this intimate acquaintance that he had been selected to command the escort which accompanied Sir Colvin Aire, whose mission was to settle finally the standing of a resident, and of road repair and protection between Sar and the frontier.

Such simple questions hung however like dewdrops on the web of a wide and hostile political influence. Their disappearance would only be of importance as a signal that the meshes had been cut.

Lewis Chantry had watched the network spreading during the six months he had served as political officer at Sar.

He had smiled at it with a soldier's easy optimism, until he tripped one day upon a strand that was being woven between him and home.

The Indian Government, palsied by a political change of control, and a demand for immediate cheapness however costly, answered his urgent appeals with vague precepts of compromise and Sir Colvin Aire.

Sir Colvin was not cheap, but, from possessing no previous acquaintance with the question, and being the most easily available and palpably the wrong person, he had, at any rate, an air of cheapness.

He was a big genial man, with no sense of his own importance, and a fixed belief in bluffness. He had shewn Terrington his instructions, some six weeks earlier, on the night his escort joined him, and the two were sitting smoking after dinner outside the tent—the stillness of the evening only broken by the cry of a jackal or the scream of an owl—looking up at the black mountain wall that blotted out the northern stars, over which they were to climb on the morrow to an unknown fate.

"You see, they say I'm to make the fullest use of your knowledge of the country," concluded Sir Colvin, as Terrington replaced the lantern by which he had been reading, and lay back in his chair.

"I see," he replied quietly; "but they were careful to make no use of it themselves."

"You're not in love with the trip?" asked the other.

"Oh, yes, sir, I'm charmed with it," said the younger man; "but I'm sorry for the chaps that will have to fetch us back."

"What do you mean?" asked his chief slowly.

Terrington stretched out his hand into the soft night air.

"It's summer here, sir," he said with seeming irrelevance, "and summer at Simla; summer for three full months. It's summer at Sar too; but in four weeks there will be snow on the passes, on the PalÁri and Darai; and, in six, whoever goes out of Sar that way," and he nodded towards India, "goes because he must."

"You think we may have to winter there?" asked Sir Colvin.

"I took a liberal view of the time we might spend there, sir, and asked at Sampur for five hundred spare rounds a man."

"Cartridges!" exclaimed the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Colonel Davis thought they might come in useful, and let me have what they had. Then there was a Maxim they were doubtful about——-"

"My good man!" broke in the other; "do you take this for an expeditionary force?"

"No, sir," replied the soldier. "I knew we were an escort, so I packed the Maxim on a mule. There's a corner in the old fort at Sar, I remembered, that it would look well in: and I thought, if we had to spend the winter there, we might make the place as cosy as we could. I meant to tell you, sir, as I had to requisition some extra transport, and I scheduled the lot as 'gifts for the Khan.'"

"Well, I must say you're a cool hand!" gasped his chief.

"I thought we'd be sure to let him have them if he came for them," explained Terrington simply; "so it read all right. I wasn't quite clear if a Maxim could be included under necessary equipment!"

"Oh, you weren't, weren't you," exclaimed the other. "And how do you think I'm to explain it?"

"Wouldn't it come under my knowledge of the country of which you were to make the fullest use, sir?" was the innocent reply.

Sir Colvin laughed, and the talk turned on what he held to be the peaceable possibilities of Sar. On that subject Terrington could hold nothing but his tongue. He was an adept at minding his own business, but he tried on the way up country to illuminate his chief's views of the men with whom he had to deal, by tales of Sari humour, which were mostly pointed by the decapitation or disembowelment of the humorist's best friend.

At Sar the Mission found everything in silver paper. It was met imposingly at the Gate of the Great Evil, ten miles below the city, where the river tears a way through rocks of black basalt, and had eaten there the salted cake of a sacred hospitality.

It was welcomed into Sar by the bellowings of an unspeakable music, and for three days the bearers of gifts and good wishes wore a path through the Bazar between the Residency and the New Palace.

Chantry reported a pleasing change in the Khan's bearing since the Mission had been appointed, his affability, attention to protests and anxiety for the comfort of the new comers.

Out of this very consideration arose the first note of discord, owing, as Chantry put it under his breath, to Terrington's "damned pigheadedness."

His own guard of Sikhs, Dogras and BakÓt levies had been housed in the Old Palace, now called the Fort, a low mud and stone building, whose brown walls of astounding thickness rose hard upon the green tangle of chenar in which the Residency stood. The little force fitted it as scantily as a wizened kernel fits its shell, and, although the river washed the Fort's eastern face and secured that from assault, was too scant to hold it. The addition of the odd two hundred of the Commissioner's escort made defence quite another matter.

The Khan knew that, and with many apologies for the lack of accommodation in the Fort, cleared out his own barracks on the other side of the river, and put them with immense affability and the stores they contained at Chantry's disposal for the escort's occupation.

Chantry, unable ever to credit any one with less than his own share of honour, accepted gratefully on the Commissioner's behalf, glad to be relieved from a further cleansing of the Fort and from the pressing difficulty of provisions.

He explained the arrangement to Sir Colvin, as the Guides swung out of the brown mob of Saris, past the guard of honour into the Residency compound, and formed front with their own undauntable swagger before Rose Chantry's smiling eyes.

Aire listened attentively, with his eye on the frail figure in heliotrope on the verandah.

"Sounds all that's desirable," he said; "but I'm not the one to settle it. There's your man," he nodded, as Terrington rode up to report.

Terrington's hard stare swept the city as the proposal was repeated, a grim smile darkening his mouth.

"Very considerate of the old gentleman," he said slowly; "but I think we'll stay here."

Chantry exploded with difficulties. The Fort wasn't habitable; he couldn't face the question of supply; the Khan would be insulted; the difficulty of negotiations increased. He turned to Sir Colvin imploringly, but the Commissioner shook his head.

"Delegation of authority," he purred. "Mine's political!"

"But what am I to tell the Khan?" cried Chantry in expostulation. "Am I to say that you're afraid?"

Terrington's stare had included absently the other's face.

"Tell the old fox," he said, "that I'm delighted to have a political officer to make my explanations. Last time we met I had, as he'll remember, to make them myself."

He asked Sir Colvin's permission to fall the men out for dinner, and rode back without a further word about the Fort. He was unused in the matter of orders either to ask or answer questions.

Chantry made a despairing but fruitless appeal to the Commissioner, who replied that, having entrusted Terrington with absolute discretion in the military affairs of the Mission, he could not interfere.

"Good man," he concluded; "dam good man! Can talk through my Pukhtu, and cooks like a chef. You'll get used to him, if you stand in with him. But he'd clear out the devil if he got in his way."

Sir Colvin had learnt something from the daring fashion in which Terrington had held up the various Khels, ill-affected most of them, but all blandly amiable, from which the Mission had accepted hospitality on the road to Sar.

He had fixed each, as he approached it, in a grip of steel; covered its avenues, commanded its towers, as if about to exterminate a nest of hornets; but he had entered with an air of unconcerned good-fellowship, as though the rifles ranged without to avenge him and the naked steel at his elbow had no real existence.

"What's about the risk in these places?" Sir Colvin had asked on quitting one of the most forbidding.

"Never can tell," replied Terrington with a shrug. "Treachery with these chaps is like a hiccup. It often comes as a surprise, even to the man who has it."

"And don't they rather resent your precautions?"

"Oh, not a bit! they admire them. It's part of the style of a gentleman hereabouts to distrust your neighbour so explicitly that he daren't misbehave. Prevents costly mistakes. The etiquette is to show him you can murder him, and then to credit him genially with too much sense to put you to the trouble."

The etiquette was complicated, as Terrington admitted, by the lasting advantages which infidel slaughter offers to one of the True Faith, very tempting to starving and houseless hill-men, with veins fired by a seductive Paradise.

But etiquette, though worn once or twice a trifle thin, saw them safe into Sar, where Sir Colvin recognized in Terrington's insulting suspicions of his host the policy which had proved so curiously effective throughout their journey.

Its observed success made him accept more readily the difficulties entailed, especially since Terrington seemed to expect no assistance in removing them.

He set to work upon the Fort with the BakÓt levies on the afternoon of his arrival, and began at the same time to organize a system of supply. He was at his desk, or directing alterations in the Fort until a late hour of the evening, eating his dinner with one hand and working with the other, so that he did not meet Rose Chantry till chota hazri next day.

A wing of the Residency had been turned into mess and ante-rooms, and furnished the Commissioner with quarters. Clones, the doctor, found lodging in another part of it, while Terrington, Walcot and Dore, his immediate subordinates, and Langford, who commanded the Sikh and Dogra detachments, made shift in an adjoining bungalow, and the native officers were sheltered by the Fort.

It was still early when Terrington, already half through his morning's work, entered the mess-room; but only Mrs. Chantry remained beside the urn. She wore a brown canvas habit, a hard straw hat, with the colours, scarlet and sage, of her husband's regiment. She looked to him absurdly young and pretty for a woman in such a place; and he was provoked by the folly which permitted her to arrive there. She was trying to look disdainfully indifferent. She was proud of being the one Englishwoman in that utmost post of the Empire, and this man alone had appeared absolutely unconscious of her presence.

"I suppose you're Captain Terrington," she said, turning towards him from the table; "as I was introduced yesterday to all the others?"

"Yes," he smiled, "I'm Nevile Terrington: and it needs no supposing to give a name to you."

"Really?" she said, reseating herself. "I shouldn't have imagined you were aware of my existence."

"All too well!" he sighed, smiling. "There is nothing I would have sooner missed in Sar."

She snapped back the tap of the samovar, and faced him in a pretty little blaze of petulance across the open teapot.

"You would turn me out now if you could, I dare say," she cried.

"This very hour," he assured her, his smile unruffled. "But I can't. 'Rien ne va plus,' as they say at another game. Do you know what that means?"

"At Monte Carlo?"

"No! in Sar? It means winter, I'm afraid."

"Winter!" she exclaimed, her resentment embarrassed by the man's imperturbable temper, and her interest provoked by his voice. "I'm going down with Sir Colvin."

"Yes!" he said. "And when will that be?"

"When he's done here."

"Yes!" he said again, "but that hardly puts a date to it. I can give you one for the snow."

"Look here!" she cried—and the little imperious words, with their little imperious manner, made suddenly a bond of battle between them—"you haven't been here a day, and you've set every one foaming. Do you know that?"

"Yes," he said humbly. "I'm afraid I've put my foot into it all round."

"Well!" she exclaimed. "Do you want me against you too?"

He shook his head gravely.

"Heaven forbid!" he said. "But you're against me already."

She rose, lifted her riding-whip from the table and took her skirt in her hand.

"Yes, I am!" she said.

She moved towards the verandah, visible through the carved screen of wood that filled a part of the wall: stopping before a quaint Cashmiri mirror that hung upon it to set her hat straight and tie her veil.

Terrington's eyes followed her as he stirred his tea.

"Where do you ride?" he asked, as she went towards the door.

She turned in the entrance, facing him, against the crimson folds of the purdah.

"Everywhere," she said.

"You'll have to give it up," he announced tranquilly.

She stood an instant longer, her lithe brown figure framed in the curtains' crimson and gold, to let him realize the defiance under her lowered eyelids and the scorn of her little lifted chin. Then she pushed back the purdah and stepped out into the sun.

III

Whatever regret may have sounded in Terrington's admission, he did nothing to mitigate the inconvenience of the boot he had thrust into Sar.

He reorganized the service of spies which had been of such use to him five years before; but the difficulties in picking up the threads, which had then been complacent to his fingers, taught him more than was told by those on which he could lay his hands.

The rise in the price of treachery, and the trivial details it could profess to furnish, warned him not only of the nearness and wide-spread intimation of an outbreak, but of a native confidence in its success. He had sufficient belief in the extractive qualities of a bribe to expect a few days' notice of the final explosion, when a knowledge of the plot should have reached the more servile of his informants. Meanwhile he could only listen to its developments in the dark.

On the surface there was no sign of trouble, save the difficulty of obtaining audience of the Khan, and his disinclination, when cornered, to talk treaties. There was much futile arrangement and re-arrangement of durbar; Mir Khan refusing to discuss politics anywhere but in the Palace, and Terrington being equally determined to provide them with quite another carpet.

Meanwhile the most amiable appearances were preserved, and polo was played three days a week on the ground beyond the Fort.

Within that gloomy building alterations of a significant kind were in progress, but the only visible addition was a dado in art paper round some of the walls.

The paper had been appropriated, from the medley of gifts collected for the Khan by some humorist at headquarters, by Terrington, who said he had a more pressing use for it.

Chantry, when he discovered that all the pressing was to be done on the mud walls of the Fort, objected petulantly to this curtailment of his stock of presents, which the Khan's policy of postponements had almost exhausted.

Terrington replied drily that the paper was marked 'sanitary,' and that the condition of the Fort when handed over to him was the reverse of that: hence his use of it.

He did not point out further that a stick drawn along the dado in a certain direction would have revealed a series of gaps in the mud work behind it; and that if the point of the stick were used vigorously to sound such gaps a lightly mortared stone would have fallen outwards from each of them, and the Fort become a better ventilated and loop-holed building.

Concealment was so essential to the undertaking that only Sir Colvin, Afzul Singh, Terrington's trusted Subadar, and the sappers who did the work were in the secret. Other noises had to be contrived to cover the daily perforations, and only in darkness could the final drilling of the walls be done: the outmost portion being replaced and the dado extended before dawn.

Sir Colvin did not appreciate these preparations; but he could not condemn them. They meant a winter's defence of Sar Fort against overwhelming odds, and that was not a pretty thing to contemplate.

An uglier one, however, was to face those odds unprepared, and be himself responsible for the improvidence.

So his consent was given, as an insurance on his reputation, but he wished that Terrington's prevision had been more accommodating or less acute.

So far, however, as the Commissioner was forced to admit, they had been justified by results. Nothing had come of the Mission, and nothing seemed to be on its way. More than a month had gone by in Sar, and though the sun still filled its sheltered valley with a summer heat, snow had fallen on the eastern passes; and, visibly from the hills about it, the everlasting whiteness of the northern peaks was spreading in frozen silence towards the plain.

Terrington had watched that whiteness, knowing what it meant, and, half ashamed of himself, hoping what it meant.

It was for the falling of that icy portcullis, he felt, that Sar was waiting: waiting till it closed across their chance of escape, across their hope of rescue.

Then the gathering conspiracy would burst: burst, as it supposed, on unprepared defenders; and the end would rest with him. It would be a siege, whatever its outcome, as great as any that had lived in story, and the man who saw it through would need no further fame.

He was a cavalryman; but this was his ideal of combat: a fight which should test every quality of manhood; a struggle through months of despairing vigilance with unconquerable hordes.

Yet though he saw in such a siege the rare chance of a lifetime, a chance for which his life had waited, he tried with an astounding probity to make it impossible.

"I believe," he told Sir Colvin on the question of secret fortification, "I believe that we can hold Sar Fort for at least ten weeks, if my plans are carried out; but, if I may say it to you, sir, I think we have no business to try."

Asked his reason, he expressed the conviction that the game of military glory in Sar wasn't worth the candle of men's lives which would be burnt in an attempt to relieve it in mid-winter.

"Your word, then, is go?" asked the Commissioner.

"Yes, sir. Make the immediate discussion of the treaty the condition of your remaining, and let the Khan realize how his refusal will be understood.

This place can be wiped out cheaply enough next summer; but if our chaps have to slam up here through the snow they'll lose two men for every one they save."

"And how are we to go?" asked the other.

"Oh; by the PalÁri," replied the soldier. it "By the PalÁri!" exclaimed Sir Colvin. "Why the snow's over it already."

"Yes, sir; but Gale is at this end of it in RashÁt. What's to happen to him if we creep out by the south?"

But the Commissioner shook his head, to Terrington's intense relief. That last argument clinched his decision. The Government which put him into the pickle must take him out of it. He was not going to fight his way home with three hundred men through the snows of the PalÁri and between the desolate precipices of Maristan, where once in ancient days an army had melted like the spring water upon its courses. So Terrington returned to his loopholes, and Sir Colvin to that merry little messroom in the shade of the chenar where all the trifling rites of home were observed with such an exacting deference, and the chances of the morrow debated with a boy's disdain. The dinner table, however, could show a feature which would have been unusual elsewhere, since a woman sat in its seat of honour.

When Mrs. Chantry had made over her two best rooms for the use of the Mission, its members had elected her to the presidency of their mess, and despite the charming shyness with which she took the chair she had converted it at once into a throne.

Most of her subjects would have welcomed the wildest folly on her behalf, and not one would have missed without dismay the light whiteness of her presence in the breakfast-room, or the lithe figure with its girlish shoulders which rose every evening from the square black chair at the head of the table and lifted a glass above its golden head to pledge their memories to their Queen. It is possible that, as they touched glasses against the one her white arm held across the cloth, they vowed a more immediate homage than the toast proclaimed; but then a soldier's homage has often so many vicarious shades.

Of Terrington Mrs. Chantry saw far less than of the rest. He made no occasions to meet her, and never offered himself as an escort for the rides which he had not yet proscribed. She saw him at polo—and he was worth seeing at polo—at dinner, and occasionally in the morning, when she was in time to pour out his tea.

For the remainder of the day he was buried in the Fort. But she learnt, chiefly through her husband, the part his counsel played in Sir Colvin's decisions, especially when that was, as mostly, in direct disagreement with Lewis Chantry's mind.

Of that mind his wife had never taken a too imposing measure, but she espoused it now even when obviously at fault.

She used it to provide causes for a quarrel with Nevile Terrington, and she despised it for starting her almost always in the wrong.

She would have been puzzled, perhaps, to give a reason for her enmity, and might have said that it dated from the moment she had seen him. But it had really an earlier origin—the moment when she expected, and did not see him; and it was kept alive by his absolute indifference to her beauty and her opinion.

Her supreme object was to show herself stronger than he, to thwart his plans, to make him repent having dared to ignore her.

For he would not take her seriously enough to explain his intentions. He treated her as a child; as though there were a world of things that could not be put into speech for her. He was for ever filling up spaces, where the matter was beyond her with the asterisks of a smile.

But while he was in Sar her efforts were of no avail.

Terrington could detect her secret influence in the sayings of all the men about her, even in Sir Colvin's tentative suggestions; but beyond creating a dull hostility to his plans and policy she could do nothing.

She tried to draw from him at mess some declaration that would irritate the others, but Terrington, though apparently indifferent to their irritations, only laughed at her attempts.

It was when, by a sudden intermission in the supplies on which he had counted for provisioning the Fort, Terrington was obliged to leave Sar in order to put personal persuasion on his agents in the country round, that Rose Chantry saw her chance, and took it.

The decision she could most effect was, she saw instantly, that of the Durbar.

Every one was chafing under the restrictions which Terrington had imposed; every one was anxious to have the crisis over, and the future settled one way or another. Aire's urgent representations had been shelved by a harassed Viceroy in the fatuous hope of something turning up to save expense and excuse his vacillations.

The eastern passes were already under snow, the southern would be white with it in a fortnight longer. If a winter in Sar were to be avoided something must be done at once, and, since no one but Terrington anticipated hostilities, a winter in Sar was the last thing they wished.

Rose Chantry found, in consequence, ground sown ready to her hand: and she fed it with a fertilizer which is always effective—a woman's smile at man's unvalorous hesitations.

In this case, probably, it only precipitated the harvest; but precipitation was essential.

On the third day of Terrington's absence the Durbar was proclaimed.

IV

The Durbar had been announced only a few hours previous to Terrington's return, but Rose Chantry had had the news of it from her husband on the previous evening.

Consequently, when Nevile, so long before he was expected, entered the ante-room, she was quite at home with her triumph and only surprised by the chance of thrusting it into his face.

When, half ashamed of having harried such a hungry man, she had flown into the mess-room to find food for him, Terrington sat staring at the white chunam walls, softly aglow with the sunlight that blazed outside. A window in one of them framed a space of blue sky, the greenness of a chenar, and, squatted on the ground beneath it, Rose Chantry's ayah, swinging a glass bead tied to the lowest bough. He was too tired to think of the news he had heard, or to keep his thoughts from following the woman who had told it. He realized with a numb surprise how many memories of her remained in the queer glimmer of that empty room. How much he remembered which he thought to have forgotten, and which, he was not too tired to tell himself, he ought to have forgotten.

Whichever way he looked he could see her figure in one of its airy poses, coquettishly sweet or coquettishly defiant; smiling, pouting, mocking, or fancifully grave. The other figures in those groups, men all of them, had faded; hers remained. A white spirit that filled the place for him.

He shut his eyes to shut it out; but found the likeness was on the other side of his lids.

He lifted them quickly at a laugh from the mess-room doorway through which Rose Chantry was leaning, with a tatty in either hand pressed against her shoulders and her golden head in the gap.

"Didn't mean to wake you," she said, smiling, "but there's some cold chikor. Will that do?"

"Nothing better," he replied.

"Well, you'd better have it where you are," she announced with a glance across her shoulder; "they're hanging a new ceiling cloth in here, and there's no end of a litter."

As her head withdrew with a shrill call to the kitmatgah, Sir Colvin and Chantry entered from the verandah.

The Commissioner, with the sense of nakedness which men have felt so often since the days of Eve from following a woman's counsel, wished, on learning of Terrington's arrival, to confront him personally with the news of the Durbar. So after he had seated himself and listened to what could be told him on the prospects of supply, he put the question with an exaggerated imitation of his own bluffness.

"Well! I suppose you've heard of the Durbar?"

"I'm afraid, sir," said the other, "I've been too hungry to hear of anything but breakfast. It's to be cold chikor," he added, smiling, as Rose Chantry, followed by the kitmatgah, made a muslin whiteness in the mess room-door.

She heard the cheerful lie with a flash of admiration for the man who spoke it.

So many beaten men, she knew, would have jumped at the peevish chance to hit back, especially when the hard truth to hit with was in their hands.

"Well," continued Sir Colvin, saluting Mrs. Chantry and reseating himself, as the tray was laid before Terrington, "I decided, as no reply came to my last demand, some sort of move must be made at once, if we weren't to be boxed here all the winter. So, as there was no chance of ferreting the Khan out of that hole of his, we're going to talk him into reason over there."

Terrington, with his knife in the partridge, looked up and nodded.

"I suppose the plan's no more to your mind than ever?" queried the Commissioner.

"No, sir," said his military adviser. "I think it's even less."

"How! from what you've heard?" exclaimed Sir Colvin.

"No," said the soldier slowly; "from what I haven't heard. There's no talk in the hills; and when a Sari man's dumb, he's either got something to say, or something not to say it."

"Hang it all!" cried Chantry. "I wonder if there's anything that you wouldn't think a bad sign?"

Aire shrugged his shoulders.

"Well! the die's cast," he said; "and we've got to see the thing through. The only question left is one of escort. We want to look imposing but not belligerent. What do you think?"

"The smaller the better," said Terrington drily.

"Why?"

"You can't take enough to make it safe for you," explained the other; "but you can take enough to make it unsafe for us."

"For you?" Sir Colvin asked.

"Suppose you don't come back?" was Terrington's reply.

"Gad! but you're a cheerful counsellor," cried Chantry hotly.

"If they murder us, eh," said Aire.

"And you think they mean to, Captain Terrington?" asked Rose Chantry.

Terrington shook his head.

"Not to-morrow!" he said. "Mir Khan wouldn't expect to get the chance."

"You mean he doesn't believe we're such unqualified fools as to go there?" Sir Colvin suggested.

"That's probably how he puts it," said Terrington blandly.

"Well that gives us a chance the more," Chantry threw in.

"A chance the less, I think," said Terrington. "Blood is always a Sari man's first thought, and he'll leave no time for a second."

The agent's dark eyes glowered with a whole-souled malediction, but Sir Colvin, tapping on the table, watched in silence for some seconds while Terrington finished his meal.

"Do you still try to dissuade me?" he asked at length.

"Not at all, sir," replied the other. "I was only thinking of the escort. If they mean murder over there they'll mean it the more the more of you there are."

"Why?"

"Supposing they intend to go for us, they'll wait till all the passes are closed, and we're cut off. In that case they'll hardly give away their game now, unless they get a chance to cripple us."

"Twenty men would be enough?"

"Ample," said Terrington. "And I'd keep as many of them outside as possible."

"Yes; and you might pick some of your own men for the job."

Terrington's face hardened. His men were his children, and he hated to let them run a risk which he could not share.

"In that case I'd ask the honour of going with you, sir," he said.

Sir Colvin shook his head.

"No, no!" he answered. "The Fort is your business, and it may prove a big one. Chantry is going in with me, and Langford, who's an old cavalryman, will take the escort. I've sent down word of what I'm doing, but I'll leave a fuller account with you, in case anything goes wrong." He turned with Chantry to leave the room, calling back from the doorway: "By the way, the polo's to come off to-morrow afternoon as we arranged. You're playing, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied the other, watching the two figures pass out of the verandah, and seem to shrink as they were immersed in the fierce yellow of the sun.

Then he turned, and met Rose Chantry's eyes.

She had flung herself into a long chair: her knees were crossed; her head thrown back; her hands clasped behind it. To Terrington's vision the tip of her toe, her knee and her chin were in a line; and the absurd little sole of her shoe, with its elfin instep and the arch curl of its heel, made a print on his memory in which it was afterwards to tread.

"Well!" she said, with her tantalizing smile, "was the chikor good?"

"Excellent," he answered.

Her lips fluttered like the wings of a bird.

"Didn't it taste of defeat?" she suggested, the dark lids drooping over her eyes.

"No," he said gravely, "it tasted extremely game."

She swept him with her covert glances, but his had fallen to her foot.

"Why did you tell that lie?" she asked presently.

He looked up into her face for an instant.

"I've forgotten," he said.

"Sir Colvin wouldn't have suspected me," she added. "He knows no more about a woman than ... than you do.

"I suppose that leaves him without much knowledge to boast of?" he reflected.

"Yes," she said; "it does."

She tilted her head sideways to see, beyond her knee, on what his eyes were fixed. She tossed her foot clear of the muslin flounces, and then with a curious twist of the ankle brought it round into her view.

"What's wrong with it?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"How should I know?" he said thoughtfully. "It wasn't made for me."

She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.

"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."

His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.

Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.

He told her.

"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"

"She wants a child," he said.

"But she has one."

"Another then."

She gave a shudder.

"What strange things women are!" she cried.

His eyes came round to her, and she felt a coldness in them like the green gleam of ice.

"Out here, you see," he said quietly, "women are still as fond of making men as of making fools of them."

"Why do you say that?" she asked sharply.

"I could think of nothing better," he replied.

"Why did you say it to me?" she persisted.

"To whom else could I have said it?" he enquired blandly.

The blaze of anger seemed to fill her eyes with a floating sparkle of fresh colours, and her lips closed tightly, as though to repress a desire to bite him. Then she met his glance and laughed.

"I wonder why you dislike me so," she said.

"I don't dislike you," he replied.

"Oh, well!" she sighed, "why don't you dislike me, then; since you seem too? You wish I wasn't here!"

"Very much," he admitted.

"Why? What harm do I do?"

"Haven't you told me that this morning?"

"No!" she cried. "You weren't thinking of that; you know you weren't. You believe that would have happened anyhow. It was what you meant about making fools of men."

"Well," he said, "don't you make fools of them?"

She shook her head softly.

"My mistake then," he said.

"Ah!" she sighed, "but you don't think so. I daresay you think something much more horrid of me than you care to say. And it ought to have been rather nice for you all, having me up here."

"Yes," he said, "I think it ought."

She looked at him doubtfully, crumpling her lips together in her fingers.

"But you do make mistakes," she went on retrospectively.

"Yes," he said, "one makes everything of them."

She regarded him for a moment in the light of the remark, before adding:

"You told me, the first time you saw me, I must give up riding."

"Yes," he admitted, smiling; "that was one of them. But I found that your riding could be of use to us."

"Of use to you?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, in creating a false impression."

"An impression of what?"

"Of security: that we did not think you were in any danger."

"Though you thought I was?"

"I was sure of it," he said.

She was sitting upright now; her hands set upon the chair-arms; her face changing stormily between anger and astonishment.

"You were sure I was in danger, yet you did nothing to prevent it!" she cried. "Do you mean that?"

"What should I have done?" he enquired.

"Warned me!" she said

"But didn't I?"

"Oh, that!" she exclaimed impatiently.

"And would you have been warned?"

"I don't know. I can't say. That's got nothing to do with it. Or you could have given me an escort."

He shook his head.

"That would have made you no safer, and would have spoilt you as an advertisement."

"As an advertisement!" she protested hotly. "Do soldiers let a woman run the risk of being murdered to make things safe far them? I think it's contemptible!"

"Yes," he said quietly; "so I see: but you don't think enough."

He sat looking at her in a way she detested; as no other man seemed able to look at her; as though she were a piece in a game he played.

"Did any one else know it wasn't safe for me?" she demanded.

He shook his head.

"Wouldn't you have been warned in that case?" he suggested.

"Yes," she returned warmly, "I'm quite certain I should."

"I think so too," he said. "Nothing in Sar would have been weighed beside it."

"Except by you," she retorted.

"Except by me," he said. "You see I'm here to weigh things. I'm here to look after you all. You think I should have told you of your danger, and shut you up in the safety of Sar. But there is no safety in Sar. That's the mistake. Your riding was a risk, but it helped our chance to make Sar safer; safer for every one, safer for you."

"And suppose I had been killed?"

"Well," he said, "you can fancy what I should have paid for it. But the safety would have been there, though it was only there for others. And it was to make that that I am here."

She met his musing observation of her with hard clear eyes.

"Haven't you wasted an unusual lot of time talking to me this morning, Captain Terrington?" she said.

He took the deep breath of a man whose heart is sick for sleep, and threw back his shoulders.

"Yes," he smiled, rising; "I was quite exceptionally tired."

V

Terrington gave a practical shape to his forebodings as soon as the Commissioner and his escort started for the Durbar.

The entire force was under arms; the Residency guard was trebled; sappers were stationed in every room to break open the loopholes; others waited with discs of guncotton to blow away the trees which masked the polo ground; and the final connexions were made with the mine which was to overthrow the courtyard wall.

Appearances were kept up by an attenuated fatigue party, which was as markedly visible about the place as the rest of the garrison was not.

Terrington, who had changed for polo, also made a peacefully indifferent figure as he strolled across to the mess-room and round the Residency garden, with a loose coat drawn over his riding-shirt, whose blue and silver showed in the scarf about his throat.

He had returned to his orderly-room in the Fort, when news of the tragedy which was to wring from England a growl of vengeance was brought to the sentries at the Residency gate by the handful of blood-smeared horsemen who swept through it with broken and clotted lances and a crimson lather on their horses' flanks.

Hussain Shah was holding Langford, mortally hurt, in the saddle, his huge figure swinging limply to and fro, and more than half that remnant of the escort reeled as they drew rein before the Residency door.

Terrington was not the first to hear of the disaster, but he heard it in the most dramatic fashion; from Mrs. Chantry's lips.

She had torn across the compound as the Lancers came to a blundering halt before the mess-room entrance, and dashed breathless into the orderly room, waiting no confirmation of the story that was told by their plight.

She caught at her side, clutching with the other hand at the table, and for an instant panted, speechless, her face white as jasmine, above a big bow of creamy lace.

Then, with a hard gasp of breath:

"They're killed!" she cried.

Terrington had sprung to his feet as she burst in upon him.

"Who are?" he demanded.

"Lewis and Sir Colvin," she panted, "and ... and most of the others. All but six or seven of them. Mr. Langford's there, but he's simply hacked; and all the men are streaming."

A long thin wail broke from her with the horror of what she had seen, and she covered her eyes with both her hands.

Terrington had stepped towards the doorway as he realized the significance of what she had seen. She put herself sharply in front of him, her head flung fiercely back.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded. "You let them go like that, you made them go like that! That's what's done it all! You wouldn't let them take the men! Aren't you going to try to save them? They mayn't be dead! Don't you think they mayn't be dead? If only you'll go at once; this moment! Take every one and smash them. Don't you think it's possible; just possible? And it wasn't I who did it, was it? was it really?"

He laid a hand upon her shoulder to put her aside.

"No, child," he said gently; "you had nothing to do with it."

As he would have passed out, leaping footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Captain Walcot almost dashed into his arms.

"Have you heard?" he cried.

"What?" asked Terrington

Walcot glanced with deprecation at Mrs. Chantry's figure.

"Say what you know!" said Terrington.

"Sir Colvin and Chantry have been murdered at the Durbar, and all the men they took in with them."

"Who told you?" said Terrington.

"Hussain Shah," replied the other excitedly. "Langford was in the courtyard with half the escort, when a yelling began inside the hall, and a swarm of those brown swine poured out shouting that Sir Colvin was killed, and attacked him. Langford charged, and tried to jam them in the doorway; but the crowd joined in behind, and when Langford was shot through the body Hussain retired 'em, and they had to cut their way through till they were clear of the Bazaar. Every man of them was wounded, and they've lost five and Langford's dying."

"Is Clones with him?"

Walcot nodded.

Terrington remained a moment without speaking, gazing almost absently through the window in the thick mud wall at the green grove of chenar. In his loose racing-coat above polo boots and breeches, and with the gay silk scarf at his throat, he suggested anything but a man suddenly met by a great emergency.

"Tell Subadar Afzul Singh," he said slowly, "to post the Fort guard, break out the loopholes and put the place at once in a state of defence. You will parade every other available man in the courtyard within half an hour, in marching order a hundred and fifty rounds a man. Dore will take over Langford's Sikhs and Dogras; the BakÓt levies will reinforce the Fort guard. Send Risaldar Hussain Shah to me here."

Rose Chantry held her sobbing breath in astonishment at the note of control which had come into the man's voice. It was lower and softer than she had ever heard it, but it spoke with a quiet and assured authority which seemed to master her even while it addressed another.

Walcot felt it too. He was the elder of the two men, and but a few months junior in the service; they had lived together for some time on terms of perfect equality, yet now, though Terrington had made no reference to a change in their relations, Walcot's heels came together while the other was speaking, and his hand went to his cap with a "Very good, sir" as Nevile ended.

The phrase, the sudden change of relation, Walcot's retreating figure, disciplined and subordinate, produced on Rose Chantry a very curious effect.

"Are you going to take over the command?" she said to Terrington, who had seated himself at his desk and was writing rapidly.

He turned his head and looked at her, his mind evidently occupied with an interrupted thought.

"I have taken it over," he said quietly, turning again to his pen.

She watched him for a moment. His silence, his unconcern, his power, were all alike beyond her.

"Are you going to the Palace?" she asked at length.

He looked round at her again, as clearly preoccupied as before, but without irritation.

"You will save them, won't you, if you can?" she went on imploringly, to force the subject into his mind.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I'm going to the Palace." Then after a pause, but with his eyes still upon her, "Mr. Clones would probably be very glad of some help with the wounded."

"The wounded!" she repeated with a little shudder.

"Yes," he said; "you'll see a good deal of them during the next few days, and it's as well to be of use. If you'll take this to him," he went on, folding up a note, "he'll show you what to do. It's only the making up of bandages," he continued, as she held back; "the time left us is very short."

Something scornful had come into his voice, though ever so faintly, and something compelling as well. She took the note when he held it out to her, unable, despite her will, to do anything else. As she passed the doorway Hussain Shah appeared on the landing beyond it, the folds of the turban above his temple stiff with blood. She paused an instant to hear Terrington's greeting, but the greeting was in Pukhtu, which she did not understand. Had she understood, her opinion of Terrington's hardness would have been confirmed, for no reference was made to the wounded man's condition until he had received his orders.

"Are you fit for duty?" said Terrington simply.

"I am unhurt, sir," replied the other as he saluted.

Half an hour later every available man in the force was paraded in the courtyard of the Fort. Walcot with his Lancers in front; then, behind Terrington, the Sikhs and Dogras that could be spared from the Fort, the Guides bringing up the rear. The Maxim had been hoisted on to the roof of the Eastern Tower, whence it covered for a certain distance an advance on the Palace. In the silence the blow of a pick could be heard, and the falling stones from the last loopholes in the walls.

Terrington sat his horse immovably, waiting for the signal from Afzul Singh which should open the gates. He was burning with a dull anger against the circumstance in which he had been placed, and against the folly of the men who had created it. He knew that in marching on the Palace to demand the men who had entered it that morning he was imperilling the safety of his entire force; yet he knew, too, that sentimental England would never forgive his sanity in declining the risk should any of Sir Colvin's party happen to be still alive. He had no hope of their safety. He was too well acquainted with the temper in which they had been attacked. That he viewed with no resentment whatever. It had been a piece of the foulest treachery, but treachery was a virtue in Sar, and he was quite able to accept, and even to respect, alien standards of conduct.

What did anger him was the stolid British arrogance which declined to make allowance for any prejudices but its own, and thought beneath its dignity all considerations which were not in the terms of its own intelligence. Rose Chantry watched him from the orderly-room window which overlooked the courtyard. She had been in the surgery helping Clones to make up first-aid bandages, but the tramp of laden men down the long passages, and the roll, like a soft volley, of grounded butts in the dust as the men fell in, so wrought on her excitement that she left her work and ran up the narrow twisted stairs to the room from which half an hour earlier Terrington had sent her.

She watched him now, with her shoulder pressed against the yellow chunam wall and her head drawn back in order not to be seen, wondering how a man of his dominant authority could wait impassively at such a moment the arrangements of a subordinate.

Her eyes, dry and hot, seemed almost to repudiate resentfully the tears which she had shed; a pulse throbbed like the flutter of a moth at her throat; her uneasy fingers seemed to crave to be closed, and yet when she clenched her fist they ached to be opened. She longed to tear about, to give orders, to rouse enthusiasm. She would have liked to ride beside Terrington to the Palace and carry a flag: and the thought of how he would regard such a proposal moved her not to a sense of its humour but to renewed irritation with the man who could ride as indifferently to death as he would to a dinner.

Her whole being was in disorder owing to the uncertainty of her husband's fate. At the first shock and accepted inference of his death tears had burst from her in the weak wretchedness of bereavement, the sense of widowhood, and grief at the dying of one so near to her in the pride of his youth. It was perhaps the very nearness of death's-knife, the cutting off of the one who was one with her, who had scarcely gone from her arms, which gave her the keenest shudder. The sword which had been thrust through him seemed almost to have pricked her breast. Not that she feared for her own safety; she never imagined that it was compromised. She had the supreme British scorn for her country's foes, and thought it was only a question of policy whether Terrington with his handful of men would not at once burn the Palace to the ground, carry off the Khan in chains, and ravage the whole country with sword and fire.

It was death in the shadow which had stabbed and was gone which made her shiver. A thing so swift, so sudden, so unforeseen mocked the comfortable security of life.

But with the fitting out of the expedition and speculation on the possible safety of those in the Palace, her emotions became dreadfully perplexed. She had perforce to cease mourning a husband who might be still alive, and with the disappearance of a reason for her sorrow she began to wonder what had caused it.

Had she cried because she loved him or because he was killed? She had not a doubt while she thought him dead, but the chance of his being alive seemed to have altered everything. Last night she would have disowned indignantly the idea that she did not love him. She had accepted him as naturally in the order of needful things as food and clothing. He was her husband and so had everything that husbands have, did everything that husbands do. She had never thought about it as a personal matter. One had a husband as one had a cold in the head; one didn't always quite know why; but having him one accepted him for the sort of thing he was.

Lewis had taken her from a life already wearily dull, and with every prospect of becoming duller. He had come suddenly into her existence—a quite unlooked-for excitement; and had transplanted her into surroundings more exciting still; full of men, and dangers, and pageants and great affairs. It was so full indeed, that in the press of things to do he was a good deal crowded out. His work, his fresh appointments—for he had been tremendously in demand—gave him rather the air of continually arranging new scenes and effects in which she played the leading lady.

She didn't in the least so consciously regard him; she had not even noticed how much his work kept him out of the occasions which she most enjoyed; he seemed just a part of the delightful movement, a sort of dashing high-spirited hot-tempered ambitious concentration of it all. He was the man who had made it all possible for her, being her husband. That was how, gratefully, she most often thought of him.

His death wrenched her by its treacherous horror; but it had put no awkward questions. The questions came with the doubt if he were dead. How much did she care for him? Did she care for him at all? Had she ever cared for him as a husband? Right on the heels of that, answering it to her astounded perception, came a shrinking of disgust that she had lived three years with a man as his wife without loving him; without even discovering that she did not love him. It was that which seared the tears in her eyes, and left her with a sense of shame and self-disdain and loneliness indescribable.

It was that too in a curious reflected fashion which increased her anger at Terrington's quiet indifference to the ways of Fate. She could picture Lewis Chantry's raging vehemence under a like provocation.

As she watched the silent mass of men in the courtyard—the dull yellow of the field-service kit lightened by the gay alkalaks of the Lancers, the orange and white of their pennons, the glistening of the sun upon lance-head and bayonet, the silence broken only by the clink of a bridoon as some impatient horse flung up its head—there was a burst of blue and red above the eastern tower and the Union Jack flew out above the Fort.

It was the signal that Afzul Singh had completed his defences. Walcot rode back to Terrington and saluted. Terrington nodded. With a sparkle of light on their lances, the horsemen were in the saddle, the rifles leapt to the 'carry,' and were swung on to the shoulder, cresting the infantry with the shimmer of steel; the gates were thrown open, the Lancers passed through and extended, the Sikhs and Dogras wheeled outwards after them in column of fours, followed by the Guides.

As the gates closed behind the last section a sharp explosion rang out, followed by others in quick succession.

Rose Chantry started and stood quivering in tense excitement; then darted across the room to the further window, which looked towards the polo ground through a green fringe of chenar.

As she reached it there was another rending uproar almost under her feet, and a tree leapt into the air from beneath the window and fell with a crashing ruin of its branches towards the river.

Afzul Singh was converting the screen of chenar into an abattis with discs of gun cotton, but to Rose the trees seemed to be falling before the enemy's shells, and she ran hurriedly to the eastern tower to get a view of the besiegers, and found there Afzul Singh himself, who explained her mistake.

A sand-bag revetment crowned the top of the tower, and the loopholes on either side of the Maxim were manned by picked shots. All were intently watching the occasional glimpse of colour or gleam of steel which marked the progress of Terrington's force through the Bazaar.

Now that the din of the detonations had ceased not a sound broke the silence; the city lay listless and without a sign of life in the haze of its noontide heat. The dust rose on the heels of the column as it emerged from the Bazaar and filtered through the collection of low mud buildings beyond it. Clear of these, Terrington swung his right at once on to the river, and the whole of his little force could be seen for the first time as it extended and moved forward across the space of open ground to the east of the Palace. It looked painfully small for its job, like an ant attacking a mouse, even though Terrington made it as imposing as he could without sacrificing its compactness. The ground, flat as a floor from the river to the foot-hills, gave no command for rifle fire over the centre of the town, and Terrington had no choice but to march straight at the wall which surrounded the Khan's buildings, and chance their being defended. It was a dangerous piece of work, and Afzul Singh never lowered his glasses till the doubtful part of it was done.

But Terrington showed at once the temper in which he had undertaken it. His cavalry wheeled to the left, leaving the front open, and, advancing, formed a screen which covered the skirts of the town. The river protected the other flank, and, with the Guides in the centre as reserve, the Sikhs went straight for the eastern gate, while the Dogra detachment advanced half right upon the Palace stables where the wall ran down to the river. The guards on the gate allowed themselves to be taken, the stables were occupied without resistance, and a command was thus obtained of the Palace compound which was seen to be invitingly empty. But Terrington was the last man to be tempted by such an invitation. He had obtained a foothold from which to enforce his demands, and did not intend to go a step further.

He could not hope to carry the Palace, filled as it doubtless was with the Khan's guards; he had no guns to batter it; but he could now, if his hand was forced, make life very uncomfortable for those within its walls. So he began to parley.

What passed was hidden by the Palace wall from the watchers on the tower, but after three hours of apprehension they could see that the force was preparing to retire, and presently some of the Khan's bearers appeared through the gateway carrying charpoys. Afzul Singh guessed what was on them, and his grave consideration made no disguise with Mrs. Chantry. He had no hope that any of those who had been trapped in the Palace would return alive, and he held out none to her.

"None come," he said, lowering his glasses; "they are all carried."

Terrington had requested the return of Sir Colvin and his escort, and, on the reply that they were killed, had demanded their bodies.

Mir Khan, informed by his spies that the Fort had been loop-holed, provisions stored, the trees levelled and every preparation made for a prolonged siege, foresaw with a chuckle the very imminent destruction of the British force in Sar, and was far too astute to hurry a game which was going his own way.

So he tendered the bodies with every mark of respect and the most profound apologies for the passions of his subjects which he had been unable to keep under control.

Terrington had replied acknowledging the arrival of the charpoys and announcing that he was for the present the British representative in Sar, and would, on receiving instructions from his Government, acquaint the Khan what reparation was demanded for the murder at a friendly Durbar of Her Majesty's Commissioner.

The old man, when the message was read to him, rubbed his foot and smiled with child-like craftiness. He admired the daring which had flung that handful of the Sirkar's men without an hour's hesitation against his Palace; admired it the more since it seemed to prove that Terrington was after all but a swine-headed fighter like the rest of his kind.

VI

Terrington brought back his men with an undiminished precaution, Mir Khan's affability merely increasing his distrust, and Afzul Singh, his equal in subtlety and in knowledge of the foe, had prepared a sally should the force require assistance in getting out of the Bazaar. Mir Khan, however, to his own everlasting regret, held his hand, so that the little expedition returned without a shot fired, and the gates of the Fort were shut and barred behind it. Afzul Singh had been already entrusted with the duty of putting every alien out of the Fort, but to prevent more securely the escape of information, the guards were strengthened, and sentries patrolled the entire front of the Fort with orders to shoot any man attempting to enter or leave it before dawn.

When the men were dismissed Terrington called Walcot and Dore into the women's durbar hall and sent for Hussain Shah and Afzul Singh, who were the two senior native officers.

"I should like to break the news to Mrs. Chantry if I may," said Walcot in the doorway.

"The news?" enquired Terrington.

"Of her husband's death," Walcot explained.

Terrington's face showed a certain blankness of apprehension. He had forgotten that there was any one in the Fort, whose hopes or fears could be affected by the confirmation obtained of that morning's tragedy.

"Oh, certainly," he said.

The room was a long gloomy one on the ground floor, used by Langford partly as an office, partly as a store. Bales and boxes still filled two of its corners, and the space in front of them was littered with Sir Colvin's and the Chantrys' belongings, which were being removed from the Residency with ostentation. One dark window in the further wall lent what dim light the room had, and the table at which Terrington seated himself was drawn somewhat towards it.

He was writing when the two native officers entered, and he assigned to them the two seats on his right, with the grave silent courtesy with which the East had coloured so curiously his English manner. Dore, nervously tired by the excitement of the morning, had dropped limply on to a bale of clothing, and lit a cigarette, but the two Sikhs sat erect and impassive beside the table. Clones came in to requisition some stores, and reported Langford to be insensible and sinking.

"If you can spare a few moments you might spend them here," said Terrington.

The doctor nodded, and sat down on a packing-case beside Dore, rising again at once as Mrs. Chantry, followed by Walcot, entered the room.

She was wearing still the frock of creamy lace in which she was to have watched the polo that afternoon. Her face looked listless and white and faded above it like a broken flower. Her eyes sought Terrington's in the dim room with a sort of frightened submissiveness.

"May I come in?" she said.

"Of course," he answered, getting out of his chair to hand it to her; but Walcot had already drawn forward a seat of Sari rush from the relics of the Residency, and she dropped into it limply, with a nod of acknowledgment to Terrington, amid all the crushed and huddled fragments of her own lost little home. Walcot sat down on a box beside her. A tiny jade god slid down the pile of rugs and bowls and cushions, and lay at her feet with a severed arm. He had been for years the very dearest of her household treasures, and now to find him maimed and friendless moved in her a despondent misery which she had not felt at her husband's death. She hid the little broken body in the hollow of her hand, and sat there, her head bent over it, shaking with sobs. It was the very smallness of the grief that brought her tears.

Terrington blotted the notes he had written and laid down his pen. He made no sort of preamble: for anything in his manner the occasion might have been the most ordinary in the world.

"I wish," he said, "to explain my plans. Some of us may not come through the next few weeks, and I don't want those who do to be saddled with my mistakes. So I'll enter any protest, to cover you in case I'm not with you at the finish. We leave Sar to-night."

Even the two dark impassive faces on his right reflected the unexpectedness of his announcement, and Walcot half rose to his feet.

"Abandon the Fort?" he exclaimed.

"Abandon the Fort, and everything we cannot carry, and retire by the PalÁri upon RashÁt," said Terrington quietly.

"But I understood, if you'll excuse me," continued Walcot, trying to control his excitement, "that all the defences of the Fort which we've been at for the last month were your idea."

"They were," said Terrington.

"Have you changed your mind then?" asked the other sharply.

"No," said Terrington slowly, "but I've changed my position. I've only so far had to decide how to make the Fort defensible if it had to be defended."

"Yes, but!" Walcot objected, "the clearing of the Residency, the blowing down of these trees; all that has taken place since! What's been the object of that if you didn't mean to stay?"

"In war," said Terrington quietly, "it's sometimes as well to keep your intentions from the enemy."

"Did Sir Colvin mean us to stay here, sir?" enquired Dore.

"Yes," said Terrington. "Sir Colvin intended to hold out in Sar if anything went wrong till a relieving force could get up here from Sampur."

"You absolutely disagree with him, then?" Walcot rapped out.

Terrington looked at him thoughtfully.

"I have another point of view," he said.

"And what's that?" snapped the other.

"He was a political officer and I am a soldier," said Terrington simply.

Dore turned his shoulder upon Walcot, with a wrinkle of annoyance at his carping note.

"Don't you think we could hold Sar, sir?" he asked with boyish eagerness for a stand-up fight.

"Yes," said Terrington, kindling sympathetically at the thought of the fight he too had longed for, "I think we just could, though it might be a near thing. I've decided to clear out," he went on, addressing the others, "because the value of being penned up here doesn't impress me politically, and because digging us out of this in mid-winter would mean a horrible waste of life. There are only a few hundred of us to be wiped out at the worst, but it might take thousands of the men who came to save us. These little sieges are often very costly things."

"I shouldn't think our retirement will be very popular at home," Clones suggested.

"I don't suppose it will," said Terrington; "at home they're rather fond of a siege; it makes the paper more interesting."

"And how about the intentions of the Government, Colonel," Clones continued in his reasonable way; "I suppose you were sent up here to carry them out."

"No doubt," said Terrington with his grave smile, "but without being told what its intentions were. Consequently one rather seems to be here to make intentions for the Government, and I'm very possibly making them all wrong. But that's their fault for not having sent a better man."

"There's one point, Terrington, you don't seem to have considered," Walcot interjected; "that you've got to take a woman over passes which even the natives won't cross at this time of year."

"I haven't considered it for a moment," said Terrington shortly.

Walcot's face curdled with anger.

"That's hardly been the habit of Englishmen hitherto out here," he exclaimed.

"I dare say not," said Terrington with dry indifference.

Rose Chantry, with her hand still closed about the little broken god in her lap, looked up at him through the tears that hung across her eyes. Beyond the cool darkness of the entrance door, against the far wall of the blazing courtyard she could see the row of charpoys with their burden of dead men, mere rolls of sallow dungari cloth, waiting till the grave being dug beside the Residency gate should be wide enough to hold them. It was the most dreadful moment of her life, when she needed above all to be petted and comforted into a sense of her importance, but the man who should have done it was indifferent even to her safety. She had already begun to cheer herself with the thought of a siege; the delicacy of her position; the solicitous homage of all the men; her cheerful and inspiring effect upon them; the excitement in England so intensified by the presence of a woman among the besieged; the accounts of her in the papers, made more touching by her loss; and then the thrill of the relief—she took the relief for granted—the sound of the guns, the fight through the streets of Sar, the cheers of the British troops, the ardent congratulations, the soft abandonment of that moment at the end of the suspense, and herself the one woman in a British army. And the coming home after such an experience; the woman of the moment, every one wanting to meet her; perhaps a command from the Queen.

All her dream was shattered by Terrington's implacable decree. She looked at him with despairing hate. She thought of the reckless sacrifices Englishmen had made for women during the Mutiny, and hated him the more. She felt sure that she could never live through the snows of those passes about which she had heard such awful stories. The cold would kill her; the cold always shrivelled her up; and she had nothing to wear, nothing warmer than was wanted for an Indian winter.

And that very morning, only a few hours back, as the party started for the Durbar, she had exulted in her triumph over him, she whose folly had given everything into his hand!

What ages it seemed since Lewis had swung buoyantly into his saddle, and Sir Colvin, ruddy and cheery, had waved her an "au revoir." Now they were rolls of yellow dungari lying out there in the sun.

In her absorption of self-pity she scarcely heard Captain Walcot's expressions of dissent from his leader's plans, which were more forcible than soldierly. He was seething with wrath at Terrington's treatment of her, and Terrington, aware of his excitement, but quite at fault as to its cause, heard him with determined patience.

"And by which pass do you mean to retire?" he exclaimed at last, unable to shake Terrington's resolve.

"By the PalÁri," said the other.

"The PalÁri!" cried Walcot derisively. "Why, it's the worst pass on this side of the Pamir. May I ask why you've chosen it?"

"Have you been through the PalÁri or Darai?" Terrington enquired.

"No."

"Then you can hardly appreciate why I've chosen it," said Terrington quietly. "The PalÁri is the only one which we've a chance of reaching without being cut off; it's the only one not commanded from above at this time of year, and Freddy Gale, holding this end of it at RashÁt, is absolutely done for unless we dig him out."

His reasons were listened to by the room in absorbing silence. Then Walcot blurted out:

"Is this a council of war?"

"No," said Terrington; "it's an opportunity for protest. I wished to put your advice on record, but I didn't propose to take it."

Walcot thereupon declared himself emphatically in favour of remaining in Sar; Dore followed him less assertively. Clones gave a shrug of his shoulders.

"It's all one to me where I doctor you," he smiled.

Terrington turned to the two men beside him, who had sat, immovably attentive, throughout the discussion.

"We are as the print of thy footsteps," said Afzul Shah, and Hussain nodded.

Terrington wrote for some moments, then read aloud his own dispositions and the objections which had been urged against retirement. His own plans and reasons were very bluntly outlined, but he gave the case for the occupation of Sar with a fulness and cogency that astonished its advocates, who did not suspect how dear the scheme had been to his ambition, nor what its abandonment had cost him.

He handed the paper to Walcot.

"Will you sign it?" he said.

The best that was in the other man responded instinctively to such treatment:

"You've put it a long way stronger than I could myself," he said, taking up the pen.

VII

Langford came back to consciousness an hour before he died, and Terrington sat beside him to the end, writing instructions to cover every detail of the departure while he spoke and listened to the dying man. Langford was a fine horseman and a very capable soldier, and the only one of his subordinates on whose decision Terrington could rely. He had left in India an uncompleted love affair but he spoke of nothing in his last moments but the safety of the force.

"You'll have to watch those BakÓt chaps," he murmured, "there's no fight in 'em." And again with more difficulty. "Those beggars 'll cut you off at the SorÁgh Gul; get round by the Bewal road. You'll have to smash 'em there." His mind was evidently away with the retreating troops. His grip tightened on Terrington's hand. "If only I could go along with you, old man. Oh, it's hard to come to grief at the first hurdle."

He shut his eyes with that inconsolable sigh, and it was his unconscious soul that whispered, "Give my love to Helen," with the last beats of his heart.

Terrington went on writing as Langford's head fell back, then he loosened the dead man's fingers from his hand, and left the room. The sheer pressure of thought seemed to have squeezed out of him the power of feeling.

In the women's durbar hall he found Walcot and Mrs. Chantry turning over the litter of the Residency rooms.

Terrington had left the porterage of the reserve ammunition to Walcot's arrangement, and had been expecting his report for half an hour. Walcot had, however, considered the packing of Mrs. Chantry's boxes of more importance.

The expression of Terrington's opinion on his preference was a good deal tempered by Mrs. Chantry's presence; but even so was caustic enough to burn itself into Walcot's memory.

As he left the hall without a word, Rose Chantry lifted an Afghan poshteen from the heap beside her.

"Did you send me this?" she asked.

It was lined with astrachan, and exquisitely embroidered, and was the most valuable of Terrington's few possessions.

"Yes," he said, "it was the only warm thing I could get for you. You will want everything you can wear, and you can put that on over a good deal. There are some boots to come."

She did not know that he had sent her the thing of which he had most need himself, and his giving had about it no air of gallantry; but the proof that he had thought of her at a moment when he had to think of everything touched her far more than had Walcot's voluble commiseration.

She held out her hand to him and tried to speak, but her throat closed and her lips trembled.

He took her hand in both of his.

"Poor, poor thing!" he said.

Gholam Muhammed entered with the long lamb-lined boots at that moment and laid them with a salaam in front of her.

They had been made for Terrington and were long enough to reach to a man's knee, and Rose, whose every breath at the moment compromised with a sob, thrust out her pretty foot beside them with unconscious coquetry.

"Oh, that's all right," said Terrington, smiling; "they'll go over the others. You'll not find them a bit too big."

He lifted one, with its tassels and showy crimson calf, and, taking her wrist as if she had been a child, thrust her hand down through the woolly lining which almost filled the top.

The loose sleeve slid back to her elbow against the leather edge, and as she looked into his face with a surprised compliance, something in the softness of the curling silken warmth against her skin touched her suddenly beyond her power of control. She snatched her arm away from him, and, flinging herself upon the heap of curtains and cushions, burst into tears.

Terrington, completely at fault, made no attempt to console her. He knew when to leave a man unhindered and to give a horse its head, and the instinct helped him with a woman's tears. He stood watching her sobbing shoulders, and the shadows on her golden hair, but his thoughts, the instant they were freed from her, flew forward to the forcing of the SorÁgh Gul, the double-headed defile on the road to RashÁt, where he knew Mir Khan could intercept him and compel him to face an attack from three sides at once. He tried to compel his memory to yield some details of the position which he might turn to account, for his own field-sketches only supplied features which would be useful to the enemy.

The sinking of Rose Chantry's sobs brought his mind back to the dim hall. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.

"What was it, child?" he said.

She raised her head from the crimson silk, leaning towards him against his hand, and mopping her eyes with the ghost of a handkerchief.

"It was the fur," she sobbed; "it felt so soft."

The explanation explained nothing to Terrington—a woman never seemed so unreasonable to him as when she gave her reasons—but its incomprehensibility absolved him from attempted consolation.

"Well," he smiled, "you mustn't cry again till you're across the border. Hukm hai!"

She looked up at him, leaning still against his hand.

"I'm afraid of your orders," she said shyly.

"Well, there's another," he went on with his paternal air; "you must wear everything warm you've got and pack only what you can put on later."

"I've nothing warm," she said with half a sob.

"Oh, come!" he rallied her; "then I'll have to send round the men who are padding your doolie to pad you too! How about that shooting suit of yours?"

His remembrance of it pleased her far more than her possession.

"It's not very warm," she murmured.

"Well, it's a good deal warmer than these flimsy things," he said, lifting the laces that lay round her neck; "and we'll turn a feather quilt into a petticoat for you, cut you a boa out of the mess-room bearskin, and put the poshteen on top of all. Mind, you'll have to parade in full marching order, or we'll leave you behind for Mir Khan to take care of."

An orderly entering with a chit at that moment made an end to the boyish talk that was meant to put fresh heart into her, and Terrington, after a glance at the scrap of paper, left her at once with a smile and a nod and an instant's tightening of his fingers upon her shoulder.

At sunset he read the sentences of the burial service over the trench beside the Residency in which the bodies of the three Englishmen were laid. The dusk was spreading under the autumn twilight, while the pale spaces of eternal snow beyond RashÁt were veiled with rose in the clear heaven above the purple ramparts of the valley and the flames of the pyres on which the dead Hindus were burned blazed in clear spires of light through the increasing gloom.

Rose Chantry stood next to Terrington, in a shooting costume of golden-brown tweed, with a leather hunting-belt, a broad band of leather about the short skirt, brown leather boots that laced half way to the knee, and a brown tam-o'-shanter pinned tight upon her curls. She hardly knew what he was reading as she looked across the miles of evening to the tinted snows, and heard the crackle of the funeral fires on either side of her. Life had been suddenly changed altogether into something hard and glaring and stale and ugly like a ball-room opened to the dawn, and she felt to be growing hard and plain and matter of fact to match it.

The melancholy volleys were fired above the grave, the level flash of orange light splitting the darkness like the sweep of a sword, for Terrington, well aware that he was watched, would omit nothing which might by its absence suggest a desire for concealment. While the ostentation of the funeral was distracting the attention of Mir Khan's spies, all the outward openings in the walls were being closed, so that when the funeral party returned to the Fort the arrangements for immediate departure could be pushed forward with continued speed and in complete concealment. The twinkle of lanterns everywhere made the labyrinth of the old mud walls look as if invaded by a flight of fire-flies. In ordered lines across the courtyard the bearers squatted, brown and impassive, beside their burdens; line after line, hour after hour, filing forth from the dark doorways of the Fort, till half the space between its walls was full. The other half was covered with accoutrements and bristled with piled arms. In the stables the Lancers were removing every needless detail from their equipment, and a wisp of rag was twisted round any piece of metal from which a sound might be shaken. In the long gully between the stable and the Fort stood strings of mules with a few zabus, snorting and shuffling under the loads that were being heaped upon their backs.

An hour after midnight the gate of the courtyard was thrown open, and a dark stream of horsemen poured silently out and turned north-east towards the river. They had left their lances broken behind them, but took every ounce of food that they could carry and three hundred rounds a man. Hard on the dust of their hoofs followed the Sikhs and BakÓt levies under Dore; the Sikhs, long and lithe, fine marchers and good fighters all of them; the BakÓt men short and square, very doubtful shooters and untried in fight, but hard hill-men, at home in the snow, and equal to almost any labour. After them came the long lines of mules out of the gully snorting and shaking their packs and harness, and kicking up more dust than the horsemen. Rose Chantry's doolie followed in rear of these. It had been padded for her with quilts of Armak wool and lined with camel's hair curtains fastened down to keep out the wind, and carried a mattress of feathers, a span in depth, to save her from the joltings of the road. Terrington had literally sketched its construction with one hand while he wrote a despatch with the other, and had himself gone down to the yard to explain away the carpenter's difficulties. But he shook his head at the boxes in which Rose had packed what she considered "absolutely necessary."

"No good!" he said. "Even if we got them to the PalÁri, we'd have to leave them in the snow."

"How many bearers have I?" Rose demanded.

He looked down at her smiling.

"Four for the doolie and a mule for your baggage," he said; "about what's allowed for half a company. And there's a tent for you on the mule already."

"I can have some one else's tent," she exclaimed crossly.

"No one else has a tent," he said with the same dry smile.

She turned from him petulantly.

"You can leave them all behind if you like; I don't care!"

Yet she repacked submissively—with the help of the khansamah, whom Terrington sent to the assistance of her pride—what she most needed in the space allowed her; with a new dull kindling of anger against the man who could compel her so easily to obey. But the eager preparations in the darkness subdued her with the sense of an impending fate, the silent streaming forth of the little force into the night towards the day of battle and the awful snows, and she was gratefully reassured when Terrington suddenly appeared beside her as the doolie drew up, and helped her in with a comforting pressure of the hand.

"Sleep if you can," he said; "we're perfectly safe for the next twelve hours."

His own beloved Guides brought up the rear, and he rode last with them out of the Fort.

For the next day and night danger only could threaten from direct pursuit, and so his place was for the present with the rear-guard.

VIII

The position in which Terrington found himself requires to be explained.

Determined to clear out of Sar, three ways lay before him. The valley of the Kotli to the south, through the Gate of the Great Evil, by which, with Sir Colvin Aire, he had come up from Sampur; the Darai Pass, due east across the Kalawari, and then south-east into the Punjab; and the PalÁri, north-east, through the wild welter of ranges under the roof of the world and over plains of snow to the western border of Cashmir.

The first, though physically far the easiest, was out of the question, since the road would be lined with hostile khels who could force him to fight every mile of the way, with the odds of the ground and numbers always against him.

The Darai, which came next in feasibility, was approached over an open and exposed country, and was commanded from above in its most dangerous defiles. Consequently it was by the PalÁri, the most arduous of all the roads between Sar and Hindustan, that Terrington determined to retire.

To RashÁt, which Gale was holding at the foot of the PalÁri, there were two roads from Sar. One, the longer, which Terrington had taken, led up the left bank of the river through gorges of increasing grandeur till the SorÁgh Gul was reached. There the shorter road from Sar joined it, and the two rose together to the snows. Terrington was forced to go the longer way because he could cover his retreat along it with a small rear-guard, and because the shorter passed through Sar itself and beside the very gates of the Palace; but he had to face the certainty of finding Mir Khan and his men at SorÁgh Gul in a position almost impregnable barring his advance upon RashÁt. There, if wedged between the force in front of him and that following him from Sar, he would be forced to starve or to surrender.

The six hundred men under him were too few to be used offensively; he could not squander them against odds in the open. If compelled to fight his way across the SorÁgh Gul not many of that six hundred would find shelter in RashÁt. By craft alone could he hope to reach the PalÁri with the foe behind him, and the craft that should deceive Mir Khan would have to be greatly daring. Greatly daring it was. He divided his force into three parts. The first, composed entirely of the Guides Cavalry Bengal Lancers, was to push on by forced marches to the further side of the double-headed valley which ended in the SorÁgh Gul. Being mounted, on a fairly good road and with eight hours' start, it could reach this before the enemy, who was mostly on foot, could arrive by the shorter road through Bewal. Sending on a summons to RashÁt for every man that could be spared, Walcot, who commanded the cavalry, had orders to wait the arrival of Mir Khan from Bewal, and then, making as much dust as possible, to retire slowly on RashÁt, fighting as determined a rear-guard action as he could without exposing his men, in order to draw Mir Khan after him across the Gul. It was Terrington's hope that the Khan, seeing British troops beyond the Gul, would imagine that the entire force had reached it by a superhuman effort and, after a perfunctory search of the road towards Sar, would follow furiously in order to drive it headlong into RashÁt.

To complete the deception, the central portion of Terrington's force, consisting of the Sikhs and BakÓt levies in charge of the transport, were to remain concealed and not to approach the Gul till the Khan's intentions became apparent; and the Guides forming the rearguard had orders so to delay pursuit along the river road from Sar that the pursuers' fire should not reach Mir Khan's ears at the Gul for at least twelve hours after he had reached it.

Then if Mir Khan came to the lure, and followed Walcot, the Sikhs were to push on at full speed, seize the road where it crossed the Gul, and await the rush for safety of the enemy on finding that he was trapped.

It was a scheme of extreme audacity, but in its audacity lay its safety. In splitting up his little force Terrington seemed to be offering it for destruction in detail, but the offering was of such effrontery that no one, and Mir Khan least of all, was likely to be prepared for it. It afforded, so far as Terrington could see, his only chance of a blow decisive enough to cripple for the moment Mir Khan's power. If it failed of that the force was doomed. Yet, if it should fail, what else would have succeeded?

Though Terrington had urged Rose Chantry to rest while she could, the morning light was peering between the curtains of the doolie before sleep closed her eyes. She listened all night to the silent march: the grunts and whinny of the mules, the jangle of harness, the low-spoken orders of unseen men. And under it all the beat of feet in the dust, the quick clatter of driven hoofs, the dull even tramp of armed men.

When she woke it was high noon and her doolie was resting upon the ground. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out upon a land unknown to her. The doolie stood against a clump of tamarisk, but no other greenness met her eye in that valley of stones. The river bubbled somewhere beneath her out of sight; and, reaching to the sky, on either side of it stood astounding walls of rock, some sheer and broken into awful precipices, others vast shelving slopes of shale which gave an even more oppressive sense of distance and desolation than the cliffs themselves. A jagged ribbon of blue sky showed between them overhead, scarcely wider than the hidden bed of the river, and the sun blazed down into that cleft of air like the mouth of a furnace.

The heat fastened with a slap upon her hand as she stretched it out into the sunlight, and the whole valley seemed to bend and waver in the clear vapour that streamed from every stone. A little green tent was pitched beside the doolie under the tamarisk, but the only other sign of a camp came from the span, of mules being driven down to the water, and some fifty brown blankets stretched between rifles and pegged down with bayonets in the shade of which men were lying in every shape of dreamless sleep. They looked, even to her unpractised eye, terribly few in that wilderness of space.

As she crawled out of the doolie she discovered that there was a sentry posted over her and the tent, who presented arms, much to her embarrassment, as she scrambled up from her knees.

She could see no sign of her ayah, but in the tent she found her dressing-things laid out on a folding camp-table; there was a canvas basin on a trestle, which was also none of hers, and a canvas bath on the floor.

She questioned the sentry in her broken mixture of tongues about the ayah, but he could tell her nothing, and evidently had not seen a woman about the place.

So, very shyly, and after cautious tying of the tent-flap, testing of its skirts, and closing of its little grated window, she began her first toilet in camp, pausing, poised, to listen to every strange sound without, and especially between every splash of the water in her bath.

She was coiling her hair about her head before the tiny mirror in one dense twist, which displayed better than any fashionable device its golden thickness, when she heard the slap of the sentry's hand on the stock of his rifle, and Terrington's voice outside the tent.

"Hope you slept," it rang out cheerily. "Gholam is getting us something to eat as soon as you're ready."

Rose Chantry's head came through the flap of the tent, with a white arm and elbow moulding the last roll of her hair.

"Where's my ayah?" she asked plaintively.

"I wish I knew," said Terrington, handing over his horse to a sais and lifting his helmet. "When we started last night she wasn't to be found. You'll have to put up, I'm afraid, with Gholam's valeting."

He offered her the idea lightly, as though it were all part of a picnic; but he had ridden through the night, after the ayah's flight had been discovered, tortured by the thought of the woman, sleeping in the litter in front of him, young, lovely, widowed and alone among six hundred men, without a single other of her sex to shield her from the coarseness and defilement of war.

He well knew how men, pressed by the necessities of the field and simplified by the daily presence of death, reverted to a savage shamelessness, a sweeping aside of convention, not at all to their discredit, but of a very fearful grossness to a woman's eyes: and he felt, contemplating the future of the next few days, almost as if he were the accomplice of some iniquitous abduction.

Rose Chantry noticed—she was learning to notice—that Terrington had not been out of the saddle since he left Sar. A smoke of dust fell from the wrinkles of his tunic and breeches as he slid to the ground, and there were tiny furrows of dust upon his face. She noticed too—but that needed no learning—how the searching hard-browed look of the scout went suddenly out of his eyes as they fell upon her, and the lines about his lips relaxed. He had ridden forward to the hanging bridge where alone the river could be crossed below the Gul, as Walcot had sent back word that it would require strengthening to carry the transport, and he was of necessity his own engineer. So he had missed the sleep and meal of which his men had partaken, and had some reason to look way-worn when he appeared before Rose Chantry's tent after thirty hours of unceasing strain.

Yet when he reappeared, washed and shaven, fifteen minutes later, he seemed as alert as though he had but just left his bed. Responsibility always endued him with double strength.

Gholam Muhammed could discover nothing better than a broken biscuit-case to set the breakfast on, so Rose brought out the camp table from her tent and improvised a tablecloth from a Russian towel.

Terrington, returning to find her seated in the shade of the tamarisk making tea, looking, thanks to the close coils about her head, more astoundingly young than ever, blithe and fresh as an English morning, caught his breath with a sharper sense of her isolation.

He seated himself on the biscuit-case at the further side of the table, and his glance travelled from her up the forbidding precipices, and back again to her trim figure.

"Well!" she enquired provokingly; "you're wishing me a thousand miles away?"

"I am," he nodded.

"You're not half grateful for your mercies," she retorted; "it ought to be rather a change to have a woman to pour out tea for you before a battle!"

"Oh, it is a change," he smiled.

She handed him a mug of blue and white enamel.

"And is there going to be a battle?"

"Not to-day," he said.

"To-morrow?"

"Probably."

"And shall we all be killed?"

"It's not impossible," he said gravely.

She leant her lips down to her own brimming mug and looked across at him over its edge.

"Don't you wish you were safe back in Sar?" she said.

He shook his head as she lifted and drained the mug and set it down with a sigh of content.

"I was so thirsty. Isn't it grilling? Why did you make me wear these clothes? I can't see much sign of the snows. Isn't this tinned milk horrid? What's become of all the men? You don't seem to have kept many to look after me! Will you have an egg?"

"Please," said Terrington to her last question.

"Was that your bath and basin I had this morning?" she went on.

"It was," he said.

"I don't see why I should be clean at your cost," she demurred.

"Oh, you're not," he assured her; "you're the only one in the force with time to be clean at all, and even you won't want to wash after to-morrow."

"We shall all be killed, shan't we?" she asked mischievously.

"Whether or not," he said drily; "we shall be too cold to have much use for water."

"I can't imagine such a condition just now," she answered.

"You'll be able to when you've crossed the PalÁri," said Terrington quietly.

She twisted her chair sideways, put one hand above the other across the back of it, and leant her chin upon them both. She watched Terrington so for a few seconds while he finished his egg. Then she asked:

"What have you done with Captain Walcot?"

"He's commanding the advance-guard."

"Miles and miles away?"

"I hope so by now," he said.

"Is he going to fight to-day?"

"No."

"To-morrow? When we all do?"

"Mir Khan permitting," said Terrington with a smile.

"Will it be more dangerous where he is than where we shall be?"

"No," said Terrington; "rather safer. He'll have a line of retreat."

"Safer!" she echoed with astonishment; "then why didn't you send me with him?"

Terrington looked at her thoughtfully as he inverted the tin of milk above his mug.

"Pure selfishness," he said. "I wanted some one to pour out tea for me before the battles."

"I don't see why you shouldn't speak the truth," she pouted.

"I don't see why you should want it spoken if you know it so well," he said.

"You were afraid to send me with him!" she thrust out sharply.

"Was I?" he said, cutting off the drip of the milk with his spoon.

"Yes! You were afraid he'd spend his time with me instead of looking after his men."

Terrington pushed the kedgeri towards her persuasively, but she shook her head.

"Do you know that Captain Walcot is in love with me?" she went on.

"How should I?" he said, helping himself to the dish she had declined.

She gave a little hopeless sigh at his obtuseness and a complacent tilt of the head.

"He's been in love with me ever since he came to Sar," she asserted.

"Has he?" said Terrington, puzzled by the confidence.

"Yes," she nodded. "You think that very wrong, I suppose?"

"Well," he admitted mildly, "do you think it very right yourself."

She straightened her shoulders, lifting her chin, and her grip tightened on the back of the chair.

"It's not a question of what I do or don't think right," she said with sudden fierceness; "it's a question of what a woman's got to be and to put up with out here if she's tolerably good looking. You think we're just silly fools, who laugh and chatter and let men make love to us. You don't know that it's just to keep things pleasant, and prevent rows for one's husband in little places like Sar, where every one's jumbled together, that one does laugh, and chatter, and pretend not to see things, and seem to like things that one hates. You suppose, because we don't make a fuss, that we're frivolous and empty-headed, and don't think for a moment what a time you'd have of it if we went in for being anything else."

"No," said Terrington doubtfully; "I don't suppose we do."

He was perplexed by her revelation, never imagining that it came of a desire for his good opinion, and resenting her careless sacrifice of another man's secret. He knew nothing about women, nor how little they counted a loss of honour from the sacrifice of anything in what could be considered an excusing cause.

So that he was quite unprepared when, with her elbow propped upon the chair, and turning her back upon his vague admission, she said in a voice uncontrollably unsteady.

"Oh, I know what you think of me!"

Terrington, who neither knew what he thought of her nor what she thought he thought of her, held his tongue, and Rose, with her back still towards him, and after a sniff at the opposite hills, continued less precariously:

"Do you think it's impossible for a woman to change?"

"Oh, surely," he protested, smiling; "that's never been urged against her."

"You might be serious when you know I am," she said with such a grieved reproach that Terrington repented his levity. "Mayn't a woman learn something sometimes from things that happen, even though she was once a fool?"

"Yes, I'm sure she may," he assented heartily; "and much quicker than a man."

She turned about towards him gratefully.

"Yes," she sighed, "but you'll never believe that I shall be good for anything, after what I did in Sar?"

"Oh, shan't I!" he said cheerily. He finished his tea, and smiled at her with a new friendliness across the table. "Look here," he said, "I'm going to turn in, and I want you to wake me in an hour's time. Will you?"

She nodded.

"But you want more than an hour."

"Yes," he said, "but I'm not going to get it." He looked at his wrist. "That'll be on the stroke of three. You've got a watch?"

She held hers to her ear.

"It's stopped," she said.

He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her.

"Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested.

"Oh, no!" she said.

He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully.

"It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want."

"You're going to be called at three," she said precisely.

He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it, got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie.

"Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully.

He took it from her with another smile.

"I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady."

But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude.

Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection.

The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of disappearance, nothing beyond.

Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air.

Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with determination than from drowsiness.

Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart.

At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his consciousness.

He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the stony valley towards the bridge.

Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her heart which no man before had ever brought there.

IX

An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.

Afterwards she fell asleep and was only wakened when Terrington drew aside the curtain and told her that it was time for dinner. The doolie was on the ground again, but the night was black about it and a cold air seemed to be pouring down out of the sky.

Rose shivered as she pushed the curtains aside and stepped out into the darkness. Spaces of pitchy gloom on either side of her, and a sparkling riband of stars overhead showed the force to be still in the defile, but something ghostlike and pale seemed to come between the stony blackness and the stars. It was the light of the snows.

A few yards beyond the doolie a fire flickered, over which Gholam was leaning, peering into a pot; and further off some score of camp-fires pierced the darkness with clear pointed cones of flame.

As she came into the circle of the firelight Terrington appeared beside her, the poshteen in his hand.

"Sleep well?" he asked as he helped her arms into it, and turning her round towards him by the collar, buttoned the frogs across her chest as though she were a child.

"It fits you proper!" he proclaimed, surveying her at arm's length.

She smiled at his motherly vigilance, but felt with keen happiness its protective care. He made her feel so completely in his charge that, had he given her a kiss as he buttoned her coat, it would have seemed no more than she had been accustomed to from others who had dressed her.

He drew a stool for her to the fire, recounted the humorous mischances of the journey while she had been asleep, and jested over the ingredients in the stew which Gholam was making them.

The frank fraternity in his manner increased her sense of a girlhood which had come back to her. She sat listening to his talk with the smiling happy-serious air of youth. And they ate together of the stew with great relish despite the suggestions he proposed to find in its bones. And when they had finished the modest little dinner, Terrington spread a rug beside the fire, and they sat close to the red verge of it, for comfort of the warmth; Rose, resting on her wrist, with her feet tucked under her, girlishly erect, and with the big collar of the poshteen turned up about her ears, but Terrington, at greater ease, leaning upon his elbow with his body bent towards the flames.

Rose, however, did not have him altogether to herself. The approach of action was signalled by a succession of orderlies, for whom brief notes had to be written, and Hussain Shah arrived later for a consultation.

Still, despite its interruptions the time seemed to her the most delightful she had ever spent. She was tasting for the first time what it meant to feel.

The blazing fire pushed the night back from a brief circle about them, and, when the flame fell, the darkness seemed to leap forward like a black thing with wings trying to spring from behind upon their shoulders.

In the darkness was the unknown morrow, and death, and the blood and horror of battle; and in the firelight just the man and herself; the man who was showing her a new unknown kind of manliness, and herself with all her married days and ways forgot, listening like a girl to her first discovery in heroes.

"Time to turn in," said Terrington, as he came back out of the darkness on parting from Hussain. "We start at two; and no one can say when we sleep again, so do all you know. I'll see if your doolie is ready."

She turned out one little hand to the flame with a shiver.

"Oh, I can't leave the fire," she said. "Mayn't I sleep here?"

He looked at her with the air of considering her request as a reasonable proposition.

"I don't see why you shouldn't," he said; "I'll fetch your blankets."

He fetched the mattress as well, and the boots he had given her, which he happened to find inside the doolie.

"You must wear these," he said, "if you sleep out."

She took them from him with a sigh of submission, sat down upon the mattress and prepared to pull them on.

"Don't put your hand into them," he said warningly.

She opened her eyes in question.

"It may make you cry," he smiled.

She repaid his memory with a glance of pleased surprise, and shook her head softly.

"Not now!" she said.

She held up the boot towards him, and thrust her arm down into its depths.

"So warm," she purred.

She covered her shyness in pulling them on before him with the pretence that they were much too tight.

Terrington smiled at her efforts.

"I'm afraid you'll grow out of them very soon," he said.

Then he tucked her in under the blankets and wrapping himself in his cloak lay down beside her. She risked the comfort in which he had arranged her to stretch out a small white hand to him to say good-night; and he held it long enough to express to her the subtle newness and nearness in their common knowledge that such a night might mean.

Rose seemed only to have just ceased to watch the changing colour of the flame on Terrington's face when a hand was laid on her shoulder and his voice spoke in her ear. She jumped up, dreaming of battles, so stiff that she would have fallen but for the arm which he put under hers. The doolie suddenly appeared out of the darkness, he helped her in, bade her good-bye with a clasp of the hand, dropped a sharp order to the sentry who strode beside her, and was gone. The bearers moved off at a quick amble, and when they halted she knew she was amongst men. The night was still of an impenetrable black and she could see nothing between her curtains, but she heard in the silence the shuffle of feet, and the grunted "Huh!" of the BakÓt men as they fell in half awake and hitched up their accoutrements.

Then with a whisper the jampanis moved on, and to the swinging to and fro of the doolie she fell asleep.

X

Rose woke to a sense of excitement which pierced her sleep.

"Tell him they're right down here in front of us," she heard Dore's voice in a hard whisper. "And take that doolie back," he added angrily.

The doolie spun round, but before it was gone a hundred yards Rose stopped the bearers.

The morning was gray, cold, and very still, just after dawn. A white wet mist had come down upon the hills, and hung from cliff to cliff like a ceiling cloth across the valley. Ahead, laid out behind boulders of blue grey stone, she could see the yellowish attenuated line of Dore's Sikhs spread like a fan on either side of the road.

A runner, naked but for his loin-cloth, and throwing up the dust from the soles of his feet, went by towards the front, coming back somewhat less hurriedly ten minutes later.

There was no further sound nor sign of life for half an hour, and then Terrington with an orderly came in view round the bend of the road riding slowly. He stopped with a smile of wonder where Rose was sitting on a stone before her doolie at the side of the road.

"However did you get here?" he asked.

"Mr. Dore sent me back," she pouted.

"Sent you back!" he echoed. "I should think he did."

She came up to his horse's shoulder, and with a "Good morning," offered him her hand.

"Is it going to be a fight?" she asked as he took it.

"It is," he answered, "and you're in front of the firing line. You must wait here till I return to you."

She stood back demurely with her hands behind her, and he rode on with some injunction to her sentry which she did not understand.

He was met, she saw, by Dore near the line of skirmishers, and in obedience to some command the section on either side of the road turned outwards and began to creep up the steep sides of the valley, taking cover, when they halted, so effectively that not a man was to be seen.

Just as the last of them had disappeared a rifle rang out, faintly, far ahead.

Rose, who had not taken her eyes from Terrington, stiffened at the sound, and stood tensely listening with an ear towards it.

She had to wait a full five minutes till the shot was repeated, but hard upon that followed the soft rattle of a fusillade. Though it sounded vague and dull as the patter of rain on water, she knew it at once for what it was, and started forward eagerly towards it along the road.

The sentry, mindful of Terrington's injunction, tried to stop her, but she ordered him to stand aside with such imperious authority that he gave way, and Rose went on towards the spot where Terrington was posted above the road with his glasses raised. He was so absorbed in the scene they gave him that he did not hear Mrs. Chantry's approach, and was only aware of her presence beside him when he turned to search for the Sikhs upon the hill.

He lowered his glasses sharply and faced her with a frown.

"I told you to wait for me," he said reprovingly.

"I know," she murmured, "but I couldn't. I'm no good at waiting." Then, as this information brought no softening to his eyes, she added defiantly: "I don't see why you should treat me as a child. I don't intend to be kept out of danger."

"There's no danger here to keep you out of," said Terrington, "except the danger of your being seen." His eyes took in her troubled face and his manner changed suddenly to a reasoning gentleness. "You see the fight's right away over there, beyond the Gul. Mir Khan's pushing Walcot back on RashÁt, and we hope he thinks he's got us all. We're hiding here, in case he sends any one to look for us along the road to Sar, and the game would be up if he spotted us."

He helped her up on to a stone which gave her a view over the low ridge in front of them, and handed her his glasses. Then, as she did not know how to use them, he turned her round to him, and fitted them to her eyes, and standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders, shifted the lens till they suited her sight.

The mists had lifted, and she could see without assistance the entrance to the double-headed valley where the gorge which brought the road from Bewal joined that from Sar. Beyond their junction was the famous Gul, showing as a dark cleft across the valley, and, again beyond that the hills closed in about a defile more forbidding than that through which they had come.

Here and there across the throat of it, like tufts of bog cotton, burst little white puffs of smoke, where Walcot's men were holding back Mir Khan's reconnaissance. The force they covered was so well concealed that even the glass revealed no sign of it, but the Khan's advance could be traced in specks and streaks of whitish yellow climbing out of the Gul, which Walcot had made but a feint of defending, and creeping dispersedly towards the puffs of smoke.

Down the valley towards Bewal the Khan's main body could be made out. Dark masses of men divided by varying spaces and mingling in the distance with driven flocks and herds. The dull morning glimmer of steel wavered over it like the light upon a spider's web.

Near the centre was a body of horsemen tailing out along the road, which made a gay tendril of colour even at that leaden hour, it was the Khan's bodyguard in purple and fawn and gold.

As Rose Chantry moved the glasses from end to end of the enemy's column, her certainty of a safe return to India collapsed utterly.

She looked round at Terrington, expecting to see the same despair on his face that had seized upon her heart, but he was watching Mir Khan's advance with an unaltered countenance.

"Oh, Captain Terrington!" she cried hopelessly, "there are thousands of them: they'll eat us up."

He put a hand under each of her elbows and lifted her down from the stone.

"Well!" he said smiling, "we're going to play the dickens with their digestion."

They walked down to the road where Dore was standing with Terrington's mare.

"You need send back word of nothing," said Terrington, "we overlook your position. Keep your men where they are, no matter what force may pass you, and don't fire a shot till you get the signal."

This laying of a line of fire across the neck of the defile had been Terrington's last piece of daring, to cover the chance of Mir Khan's detaching a force to search the Sar road strong enough to pen the British troops in the defile and prevent their issuing to fall upon the flank of the men engaging Walcot beyond the Gul.

Terrington realized the possibility of such a move on seeing the size of the force which the Khan had so unexpectedly collected, and added at once this risk the more to the many he was taking in order to make the enemy's defeat sufficiently disastrous to deter him for a few hours from pursuit.

He nodded a farewell to Dore, lifted Rose into the saddle, and walked back beside her.

She leant forward to pat the mare's neck and get a side view of his face.

"Are you awfully excited?" she asked shyly.

His thoughtful eyes came round to her.

"Awfully!" he said, smiling.

He signed to the doolie to follow them, and led the way back along the road, which rose slowly for about a mile. There was nowhere any sign of life, and the fight and the scene behind them seemed suddenly to have passed out of being.

They went a little way in silence, and then Rose Chantry said gravely:

"Captain Terrington, do you really think we shall beat them?"

He put a hand on the saddle behind her.

"Are you afraid, child?" he asked.

She nodded pensively.

"I can't help it," she broke out with a sort of petulance; "I do so love being alive: and I've had so little of it; only just the last few years."

He looked up into her face, with its gay air of beauty softened and sobered by the thought of death.

"Yes," he said, "I understand."

She searched his expression doubtfully.

"Only for me?" she questioned.

"Oh, I'm not a lovely woman," he smiled.

"Who told you that I was?" she asked him.

"Ah! I've found it out for myself," he sighed.

"Have you?" she said without conviction. "And aren't you afraid to die?"

"A man has to be afraid of other things more," he told her quietly.

A sharp turn of the road brought them suddenly into the Dogra's camp. Though no fires were burning the men were round their cooking-pots finishing a meal; food and sleep in Terrington's conception going half way always towards winning a fight.

He lifted Rose out of the saddle, asked her if she were equal to a climb, and together they clambered up the ridge of shale on the north of the valley at the head of which Hussain Shah had his post of observation.

The track was steep and the stones slippery, so that for most of the way Rose's hand was in his, and when they came to a spot where the shale slope was half afloat in water he stooped, with the remark that he must carry her, and lifted her on his arm; setting her feet down, an instant later, upon a rock, in order to seat her for greater ease upon his shoulder.

She sat erect, with one hand under his chin, rejoicing in the air of mastery that never thought to ask her leave, and in his strength which was more severely tried than she suspected by the shifting stone and slush.

Hussain's post overlooked the ridge where Dore was lying, and commanded a view of the valley towards Bewal; but the eastern trend of the road hid Walcot's doings beyond the Gul.

Hussain at once began an elaborate explanation in Pukhtu, Terrington nodding his head and following the indications of the other's hands, but Rose could not tell by any outward sign how the recital affected him. He turned to her when it ended, and told her they were going higher for a wider view. She pleaded to go with him, but he merely shook his head, smiling at the chaos of rocks above them, over which a goat only could go in safety.

Rose sat herself down in a corner of the sangar opposite the three signallers, and watched Terrington and Hussain haul themselves up the scarp, taking cover as warily as though they were stalking sambur, yet never hesitating nor halting for an instant, the Risaldar a length in front, and Terrington swinging hand and foot after him in absolute accord.

They disappeared behind a buttress, and Rose fell to watching the signallers, two bronzed and splendid sepoys and a havildar of the Guides, whose blue and white flag slapped ceaselessly in the air.

Far away upon a spur above the road by which they had come she could make out the flutter of an answering signal, and, while she tried to follow it, suddenly a star of light winked like a sunlit window on the hill-side far down the defile.

It stirred the little group like the fall of a shell. The havildar thrust his paper and pencil on the unoccupied sepoy, hoisted the heliograph over his shoulder, and scrambled out of the sangar with his head turning as he went for a glimpse of the unexpected sun. He had his tripod settled, and an answering shaft of light was flying from his mirror down the valley before the flag had ceased its flapping behind him, but not before the nearer station had also found the sunlight and set a second star in the gray sameness of the hills. The flag fell, the click of the mirror took up the speech of its shaken folds, and dazzling lances of sunlight flung from ten miles away began tilting with the lashes of Rose Chantry's eyes. She was so absorbed by the strangeness of their silent language, that she was startled to find that Terrington had dropped alone and unnoticed from the rocks above her, and was scribbling a message which he handed as he finished it to the havildar.

He stood watching intently the answering flashes, twice prompting the reader when he was at fault. Rose, conscious of a certain still determination which had come into his manner, went over and stood beside him.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, as the answer to his order sparkled in the air.

He wrote a second message before replying; then he put his hand in her arm and walked her back to the sangar.

"Yes," he said; "Mir Khan is proving himself to be a good soldier. He's going to take no risks."

"Are you taking any?" she asked.

"Oh, yes!" he smiled; "I'm taking them all. That's the worst of being the weaker side."

He stopped, and looked out again over the Bewal valley, where the enemy's forces could be seen dividing in the form of a Y, one arm leading towards the SorÁgh Gul and the other towards the entrance of the Sar defile, where Dore was lying.

"He's coming this way?" she suggested.

"Yes," he assented, "he's coming this way—half of him. He's either found out our little game, or he's going to make sure we're not playing it. So we've got to fight him here."

"Is that worse for us?" she enquired anxiously.

He nodded.

"And who's over there?" she asked, with a tilt of her head towards the distant hills.

"Subadar Afzul Singh and the Guides," he said; "but thanks to Mir Khan, they can move up now, which is a point to us. And now we must go down to lunch."

It was all so evidently the playing of a game to him, though the stakes were life and death, that she was infected for the moment by his incentive to the forgetfulness of her own fears, and asked eagerly of Afzul's march as they went down the hill together.

Terrington expected the Guides in three hours, and though he had no fear of being unable to hold out until they joined him, it was a question if he could delay his counter attack so long without rendering Dore's position too precarious. Everything would depend on the pace at which the enemy advanced and the force employed for his first attack.

When they came again to the water, Terrington knelt down without a word, and Rose seated herself with a laugh upon his shoulder.

But he did not set her down when the wet space was crossed, but carried her on to the little green tent which Gholam had pitched above the road, laughing to her protests that it was one of the disadvantages of being so light that people would insist on carrying her.

The signal which had dropped from the ridge had set all the camp in motion.

Men were building sangars; boxes of ammunition were being unloaded from mules and carried up the hill; all signs of a camp had disappeared and the transport was slowly toiling back by the way it had come.

Rose declared herself to be too excited to eat, but Terrington insisted on her finishing what he thought sufficient, and set her an example in appetite in spite of numerous interruptions.

No one could say, he reminded her, where nor of what their next meal might be.

Then he found her a place from which she could see, as she insisted, the progress of the fight in the greatest safety, posted her doolie with its bearers behind, and left the faithful Gholam in charge of her.

"I mayn't see you again," he said, taking her hand, "but word will be sent to him, and you must do as he tells you, as we may have to make a dash to get over to the Gul."

"And if we're beaten will we go back?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"If we're beaten we shall die here," he said quietly.

She held out her other hand to him.

"I'm not afraid now," she said under her breath.

An hour of anxious waiting followed, then the enemy's scouts began to appear on the road in the gap of the ridge that Dore was holding.

As the ridge offered them no advantages and the searching of it entailed exposure, they kept to the lower ground and came on slowly on either side of the road. An advance-guard followed, and then a body of horsemen, the valley growing slowly brown with them.

They halted with evident suspicion of Terrington's tactics, but came on again, reassured by the safety of the scouts, who were within a few yards of the lower sangars, before, following the signal stammer of the Maxim from the road, fire opened from the whole line at once upon the packed mass in the valley.

The result should have been disastrous to the attackers had the shooting been even fairly accurate, which unfortunately it was not. The Dogras included a very small proportion of marksmen, and the BakÓt men had not outlived their remembrance of the matchlock, and probably fired over the heads of everything. Some score of the scouts were turned over, and a few men and horses fell in the main body, chiefly to the Maxim. The remainder scampered for cover in all directions, followed by an independent fusillade which did very little harm. At the sound of the firing, reinforcements began to pour through the gap above which the Sikhs lay, silent but excited spectators, and in a very short time the attack was more cautiously renewed.

The high ground which Terrington was holding on either wing converged forward from his centre, so that the Saris in trying to force the road found themselves exposed to a crescent of fire, and after a vain attempt to rush the Maxim, fell back, and by creeping up the sides of the valley began a movement to outflank him from above.

For this they only needed time to be successful, as the defenders' line was already stretched beyond the limits of safety, and Terrington watched with varying anxiety the progress of this movement, the gathering mass of the enemy on the road beneath him, and the slow closing up of the Guides in his rear.

He gained some time by a sortie from either flank, cutting off the men who were climbing above him, but this only forced them to make a wider circuit and postponed their eventual success. He returned from this sally, a smoking carbine in his hand, his face smeared with heat and dust, and a bullet-hole through his helmet, to find Rose standing in the sangar which he had quitted, watching him with proud admiration.

The enemy's centre was following the sortie back with every rifle that could bear upon it, and bullets were striking in front of the sangar and flying over it like brazen winged bees. Two or three men had been hit, and Terrington stooped to lift one of them into safety before he could speak to Rose.

"Go back!" he said almost angrily. "What are you doing here?"

"I shan't!" she returned defiantly. "I'm going to be with you."

Terrington turned to direct the carrying of the wounded down to the road: then he put his hand upon her shoulder and said quietly.

"Go back, please, for my sake, to the doolie, we're all going forward in a few minutes."

Gholam, who had been standing beside her, with an expression, turned towards Terrington, of absolute impotence, gave a little jump and clapped his hand to his elbow.

"Are you hit?" said Terrington.

The man withdrew his hand, looked at it, all smeared with blood, and salaamed.

"The Sahib's servant has the honour," he replied gravely.

Terrington placed himself more completely between Rose and the enemy's fire.

"Take him down, dear, will you, and tie him up?" he said.

The little endearing word moved her more than the command.

"Come!" she said, as though it were rather the servant than herself that was responsible for the trouble, and walked straight down to the doolie.

The enemy had made another dash on the centre after the sortie, and as it was driven back the signal was given Dore for which he had so eagerly been waiting, Terrington's hand having been forced by the increasing number of the enemy in front of him, the Guides being still a long way to the rear.

A bugle call replied to the signal, and Dore's men opened fire instantly on the crowded road beneath them.

The Saris turned at the sound, to find themselves penned between two lines of fire and the precipices of the defile.

It was little wonder that panic seized them; the long deferred disclosure of the trap adding to their apprehensions. Those nearest Dore's ridge dashed for the gap without an attempt at resistance, and those in front, seeing their supports in flight, fell back, firing wildly in both directions.

The BakÓt men finding the foe in retreat began to shoot with more effect, but Terrington, trusting rather to their knives for slaughter and feeling that the decisive moment was come, signalled to the Guides, still three miles away, to press forward, and ordered a general advance.

The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them from behind. The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the Durbar—a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and, as the BakÓt levies descended with their crooked knives upon the scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each other to escape the avengers.

Terrington stopped the pursuit with the utmost difficulty as it came under the fire which Dore was pouring upon the fugitives, and sent volley after volley with deadly effect into the maddened wedge of men penned in the gap. It was absolute butchery, and the struggling men fell to the bullets in sheaves across the road, the life blown out of them at three hundred paces.

The Sikhs continued to fire despite Terrington's attempt to stop them so long as any of the flying mob remained beneath them, and then, scampering over to the other side of the ridge, opened on the runaways as they emerged from the defile.

Terrington pushed the Dogras forward into the gap as soon as the bullets of the Sikhs had ceased to search it, and discovered at once, in spite of his advantage, the greatness of the task in front of him.

Mir Khan, realizing from the sound of battle in the defile the trick which had been played him, was throwing forward every man he could spare to shut Terrington within it till he could extricate the force which Walcot had skilfully drawn after him up the road to RashÁt.

Terrington gathered at a glance that the disorder which the flight of the panic-stricken Saris was creating in the ranks of the reinforcements offered him the one chance of getting his transport out of the defile and of holding a fighting position on the ground beyond it.

So, though the Guides were not yet in sight, and his force utterly inadequate to the task before it, he pressed on upon the heels of the fugitives which were blinding the enemy's front, in order to give Dore's men on the south of the road an opening to descend from the ridge and crumple the broken flank back upon the centre. So soon as he saw that the Sikhs were in motion he pushed the Dogras forward in the centre to maintain touch with them, and cover the egress of his transport from the defile, taking the BakÓt men along himself to prevent an enveloping movement on the other flank. This, the extreme right, was the weak point in his advance, since he had not sufficient men for an extension to gain the support of the hill-side, and the enemy's line was long enough to overlap him, and, by passing round his right, to force him off the road and close the entrance to the defile behind him while the Guides were still within it. This was the critical hour of the day, for Mir Khan, who had hurried back from the Gul to direct the attack, at once realized his advantage, and leaving his right to take care of itself, swung all his horsemen round to the other wing, and sent them dismounted clambering over the further slopes of the valley, while he himself advanced against Terrington in front. Sending word to the half of Dore's force, which still lined the ridge on the north of the gap, to get still higher up the hill and threaten in turn to outflank the enemy's flankers, Terrington set himself to hold the half-trained BakÓt levies in a position which would have tried the morale of the best disciplined troops.

In this, without the special help of Heaven, he certainly would not have succeeded, since in order to keep his men together he had to expose himself in a fashion that should have brought death to him twenty times in the day.

Rose Chantry who, with the rest of the transport, had been hurried through the gap and left to find what cover they could in the open ground beyond it, watched him through her glasses, standing erect amongst the men who were crawling and slithering at his feet, with a growing wonderment of appreciation for the manner of man he was. She saw him pounce upon one skulker who was trying to slink away, lift him like a dog by the neck to his full length, march him forward in the face of the bullets, and fling him down again in the firing line.

The charmed life which he seemed to wear had its effect at last upon the superstitions of the men he was leading, and a fatalist spirit took the place of their fears. This improved their pluck if it did not mend their shooting; yet Terrington was compelled none the less to retire them, leaving his dead and badly wounded behind him, as the enemy's flankers had worked round far enough to enfilade him. He was thus compelled to fall back slowly for the better part of a mile, until his supports became entangled with the head of the transport column. This caused the officer in charge of the transport to attempt an immediate withdrawal, forgetting that the ground over which they had reached their present cover was now swept by the bullets which were passing over Terrington's head. The first two mules to emerge from the shelter of the rocks fell dead with their driver, and the significance of the little spirts of dust that barred the way was brought home to those that followed. The head of the column halted, the rest of it continued to advance, the mules becoming jammed into a huddled mass. Rose Chantry's bearers had picked her up when the retirement was ordered, and when it ceased and the crowding beasts began to accumulate round the doolie she put her head through the curtains and asked Gholam what had happened. He explained apologetically that the leaders of the transport were smitten with great fear.

"Go on," she shouted to her bearers, "and show them the way."

Gholam interpreted the order and the jampanis had shuffled timorously along for a few paces, when the enemy's flankers came in view of the disordered transport and with cries of triumph began to shoot down into it from the hill.

One of the jampanis was hit in the first fusillade, and, another dropping with fright, the doolie came with a crash to the ground, and Rose scrambled out of it, her teeth set and a little revolver in her hand, to face what would probably have proved the closing scene of the day's fight, had not, at that moment, the leading company of the Guides emerged from the defile.

They had come for three miles at the double and had no breath for shouting, but they extended with parade precision, and went straight for the scattered sharpshooters on the enemy's left.

But the day was too old for half measures. With a faith in reinforcements and a strong front, Terrington signalled Afzul Singh, who had, despite his forty-five years, outpaced on foot the youngest of his men, to keep his right shoulder up, thus ignoring the enemy's left and bringing the Guides through the broken BakÓt men on the main road. Then, as the panting line came up to him, Terrington put himself in front of it and charged straight at Mir Khan's centre.

That part of the enemy's front, unaware, owing to the slope of the ground, of the Guides' arrival, only waited a snap of the trigger, as the wave of buff-clad men burst over the rise. Then it turned and ran.

Blown though his men were, Terrington carried them half a mile further before halting them. By doing so he cut in halves Mir Khan's line of battle and isolated his entire left wing, which did not need a second volley from the Guides to explain what had happened, and in an instant was leaping like a flock of goats over the shale slopes in wild retreat.

Leaving Afzul with half a company to complete the rout, Terrington wheeled the other half to the left, and, coming into line with the Dogras and Sikhs, fell upon the enemy's right, which had seen the defeat of the centre, and pressed it hotly down the hill.

He only carried the pressure far enough to clear the road, and, as soon as the second company of the Guides appeared in the gap to form his rear-guard a general movement began across the valley towards the SorÁgh Gul; the Sikhs, Dogras and half a company of the Guides covering the transport on the south side, the second company of the Guides, breathless but athirst for battle, holding the road behind it, and the BakÓt men still running like hounds over the great shale slopes on the north hacking down the flying Saris with their knives or shooting them like rabbits at a dozen yards.

It was a triumph of unhoped-for victory, but even yet was not complete. For the swiftness of Terrington's advance brought him to the Gul before the men who had been pursuing Walcot could recross it after the news of Mir Khan's defeat had reached their ears. The Gul was a ravine with sides almost precipitous and close upon two hundred feet in depth, with a torrent raging over its rocks which could only be forded at one place.

Walcot, reinforced by Freddy Gale with the garrison of RashÁt had turned upon his pursuers, who reached in their flight one side of the Gul as Terrington's force appeared on the other.

Panic-stricken they plunged into its abyss to escape the bullets behind them, hoping to hide amongst the boulders in the torrent's bed.

But the river had risen behind them, and a foaming floor of water stretched from side to side of the chasm.

Clinging like conies to those bare declivities they were shot screaming for mercy or insane with fear, and fell like blood-gutted leeches into the flood beneath.

Terrington watched the slaughter, silent and stern, feeling to be but the avenging instrument of God, yet wishing for the qualities of a god to reconcile him to its pitilessness and inevitable injustice.

While he watched, his ear caught the click of little feet on the rocks, and he turned to find Rose Chantry beside him, gazing down upon the torment of that gulf of death.

"Go back!" he said hurriedly. "You mustn't see this."

She turned to him a little face fierce and white and ablaze with vengeance.

"I shall see it," she cried imperiously; "they killed my husband."

Yet her vengeance came rather from the relief of long pent anxiety, and it was less of her husband that she was thinking than of the man who had come back to her out of mortal danger, his coat ripped by bullets in two places and a dark scum of dried blood across his face from a flesh-wound in the temple.

XI

After a brief halt for a meal, Terrington sent on the Dogras to convoy the wounded to RashÁt, the BakÓt levies following at midnight with the transport. He would rely only on his tried fighters for the long rearguard action which would begin on the morrow, and only end beyond the Paldri.

But though the struggle of the next few days would mean hardship for all and death to many, the worst was over with that day's ordeal, on which had hung the safety of the entire force. Had Terrington been beaten, every man with him would have been massacred, RashÁt would have fallen within a month, and his name held up to the scorn of the years to come as of one who had lacked the courage to stand to his post. Yet his victory had been, under Heaven, but an accident. He knew that well enough. That fight, the most sanguine for its size in Indian history, which has coloured the name as it dyed the water of RashÁt river, would have been lost but for the arrival at its crisis of men on whose coming he had no right to count. It was won indeed, won in its overwhelming effectiveness by his subtlety, his daring tactics, his personal valour, but it would have been lost despite all those, despite any devices that men could have contrived, had not a certain company of the Guides possessed the splendid training and the undauntable energy of the men whom Afzul Singh had led.

Yet now he had, thanks to them, the redounding credit of it, who, but for them, would have borne its enduring shame.

Determined to hold the Gul on the morrow as long as possible, Terrington halted the Guides on the further side of it, and ordered them to turn in as soon as they had made a meal, while the Sikhs prepared defences and furnished pickets for the night. The Guides, save for their three miles' scurry, had been under fire all the way from Sar, and had not left a man behind them. Keen soldiers all of them, they forgot their own part in the day's success, and, when Terrington went down to inspect their camp, gathered from their cooking-pots and cheered him tempestuously.

Terrington laid his hand affectionately on Afzul's shoulder.

"You did it," he said gratefully; "you did it!"

The circle about his own camp fire was completed by Walcot and Freddy Gale, and it was there that Rose Chantry watched the ways of men who have come out of battle. Walcot, who had fought well and been slightly wounded in the shoulder, seemed unable to talk enough. Speech gurgled out of him like rain from a gargoyle. Freddy Gale listened, throwing in brief descriptive touches, his round merry face convulsed from time to time with infectious laughter. Terrington, who sat beside her, said nothing at all, but the keenness of his eyes was softened by a grave content.

Rose noticed the warmth of his greeting to Gale and his evident gladness to have a man under him on whose knowledge and judgment he could depend. Once, when leaning forward across the fire after dinner to ask Walcot a question, she put her hand unawares on Terrington's, which was lying on the ground. He did not move, and she took it in so tight a grip, that, as she settled herself again, he turned his head and looked smiling into her eyes.

The enemy had been so roughly handled that Mir Khan could not persuade his men on the morrow to a fresh attack across such an obstacle as the Gul, and Terrington after holding it till nightfall fell back upon RashÁt.

But before he reached it the Saris were again upon his heels like a pack of famished wolves, ravenous for blood. During the three days' march to the foot of the PalÁri, the fighting never ceased night or day. In the dark it dwindled to the buzz or the slap of the sniper's bullet, varied by an attempt to rush a picket; doing only occasional damage but keeping the whole camp awake, and causing a suppression of the fires whose warmth was becoming with every hour more essential.

Dawn generally brought an attack on two or three points at once, and persistent efforts were made during the day to outclimb the British flanking parties and command the line of march.

Once, when these were successful, Terrington only obtained relief by an attack upon the centre, threatening the safety of the men above the valley, but the effort proved so expensive that he was obliged in the future still further to extend his wings and retire by continuous echelon up and down the slope of the hills. It was slow work.

Then, too, though his losses were not heavy, the carriage of the wounded was an increasing labour, and he was finally obliged to dismount the Lancers and use their beasts for his injured men.

The first fringe of the snow was hailed, for all its augury of hardship, with a shout of welcome.

As the men's feet slipped in its yielding softness, their eyes followed the vast white slope that stretched above them till it was lost in the grayness of the sullen sky. There, close under the heavens, tormented by winds that powdered the snowflakes into icy points and whirled them to and fro in furious eddies, lay the road to safety.

There was death in its blinding whiteness, death in its numbing torpor death in its piercing cold; but beyond was life and wife and honour and reward.

The sight of the snow drove Mir Khan to more desperate means, for, without some critical success, beyond the PalÁri he dared not go, since his opponents might be able to count on reinforcement, and the pass close behind him.

But to Terrington the pressure of the enemy now became less serious than the difficulties of the road. His men soon learnt the value of snow as a protection, and snow entrenchments were much more rapidly constructed than stone sangars. But with every march the strength of his coolies was declining, and they could scarcely carry their reduced loads. The horses, barely able to keep their footing on the frozen ground, became at once exhausted when the deep snow was reached, and had to be killed and eaten. This brought him almost to the end of his fuel, and left the wounded to be carried by effectives who were already beginning to feel the strain of constant fighting and the toil of forcing their way through a foot's depth of snow. Moreover every hour of ascent brought them into an air perceptibly rarer, and increased grievously the stress of every added effort.

On the second day they reached the terrible region of the winds, and for three hours waited helpless in a blast of icy crystals that cut the face till it bled, and froze the eyelids with the tears that it brought to them, and made every breath a pain.

The storm struck without warning. The snow ahead seemed suddenly to rise on end; the next instant the awful gray mist of ice was tearing past them. For those three hours it was impossible to move or to see. The air seemed as thick as a river jellied with snow, and even when the eyes could be opened, the clotted whiteness hid the end of one's arm. Where the men clung together in frightened and shivering groups, the wind piled drifts on the lee side up to their necks.

It seemed as though the snows of all the mountains was being swept into the sea, and yet scarcely a flake fell upon the rear-guard, fighting some few hundred feet below.

Terrington was alone when it fell, riding along the column, persuading, encouraging, helping, threatening; lifting, by sheer strength of will, the tired trail of men higher and higher. He slid off his shaggy barebacked little pony, turned its tail to the wind, and leant against it for the warmth which he knew both soon would need. He had an immense capacity for patience, but it failed him now; and its failure taught him what otherwise he might have waited long to learn. For through those long bitter hours it was not of his men that he thought—his men who had been his only care and love for years—but of Rose Chantry. Thought of her, crouching frightened in her doolie, fallen somewhere in the snow, the warmth going surely hour by hour from her frail shivering little body, the cold fingers of death slowly closing upon her, and no one by to bring her comfort and help her to be brave. The thought was agony to him, and by the agony he knew that it was love. Light, vain, fickle, ignorant, there were reasons enough, and he knew them, for not even liking her. He did not know, for that matter, if he did like her. He longed with indescribable solicitude to see her face again. That was all he knew.

Even the cold that crept numbingly through him could not stifle that desire. If the storm lasted for six hours no living thing would be left in the pass. He was not afraid of that. He feared to outlive it and find her dead.

Yet when the storm ceased as suddenly as it began, he made no search for her. He was still that much master of himself. Finding a floor of rock swept bare by the wind, he diverted the line of march across it, and there, with Clones, inspected all the men as they passed for frost-bite; and soon had a row of them laid out under blankets and vigorously rubbed with snow.

The wounded had suffered most; all the worst cases were dead, many were past help, and none had escaped injury: after them came the baggage carriers, ill-clad and ill-nourished as they were, nearly all of whom had paid for the exposure with a frozen foot or finger.

It was right at the end of the transport that Rose's doolie appeared, and to Terrington's immense relief she thrust out her head from the curtains as the bearers halted. It was a face fearfully pinched and cold, but there was a new spirit behind it, for she would not speak of her own ailings, but insisted upon getting out to rub the hands of the frozen, till Clones, seeing she was likely to faint from fatigue, put her back in the doolie.

On that night they camped below the PalÁri, and the next day it was crossed by the entire force.

But though the wind spared them, that day was the most trying of the retreat.

The blazing sun upon the snow after the storm had produced a rapid increase of snow blindness. Of the English officers Terrington alone was unaffected, the others all having to be led, Walcot especially being much disfigured and in great pain.

The blinded men went hand in hand in single file with a leader who could still see the track to each squad of ten, the skin of their faces blistered and bleeding, their eyes crimson and inflamed, and tears trickling continuously from them, to freeze upon their cheeks.

At a height of twelve thousand feet each movement was a struggle, and, from ceaseless fighting, marching and want of sleep, every nerve and muscle were at the breaking point. Gale, blind and worn out, but cheery as ever, facing a fight which he could not see, kept the rear-guard in splendid shape, and Clones, though blind also and suffering from frost-bite, continued to feel his way among the wounded.

The faith of all was pinned desperately upon Terrington, and keen the anxiety about his sight. It was perhaps sheer determination which kept him as impervious to the glare as to fatigue.

Tired out he was, and knew he was, but he seemed able to hold his tiredness at arm's length for so long as he was needed.

By evening the last man was clear of the pass; the enemy had not dared to cross it, so the British force was practically safe from pursuit, and on the morrow would be dropping down towards the green valleys and the south. But only a few of the hardier hill-men had energy to kindle smoking fires of the wet brushwood they were able to collect.

Terrington had gone round the camps to say a cheering word to the men and see if all that was possible for the frozen and wounded had been done; and at last, his task ended, turned with foreboding to the green tent, which Gholam had pitched warily in a crevice of the rocks.

In the supreme effort of that crowning day he had not seen Rose since the night before, when she had seemed achingly weak and ill.

She was sitting on the mattress, all her rugs piled about her, shivering. She burst into tears as he knelt down beside her.

"My feet are frozen," she sobbed, "my feet are frozen."

He had her boots off in an instant, and set the lantern on the ground, searching anxiously for the fatal whitening of the flesh. But though her feet were absolutely numb the frost-bite had but just begun, and half an hour's vigorous rubbing took the whiteness out of them; and then Terrington chafed them gently, and breathed on them, and wrapped them under his coat to bring the blood back to them as imperceptibly as possible while Rose sat with hands clenched and face working, smiling at his tenderness and crying with pain.

But in that torture of recovery she reached her limit of endurance. The cold had sunk into her soul, and when Gholam brought in the smoky lukewarm mess, which was all that even his adroitness could contrive in that white waste she turned her head away from it, saying wearily that she did not want to eat.

Terrington, with a sense of difficulty beside which the leading of men was a simple matter, sat down on the mattress beside her and put his arm supportingly about her shoulders.

"I'm going to feed you," he said.

She tried to meet his mothering with a smile, but as the flap of the tent lifted with a blast of wind, which flung a spray of snow over them, she shivered and shrank back, shaking her head.

"It doesn't matter if I eat or not," she said despairingly. "I can't live another night with the cold. I wished I could die all last night, it was such dreadful pain. I can't stand it any more."

For answer he drew her a little closer to him.

"God's brought us to the end of our trouble, child," he said. "To-morrow it will be all going down, down, down, and warmer and warmer every hour. You've only to make a fight of it just this one night more—for my sake," he added.

She shook her head despondently, but he thrust his fork into the dish, and brought a morsel of meat to her mouth, and made her eat it. And so, coaxing and commanding, he forced a meal upon her, eating one himself to give her time, and she leant against him with her head upon his shoulder, faintly happy, but shivering at every blast that pierced the chinks of the tent.

He rose when she had finished and laid her down on the mattress, wrapping her up in everything he could find.

"You're not going away?" she murmured apprehensively.

"Only to have another look at the men," he said, tucking the rugs closer about her.

"You'll come back; promise you'll come back," she pleaded anxiously.

Kneeling down beside her, he bent down and kissed her forehead gently.

"The moment I can," he said.

He tightened the flaps of the tent, and set Gholam Muhammed to pile snow about the skirts of it. Then he went on to the camp.

He found everything there very much in need of him. The plans he had made had not been completed. The men, utterly worn out, had flung themselves down too tired even to care for self-preservation.

Walcot was seriously ill; Gale, Dore, Clones, and the two senior native officers were all blind, and so were ignorant of what had been left undone.

Freddy Gale, though he had twice fallen from exhaustion, had directed personally the issue of rations, and used every chance to cheer his men; but he missed that sense of their condition, and they the sense of his control, which can come from sight alone.

They lay in the snow, inert, benumbed, certain victims to that frozen sleep from which there is no wakening. Only the old soldiers of the Guides had stretched their blankets, and made any likeness to a bivouac.

Terrington's voice came upon the scene like the call of a bugle. There was help in it and scorn and energy and command, and, behind if, unconquerable will and eyes that saw. The men dragged themselves to their feet, and straightened themselves to match its clear direction. Order after order rang out, like the voice of a ship's captain shortening sail, quick, certain, vivid with necessity, but cool as the dew. The heaps of men became ranks that took shape and moved. Rifles rose on end, blankets were slung between them, and slowly the crescent camp came into being, which should offer least resistance to and most shelter from a storm. The little hospital leanto was enlarged, the worst cases were brought in and treated, and then laid for warmth one upon the other at the end of it.

For close on three hours Terrington's labour never ceased for a second, and the camp lived upon his voice. He did not leave it till he had seen every man with some covering over him, and some food to eat; not, indeed, till maternally, he had tucked them all into bed. Then, hoarse with shouting and drunk with fatigue, he staggered back to the little green tent.

Rose turned her head as he entered, but the eyes were strange to him. He kneeled down beside her, dried the snow from his hand, and laid the back of it upon her cheek. Her skin was gray and mortally cold.

"I'm dying," she whispered.

He felt her hands, which were blue and lifeless, and with no flutter of a pulse. The air in the little tent was a long way below the freezing-point, and it was quite evident that she was slowly sinking into the torpor from which she never could be roused.

He chafed her hands, but no heat came to them; she merely turned from him with a weary gesture to be left alone. Then he pressed her palms against the talc of the lantern, but the flickering candle seemed to give out no warmth. Then, suddenly, a thought struck him with the fierce hazard of despair.

He gazed at her in doubt for a moment, then he got up, dusted the flakes of snow from his riding-breeches and drew off his long boots.

Rose turned her head away from him on the pillow with a sigh and closed her eyes. She was slipping happily away from him into the land of shadows.

Terrington took off his greatcoat and spread it over her. Then he lifted the wraps that covered her, and lying down upon the mattress slowly drew them over himself as well. She turned again, childishly fretful at being disturbed. Running a finger down the buttons of his patrol, Terrington raised himself, and taking her in his arms drew her under him, spreading his body upon hers.

Though he was heated with exertion, it was a long time before any warmth could melt its way into her chilled flesh. Terrington pressed his face against hers, first to one cold cheek and then to another, breathing, as one thaws a window pane, upon her neck. At last, when he had almost lost hope of saving her, she made a little nestling motion towards him like a frozen bird before the fire. Then her breath began to be audible, and she gave long sighs as though to free herself of his weight upon her.

Terrington's limbs were numb with the intentness of their pressure, and his arms, folded about her, had fallen asleep. The cold seemed to lie like a wet sheet over his back.

Presently Rose moved beneath him, a movement of her whole body: her eyes opened, met his without wonder, and closed again with a sigh of content. Her arms straightened, and then, loosening limply from the shoulders, slipped to her sides. She seemed to soften and grow supple beneath him and her breath came evenly between her lips. She was asleep.

Terrington raised himself slightly, and so stayed all the night.

The agonies that he suffered from cold, cramp, and the stubborn struggle with fatigue passed what he had thought possible to human endurance.

In the gray of the morning she opened her eyes again.

"Nevile!" she exclaimed, as though she had but just parted with him in a dream.

She had pushed in wonderment her hands against him, and he fell over as though his arms had been cut off. She stared an instant at his grotesque efforts to move, then with a sudden passion of enlightenment seized his useless arms.

"Nevile, Nevile!" she cried, "what have you done for me? You've saved my life."

He smiled dimly, trying to lift himself upon his elbows, but dropped back again.

"Have I?" he said.

Her left arm went like a snake about his shoulder, and her face came down quick and close to his.

"Why did you do it?" she asked almost angrily.

"I love you, dear," he said.

XII

After the night under that gable in the roof of the world, many things happened; but there ended the siege of Sar. For Sar is, in the old tongue of Maristan, the word that stood alike for the kingdom's centre, the heart's core, and this was a siege unprepared and unintended, by a girl of a man's heart. For it was to the girl that he surrendered.

The rest of the retreat, the cold neglect with which the Government of India tried to treat the little force, the angry expostulation of the Press of England, and the tardy honours, are they not written in the book of the Rulers of India, and in the heart of a people that does not forget?

But with his crossing of the PalÁri, Terrington's achievement ceases. The rest was mere marching. Thanks, indeed, to his diplomacy it was mere marching, and that not a sword was drawn against him on the road home. But he thought little of such success; he had a natural capacity, he said, for creating false impressions.

He came very near incapacity during the first day of the descent: for his vigil of the night before had cost him the use of both his arms and legs. Rose prayed him to be carried in her doolie, but he knew the effect the breakdown of his seemingly unassailable strength would have upon his men, and had himself tied upon the back of his little pony, and led, with no slackening for his infirmities, wherever his encouragement or his counsel was required.

The perpetual jogging down-hill was, in his condition, not a bad imitation of martyrdom, which, in his heart he bore as deserved for having spent his strength upon a woman instead of for his men.

But the power came back to his arms by the way, perhaps from sheer pain; and the use he found for them at the end of the day, when, though still in the snow, the weary little band gathered warm and happy about fires of fir, certainly suggested no regrets to the woman they enfolded.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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