The villagers looked leery and eyed Cunningham sideways at each fresh sally. The fakir grew bolder, until one of his listeners smothered an open laugh in both hands and rolled over sideways. Cunningham came closer yet, half-enamoured of the weird scene, half-curious to discover what the stone could be on which the fakir sat.
The fakir grew nervous. Perhaps, after all, this was one of those hatefully clever sahibs who know enough to pretend they do not know!
The abuse and vile innuendo changed to more obsequious, less obviously filthy references to other things than Cunningham"s religion, likes, and pedigree, and the little crowd of men who had tacitly encouraged him before got ready now to stand at a distance and take sides against him should the white man turn out to have understood.
But Cunningham happened to catch sight of a cloud of paroquets that swept in a screaming ellipse for a better branch to nest in and added the one touch of gorgeous color needed to make the whole scene utterly unearthly and unlike anything he had ever dreamed of, or had seen in pictures, or had had described to him. He stood at gaze--forgetful of the stone that had attracted him and of the fakir--spellbound by the wonder-blend of hues branch-backed, and framed in gloom as the birds"
scream was framed in silence.
And, seeing him at gaze, the fakir recovered confidence and jeered new ribaldry, until some one suddenly shot out from behind Cunningham, and before he had recovered from his surprise he saw the fakir sprawling on his back, howling for mercy, while Mahommed Gunga beat the blood out of him with a whalebone riding-whip.
The sun went down with Indian suddenness and shut off the scene of upraised lash and squirming, naked, ash-smeared devil, as a magic-lantern picture; disappears. Only the creature"s screams reverberated through the jungle, like a belated echo to the restless paroquets.
"He will sleep less easily for a week or two!" hazarded Mahommed Gunga, stepping back toward Cunningham. In the sudden darkness the white breeches showed and the whites of his eyes, but little else; his voice growled like a rumble from the underworld.
"Why did you do it, risaldar? What did he say?"
"It was enough, bahadur, that he sat on that stone; for that alone he had been beaten! What he said was but the babbling of priests. All priests are alike. They have a common jargon--a common disrespect for what they dare not openly defy. These temple rats of fakirs mimic them.
That is all, sahib. A whipping meets the case."
"But the stone? Why shouldn"t he sit on it?"
"Wait one minute, sahib, and then see." He formed his hands into a trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating order to somebody behind:
"Oh-h-h--Battee-lao!"
The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.
Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him, until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.
"Look, Cunningham-sahib!"
The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light, to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side, in curves, across the stone; but it was too dark--the light was too fitful; the marks themselves were too faint from the constant squatting of roadside wanderers.
Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig hurriedly, scratching and sc.r.a.ping at what presently showed, even in that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering. Soon Cunningham himself began to lend a hand. He made out a date first, and he could feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it. Gradually, letter by letter--word by word--he read it off, feeling a strange new thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from the haunted past.
A.D. 1823. A.D.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM WHO DIED ON THIS SPOT AETAT 81 FROM WOUNDS INFLICTED BY A TIGER
There was no sound audible except the purring of the lamp flame and the heavy breathing of the three as Cunningham gazed down at the very crudely carved, stained, often-desecrated slab below which lay the first of the Anglo-Indian Cunninghams.
This man--these crumbled bones that lay under a forgotten piece of rock--had made all of their share of history. They had begotten "Pukka"
Cunningham, who had hacked the name deeper yet in the crisscrossed annals of a land of war. It was strange--it was queer--uncanny--for the third of the Cunninghams to be sitting on the stone. It was unexpected, yet it seemed to have a place in the scheme of things, for he caught himself searching his memory backward.
He received an impression that something was expected of him. He knew, by instinct and reasoning he could not have explained, that neither Mahommed Gunga nor the other men would say a word until he spoke. They were waiting--he knew they were--for a word, or a sign, or an order (he did not know which), on which would hang the future of all three of them.
Yet there was no hurry--no earthly hurry. He felt sure of it. In the silence and the blackness--in the tense, steamy atmosphere of expectancy--he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that there was superst.i.tion to be reckoned with--and that is something which a white man finds hard to weigh and cope with, as a rule.
The sweat ran down his face in little streams a the p.r.i.c.kly heat began to move across his skin, like a fiery-footed centiped beneath his undershirt, but he noticed, neither. He began to be unconscious anything except the knowledge that the bones of his grandsire lay underneath him and that Mahommed Gunga waited for the word that would fit into the scheme and solve a problem.
"Are there any tigers here now?" he asked presently, in a perfectly normal voice. He spoke as he had done when his servant asked him which suit he would wear.
"Ha, sahib! Many."
"Man-eaters, by any chance?"
Mahommed Gunga and the other man exchanged quick glances, but Cunningham did not look up. He did not see the quick-flashed whites as their eyes met and looked down again.
"There is one, sahib--so say the kansamah and the head man--a full-grown tiger, in his prime."
"I will shoot him." Four words, said quietly--not "Do you think," or "I would like to," or "Perhaps." They were perfectly definite and without a trace of excitement; yet this man had never seen a tiger.
"Very good, sahib." That, too, was spoken in a level voice, but Mahommed Gunga"s eyes and the other man"s met once again above his head.
"We will stay here four days; by the third day there will be time enough to have brought an elephant and--"
"I will go on foot," said Cunningham, quite quietly. "Tomorrow, at dawn, risaldar-sahib. Will you be good enough to make arrangements? All we need to know is where he is and how to get there--will you attend to that?"
"Ha, sahib."
"Thanks. I wonder if my supper"s ready."
He turned and walked away, with a little salute-like movement of his hand that was reminiscent of his father. The two Rajputs watched him in heavy-breathing silence until the little group of lights, where the horse-tents faced the old dak-bungalow, swallowed him. Then:
"He is good. He will do!" said the black-beard who had brought the lamp.
"He is good. But many sahibs would have acted coolly, thus. There must be a greater test. There must be no doubt--no littlest doubt. Alwa and the others will ask me on my honor, and I will answer on my honor, yes or no."
It was an hour before the two of them returned, and looked the horses over and strolled up to bid Cunningham good night; and in the meanwhile they had seen about the morrow"s tiger, and another matter.
CHAPTER VII
What found ye, then? Why heated ye the pot?
What useful metal down the channels ran?
Gold? Steel for making weapons? Iron? What?
Nay. Out from the fire we kindled strode a man!
THEY set the legs of Cunningham"s string-woven bed into pans of water, to keep the scorpions and ants and snakes at bay, and then left him in pitch darkness to his own devices, with a parting admonition to keep his slippers on for the floor, in the dark, would be the prowling-place of venomed death.
It was he who set the lamp on the little table by his bedside, for his servant--for the first time on that journey--was not at hand to execute his thoughts almost before he had spoken them. Mahommed Gunga had explained that the man was sick; and that seemed strange, for he had been well enough, and more than usually efficient, but an hour before.
But there were stranger things and far more irritating ones to interfere with the peaceful pa.s.sage of the night. There were sounds that were unaccountable; there was the memory of the wayside tombstone and the train of thought that it engendered. Added to the h.e.l.l-hot, baking stuffiness that radiated from the walls, there came the squeaking of a punka rope pulled out of time--the piece of piping in the mud-brick wall through which the rope pa.s.sed had become clogged and rusted, and the villager pressed into service had forgotten how to pull; he jerked at the cord between nods as the heat of the veranda and the unaccustomed night duty combined to make him sleepy.
Soon the squeaking became intolerable, and Cunningham swore at him--in English, because he spoke little of any native language yet, and had not the least idea in any case what the punka-wallah"s tongue might be.