mean and grubby little sacrifices to the nats of the tree, a time-worn fowl, a jungle rat, or what-not. They untied his legs and stood him up; the villagers retired, and left the three of them. Grant, dry-as-dust savant, most superfluous highbrow in the street-arab pigsty of jungledom, was clean grit all though. He stood there and faced it out, a dingy and a lonely death. It is good to think of him, at the last, holding up his head and looking it all fairly and squarely in the face, a Highlander and a gentleman. Grant, a-Grant! Stand fast, Craigellachie! As I was saying, the gam of Labêk village lay, in handcuffs, in the Quarter Guard of Labêk stockade. He had known of it for two days, and had said nothing. And even now we could get nothing definite out of him. The sahib had been killed. When? Ki - jané. Where? Ki-jané. BY WHOM, damn you? Ki-jané; somewhere up north, not us. How far? Who did it? . . . I'm afraid we lost our tempers. . . Rotten thing to do, because it set loose just that very electricity which it was allimportant to suppress. The men caught it from us, and for an angry half-hour there was pandemonium. Crooke dictated the bare information and crisp orders, copied to half a dozen copies, and sent off by runners, east and west, to the other stockades; and a duplicate to Pardon-Howe saying what he was doing. The movable column from each stockade, ever kept in fire-brigade readiness; a driving, sweeping, converging movement from all sides, northwards. Search everywhere; go far, go fast; search every village, every yard of jungle; put to the keenest question every soul found; burn nothing; kill nobody; but search for, and find quickly, the village and the men who killed Grant Sahib. In twenty minutes the Labêk column was off. We passed through the village; deserted; every soul had fled to the jungle, and everything living and movable with them, save only the Rhode Island Red, safely fenced in, as we found in several other places, against the mischief he might do. (Lord, what would they have done with the patent reversible Frizzles if they'd had them!) The desertion was a bad look-out for the future ; where were we to get people to question? By afternoon every movable column was out, and on a hundred mile front such a search went forward as the jungle had never known. Each column broke up into squads, and each squad fanned out on its broadest practicable front. Up hill, down dale, through every thicket and tangle we searched and ferreted, white man and Gurkha; all silent, grim, and intensely set on finding anything, anybody, who could be made to give up the secret of Grant's end. Paths were negligible, except that they led to villages; and every village, as we came to it, lay empty and deserted as a last year's bird's nest. At nightfall we halted and bivouacked on an irregular predetermined front. No need for concealment; we had the gloves off to them now; but the grim silence persisted, and all went about their jobs in soft footfall and whispers. I pity the jungli who had the temerity to attack one of those groups just then; he would have been torn to shreds. Next morning before daylight, off again. It is easy to describe jungle as dense, as gloomy, rain-soaked, all but impassable; but until our language is enriched with verbs and adjectives still to come, it will be impossible to describe the frank solidity of that tangled mass. The Gurks melted through it, silently, as only born jungle-men can, and the white officers followed strenuously in their trail; led, not leading. It was inevitable that patches and bolt-holes should be left, where every square yard of tangle was cover for a grown man; and yet, as near as might humanly be, we sorted that jungle as with a comb, and kept on sorting it. The very sambhar and barking-deer fled before us, as before a line of beaters. We climbed, we scrambled, we wedged our way through, over, and under countless obstacles; self-contained in all necessaries; silent, and growing more grim and more determined as, day by day, we drove northward, and, night by night, we bivouacked and sent back word of our unsuccess. And as the Labêk column searched, so did the columns from Mu Plos, 'Srosheng, Amili, and a dozen others, all on the one same broad front, driving ever northward. Silent, sodden, leech-bitten, and with a growing vindictiveness filling us all. Where the junglis went to, I know not. They must have fled northwards by families, by droves, and by tribes. For just once, the Fear of God stalked gaunt and grim through their sodden wilderness, and, hushed and hurrying, the naked villains forbore to chatter and slunk away before it. Pardon-Howe sat at River Headquarters, deliberately refusing to butt in. He trusted us all, and, at best, could only have been one more searcher. He reported briefly enough, VII. the finality of Grant's loss, and the steps taken to find his slayers. Thereafter, silence; not to be broken by the indescribable sequel to which he was treated, on reams of paper, by the Author of All The Mischief. I think Barron realised that the situation was too big for him, and he had-thank God!—the sense to keep away. In silence, day by day, we worked northward. Pardon-Howe found the messengers arriving too slowly. He packed a rucksack and stalked after us, unescorted; his great tall bulk swung out up the path as he pushed the miles behind him. He had grown grimmer than ever in these days; more silent, were that possible. Five miles out he turned a corner and ran into Toyo, Gam of 'Srosheng, the old and valued colleague of the Kitai-hunt. Toyo rose from the path, his grotesque little face broken up into a grin of a thousand wrinkles at the sight of the Bor Shap, who was more than his gods to him. and then, with a rush, as he realised the brick he'd thrown, "the two who killed Grum Sahib at Mu Fereang. They're getting a canoe out, at the ghat over there, below Pillung!" The great square jaw set like a rat-trap. The thin lips were a straight slit across the wide and bony face. He jabbed his khudstick into the ground and slipped off his rucksack straps. "Where are you off to, Bor Shap?" "Going to fetch 'em," he muttered. "Watch it, Shap; there are two of them; fine big men, and armed. Better wait till we can get some Gurkhas "he spoke to Pardon-Howe's back view, as he found himself following, and not an answer did he get. "Anyhow, I'm coming too." He slung his dao handy, and ran alongside with pace quickened by the merry prospect of a scrap. PardonHowe turned on him and pointed back to the path. "Stay you here, Gam; watch my things for me," and sprang lightly into the jungle. Toyo subsided in his tracks. There was no gainsaying that grim voice. His heart sank like a dropped stone as he listened to the last sounds of the great bulk pushing through the jungle. "Ai-e-e-ee. The Bor Shap. And he unarmed. He's gone to fetch 'em." With eyes glued on where he had last seen his deity, he squatted beside the cast rucksack, gazing and gazing, and listening, like a spaniel dog. His scraggy a little song in happy little little figure seemed to shrink minor quavers. smaller yet; his chin drooped to his bony knees; two tears very slowly welled up in the little slant eyes, and rolled suddenly down the grimy furrowed face. He reached for his snuff-mull. How long he sat there he doesn't know. He woke to a sound of crashing and bumping; and, through the screen of the jungle edge, emerged a strange trio. Bomlaw and Lapok, helmetless, daoless, and dishevelled, their bullet heads craning forward and their piggy eyes goggling, panting for breath. They came in jerks and snatches, stumbling; for, big as they were, between them towered Pardon-Howe, an immense hairy paw gripping each by the nape of the neck, and the tense muscles standing out on his powerful forearms like ship's cable. His clothes, from right armpit to knee, were a sloppy mess of blood. He impelled them along by jerks; he swung them on to the path, and in complete silence he marched them back the five miles to Headquarters. The iron grip never relaxed, the slow long stride never slackened; no, not when he, sore wounded though he was, had almost to hold up on their feet his two exhausted and panting prisoners; clenched in that vice, they tottered along, all stiltily and a-grog, as it might be sick hens. Toyo, with the rucksack, trotted along behind, crooning Now Pardon-Howe, Political Officer of the Jungle Tracts and Plenipotentiary in the Areas North of the River, held the high, the low, and the middle Justice. He held-and very rightly held-the power of life and death throughout his province. He exercised it with the unhurried judgment and calm sense of fairness which was, and ever will be, head and shoulders above Codified Law. So that when we, recalled at length by runners, arrived at Headquarters, it was to find Bomlaw and Lapok squatting behind bars in the Quarter Guard, very stiff in the neck, refusing all food, and looking an impending death full in the face. The trial was full and formal, but simplified by the frank and obvious truthfulness of the two scoundrels. They gave the history of it all, and their reasons, and how, and why, and where they did it. Throughout the proceedings, the non - moral jungli mentality was apparent in that they viewed their fate more as punishment for their hardihood in slicing a hole in the great, though interfering, Bor Shap, than as retribution for killing Grant. We could not get them to see that they had done anything wrong in murdering him. "Yes, we did it. The villagers brought the shap to the Rami tree, and left him. We stood him up before the tree. Lapok came behind the shap and cut downwards winds playing round his great once, and his dao sank deep bald head. into the shap's brains. And then we cut him into pieces the size of raindrops." Ab-solutely impenitent. Next day Pardon-Howe, with seven stitches in his ribs and swathed in uncomfortably hot bandages, sent word abroad. And it was thus and so; and presently the fifteen principal gams of the Province assembled, in fear and trembling, at Headquarters. To these, and to none other, he entrusted Bomlaw and Lapok, nor would he have one of us, or a single Gurkha, of the party. With these he stalked northwards, himself well ahead and walking alone; and though every step must have pulled on the stitches most confoundedly, he walked with a swing and a lilt, his hat in his hand, and the jungle A week they went thus, and not a fearful gam of the party but hedged in the two prisoners and pressed close on them, lest they should make a bolt for it. A week through the jungle, climbing through owners and descending; villages where where the were beginning to dribble back, and gazed at the fearsome cortége in awed silence; up and up, into the unmapped beyond. On the evening of the seventh day they reached the Rami tree by Mu Fereang village ; and there, to the big overhanging bough With hanging bough which had shaded Grant's last moments, he well and truly hanged Bomlaw and Lapok, the fifteen gams tallying on to the cane ropes. They made all fast, coiled up the slack neatly, and left them there. |