The Siege of Sar (continued 2)

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.