II
Dusk fell, a quick curtain, and the lamps of night shone out with glorious brilliancy, illuminating the little plateau. The tents gleamed whitely in the cold radiance; there was a dancing redness to show where the fire had been built, with figures grouped dimly around it. On a jagged rock, which started up from the very heart of a thicket, black against the newly risen moon, was silhouetted the figure of Major Fayne. Night things swept the air about him, and rustled in the cane brake below him; the fire crackled in the neighbouring camp; sometimes a murmur came from the group of natives.
But, heedless of these matters, Moreen’s husband stood on the rocky eminence looking back upon the way they had come, looking down to the distant river valley.
For many minutes he remained so, but presently, clambering down, heavily forced his way through the undergrowth to the little camp. Passing the tents, he walked back to the dip of the pathway, and paused again, watching and listening; then turned and strode to the fire, grasped Ramsa Lal by the shoulder, and drew him away from the others.
“Come here!” he directed tersely.
At the head of the pathway he bade him halt.
“Listen!” he directed.
Ramsa Lal stood in an attitude of keen attention, and the Major watched him with feverish anxiety, which he was wholly unable to conceal.
“Do you hear it?” he demanded—“hoofs on the path!”
Ramsa Lal shook his head.
“I hear nothing, Sahib.”
“Put your ear to the ground, and listen. I tell you that I saw figures moving away below there, and I heard—hoofs, stumbling hoofs.”
The man knelt down upon the ground, and, bending forward, lowered his head. Major Fayne watched him, and with growing anxiety, so that, what with this and the pallid moonlight, his face appeared ghastly.
But again Ramsa Lal stood up, shaking his head.
“Nothing, Sahib,” he repeated.
Major Fayne suddenly grasped him by the shoulders, spinning him about, and dragging him forward, so that the dusky face was but inches removed from his own. He glared into the man’s eyes.
“Are you lying to me?” he demanded, “are you lying?”
“I swear it is the truth: why should I lie to you, Sahib?”
“You want them——”
Major Fayne broke off abruptly and thrust the man away from him. A different expression had crept into his face, an expression in which there was something furtive. He spun around upon his heel and stepped to the tent where Moreen was. Raising the flap slightly:
“Good-night,” he called, and turned away.
Ramsa Lal had gone back to the fireside; and Fayne, following a moment of hesitancy, strode with his swaggering military gait to the tent erected in the furthermost corner of the clearing. He had stooped to enter, when he hesitated, remaining there bent forward—and listening.
From the opposite side of the distant fire, Ramsa Lal, though few would have suspected the fact, was watching. Evidently enough, the leader of the little company was obsessed with his delusion that some one or something clambered up the steep path beneath. Suddenly shrugging his shoulders, he stooped yet lower, and dived into the tent.
One of the natives threw fresh fuel upon the fire, and a stream of sparks sped up through the clear air in a widening trail ever growing fainter.
There was a crackling, a murmur of voices, and then a new silence. This in turn was broken by the distant howling of dogs, and in the near stillness one might have heard the faint shrieking of the bats, who now were embarked upon their nocturnal voyagings.
A shrill, wild scream burst suddenly from the heart of the trees in the east, rose eerily upon the night, and died away. But the group about the fire moved not at all, for this dreadful screaming but marked an animal tragedy of the Burma forests. So furred things howled and screamed and moaned in the woodlands, feathered things piped and hooted around and above, and the bats, uncanny creatures of the darkness, who seem to have kinship neither with fur nor feather, chirped faintly overhead.
Once there was a distant, hollow booming like the sound of artillery, which echoed down the mountain gorges, and seemed to roll away over the lowland swamps, and die, inaudible, by the remote river-bank.
Yet no one stirred; for this mysterious gunnery is a phenomenon met with in that district, inexplicable, weird, but no novelty to one who has camped in the Shan Hills.
A second time later in the night the phantom guns boomed; and again their booming died away in the far valleys. The fire was getting low, now.