In peace? Yes, so far as he was concerned. But he fixed his dwelling among the wildest and most impracticable of mountain deserts—always ensuring for himself a safe retreat—and thence he began to prey upon all and any who had the wherewithal to pay up smartly for further immunity.
Then complaints began to reach Shâlalai. Peaceable banyas had been plundered of all the gains they had made during a travelling trade. Merchants on a larger scale trading with Kâbul had been relieved on a proportionate scale, or even held to ransom. Umar Khan adopted a method of his own for putting a stop to the complaints of such. It was the method best expressed by the saw, “Dead men tell no tales”—and by way of doing the thing thoroughly, he seized the whole of the plunder instead of merely the half as heretofore, but took care that the owner should not be on hand to lay any complaint. And leaving out many other unchronicled misdeeds, we think we have said enough to establish our opening statement, viz: that Umar Khan was a Baluchi who bore a very bad record indeed.
He was not a sirdar, nor even a malik. He was, in fact, a nobody, who—as not unfrequently happens among barbarian races—had raised himself to a sort of sinister eminence by a daring fearlessness and a combination of shrewdness and luck in evading the consequences of his countless acts of aggression. Added to this, his enforced outlawry and the exploits, half mythical, wherewith rumour credited him during that period, had thrown a kind of halo around him in the eyes of his wild, predatory fellow-tribesmen. Nominally he lived under and was responsible to the Sirdar Yar Hussain Khan, who was chief over a large section of the powerful Marri tribe; actually he was responsible to nobody in the wide world. His own particular following was made up of all the “tough” characters of the tribe, which is saying much, for the Marris bore the reputation of numbering in their midst some very “tough” characters.
The saw relative to the endowment of anybody with a sufficiency of rope was beginning to hold good in the matter of Umar Khan. Things were going badly with him. He had been obliged to be more than liberal with his ill-gotten gains in order to retain the adherence of his following, and the shoe was beginning to pinch. Then his tribal chief had given him a hint to sit tight; in short, had given him two alternatives—either to behave himself or clear out.
He had about concluded to embrace the latter of these—and the motive which had led him up to this conclusion was dual—and akin to that which tells with like effect upon men far more civilised than the Baluchi ex-outlaw. Umar Khan was hard up; likewise he was hipped. He was perfectly sick of sitting still. Times were too peaceful altogether. So he sold what few possessions he had left, and with the proceeds laid in a stock of Snider rifles and ammunition.
Umar Khan sat in his village at sunrise. It was the hour of prayer, and several of the faithful, dotted about, were devoutly prostrating themselves, in the most approved fashion; indeed Umar himself had only just finished the performance of his devotions, for your Moslem is a logician in such matters, and has no idea of heaping up great damnation to himself by committing two sins instead of one, as would be the case were he to omit the prescribed devotion simply because he had just cut somebody’s throat. The low, flat, mud-walled houses were in keeping with the surroundings—looking indeed as if they had but been dumped down and left to dry, like other piles of earth and stones which had rolled down the arid slopes and remained where they fell. A flock of black goats and fat-tailed sheep, mingled together, was scattered over the plain, though where they could find sustenance in such a desert, Heaven alone knew. Camels, too, were stalking around, also making what seemed an ironical attempt at browsing.
The sun had just risen beyond the far off limit of the desert plain, tinging blood-red the line of jagged peaks shooting skyward behind the village. Umar Khan sat in gloomy silence, smoking a narghileh, and, like most Orientals, indulging in much expectoration. His grim, hawk-like face, with the shaggy hanging brows meeting over his hooked nose, looked more cruel and repulsive than ever, as he stroked his beard, or pulled at the long black tresses, which hung down on each side of his face. Then he looked up. A fellow-tribesman was coming towards him. Umar Khan’s glance now lit up with animation. The man came to him and sat down. Their talk was short, but the ex-outlaw’s expression of countenance grew positively radiant, as the new arrival went on unfolding his tidings.
Umar Khan rose and ordered his best horse to be saddled. As he rose, it might have been noticed that he suffered from a slight limp. Then taking with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself—if that were possible—he rode forth.
For many hours they fared onward, avoiding the more frequented ways, and travelling over precipitous mountain path and through wild tangi, by routes well known to themselves, halting at convenient places to rest and water their horses. All had rifles, as well as their curved tulwars, and this savage band of hook-nosed, scowling copper-coloured ruffians, armed to the teeth, looked about as forbidding, even terror striking a crew as the peaceable wayfarer would not wish to meet—say half way through a tangi where there was precious little room to pass each other.
The sun was now considerably past the meridian, and at length the band, at a word from Ihalil Mohammed—the man who had brought the news which had led to this undertaking—halted amid some rock overlooking a broad high-road.