The next instant, after one careless salute to the newcomers he was deep in the mechanism of a complicated gun, and his face lit up as he looked. "See you," he went on--apparently as much for himself as for those others who, left behind by his imaginings, stood patient, half-comprehending--"if this moving wheel duly loaded, could fit the one barrel what need for more? The twin cannon fired by one match which we made last year works well, but this will be better--if it can be compassed." And then suddenly as his hands fingered ratchet wheel and eccentric, bolt and socket with sure practical touch, his eyes grew full of dreams.
"Lo! we work in the dark," he murmured, "since none know why the bullet curves, and so the worst may do as well, nay better than the best. 'Twas an old matchlock snatched from a sleepy sentry which gave me empire."
He paused, back in thought to that false dawn before the trenches at Chitore when, going his rounds after his wont, alone and in darkness, he had seen upon the ramparts of the besieged town the figure of his foe also going his rounds, but by the light of lanterns.
It had been a long shot, but in the dawn Chitore was his, and he was Emperor of India. Yet, once again, almost overmastering regret came over him for the past horrors of that sun-bright dawn. The awful onslaught of saffron-robed heroes, doomed to desperate death, which he had seen against the rolling clouds of dense white smoke that rose from the very bowels of the earth, where, in dark caves, the Râjpût women were burning--self-immolated!
Then as he stood there fingering the outcome of his uncontrollable desire for success, all his victories seemed to slip from him for the moment; he remembered--as, nearly two thousand years before him another great King of India had remembered--nothing but his regret. At the moment he, also, could have inscribed an edict for all time setting forth his sorrow for "the hundreds of thousands of God's creatures needlessly slain." But the next instant the mood passed and he turned with almost insolent regality to the English adventurers.
"Yet tell your queen, sir travellers," he said, "that Akbar holds the best gun to be the best key to empire."
John Newbery looked at Ralph Fitch, who bowed his answer:
"Most Excellent, we will give the message without fail."
As they passed on, Birbal paused a moment beside Abulfazl to whisper in his ear:
"The Bârha hawks are in. Hast news of them?"