“About ten o'clock at my quarters. He was coming here to change in time for the assembly at eleven forty-five—the column is just marching. I came here to hurry him up and found him like this. The whole attack is his planning. It would have been the making of him. He was to have led the ladders. Gad! what a chance the man had—and look at the poor devil now!”
I was examining Austin Graham with a thumping heart, for a queer suspicion was in my mind. Presently I ran downstairs and uncorked the bottle which I now label “Bertha.” The smell was identical, and I went upstairs again.
“Help me to get him into his boots and tunic,” I said.
And Le Mesurier-Groselin and I huddled the man's fighting clothes on to him by the light of a flickering candle. Le Mesurier-Groselin was a big man, and my trade had taught me a certain skill in the handling of the dead. We soon had Austin Graham in full uniform sitting up in my arms, with the helmet crammed on his head at an unseemly angle. He was perfectly insensible, but his heart went well.
“Now help me to get him on to his horse,” I said.
Le Mesurier-Groselin dropped his eye-glass for the first and last time on record, and looked at me with a surprised eye and a solemn one.
“I'll obey orders,” he said. “But I take it that you are very drunk or else mad.”
We carried him downstairs and I climbed into Graham's saddle. Le Mesurier-Groselin lifted Graham, who must have weighed fourteen stone, into the saddle in front of me, and I rode twenty miles that night with him there. He recovered consciousness an hour before we reached the Khan's stronghold, and, as I expected, awoke, as if from sleep, refreshed and ready for any exertion. We had no time for explanations.
“You were drugged,” I said, “by some native spy, who must have got wind of the intended attack to-night. I knew that the stuff would have to run its course, so I did not physic you, but brought you along with the column.”
I am glad to say he believed me.