"Sahib, lie still!"
He felt the hand again, then a pressure upon his arm--a pressure that increased and diminished in rapid alternation. He throbbed with joy. Some one--was it Fazl?--was sawing at his bonds. The sound made by the knife or sword was scarcely perceptible; yet to his feverish apprehension it seemed loud enough to waken the heaviest sleeper. Soon he was conscious that his arms were free, and he ventured to move them stealthily to ease them of their numbness. The pressure was transferred to his feet, and after some moments of quivering anxiety he felt that these also were released from their bonds. Then cold metal touched his hand, and his eager fingers clasped over a grooved hilt.
"Sahib, a minute to rest, then follow me," whispered the voice.
He could hardly endure the waiting, though he knew it was intended to give him command of his limbs.
"Sahib, now!"
He raised himself on all fours, and began to creep after his deliverer, a black form crawling towards the ring of sleeping Kalmucks.
The Gurkha--for it was he--had almost passed between and beyond the two men who lay stretched towards the track, when a hand shot out and gripped him by the ankle. At the same moment the owner of the hand gave a shout, his companions started up, and Bob leapt to his feet. As soon as he felt the touch upon him, Fazl wriggled like a snake, his right hand groping towards the dark form beneath him. There was a groan, and he stood free.
A foot or two behind him, Bob came to a halt when he dimly saw the two figures writhing on the ground. When one of them sprang up, he was not sure for the moment whether it was friend or foe. A murmured word reassured him, and he was ready to go on. But his way was blocked. Roused by their comrade's cry, the Kalmucks hurled themselves in a shouting mass across the open space. One of them kicked up the embers of the expiring fire, and a dull glow illuminated the scene. It lent aid to the fugitives, who were themselves in shadow. But for his sprained ankle Lawrence could have sprinted away into the darkness; Fazl might by this time have been out of harm's way, but the little man, perplexed and anxious at his master's dilatoriness, turned to his assistance. Lawrence had been checked by a man who sprang at him from the left. He had no time to swing round and bring into play the right hand clutching Fazl's knife; but, instinctively shooting out his left hand, by good luck he got home upon his opponent's chin. There was little 'body' in the blow, delivered so rapidly and at such close quarters; yet his muscles were hard, and the man staggered and fell in a heap.
At this moment Fazl rushed to his side, in time to engage a group of the enemy who had now got their bearings and were rushing towards him. That moss-carpeted enclosure was the scene of a struggle as extraordinary as it was short. The little Gurkha twirled and twisted, sprang high, bent low, legs and arms gyrating with a rapidity that the eye of a spectator could scarcely have followed. It was as though some infuriated gnome had sprung out of the bowels of the earth, and was executing a fantastic dance among men bewildered by his demoniacal antics. But it was a dance of death. The red glow of the newly rekindled fire flashed upon a terrible kukuri, which whirled in circles, ovals, parabolas, and fifty unnamed curves, carving intricate luminous patterns on the night. Nor were these evolutions purposeless: every stroke of the keen nimble blade was directed by the keener mind of the man wielding it. Here it struck up a knife, there a rifle; now it pierced a shoulder, now grazed a head; so swift in its darting movements that it seemed multiplied into a dozen weapons each barbed with fire.
While the Gurkha was thus in the ecstasy of sword-play, keeping half the party of Kalmucks urgently engaged, Lawrence was in difficulties. The knife given him by Fazl was no doubt sharp and deadly, but it was a weapon to whose use no Englishman is bred, and demanded, though not so much free space as a sword, yet a certain amount of elbow room for its effective employment. Lawrence had only just felled his first assailant when he was himself beset by two or three at once. Half conscious of stinging sensations in arm and thigh he lashed out with left fist and right hand grasping the knife, but lost his footing, stumbled, and fell to the ground with his aggressors on top of him, snarling like wolves. He found himself with his left hand gripping one of them by the throat: his own right wrist was held as in a vice. Struggling to wrench himself free, he rolled over, dragging the panting enemy with him, their movements carrying them nearer and nearer to the camp-fire; and in a sudden flicker of light he recognized the savage features of Black Jack.