CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST
THE FRONTIER HOUSE
Some ninety miles southward of the tower in which Major Endicott had been besieged, on the bare summit of a low hill, stood a solitary building of stone, known to the British officers of the borderland as a frontier house. It had no pretentions to architectural excellence, consisting of a square tower, somewhat resembling a truncated chimney-stack, crowned by a small turret on a platform, which looked like a square straight-brimmed Quaker hat. Adjoining the tower was a sloping wall twenty feet high, that formed one side of an enclosure, within which were a number of rudely built huts, set up against the inward side of the wall. Neither tower nor wall had any windows, but in the latter a doorway gave entrance to the interior.
One day Dafadar Narrain Khan was squatting with a few of his sowars on the wall of the enclosure, looking out over the country before him. The building commanded a prospect extending for many miles. Its immediate vicinity was barren, stony ground; one scraggy tree raised its wizened branches at the angle of the wall. A narrow track wound through this wilderness from the doorway down the hill to the plain below, meandering northward among boulders and patches of sparse vegetation until it was lost to sight amid the dark pine-trees that covered the lower slopes of the distant hills. Beyond, as far as the eye could reach, these hills stretched, an endless series of scarps and eminences, cleft by tortuous ravines and breaking away here and there into sheer precipices. In the remote distance, a jagged snow-clad ridge flashed with purple and gold in the rays of the sun. In the opposite direction, southward, the country was rugged but less hilly. A metalled road wound away into the distance. At regular intervals on one side of it stood tall posts, carrying a telegraph wire that emerged from a hole in the tower wall.
As the troopers sat there chatting, with their rifles in the hollow of their arms, there was a sudden cry from the sentinel posted alone on the top of the tower.
"Hai, dafadar! I see a speck moving in the sky far away," he shouted.
"How far away, Coja?" called the dafadar.
"Seven kos at least," was the reply.
"The speck is in your own eye, my son," cried the dafadar, and the men about him laughed: Coja was always seeing something!
The sentinel shouted a word of expostulation, then was silent, and the others resumed the conversation he had interrupted.