About two Andover turned up with fifteen men, hot and desperate. He listened to St. John’s story in silence.
“Thank God, I’m in time. Who found out this? Haystoun? Good man, Lewis! I wonder who has been firing out there. They can’t have been stopped? It’s getting devilish late for them anyhow, and I believe there’s a little hope. It would be too risky to leave this pass, but I vote we send a scout.”
A man was chosen and dispatched. Two hours later he returned to the mystified watchers at Nazri. He had been on the hill-shoulder and looked into the cleft. There was no sign of men there, but he had heard the sound of men, though where he could not tell. Far down the cleft there was a gleam of fire, but no man near it.
“That’s a Bada dodge,” said Andover promptly. “Now I wonder if Marker trusted too much to these gentry, and they have done us the excellent service of misleading him. They hate us like hell, and they’d sell their souls any day for a dozen cartridges; so it can’t have been done on purpose. Seems to me there has been a slip in his plans somewhere.”
But the sound of voices! The man was questioned closely, and he was strong on its truth. He was a hillman from the west of the Khyber, and he swore that he knew the sound of human speech in the hills many miles off, though he could not distinguish the words.
“In thirty minutes it will be morning,” said George. “Lord, such a night, and Lewis to have missed it all!” His spirits were rising, and he lit a pipe. The north was safe whatever happened, and, as the inertness of midnight passed off, he felt satisfaction in any prospect, however hazardous. He sat down beneath a boulder and smoked, while Andover talked with the others. They were the frontier soldiers, and this was their profession; he was the amateur to whom technicalities were unmeaning.
Suddenly he sprang up and touched St. John on the shoulder. A great chill seemed to have passed over the world, and on the hill-tops there was a faint light. Both men looked to the east, and there, beyond the Forza hills, was the red foreglow spreading over the grey. It was dawn, and with the dawn came safety. The fires had burned low, and the vagrant morning winds were beginning to scatter the white ashes. Now was the hour for bravado, since the time for silence had gone. St. John gave the word, and it was passed like a roll-call to left and right, the farthest man shouting it along the ribs of mountain to the next watch-fire. The air had grown clear and thin, and far off the dim repetition was heard, which told of sentries at their place, and the line of posts which rimmed the frontier.
Mitchinson moistened his dry lips and filled his lungs with the cold, fresh air. “That,” he said slowly, “is the morning report of the last outpost of the Empire, and by the grace of God it’s ‘All’s well.’”
CHAPTER XXXII
THE BLESSING OF GAD
“Gad—a troop shall overcome him, but he shall overcome at the last.”