[1] Prestige.
[2] As your Honour's pleases.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"The work is with us; the event is with Allah."
—Kipling.
"Shade, water, grass . . . Not half a bad place for a picnic, eh, Major? And I hope that plausible-looking scoundrel, talking to Norton, has provided a decent breakfast for us. Five hours of marching in this air puts an edge on a fellow's appetite."
Richardson's remark was addressed to Desmond,—now a Major of six months' standing,—whose practised eye was critically surveying the camping-ground assigned by the local magnate, Nussar Ali Khan, to the seven British officers and their handful of native troops.
The site chosen was the topmost of two wide terraces descending to a stream, from whose farther bank a great hill rose abruptly, dark with pine and ilex, and cleft into a formidable nullah. On the right, flat house-tops of a walled native village overlooked the terrace, with its inviting group of trees, beneath which breakfast was in preparation. On the left another elevation, crowned with huts; behind them an open field, sloping to a ten-foot wall; and above the wall the ubiquitous watch-tower of the Border glowered like a frown upon the face of peace. The impedimenta of the little force,—transport, field-hospital, and camp-followers,—still trailed along a narrow lane leading from the kotal[1] over which they had come, to the terrace itself. Already grey films of wood-smoke soared, plume-like, into the blue; and the air at ten of the morning was still keen with the sharpness of a small frost at high altitudes.
"Not half a bad place for a picnic," Desmond admitted mentally; though for several reasons, this man,—who was a Frontier soldier by instinct and heritage,—would scarcely have chosen it himself.
But stringent military precautions were no part of the programme: Norton's escort of half a squadron, two guns, and five hundred Sikhs and Punjabis, being little more than a necessary appendage to a peaceful visitation. Such commonplaces of Frontier government as the enforcing of a fine, and the choosing of a site for an outpost manned by friendly tribesmen, was unlikely to cause friction or stir up strife; and Norton, standing apart from the group of officers in khaki, was listening politely to Nussar Ali Khan and his friends,—some half a dozen Maliks from the fortified villages scattered among the hills. Spare, muscular men, all of them, in peaked caps and turbans, sheep-skin coats, and voluminous trousers, girded by the formidable Pathan belt, with its pouches, dagger, and straight-handled sword; their bearded faces lighted up, as they talked, by flashes of white teeth; most of them towering half a head above the squarely-built Englishman, with the jaw of a bull-dog and the eyes of a hawk, who understood their language, their strange mingling of courage and cruelty, of simplicity and cunning, as a man only understands that to which he has devoted a lifetime of labour and thought.
Lower down, under the lee of the village wall, a local jirgah[2] sat watching the influx of troops with non-committal indifference, waiting to come forward and protest their devotion to the White Queen and the Burra Sahib; their entire readiness to be bound over by the Maliks' proposals, and, in effect, to behave themselves till next time! The utmost guarantee of good conduct that will ever be wrung out of the lawless sons of the North-western hills.