“I won’t mind—if you’ll pitch me a tent on deck again?”
“As you please, ma’am. But you’ll find it rarely chilly these nights—not like when you came up from Bab-us-Sahel.”
Eveleen shivered mentally, for she hated cold. Her own first impulse had been to take a high hand, and remark casually that the cabin—the only one—would suit her quite well, but it had been succeeded by another. Richard was always saying, or hinting, that she was unreasonable. She would show him how wrong he was by refusing to deprive him and his friend of the comfort—such as it was—of the cabin, and making martyrs of herself and Ketty on deck. She smiled heroically at the captain.
“As if I’d mind that! I’ll keep everything packed ready, and be on board as soon as I get your message.”
Ketty and the old butler could hardly be expected to look at things from her point of view, and by the tone of the long conversations she heard going on between them after her orders were given, she gathered that they objected strenuously to the proposed journey; but they knew better than to remonstrate with her, and she ignored their discontent callously. One more letter she received from Richard, written when the forlorn hope was about to strike into the desert:—
“Bayard arrived this evening, and accompanies us,” he wrote. “I fear he is disappointed by his interview with Sir Henry. He tells me he called upon you. Surely you might have taken the trouble to make him aware of his true position here?”
“Taken the trouble, indeed! As if I hadn’t tried! And when he wouldn’t listen to a word!” said Eveleen indignantly, and passed on to another scrawl from Brian, written like the first on the back of a huge envelope:—
“Don’t quarrel with my stationery,” he said. “The General has an economy fit on, and has locked up all the writing-paper, and I must send you a few lines. Why would I always be writing to you about camels, I wonder? but believe me, I’d give a year of my life for you to have seen the things that have left me near dead with laughing at this moment. Three hundred and fifty men of the Queen’s —th mounted on camels, two to a camel, and camels and men all strangers to one another. But they were not mounted long. I give you my word, the whole country was speckled over with spots of scarlet and dun, wrestling in every variety of contention, and whether the language of the soldiers or of the camels was the worst, I would not like to say. And there was poor old Colonel Plummer looking at the scene with the liveliest disgust I ever saw depicted on a human phiz—he was in the Dragoons once, you may remember. But he plucked up heart and plunged into the fray, reconciling his men to their mounts, and the camels to one another, till he got ’em into some sort of order, and he is now putting his fantastic force through a few simple evolutions. He’s a great old sportsman—almost as great as my old lad, who is near bent double with rheumatism when he crawls out of his little tent to mount his horse, and unstiffens bit by bit as he rides, till you’d swear he was the model for a statue of the Duke. A fine set we are, I assure you—with our camel-men and our two howitzers drawn by camels, and our detachment of horse to frighten off the desert banditti from our slow-moving column. We have provisions for a fortnight, water for four days, our tents—common soldiers’ tents—and nothing in the world else. Won’t we be a sight to make the ladies stare when we come through this?”
That was the last news from the column for nearly three weeks, though messengers still arrived from the main body, which was encamped about Shahbaz Khan’s fortress of Bidi—thus holding his family hostage, though this was not stated, in case of any attempt at treachery on his part. But there was no call to dash into the desert and rescue Sir Harry and his force, and even the tongue of rumour was silent in face of his daring move. Then at last there came a summons from Captain Franks to Eveleen. He had been warned by an express messenger to start at once for a wooding-station about thirty miles down the river, there to pick up Colonel Bayard and Major Ambrose and take them on to Qadirabad. If Mrs Ambrose wished to go too, would she kindly lose no time? Mrs Ambrose was at the landing-stage little more than an hour after receiving the message, and found everything in a bustle, horses being embarked in flat-bottomed boats, which the Asteroid was to tow, and the troops to whom they belonged crowded on board the vessel herself. There did not seem to be an inch of room to spare anywhere.
“Are your horses to go, ma’am?” asked Captain Franks distractedly, as he welcomed her to her tent, and in the same breath bade the mate beware lest the lubbers on board that flat should knock all the ship’s paint off.