"To Lieutenant Henry Gerrard, wherever he may be.
"DEAR HAL,—For Heaven's sake bring up your guns by five o'clock to-morrow afternoon. I have nothing but zumboorucks,[1] and Chund Sing with all the Augpoor artillery is in front of me. I will maintain my position at all costs till five, but if you have not come up then I must retreat across the river—and my Grunthees will stay on this side of it.—Yours,
R. CHARTERIS."
Charteris wrote the message in Greek characters, forming the letters stiffly with unaccustomed fingers, and pausing now and then for recollection. Gerrard would be able to read it, but no native in India could do so. He made three copies, and despatched them by separate messengers along different routes—by the river-bank, to the south and to the south-east respectively—in the hope that one of them would succeed in reaching his friend.
Charteris looked older and thinner than when he had parted from Gerrard a fortnight before, and his face was tanned to a more pronounced red than ever. Many hours of gloom had been encountered in the fulfilment of the task willed in that hour of insight. Unforeseen difficulties of various kinds had hindered him, and it was also quite certain that he had underestimated the time necessary for Gerrard's arrival from Habshiabad with the reinforcements. On returning to his camp that first evening, he had mounted a fresh horse, and ridden on at once towards his headquarters at Dera Galib Khan, whither his messengers had preceded him, warning the Granthi troops there to be ready to take the field at once. Fast though he travelled, however, reaching Dera Galib in two nights of hard riding, he had been outstripped. Emissaries from Sher Singh had already been at work among the Granthis, calling upon them to join their brethren who had betrayed Nisbet and Cowper, and fight the English for the sake of God and the Guru. Valuable gifts, and the promise of doubled pay and unlimited loot, strengthened the effect of the appeal, and the men were seething with disaffection when Charteris came to them. They had not quite arrived at the point of murdering him and his lieutenants and marching to join Sher Singh, but the thing was openly discussed, and very little was needed to precipitate matters. In face of this heavy blow, Charteris acted with his customary despatch. The disaffected infantry he took with him, deciding that under his own eye they would be as safe on active service as anywhere, but the artillery he left with a heavy heart at Dera Galib. He had counted much on their services, but he durst not take the gunners where a bribe or two would double Sher Singh's present strength, and there was no time to extemporise artillerists from among the Darwanis. These wild men rushed to his standard joyfully as soon as they heard he needed recruits, and the robbers whom he had fined and whose forts he had destroyed forsook the pursuits of peace and declared themselves ready to follow him to the gates of hell if necessary. Of them he chose out those who already had relatives or fellow-clansmen in his irregular corps to accompany him at once, leaving the rest under the command of his subordinate Carpenter at Dera Galib, nominally for drill, but also to serve as a check upon the disaffected artillery.
With his untrustworthy Granthis and his half-trained auxiliaries he crossed the Tindar at Kardi, as he had intended, and employed the former, to their intense disgust, in throwing up rough entrenchments round the camp. The Darwanis he sent out in raiding-parties (this operation appeared under the more decorous name of "making reconnaissances" in his reports to Ranjitgarh), with orders not to penetrate more than a certain distance into the country, but to do as much damage as possible, and bring back supplies for the force. These tactics had the result he anticipated. Sher Singh's army, which was organising itself, with much squabbling and mutual recrimination, for a dash across the frontier, found its rear threatened, and perceived that unless the capital was to be left open to attack, these impudent intruders must be driven back to their own side of the river. The matter was complicated by the speedy appearance of the Habshiabad troops in the south of the state, where Gerrard seized one of the riverside towns, and held it by means of Rukn-ud-din's men and the most serviceable of the Nawab's batteries of artillery, while he laboured day and night, with Sadiq Ali, almost beside himself with joy, hindering as much as helping him, to get the army into the field. Happily the problem was not so complicated as it would have been in the case of European troops, and the Nawab and his soldiers alike would have scouted the idea of obtaining supplies otherwise than from the country traversed, but weapons for the men and transport for the guns, and ammunition for both, were necessaries difficult to improvise on the spur of the moment. The Habshiabadis took the field at last, in a state that would have made a European commander tear his hair, and Gerrard hustled them on, blooding them by a smart little engagement with a force sent by Sher Singh's nearest governor to dispute their passage. The Rani joined them with every man she could bring as soon as they were ready to cross the Ghara, but left the command of her contingent to Rukn-ud-din, maintaining rigid seclusion on her elephant with one or two faithful attendants.
Thus far, then, Charteris's bold scheme was justified. Sher Singh's power for mischief beyond his own borders was largely neutralised for the present, and for so long as an active enemy remained in arms upon his soil. But the march from the Habshiabad frontier to Kardi was a matter of seven days in favourable circumstances, and this was the hot weather, and the partially trained troops disgraced their leader by straggling, making unauthorised expeditions for the sake of plunder, demanding longer halts and more frequent opportunities of meeting the foe, and all manner of other military crimes. The high officers who accompanied them on gorgeous elephants, with long trains of attendants and baggage-animals, were quite useless as an aid to discipline, and Gerrard fell into the habit of issuing his orders first, and then sending a special copy to be handed round among them. It was not at all the fulfilment of the ideal he had set before himself, the reformation of the army through and with the help of its leaders, but time was pressing, and far ahead, at Kardi, Bob Charteris was looking out for him and wondering why he did not come.
The elements seemed to combine with troublesome humanity against Charteris at this moment. A sudden rise of the river, a week before the usual date, flooded him out of his entrenchments and obliged him to take up a less satisfactory position. Moreover, at the same time, Chand Singh, the Agpur general, after some painful vacillation as to whether he should annihilate the western or the southern intruder first, made up his mind suddenly, and marched with quite unexpected speed upon Kardi, driving in the Darwani raiding-parties before him. One fortunate result of his haste was that his guns were left behind, and he was obliged to wait for them, but his army held the whole range of ground in front of Charteris. Charteris had requisitioned every boat that could be found on the Darwan side, and kept them safely guarded, but it would be quite easy to obtain others if Chand Singh cared to try a naval action. This he would probably combine with a frontal attack all along the line as soon as his artillery arrived, with the result that Charteris's force must choose between destruction and being driven into the river, unless they retreated in time. But everything forbade this last course. It would leave Gerrard's force exposed to the full onslaught of the Agpur army, and even if they succeeded in escaping across the river, would set Sher Singh free to pursue his larger designs, which would probably begin with an invasion of Darwan, and a joyful reception from the unsettled Granthi artillery at Dera Galib. Moreover, Charteris had a shrewd idea that somewhere on that other bank would be lying in wait for him that despatch from Ranjitgarh, the receipt of which he had hitherto successfully evaded, but which was practically certain to contain a sharp order to return at once into his own province. Every possible consideration, therefore, urged him to hold out at Kardi at all costs, but when on this particular evening he wrote his notes to Gerrard, of whose whereabouts and approach he had for several days received only vague rumours, he was face to face with the necessity of retiring unless relieved.
This necessity was not to be made public, either to the unsatisfactory Granthis or to the dispirited Darwanis, who were perpetually entreating to be let loose against Chand Singh's array, which they were quite certain they could drive away, if not destroy. Charteris said nothing of it, even to his sole European companion, whom Carpenter had unselfishly sent to his assistance with a small reinforcement. But in view of the morrow even his iron nerve gave way, and he found himself noting narrowly the colloguing of the Granthis round their camp-fires, and their sudden silence when he approached, and wondering whether a murderous attack in the night would be the end of it after all. He pulled himself together quickly. He had done the best he could, what he thought was right, and it had at any rate delayed Sher Singh long enough to prevent his taking the British in Granthistan by surprise, and when he did it he had known that he staked his life on the result. To-morrow was bound to be a hard day, whatever happened, and he would want every ounce of force that he possessed. What folly to be sitting up listening for murderers! He added hastily the concluding words to the report so scrupulously sent off day by day to James Antony, bade Vixen keep guard, and lay down and slept. Gerrard would not have been able to sleep in these circumstances, and Charteris's lieutenant was equally destitute of the capacity for repose. He roused his chief quite unnecessarily early in the morning, his flushed face and haggard eyes telling of vain attempts at slumber, though he merely guessed at what Charteris knew.
"Chand Singh's guns are beginning to come into camp," he announced dramatically.