“What's that? Better have a rest? Tired out, you say? Oh! Form them all up in hollow square, then, and I'll say a few words to them. There are other ways of reviving a leg-weary column than by letting it lie down.”
Ten minutes later a dull roar rose up through a steel-shot dust-cloud, and three thousand helmets whirled upward, flashing in the sun. Three thousand weary men had given him his answer! There was no kind of handle to it; no reserve—nothing but generous and unconditional allegiance unto hunger, thirst, pain, weariness, disease or death. It takes a real commander to draw that kind of answer from a tired-out column, but it is a kind of answer, too, that makes commanders! It is not mere talk, on either side. It means that by some sixth sense a strong man and his men have discovered something that is good in each other.
XI.
“You've made good time, friend Juggut Khan!” said Brown, advancing to meet him where the men and the fakir and the interpreter would not be able to Overhear.
“Sahib, I killed one horse—the horse you looted for me—and I brought away two from Bholat. One of them carried me more than fifty miles, and then I changed to this one, leaving the other on the road. I have orders for you, sahib.”
“Hand 'em over then,” said Brown. “Orders first, and talk afterward, when there's time!”
The Rajput drew out a sealed envelope, and passed it to him. Brown tore it open, and read the message, scowling at the half-sheet of paper as though it were a death-sentence.
“Where's the general?”
“With his column-twenty or thirty miles away to the northward by now!”