Another hour went by – two precious hours – eating into the none too wide margin of the start they had attained – and that alarmingly. And then – relief showed in their quickly exchanged glances. The mist had begun to roll away.
Chapter Twenty Nine
The Valley of the Mud-Slide
A puff of damp air came down the slope, driving the vapour before it, and bringing a hard, unpleasant downpour. But this mattered little now. The great thing was to be able to distinguish their way. Girths were tightened, and in a moment they were prepared to resume the march.
Even yet they had to move slowly. The paths, for one thing, were extremely slippery, for another, the further side of the valley had not begun to show at all. Then, when it did, and that suddenly, there lay a couple of low, mud-walled villages, below, but not very far from their way.
Could they pass unseen? It was in the highest degree important that they should. But as if to put this hope to flight, several dogs, great fierce brutes, such as were used by the native herdsmen to protect their flocks, came rushing forth, yelling and baying with frantic clamour.
Their owners were not long in following. But they stopped suddenly. The sight of Hussein Khan, and Helston, whose disguise made him look every inch a sirdar of the Gularzai – in which capacity, by the way, Melian had greatly admired him – allayed their natural suspiciousness. Under such escort these Feringhi could not be interfered with, and they came no nearer. But the discovery was untoward, if only on account of information these could supply to eventual pursuers.
The villages were left behind, but travelling became perforce slow – deadly slow. The path along the well nigh precipitous slope had become so slippery and dangerous, that more than once it was deemed expedient to dismount and proceed on foot. And then, as they rounded the spur in front, an exclamation escaped Hussein Khan and his tone took on a note of blank dismay.
“Now I see where we have come,” he said. “
Hazûr
, it was written that we should stray from our course in yonder accursed cloud, which assuredly was the breath of Shaitan himself. Here before us lies the Valley of the Mud-slide. And we must cross that, for there is no turning back.”
“It is written,” was the answer. “Therefore we will cross it, since there is no other way.”
In front lay the same steep gigantic slope, sheering upward to a great height, and along this they were threading, like flies upon a wall. The other side of this long and narrow gorge was precipitous, being composed of tier upon tier of terraced cliff. And the rain, beating pitilessly down, lent huge vastness to the serrated crags rearing black against an unbroken murk of sky. In front, right across their way, sweeping down the slope from the high
kotal
to its base, spreading like a gigantic peacock’s tail, was the result of a former mud-slide. It was as though the whole mountain side had at one time – and that not so very long since, fallen away, bringing millions of tons of blue grey soil with it. The base of it filled the bottom of the gorge, though a watercourse had drilled its way through, and the sombre thunder of this they could now hear, far down between its perpendicular walls of solidified mud.
There was misgiving in the hearts of all three men as they reached the edge of this. Would they be able to cross it. They were familiar with similar freaks in the wild mountain country, but this one was of gigantic proportions. In the regular wet season they might as well try to cross a quaking morass, but there had been little rain of late, still even that little was enough to turn such a place into a slough. But there was nothing for it. It was the only way through. The alternative was to retrace their steps right into the teeth of their enemies. And one consolation was theirs. Once on the other side they knew where they were now, and could make up for lost time.
There was no path. Selecting what to his practised eye seemed the firmer ground, Hussein Khan led the way. Soon the horses were laboriously dragging their weighted fetlocks out of the stiff, clinging stuff – only to plunge them in deeper with the next step. Then it became manifest that the right course was to dismount, and proceed on foot. Helston Varne looked at Melian, so too, did Mervyn.
“I should think Miss Seward could keep the saddle,” said the former. “She’s lighter than we are, and it’s infernally laborious going for a lady on foot and hampered with skirts.”
“Of course she can,” came the answer, gustily. “Lord, I’d like to get Mr Allah-din Khan over the sights of this rifle. I’d drill his parchment hide for him. Ya Mahomed! I would.”
And then, as if in answer to the invocation, something happened. The gloomy, Dantesque valley bellowed to the echoes of a resounding roar, the reverberations of two
jezail
shots behind. The missiles hummed by, rather wide, and sploshed into the ooze of the mud-slide. Every head turned.
Coming along the way they had fled, strung out like hounds, were a number of mounted figures. The dirty white flowing garments, the reckless rush of their advance proclaimed their unmistakable identity. The time lost in the mist, the deflection from the right track, possibly that Helston Varne had miscalculated the duration of the effects of the drug which his shikari had deftly inserted into so many hookahs and other things – had handicapped the fugitives – and now here was Allah-din Khan, and all his cut-throats hot foot behind them, fired, too, with baffled hate and the disgrace which had been put upon them. The
malik
of the villages they had passed had not only supplied the chief with information, but had turned out his own men – and they very willing – to aid in the pursuit. Two of these indeed, had slipped on in advance, and had discharged their jezails, with the result foregiven.
The bulk of the pursuers were still some way behind. Quickly Helston Varne’s mind had framed a plan, but it, he saw was but a shadow of a one. Once they were through this slough of despond he would send the others on, and himself remaining behind would take cover on its edge, and deliberately pick off every one of them as they struggled through the semi-morass. But even he knew that in view of the state of fiery exaltation to which they were worked up, his chances of success were not great. They would rush it somehow, just as his own party had themselves done, and – there were too many of them. He sent one look back.
“Hurry on,” he urged. “Mount now, and push the horses for all they’re worth. It’s our only chance.”
And it was done. How – they knew not. Perhaps the animals themselves caught some of the fever heat excitement of being chased, but floundering, plunging, snorting, they found safe, firm foothold at last on the other side, and stood panting, and streaming, and utterly blown. Here was no safety. It would take half an hour at least before they had sufficient go in them to resume a race for life, and the pursuers had time to cross the mud-slide at their leisure.
Mervyn’s heart was filled with black, gloomy despair. It was fated they were not to escape. Well, at the last it would be soon over. With the recollection of that hellish cavern of torture, and the words spoken therein, he had made up his mind that Melian should not fall into their hands. They had shown him what they were capable of, and that was enough. One quick merciful shot for her, and the next for himself, and that the moment he realised that all hope and chances were gone.
“Now,” said Helston Varne. “You press on to the
kotal
, Mervyn. I’m going to take cover here and keep them back – and directly they get into the mud-slide I’m going to massacre them like holy Shaitan.
Jao
Hussein Khan. Go on Mervyn,” he added, more peremptorily, seeing him hesitate. “You’ve got to take Miss Seward out of this, and I’ve got plenty of ammunition. I’ll catch you up, by and by.”
“Well, don’t be long,” said the other queerly, as he obeyed.
Now two or three more shots straggled across from beyond. The main body of the pursuers came racing up, urging their steeds mercilessly over the cruel, stony ground. Now they were on the edge of the mud-slide. Wild, yelling, threatening shouts went up from them, as they drew their tulwars and flashed them furiously in the direction of the fugitives. Helston looked back. The result was not unsatisfactory. If only he could hold up these. He would try parley. It would gain a modicum of time.
“Brothers,” he shouted. “Go back. I would not shed your blood, for we have eaten together. But no man reaches this side of the mud-slide alive.”
For answer, a fierce, blood-thrilling yell of vengeance, as they discovered his presence, for they had missed his manoeuvre. And shouting out the torments of hell to which he, and all with him, were destined when once more in their hands, they pushed their steeds furiously into the slough.
In the chaotic splashing and floundering that ensued, Helston’s rifle spoke. The man who rode beside the chief toppled from his saddle. Again came the roaring detonation, tossing to and fro from crag to crag. Another saddle was emptied, but so far, for reasons of his own, the marksman had spared Allah-din Khan. In the sudden confusion, he poured another shot into “the brown,” but nothing seemed available to stop that rush. They were mad with revenge and fanaticism. As a sheer matter of time he would not be able to destroy anything like all of them before they should cross. Well, this time the chief must go. He had been given every chance, and the stake being contested was too great.
“Once more go back!” he shouted. But only a renewed and fiend-like scream came in reply, and horses, floundering fetlock deep, were making surprising headway, and the wild savage faces were alarmingly nearer. He put up the rifle again, and – it swayed in his hands. He could not get the sighting. The earth under his feet was swaying. What did it mean, in Heaven’s name?
There came a deep, growling, rumbling roar. He looked upward. Heavens! Was the whole world falling over upon him? In the flash of a moment, abandoning all thought of human enemies – of human forces, Helston had wrenched his horse from behind the great hump of earth where he had sheltered it, and mounting, spurred with hot haste onward and upward in the track of those who had gone before. At the end of a couple of hundred yards or so he alighted from his saddle just in time to avoid being hurled therefrom in the rocking swaying horror of a moving world, and looked back. A cracking roar, painful to the drums of his ears, split the air. He took in the enormous mass curling over, the volume of mud and earth and stones, at least two score of feet high, pouring like a gigantic flood down the face of the slide. He took in the frantic struggling crowd of horsemen right in the centre of its road, and then, the whole slope took on a new formation as half a mountain side poured down it, roaring up stones and mud masses high in the air. And – of the three score and odd Gularzai – pressing on in hate and vengeance to destruction – there remained no more trace than there had been before their arrival there at all. That gigantic mud-slide had in a moment found a common sepulchre for the lot.
“Well, Miss Seward,” Helston remarked, as somewhat shaken by the stupendous awesomeness of the phenomenon, he rejoined the fugitive group, higher up. “Allah is on our side this time anyhow.”
“Yes,” she said in an awed tone. “What a sight! But what was it? An earthquake?”
“Another mud-slide, like the one which formed the first – or a little of both. Maybe a touch of earthquake that started it off. But we were through just in time, and – good-bye to Allah-din Khan and Co.”
“Whom I hope are grilling in their Jehanum,” growled Mervyn, with the recollection of his own ordeal fresh upon him.
“Well, there’s nothing between us and Mazaran now,” pronounced Helston Varne, “and the sooner we get there the better. No, Miss Seward. You’d better not look back. Get it out of your mind.”
For Melian’s gaze seemed riveted on the gloomy Dantesque gorge, now half barred up by the tremendous convulsion of Nature which had taken effect right under her very eyes, and the thought of the buried men lying there – even though they were fierce barbarians and fanatical enemies, still they had been engulfed in the horrible cataclysm right under her eyes. But she recognised the other’s advice was sound, and laid herself out to follow it. And the reaction of feeling that they were all in comparative safety largely helped.
Chapter Thirty
Envoi
John Seward Mervyn lay back in his accustomed armchair and puffed very contentedly at his pipe. The fire burned clearly in the deep, old-fashioned fireplace, and the room looked exactly the same as when we first discovered him in it. Even the wind, swirling boisterously around the gables of Heath Hover, seemed to sound the same note, but it was not snow-laden this time, for autumn had not yet fairly gone out. The same little black kitten, though it was no longer a kitten now, still it had grown not much larger, and was as fluffy and almost as playful as ever, had jumped up on to his knee and sat there purring.
“Fill up, Varne,” he said, pushing the square bottle over to his companion – the glow of glasses and syphons between them shone merrily in the cheerful lamplight. “And now – we can talk. No, it’s all right. She can’t hear,” following an almost imperceptible lift of the other’s eyebrows toward the ceiling, the sound of footsteps on the upper side of this betokening that Melian was undergoing the intricate and protracted process of feminine turning in.
Helston Varne, ensconced in the opposite chair, mixed himself a deliberate peg and relit his pipe. He was, in fact, more interested than – from force of habit – he allowed to appear, for now he was going to learn at first hand what he had pieced together in theory.
“First of all, tell me,” went on Mervyn. “I haven’t asked you yet, was purposely waiting until we got back here – on the very scene of it all, so to say. How did you get your cue to play up to on that Star business, when you were doing inquisitor-in-chief in that damnable hell-cave?”
“Mainly from deduction, I found the confirmation – here.”
“Here? How – when?” And remembering various manoeuvres of his own – here – Mervyn might well give way to amazement.
“You remember that day you came back from Clancehurst, and found me in the old lumber room. I had just discovered it then, and shoved back the old sideboard barely in time when you came in.”
“Good God!”
The other nodded.
“I’ll astonish you still further, Mervyn,” he said. “Before it got there it reposed under a roundish topped stone on the sluice path. You transhipped it while you had me locked up in the cellar yonder.”
“Wrong there, Varne,” said Mervyn, with something of a chuckle, “but not altogether though. I did transfer that one, but it wasn’t the one you found. That was kindly delivered here since, and it was the one I stowed away upstairs temporarily. By the way I take it you have some inkling of what those things represent?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“Well, then – they are charged with a most deadly, subtle, and hitherto unknown poison. The touch of a hidden spring in the centre releases this, and then the merest invisible pin-prick from any one of the points – good-night! Well just imagine my feelings when I looked out of the window to see Melian airily coming down the path with that infernal thing in her hand. I wonder I didn’t faint. Well, that was the one you found.”
The other started at the mention of Melian in this connexion, and his face took on something of the look of horror which had come over that of his host, evolved by the bare recollection.
“Yes, indeed. I can imagine them,” he said. “Then the man you pulled out of the water – and who incidentally was instrumental in setting up the great Heath Hover mystery, brought the first?”
“That’s right.”
“What have you done with these two infernal things up to date, Mervyn?” asked Helston Varne, not without some shade of anxiety.
“They’re both snug and safe till the Day of Judgment at the bottom of the deepest part of Plane Pond. Thickly rolled up, well weighted, and by this time under six feet of mud and twenty of water. If they drained the pond they’d never find them.”
Helston Varne nodded approvingly.
“It’s an interesting case, Mervyn – very. But – do you know, I was very much getting on to the hang of it when – well, when we began to know each other.”
“The devil you were? I knew you were – trying to.”
“I know you did. Well, we’ve been through a strange experience together since then haven’t we? But it’s an infernally inconsequent world. For instance why should I have predicted to Coates that you would be sure to turn up over there again, and he have predicted that it would be bad for you if you did? And – we were both right.”
“Yes, indeed.”
There was silence for a few moments. Both lay back in their chairs puffing out contented clouds of smoke, and gazing into the red-hot wood cavern. Without the wind howled.
“Do you know, Varne,” resumed Mervyn, meditatively. “It’s a deuced odd thing, but that chap I got out of the pond, you know – to this day I can’t make out whether I killed him or whether he killed himself. He died from a prick from the Star anyhow, because none of the doctors could make head or tail of it, and by an inspiration of luck I had been careful to hide away the thing.”
“If you only knew what sleepless nights you’ve entailed upon Nashby. He’s just as suspicious as ever, you know. When I saw him in Clancehurst the other day he looked at
me
suspiciously. Thinks I’ve deserted to the other side.”
“Oh damn Nashby. He’s a fool,” came the gusty reply. “Well Varne, you know all about the finding of the chap dead, and the inquest, and all that. Very well. I had a sort of instinct against him from the moment I saw him in the full light. After I had left him to turn in on that sofa, I took precautions against him – I mean against him getting near me during the night. Now,” – lowering his voice to what was almost a whisper, and an impressive one, “I am almost certain I went down – in my sleep – and – turned the Star upon him. In my sleep, mind, and unconsciously. For, I give you my word that when the thing dropped off him in the morning the discovery came upon me as a wild and entire surprise. But it seemed to bring back a lot, and that with a rush.”
The other emitted two deliberate puffs of smoke.
“If it’s as you say, Mervyn, you are not responsible, but whether it is or not – or whether the chap was careless over handling the infernal machine, and so did for himself – and I don’t see why you shouldn’t give yourself the benefit of the doubt – the result’s the same, and a good one for you, in that we shouldn’t be here talking to-night, if he had lived another day. Had you any reason, by the way, to expect the attentions of this amiable confraternity?”
Mervyn knitted his brows and hesitated.
“Well, yes. I had,” he said at length. “I had received signs to put myself under its orders again. I had chucked it – clean, altogether – for years, in fact I thought that the very act of coming to this out of the way place would – well, blot out the trail. But I took no notice of them, and – this was the consequence. There’s no mistake about it, mind. I’ve no idea as to the man’s identity, but I recognised him, not at first, but the next morning, as one of those light coloured Afghans. He was Europeanised and talked English perfectly. Then, of course, I had the key to the whole situation.”
“Well, as I said, if he had lived, you would not have,” said the other.
“I’ve sometimes thought,” rejoined Mervyn, “and that’s the only thing that has bothered me – that is supposing I really did – you know – that after saving his life, he might have backed out of his errand.”
But Helston Varne shook his head slowly.
“I can’t presume to teach
you
your East, Mervyn. But – I think you are mistaken there.”
“Perhaps I am – most likely I am,” came the answer. “Anyway, Varne, I’m not going to stick on here any more, so if they plant another of those little reminders on me they’ll have to find out where I’ve got to.”
“They won’t,” said the other. “And when you’re in that jolly little cottage inside my park that you’ve promised me to inhabit, for – well, as long as it suits you – I think it’ll be a risky matter for any one to come fooling round you on that sort of errand.”
And then the two men talked on – on this topic and others – far into the night.
Since her return to Heath Hover Melian had experienced none of the fears and misgivings which had hung over her before. The “influence” what ever it was, seemed to have ceased, or was it in abeyance? Anyway, with Helston Varne under the same roof nothing mattered. It seemed as if nothing could matter.
For here he was, installed at Heath Hover as a guest, he who had first come there as a spy, and that in a hostile interest to his now host. He had not returned from the East in their company. With marvellous self denial – or self control – or both, he had waited a week later, and then returned alone. Characteristically he had reckoned that just that period of time without him would deepen Melian’s interest in him, would cause her to miss him, in short – or not. If so, and he felt justified in feeling sanguine – why there were all their lives before them to make up for it in. If not – well, he refused to contemplate such a contingency.
They had stayed at Mazaran just long enough for a rest after their hard, perilous experiences, but Mervyn had seemed as eager to get away from the country as before he had been to return to it. Helston had seen them off at Karachi, himself taking a passage which brought him home nearly as soon as themselves. And now he had arrived at Heath Hover the evening before, and certainly had found no cause to complain of the nature of his welcome.
The clear, brisk, bracing air lay upon Plane Pond, and upon the reddening woods which flowed down to it, in the early morning, and the voices of birds lifted in their late autumn song, ere silencing for drear winter, made music in “Broceliande.” The girl, tripping lightly up the sluice path, felt all the invigorating influence of it go through her system like a stimulant.
“Good morning, Sirdar.”
Helston Varne turned. He had been leaning on the rail gazing out over the expanse of water, thinking; and what he was thinking about was embodied in this vision of youth and bright sweetness which now stood before him in the early freshness of morning. Melian had taken to calling him “Sirdar” since she had seen him in his wonderful Eastern make-up. But neither of the two men had ever told her the extent of the ghastly peril which the wonderful success of that make-up had been instrumental in deliver