第59章

For a second he looked at me in blank surprise.'You can't,' he said; 'I've got to enter Samarkand before I can...' and he stopped again, with a glimmering sense in his face that he was giving himself away.And then I knew that I had surprised Tommy's secret.While he was muddling his own job, he was salving his pride with fancies of some wild career in Asia, where Tommy, disguised as the lord knows what Mussulman grandee, was hammering the little states into an empire.

"I did not think then as I think now, and I was amused to find so odd a trait in a dull man.I had known something of the kind before.I had met fellows who after their tenth peg would begin to swagger about some ridiculous fancy of their own--their little private corner of soul showing for a moment when the drink had blown aside their common-sense.Now, I had never known the thing appear in cold blood and everyday life, but I assumed the case to be the same.I thought of it only as a harmless fancy, never imagining that it had anything to do with character.I put it down to that kindly imagination which is the old opiate for failures.So I played up to Tommy with all my might, and though he became very discreet after the first betrayal, having hit upon the clue, I knew what to look for, and I found it.When I told him that the Labonga were in a devil of a mess, he would look at me with an empty face and change the subject; but once among the Turcomans his eye would kindle, and he would slave at his confounded folly with sufficient energy to reform the whole East Coast.It was the spark that kept the man alive.Otherwise he would have been as limp as a rag, but this craziness put life into him, and made him carry his head in the air and walk like a free man.I remember he was very keen about any kind of martial poetry.He used to go about crooning Scott and Macaulay to himself, and when we went for a walk or a ride he wouldn't speak for miles, but keep smiling to himself and humming bits of songs.

I daresay he was very happy,--far happier than your stolid, competent man, who sees only the one thing to do and does it.

Tommy was muddling his particular duty, but building glorious palaces in the air.

"One day Mackay, the old trader, came to me after a sitting of the precious Legislative Council.We were very friendly, and Ihad done all I could to get the Government to listen to his views.He was a dour, ill-tempered Scotsman, very anxious for the safety of his property, but perfectly careless about any danger to himself.

"'Captain Thirlstone,' he said, 'that Governor of yours is a damned fool.'

"Of course I shut him up very brusquely, but he paid no attention.'He just sits and grins, and lets yon Pentecostal crowd we've gotten here as a judgment for our sins do what they like wi' him.God kens what'll happen.I would go home to-morrow, if I could realise without an immoderate loss.For the day of reckoning is at hand.Maark my words, Captain--at hand.'

"I said I agreed with him about the approach of trouble, but that the Governor would rise to the occasion.I told him that people like Tommy were only seen at their best in a crisis, and that he might be perfectly confident that when it arrived he would get a new idea of the man.I said this, but of course Idid not believe a word of it.I thought Tommy was only a dreamer, who had rotted any grit he ever possessed by his mental opiates.At that time I did not understand about the kings from Orion.

" And then came the thing we had all been waiting for--a Labonga rising.A week before I had got leave and had gone up country, partly to shoot, but mainly to see for myself what trouble was brewing.I kept away from the river, and therefore missed the main native centres, but such kraals as I passed had a look I did not like.The chiefs were almost always invisible, and the young bloods were swaggering about and bukking to each other, while the women were grinding maize as if for some big festival.However, after a bit the country seemed to grow more normal, and I went into the foothills to shoot, fairly easy in my mind.I had got up to a place called Shimonwe, on the Pathi river, where I had ordered letters to be sent, and one night coming in from a hard day after kudu I found a post-runner half-dead of fatigue with a chit from Utterson, who commanded a police district twenty miles nearer the coast.It said simply that all the young men round about him had cleared out and appeared to be moving towards Deira, that he was in the devil of a quandary, and that, since the police were under the Governor, he would take his orders from me.

"It looked as if the heather were fairly on fire at last, so Iset off early next morning to trek back.About midday I met Utterson, a very badly scared little man, who had come to look for me.It seemed that his policemen had bolted in the night and gone to join the rising, leaving him with two white sergeants, barely fifty rounds of ammunition, and no neighbour for a hundred miles.He said that the Labonga chiefs were not marching to the coast, as he had thought, but north along the eastern foothills in the direction of the mines.This was better news, for it meant that in all probability the railway would remain open.It was my business to get somehow to my chief, and I was in the deuce of a stew how to manage it.It was no good following the line of the natives' march, for they would have been between me and my goal, and the only way was to try and outflank them by going due east, in the Deira direction, and then turning north, so as to strike the railway about half-way to the mines.I told Utterson we had better scatter, otherwise we should have no chance of getting through a densely populated native country.

So, about five in the afternoon I set off with my chief shikari, who, by good luck, was not a Labonga, and dived into the jungly bush which skirts the hills.