and wished them all fortune, talking of the border, and how Pennell managed the tribesmen, and of his wonderful old mother, in her British soldier's sun helmet, and her constant suspicion lest her white visitors should smell of tobacco. Those were the days before Pennell had married Dr Sorabjie, and later died untimely, at the point of duty, in the middle of high achievement. In the morn ing we went our several ways, and beyond an occasional remembrance, Susie and her family passed out of my mind. III. A few months later the Hot? No, hardly; it wants border had been extremely a better word than hot to restless. That firebrand, the Mullah Powindah, had, as usual, been pulling out the British tail-feathers. Government was also, as usual, very disinclined to have a military expedition to bring the border folk to reason. Also, it was quite the worst time of year for moving troops. So it was advisable to pretend that the trouble was merely the young bloods frolicking, and that no doubt the elders would make restitution in due course. Still, precautions were necessary, and the political officers of the border, and those lost souls who form for the time being the Frontier garrisons, were enjoying the month of August in tents at the mouth of the Tochi, one of those popular passes leading from Afghanistan to England vid Waziristan. It was a foul night. describe the mouth of a Frontier pass in August. The raw red cliffs have baked in the sun all day, and are now yielding the heat to the atmosphere at compound interest. A dust haze hung around, and the river had given off some of its moisture to make that dust hang, as a velvet curtain hangs, heavy and still. The soldiery lay and gasped, the only good thing in the world being water-melons. A watermelon in the Tochi, after a day in the sun and dust, is far, oh! far better, than a dinner at the Ritz, for the whole world goes by contrast. When you have ridden long from border post to border post, and your horse can hardly crawl, there is no hostel to compare with the officers' mud - room in the Frontier post. There is then no meal like the tea and mixed biscuits out of a tin, with an old bound volume of 'Maga,' dealing of tales from the outposts in the seventies, or how the Bengal Fusiliers marched to Delhi and the like. letter in his hand. On it was written to "Brother Baring Sahib." Inside was a strange mark, and the words in badly written English, "Remember the children of the widow." That was how Susie came back to her own people, her man with her. However, the soldiery were sucking melons for consolation, all except a chapao, or ambush, The camel knelt outside my with a British subaltern in tent, and Susie, hollow-eyed charge, out to catch one of the and silent, climbed down from krab admis, who had fired her seat. In her hand was a into the camp the night before long-barrelled Colt pistol. The from his Majesty's turnpike children were lifted out in road. Those who had not silence, and taken to a spare melons lay and gasped. A tent of mine. The two Afghans foul moon redolent of heat went off to the political serai. sneered down on the bivouac, The story, as I gathered it from and Aldebaran looked like the the clansmen and as Susie confiery eye of some devil. Then firmed it next day, was simple a shot; only one, and from our enough. The caravan I had side. The camp sat up and seen in the spring had got said, "Got the blighter this through with the bales of frocktime." But then on the rest- coats. Sultan Jan had effecless air came a murmur. There tively eluded any one waiting were prisoners, and they were for him. They had gone up bringing them along. To me into their summer camp after as warden the party was disposing of their wares, and brought, as they were rounded had their camels and their up on the road. The shot had flocks grazing on the downs been nerves on the part of the north of Ghuzui. In the peace sentry. And this was what and quiet of the upland summer the party consisted of. A there had been no troubles save with the young camels. The children rambled through the aromatic heather and filled their skirts with the Prophet's flower. There had been no talk of war or raids, and even the news from Kabul was uneventful. One night a small caravan, however, came along, apparently of Wazirs from Birmal, and had craved hospitality, which was of course freely offered them. The guests had talked trade and great shaggy Central Asian camel, with a female figure on top, with a long rolled bundle in her arms resting across the camel's hump. On either side of the camel a pannier, and in each a frightened child. Behind, disarmed but mounted, two Afghans. It was Susie Hammerslip and her twin babies, with her man's corpse in her arms, and two clansmen behind her. The officer of the piquet had a 1 Bad men. politics, and dipped deep into the cinnamon stew of fat-tailed sheep, and slept as tired men sleep. In the morning Sultan Jan had accompanied them to the edge of his camp, and his guests lingered while their camels moved ahead. Then one had struck him with a knife and another shot him through the chest simultaneously and galloped off. Susie and a servant had rushed out to find her husband lying dying but able to speak. He had told her that the men had said to him, "This will teach you to trade in rifles," and then had scrawled the note to me, and told her to come over the border to the British at once. This had only happened the day before yesterday in the morning, and she with two of her husband's relatives had brought the children and his body straight through, unmolested by tribesmen. Sultan Jan had evidently feared that the vendetta might be carried on to his children, and Susie had moved immediately, with the help of his two relatives, bringing, as so often is done in the East, the poor corpse with her. The rest of the story is uneventful. Next day Sultan Jān was buried by his relatives and some Pathans from the militia in the little Muhammadan cemetery, under a willow-tree, by the shrine of a local saint. The grave, after the fashion of Islam, contained the recess for the examining angel to question the departed on his record of life. He had done his best by the wild girl VOL. CXCIV.-NO. MCLXXVI. of alien creed and race, and she had done him equally well. In both accounts it is without doubt recorded. Susie and her children went down to Kohat by tonga next day, consigned to the nuns in a quiet convent in the Himalaya, till I and the brethren could make permanent arrangements. One little glimpse I had of the youngsters that cheered me. Rosy, jolly folk the two of them-the girl a little frightened, the boy sturdy and defiant. They were waiting for the tonga, by their small bundle of possessions, and their Afghan relatives were saying farewell. One knelt to the boy, and said, "Now, sonnie, what will you do for us who have rescued you and brought you down with such care?" "I will cut the throats of the lot of you," said the boy, and the fierce men of the hills laughed approval. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! This mingling of Briton and Afghan is a sturdy blend, and some of the sons of such mingling have already carved a mark or two in history. So Susie and her twins galloped away into the dust of the Frontier road, and I and the troops went about our business. Since then it has been arranged that she and her children shall be installed on a small fruit and chicken farm in the Himalaya, and the children in due course properly educated. And there the tragedy rests for the time being. G. F. MACMUNN. THE VERY DEVIL. BY SIR HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G. It was the Chinese servants who, in the first instance, announced it dogmatically and uncompromisingly as the Devil. It was Jack Norris who added the adjective colloquially when describing the visitation. With the detestable bias in favour of the accuracy of white men, which renders the British "imported official" a scandal to the West Indian Press, I have admitted the adjective, after much consideration, in the title which heads this page. Yet the Chinese servants were not indulging in hyperbole. They were stating an obvious fact in the language of everyday. If It were not a bad dream It could only be the Devil; and your Chinaman, unaided by opium, is little given to dreaming. Moreover, in witness to the faith that was in them, their faces were blanched under the yellow skin, their eyes had lost their obliquity and were starting circular from their sockets, and their mouths were opening and shutting in the convulsive contortions · which, with men of this race, denote an extremity of fear. Bishin Singh, the Sikh orderly, glaring and mouthing horribly through the tangle of black beard upon his cheeks and chin, corroborated the Chinese. He also inquired anxiously, "Is there any order, Sahib ?" It was to him a thing unthinkable that It could conceivably have been let loose upon the world in this fearsome fashion without the written permission of the Government or of some senior European officer. Simpul, Norris's Malay orderly, whose belief in the Powers of Darkness exceeded his faith in any organisation devised by white men, stated his considered opinion that It was without doubt the Youngest Daughter of the Burong Garoda. Now the Burong Garoda, which is the Roc of Sinbad, nests, as everybody knows, in the magic pauh tree, which grows beside that chasm of the under-world which is named the Navel of the Lake. This portal of the nethermost depths is ordinarily blocked by the body of the immense crab which makes of it its home; but when the monster quits it in search of its daily meat, the waters of ocean pour down into it, thus causing the tide causing the tide to recede. This, of course, throughout the Malayan Archipelago, is part of the common knowledge of mankind; so in addressing Norris it was not necessary for Simpul to enter into ex planations. This was as well, for no time, he urged, was to be lost. The Youngest Daughter having strayed so far from the maternal nest, the Mother Bird might be expected any moment to follow in order to retrieve and avenge her offspring; and then, literally, there would be the devil to pay. "Haste, Tuan," he cried. "With the Youngest Daughter we may perhaps cope, but when She arrives, there will Chinese servants. the cook be nothing for it but to make and two body-boys, the Sikh, ready our shrouds. Already I and the Malay orderly-would hear the earth of many graves later in the evening creep into shouting to the coffin-planks." the second hut, and sleep there In a word, though Simpul in a glorious "fug"; but for was more detailed and circum- the moment it was a cook. stantial, his opinion differed house, not a dormitory. from that of his fellows only in that he knew the particular breed of devil by whom they were assailed, and declared it to belong to a peculiarly devastating caste. Norris was in North Borneo, travelling on duty in connection with some business of the Chartered Company, and he was accompanied by a youngster named Baring. They had been tramping all day through those dismal coast forests, interspersed with stretches of rank grass country where the red soil shows like raw flesh through a worn-out garment of green; and just as the sun was sink, ing in an indescribable glory of gold and crimson behind the towering bulk of Kinabalu, they had reached their present camping-place. It consisted of a couple of deserted shanties, built of rude uprights, walled with sodden palm leaves, and roofed with thick, touzled mats of thatch, supported on substantial, untrimmed beams. Norris had appropriated one of the huts for the use of Baring and himself. The other was being used as a kitchen. The Murut bearers were camped a quarter of a mile away, down wind. This is a necessary precaution, as these people delight greatly in meat which has liquefied through putrefaction. The Norris and Baring, after a heart breaking attempt to cleanse the sweat of travel by a wallow in a mud-hole, had got into their sleeping suits, and were sitting down to dinner. As the soup was served a languid gust of wind shook the hut, and a shower of particles of dry thatch and insects was precipitated from above into their soup. Looking upward, by the light of the stinking hurricane-lamp, the outlines of the uneven rafters could be dimly seen. It was at this moment that the servants erupted from the other hut, and in chorus announced the arrival of the Devil. "What like of devil is it?" inquired Norris; but the natives of three races were all in a state of mind which paralyses the descriptive faculties. Norris could make nothing of their disjointed ejaculations. "Let's go and see," said Baring. "Where is it?" asked Norris. "It is in the kitchen. It hath invaded the kitchen! It hath driven us forth and hath possessed itself of the kitchen!" On this point the chorus was unanimous. "I wish I hadn't left my rifle behind," said Norris; "but any way I'm not going to interview any devil without my scattergun. Here, Simpul, and you, Bishin Singh, lend a hand.” |