with, because utterly fearless, utterly reckless. He had still five chambers in his pistol, but the weapon was small, and quite unreliable, save at point blank—in which case his enemies would cut him down before he had time to account for more than one of themselves.
All this flashed through his mind. Then he realised that the ferocious yelling had ceased. He looked back. A turn in the road hid the pursuers from view, and now it was nearly dark. But the darkness brought hope. Had they abandoned the pursuit? Or could he not conceal himself in some of the holes and crevices on the stony hillside until they should be tired of searching?
Still keeping his steed at its best speed—and that was not great—so as to ensure a good start, he held on, warily listening for any sound of his pursuers—and thus covered about two miles. A thunder peal rolled heavily—its echoes reverberating from crag to crag—and the cloud-curtain in front was alive with a dazzle of sheeting flame, which lit up the road and the dreary landscape like noonday. By its light he looked back. Still no sign of the pursuers, whose white flowing garments could not have failed to catch his eye. Hope—strong hope—rekindled within him.
But not for long. His horse, thoroughly blown, dropped into a walk. A walk? A crawl rather, for the poor beast staggered along, its flanks heaving violently, swaying at times, as though the mere effort to drag one leg after another would bring it down, and once down well its rider knew there would be no more rising. And then? One man—alone, dismounted, inadequately armed—in the vast heart of an unknown country, tracked down by fleet-footed pitiless destroyers, stung to a frenzy of massacre by a twofold incentive—blood feud for a comrade slain, and the fanatical dictates—or supposed dictates—of the most merciless religion in the world. There could be but one end.
Again he dismounted. The horse, relieved of so much weight, seemed to pant less distressingly. Every moment thus lost was a moment gained by his bloodthirsty enemies to come up with him, yet he felt it to be the wisest policy to spare his steed to the very utmost. Then he climbed into the saddle once more.
Now the storm was wellnigh overhead. The thunder roared and crashed, and great drops of rain shone like silver in the momentary dazzle of the lightning gleam—In that livid flare, too, the peaks stood forth on high, silhouetted against the heavens, and every bough of the ragged juniper trees was clearly and delicately defined.
Something else, too, was clearly but appallingly defined—to wit, four white-clad figures—with bronzed faces and flowing hair and flaming eyes; and the sheen and flash of four curved naked swords. They had been running in silence hitherto—but now—with a deafening howl they hurled themselves forward on their prey—
Without even cocking his revolver, the hunted man dropped it to the present and pressed the trigger. It would not move. Then he drew up the hammer—no—tried to—It, too, would not move. The cylinder was jammed. The cartridges—which he had purchased at one of those large co-operative stores, where they sell many things, but nothing reliable—were too tight a fit. The weapon was as useless as a bit of stick.
With a bitter curse upon the pettifogging dishonesty of his trading fellow countrymen, the now desperate man wrenched off one of the stirrups—not a bad weapon at a pinch—But once more fortune befriended him. The horse, spurred by terror to one more effort, plunged down the road, which now made a sudden descent. The stunning report of a jezail, which the Ghazis had presumably stopped to reload, added to its terror, but the missile hummed harmlessly by. And now in the ceaseless gleam of the lightning, the fugitive saw right before him at the base of the slope, the wide stony bed of a watercourse.
On, on, on, anyhow—though where safety lay was too great a hope to enter his despairing brain—Then, drawing nearer and nearer from the hills on his right came a strange, swirling, rushing roar. It was not the thunder. It had a note of its own as it boomed louder and louder with every second. It was as the breaking of surf against the base of an echoing cliff. And as another vivid lightning flash lit up the whole landscape with a noonday flare, the traveller beheld a sight that was appalling in its wild terror.
A wall of water was sweeping down the dry nullah—a vast brown muddy wave, many feet high. His escape was cut off. Yet not. So far it had not reached the point where the road crossed. Could he be before it there was safety. Otherwise death, either way.
In the nullah now, the slipping, stumbling horsehoofs were flashing up showers of sparks in the blackness—Then another lightning gleam. The fugitive glanced to the right, then wished he had not. The advancing flood, tossing against the livid sky, was so awful as to unnerve him, and he was just half way across. The four Ghazis arrived on the bank, but even they shrank back from the roaring terror of that wave wall. But the remaining loaded jezail spoke—and the miserable steed, stricken by the missile, plunged forward, throwing the rider hard upon his head.
The wild triumph scream of the furious fanatics, leaping like demons in the lightning’s glare, was drowned by the bellowing voice of the flood. It poured by—and now the whole wide bed of the watercourse was a very hell of seething roaring waves. But on the further side from the bloodthirsty Ghazis lay the motionless form of a man—He lay at full length, face downwards, and the swirling eddies on the extreme edge of the furious flood were just washing the soles of his riding boots, and leaving little wisps of twigs and straws sticking in his upturned spurs.
Chapter Two.
Through Flood.
Ernest Aurelius Upward was the chief official in charge of the Government forests of Baluchistan.
Now the said “forests” had about as much affinity to the idea of sylvan wildness conveyed by that term as many of the Highland so-called deer forests; in that they were mainly distinguishable by a conspicuous lack of trees; such trees as there were consisting wellnigh entirely of the stunted, profitless, and utterly unpicturesque juniper, which straggling over the slopes of the hills and devoid of undergrowth imparted to the arid and stony landscape somewhat of the aspect of a vast continental burying-ground, badly kept and three parts forgotten.
Being thus devoid of undergrowth, the land was proportionately depleted of wild life, since game requires covert. This added not to its attractions in the eyes of Ernest Aurelius, who was a keen Nimrod. He had been a mighty slayer of tiger during an experience of many years spent in the Indian forest service. Long indeed was the death roll of “Stripes” when that energetic official was around with rifle and camp outfit among the jungly hills of his North West Province section. Of panther he had long since ceased to keep count, while cheetul or blackbuck he reckoned in with such small game as partridge or snipe. We have said that the great rugged slopes and towering crags of his present charge still held the markhôr and wild mountain sheep; but Upward was not so young as he had been and remembering the fine times he had had with the far easier shikar of the lower country, frankly declared his distaste for the hard labour involved in swarming up all manner of inaccessible heights at all sorts of unearthly hours of the day or night on the off-chance of one precarious shot. So the gadh and markhôr, so far as he was concerned, went unmolested.
But its lack of sport notwithstanding, his present charge had its compensations. Life in camp among these elevated mountain ranges was healthful and not unpleasant. At an altitude of anything up to 8,000 feet the air stirred keen and fresh, and the climate of Shâlalai, the cantonment station where he had his headquarters in the shape of a snug, roomy bungalow and a garden in which he took much pride, was appreciated alike by himself and others, to whom recollection was still vivid of the torrid, enervating exhaustion of plains stations. Furthermore his term of retirement was not many years distant and on the whole, Upward found no great reason
