Two gun bob, p.131
Two-Gun Bob, page 131
The charge was signalled by a deafening roar from a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Ivan’s Mongols. That maddening sound smote the ears of Gordon and his Waziris just as they slid, undetected, over the unguarded western wall of the Garden of the Egyptian. They were just raising their rifles to aim at the bare score of Assassins who crouched along the eastern wall, firing at the orchard across the way, and oblivious to anything behind them. That outrageous brazen clamor momentarily stunned and paralyzed them, and then a perfect hell-burst of yells followed the trumpets, and a mass of frenzied, weapon-brandishing humanity burst from between the houses across the way and swept up the street like a foaming torrent.
The men on the roofs and in the garden laid down a perfect barrage along the orchard wall, and all hell seemed bursting at once.
It was a moment where everything depended on a hair-trigger decision. And Gordon rose to the occasion, just as Baber Khan had risen earlier in the day. His eager but bewildered Waziris could not hear the order he shouted, but they understood him when he threw his rifle to his shoulder. In that raging hurricane of sound, the volley which cut down the twenty riflemen along the garden wall passed unnoticed. Those Assassins died looking the other way, without knowing what hit them. A few seconds later their slayers were kneeling among their bodies, sighting over the wall in their place. The men still on the roofs, firing madly over the heads of their charging comrades, never knew what had taken place in the Garden of the Egyptian.
The Waziris had not yet reached the east wall when the frothing horde swept past the last house and lunged toward the orchard. A fearful volley met them; the wall was lined by jetting spurts of flame and smoke rolled up in a cloud. The whole first rank went down. In an instant the road was carpeted with dead men. Ivan had counted on the momentum of that headlong charge to carry it over the open space, but even his fanatics faltered in the tearing teeth of that blast. They reeled and wavered.
But at that moment the hundred Ismailians who had circled through the gardens reached the east wall of the orchard and found it unguarded, because the Ghilzais had been forced to concentrate their forces in the southwest angle to meet the charge. Ivan had counted on that, too; but he had overlooked the density of the trees through which the hundred warriors would have to fire. So their volley into the backs of the men along the southwest walls, while murderous, was not as devastating as he had hoped it would be.
Nevertheless it staggered the Ghilzais, and in that moment, as their fire wavered, the maddened Ismailians in the road sent up a roar that burst the very ear-drums of battle, and surged irresistibly on the barrier. It was at that instant that Gordon and his Waziris opened fire from behind them. A whole line of men dropped, shot in the back, but the rush was not checked in the slightest. Like a roaring wave the Assassins rolled against the wall and locked with the defenders. Rifles poked over the wall from either side were fired full into snarling faces. Tulwars lunged up or hacked down. Men were dragged from the wall into the road, men scrambling up on the wall from without tumbled or were knocked over into the orchard. The Ismailians, trampling their dead and dying underfoot, clustered in a straining, heaving mass against the wall, those in front crushed upon it by the pressure of those behind. They swarmed upon the barrier fighting like furies, and as fast as they fell others took their place from the shrieking horde.
The Waziris in the garden fired again and again, and their slugs ripped into the rear flank of the mob, reaping a grisly harvest. But the frenzied horde was like a man who is so blood-madly intent on killing the foe before him that he is not aware that a knife is being plunged again and again into his back.
The hundred Ismailians in the orchard came tearing through the trees to fall on the rear of the Ghilzais with knife and rifle-butt. Gordon’s Waziris, carried beyond themselves, leaped the garden wall and hurled themselves at the backs of the horde before the orchard, clubbing and stabbing. And the riflemen on the roofs deserted their posts to rush into the road and add their fury to the general frenzy.
It was at this moment that the wall gave way under the impact of hurtling tons of straining human flesh, and the red tides which had been foaming against the barrier on each side flowed together and mingled in an awful welter.
After that there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, blood splashing the blossoms and straining feet stamping the grass to shreds. Mixed and mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied all over the orchard and flooded the road. The firing ceased, gave way to the crunch of clubbed rifle butts and the rip of stabbing blades. There was not much difference in the numbers of the rival hordes now, for the losses of the Batinis had been appalling. The outcome hung in the balance and no man knew how the general battle was going. Each man was too busy with his own individual problem of keeping a whole skin and killing the man next to him to be able to see what was going on about him.
Even Gordon, whose brain generally functioned crystal-clear in the reddest rages of battle, could obtain no distinct conception of that fight — the most savage of all the myriad unrecorded and unnamed battles fought out in the mystery of the Hills to decide the fate of empires.
He did not waste his breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer manpower and individual ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, with no one to listen to orders if he gave them, and no breath to give them in any event, there was nothing to do but break as many heads as he could and let the gods of chance decide the general issue.
Gordon remembered firing his last shot point-blank into a wild face. Then he clubbed his rifle and smote and smote and smote until the world became strange and red and hazy and he almost lost even his individuality in the tumult about him.
He knew — without being conscious that he knew — that Lal Singh fought on one side of him and Yusuf bin Suleiman on the other; and behind them, all who were left of the Waziris hung doggedly at his heels, swinging dripping tulwars.
And then, suddenly, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle was beginning to thin out, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals. Gordon knew that one side or the other was giving way; men were turning their backs to the slaughter. It was the Batinis who wavered, the madness inspired by the hemp they had eaten beginning to die out. Without the drug their fury was less absolute than the desperation of the Hillmen who knew they must conquer to survive. Besides, the Ismailians were a mongrel throng, lacking the racial unity of the Afghans.
But the break did not come all at once. The edges of the battle crumbled away, but in the midst of the orchard the stubbornest fight of the whole day swirled and eddied about a dense clump of trees where the fiercest fighters of Shalizahr made their stand with their backs to the trees.
Gordon led his men that way, hacking through the loose lines of individual combats. He saw a glitter of gilded corselets among a wave of sheepskin coats, and Yusuf ibn Suleiman croaked something, and sprang away from his side, toward a plumed helmet which waved above the turbans.
And then Gordon saw Ivan Konaszevski. The Cossack was stripped to the waist, his cord-like muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of the saber in his hand. His dark eyes blazed and his thin lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Ghilzais lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Arabs and squat Mongols in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Ghilzai swordsmen. And into this carnage Gordon’s Waziris hurled themselves howling like wolves.
Gordon saw Yar Ali Khan for the first time, looming above the mob as he glutted his berserk fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Baber Khan — reeling out of the melee, covered with blood. Gordon began beating his way through to Konaszevski.
Ivan laughed, with a wild gleam in his dark eyes, as he saw the American coming toward him. Blood streamed down Gordon’s muscular breast, coursed in tiny rivulets down his corded brown arms. The butt of his clubbed rifle was clotted with blood and brains.
“Come and die, El Borak!” laughed Ivan, and Gordon crouched for a charge, swinging the rifle butt above his head.
“Nay, sahib, take this!” And Lal Singh thrust into his hand the hilt of his dripping saber. El Borak straightened, shook his head to clear it, and came in as a Cossack would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Ivan sprang to meet him, and they fought as Cossacks fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow them. Time might have turned back three hundred years to a duel between Zaporoghian swordsmen on the shores of the Dneiper.
And in a circle about them the panting, blood-stained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the sight of two Western warriors settling the destiny of the East between them!
“Aie!” It was a cry from a hundred throats as Gordon stumbled, lost contact with the Cossack blade.
Ivan cried out ringingly, whirled up his sword — and felt Gordon’s saber in his heart before he realized the American had tricked him. He fell heavily, wrenching the hilt from Gordon’s hand. He was dead before he struck the ground, his thin lips twisted in a smile of bitter self-mockery.
Gordon was stooping to regain his sword when a shot cracked back among the trees; he stooped even lower as if to kneel to the dead man — and pitched suddenly across the corpse, blood oozing from his head. He did not hear the maddened yell that rose up to the hot blue skies, nor see the headlong rush of the frothing Afghans as they stormed past him and hurled themselves at the throats of their enemies.
Gordon’s first sensation of returning consciousness was a lack of sensation — a numbness that held him helpless. He seemed to lie in soft darkness. Then he heard voices, mumbling and incoherent at first, growing more distinct as life grew stronger in him. He began to distinguish the voices, and to recognize them. One was Yar Ali Khan’s, and he was startled to realize that the giant was weeping — blubbering vociferously and without shame.
“Aie! Ahai! Ohee! He is dead! His brains are pouring out of that hole in his head! Oh, my brother! Oh, prince of slayers! Oh, king among men! Oh, El Borak! Dead, for a mob of ragged hill-bastards! He whose smallest finger nail was worth more than all the Ghilzai horse-thieves in the Himalayas!”
“He is not dead, Allah curse you! And how are the Ghilzais to blame? My warriors lie dead by scores!” That was Baber Khan.
“Ohai! Would they had all died, and thou with them, aye, and I too, if so El Borak could have been saved alive.”
“Oh, hush that ox-bellowing and hand me that bandage!” That was Lal Singh. “I tell you, his wound is not mortal. The bullet but grazed his skull, knocking him senseless, curse the cowardly Batini who fired it.”
“I split the dog’s skull,” blubbered Yar Ali Khan. “But that can not restore life to our sahib. Here is the bandage. Sikhs have no hearts. They are a breed without bowels of compassion. Your friend and brother lies there dying, and you shed no tear! Nay, you mock me for my woe! By Allah, were it not that grief unmans me, I’d give you something to weep about!”
Gordon’s awakening senses were then aware of a throbbing in his head, which was eased somewhat under the manipulation of strong, gentle, skillful fingers that applied something wet and cool. The darkness cleared from his brain and eyes, and he looked up into the anxious faces of his friends.
“Sahib!” cried Lal Singh joyously. “Look, Baber Khan, he opens his eyes! Ali, if you were not blinded by those idiotic tears, you would see that El Borak lives, and is conscious!”
“Sahib!” yelled the great hairy cutthroat, and forthwith fell to weeping for joy. Gordon lifted his bandaged head, and set his teeth as the movement started it to throbbing agonizingly again. He was lying in a corner of the orchard wall, and a peach tree bent its branches over him, green leaves against blue sky, and blossoms raining petals about him in a soft shower as the breeze blew. But the air reeked of fresh-spilt blood; there was blood on the grass, and a dead man lying face down a few yards away.
The orchard was strangely quiet after the noise of battle, but he thought he heard men screaming somewhere in the distance. He could not be sure, for the roaring inside his head.
“What happened?” he mumbled. “Is Ivan dead?”
“Dead as man can be with a saber through his heart, sahib,” answered Lal Singh. “The devil himself would have bitten at the trick you played on the Cossack. My own heart was in my mouth when you seemed to stumble. A Batini skulking among the trees shot you an instant later. But the heart was gone out of the Assassins, and our Afghans went stark mad when they saw you fall. They fell on the Ismailians with a fury that could not be withstood, and those sons of dogs gave way and fled in every direction — those who lived to flee. Even now the Ghilzais harry them up and down the street. Hearken!”
Gordon stared at Baber Khan.
“I feared you were slain.”
The chief grinned wryly. His beard was clotted with blood from a cut on the neck, and his leg was stuck out stiffly before him as he sat leaning against the wall.
“A bullet in the thigh. It is nothing. We feared you were dead.”
“Ha!” Yar Ali Khan smoothed his beard and stared scornfully at his friends. “Old women! Sahib, you should have heard them bellowing over you! Wallah! Did I not bid you cease your unmanly weeping? Did I not tell you that El Borak’s head was too hard for a bullet to break? Where are your manners? The sahib perhaps has orders!”
Gordon struggled up to a sitting position and stared out over the orchard. What he saw there shook even his iron nerves. It was a garden of corpses. The dead lay like fallen leaves in wind-blown heaps and mounds and straggling lines. In the bloody angle and in the road outside the bodies were piled three deep, among the ruins of the wall.
“God!” For a moment Gordon was speechless, his soul in revolt. “Baber Khan, send someone after your warriors. Ali will go. Tell them to stop the slaughter. Enough men have died. Tell them to spare all who will lay down their arms and surrender. And another thing — there are many captive women in Shalizahr who are not to be harmed. I intend to return them to their homes.”
Yar Ali Khan swaggered off importantly to carry the orders, just as another man approached. Yusuf ibn Suleiman came toward Gordon, holding a broken scimitar. He spoke with difficulty because he had been slashed across the mouth and the bubbling blood choked him.
“Effendi, my sword broke with the last stroke, but it was enough. Muhammad ibn Ahmed lies yonder among the corpses of his corseleted dogs. He will never insult a mountain-Kurd again. Have I not kept faith, El Borak?”
“You have kept faith. But why ask me that question? I never expected anything but that you would keep faith.”
Yusuf sighed deeply and seated himself cross-legged beneath the tree, the broken sword across his knees.
A low moaning began to make itself manifest over the orchard — the wounded crying for water. Gordon grasped Lal Singh’s shoulder and rose stiffly.
“Baber Khan, we’ve got to get the wounded into the houses and do what we can for them. The women can help. I can stand alone, Lal Singh, and in a few minutes I’ll be able to walk without help. You and Yusuf go to the nearest canal and bring water.”
As the men set out, Gordon supported himself by grasping a peach limb; he had not yet fully recovered from the paralyzing shock of that bullet-wound. His legs still felt numb.
“I have been thinking while sitting here holding a broken leg, El Borak,” said Baber Khan. “This city is easier to defend than Khor; with Ghilzai warriors guarding the outer cleft and the Stair, not even the Amir’s field-pieces could take Shalizahr. I will send for the women and children and we will hold this plateau. Stay with us, El Borak, and rule beside me! We will build a kingdom here!”
“Are you touched with the madness that has led to the slaughter of hundreds this day?” retorted Gordon. “You see to what doom a like ambition has led the rulers of Shalizahr. They too plotted a kingdom among these Hills.”
“But the Amir has doomed me anyway!”
“You need not fear his displeasure now! Any man who has freed him of the fear of the Triple-Bladed Dagger is sure of the Amir’s pardon, regardless of his past offenses. My head upon it! Why do you think I summoned you to help me take this city? Merely to aid my own interests? You know me better than that. I knew that if we stamped out this nest of cobras together, it would win you the Amir’s pardon.”
Baber Khan sighed gustily.
“The sword is lifted from my neck by your words, El Borak. I have had no love for the life of an outlaw, but I was caught in a web of lies.”
“We have broken that web. But at a bitter price. I wish it could have been done at lesser cost of brave men.”
“All would have died, and me with them, if the Amir had come against us, as he planned,” grunted Baber Khan. “Those who died, died as a Ghilzai wishes to die. And there will be loot for the living, and the women of the dead.”
“Let’s don’t be too hasty about plundering. We’ll have to deliver the city to the officers of the Amir, but I think I can persuade him to make you governor of the city. With these Ismailite thieves replaced by decent citizens from other parts of the kingdom, this will make a city of which any king should be proud. The Amir will wish to reward me for my part in this affair. I will ask him to place you in charge of the city. Governor of Shalizahr — how does that sound, Baber Khan?”
“Your generosity shames me,” said the Afghan chief, tugging at his beard in his deep emotion. “But what will you do, El Borak? You have provided for everyone except yourself.”
“Well, just now I’m going to take water to those poor devils out there, and tie up their wounds the best I can. I see Lal Singh and Yusuf coming with water, and my legs are alive again.”
