Stalky & Co.

“Talkin’ of baths,” said McTurk, with a chuckle, “‘member our bath in Number Five, Beetle, the night Rabbits-Eggs rocked King? What wouldn’t I give to see old Stalky now! He is the only one of the two Studies not here.”

“Stalky is the great man of his Century,” said Dick Four.

“How d’you know?” I asked.

“How do I know?” said Dick Four, scornfully. “If you’ve ever been in a tight place with Stalky you wouldn’t ask.”

“I haven’t seen him since the camp at Pindi in ‘87,” I said. “He was goin’ strong then – about seven feet high and four feet through.”

“Adequate chap. Infernally adequate,” said Tertius, pulling his mustache and staring into the fire.

“Got dam’ near court-martialed and broke in Egypt in ‘84,” the Infant volunteered. “I went out in the same trooper with him – as raw as he was. Only I showed it, and Stalky didn’t.”

“What was the trouble?” said McTurk, reaching forward absently to twitch my dress-tie into position.

“Oh, nothing. His colonel trusted him to take twenty Tommies out to wash, or groom camels, or something at the back of Suakin, and Stalky got embroiled with Fuzzies five miles in the interior. He conducted a masterly retreat and wiped up eight of ‘em. He knew jolly well he’d no right to go out so far, so he took the initiative and pitched in a letter to his colonel, who was frothing at the mouth, complaining of the ‘paucity of support accorded to him in his operations.’ Gad, it might have been one fat brigadier slangin’ another! Then he went into the Staff Corps.”

“That – is – entirely – Stalky,” said Abanazar from his arm-chair.

“You’ve come across him, too?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied in his softest tones. “I was at the tail of that – that epic. Don’t you chaps know?”

We did not – Infant, McTurk, and I; and we called for information very politely.

“‘Twasn’t anything,” said Tertius. “We got into a mess up in the Khye-Kheen Hills a couple o’ years ago, and Stalky pulled us through. That’s all.”

McTurk gazed at Tertius with all an Irishman’s contempt for the tongue-tied Saxon.

“Heavens!” he said. “And it’s you and your likes govern Ireland. Tertius, aren’t you ashamed?”

“Well, I can’t tell a yarn. I can chip in when the other fellow starts bukhing. Ask him.” He pointed to Dick Four, whose nose gleamed scornfully over the rug.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” said Dick Four. “Give me a whiskey and soda. I’ve been drinking lemon-squash and ammoniated quinine while you chaps were bathin’ in champagne, and my head’s singin’ like a top.”

He wiped his ragged mustache above the drink; and, his teeth chattering in his head, began: “You know the Khye-Kheen-Malot expedition, when we scared the souls out of ‘em with a field force they daren’t fight against? Well, both tribes – there was a coalition against us – came in without firing a shot; and a lot of hairy villains, who had no more power over their men than I had, promised and vowed all sorts of things. On that very slender evidence, Pussy dear – ”

“I was at Simla,” said Abanazar, hastily.

“Never mind, you’re tarred with the same brush. On the strength of those tuppenny-ha’penny treaties, your asses of Politicals reported the country as pacified, and the Government, being a fool, as usual, began road-makin’ – dependin’ on local supply for labor. ‘Member that, Pussy? ‘Rest of our chaps who’d had no look-in during the campaign didn’t think there’d be any more of it, and were anxious to get back to India. But I’d been in two of these little rows before, and I had my suspicions. I engineered myself, summa ingenio, into command of a road-patrol – no shovellin’, only marching up and down genteelly with a guard. They’d withdrawn all the troops they could, but I nucleused about forty Pathans, recruits chiefly, of my regiment, and sat tight at the base-camp while the road-parties went to work, as per Political survey.”

“Had some rippin’ sing-songs in camp, too,” said Tertius.

“My pup” – thus did Dick Four refer to his subaltern – “was a pious little beast. He didn’t like the sing-songs, and so he went down with pneumonia. I rootled round the camp, and found Tertius gassing about as a D.A.Q.M.G., which, God knows, he isn’t cut out for. There were six or eight of the old Coll. at base-camp (we’re always in force for a frontier row), but I’d heard of Tertius as a steady old hack, and I told him he had to shake off his D.A.Q.M.G. breeches and help me. Tertius volunteered like a shot, and we settled it with the authorities, and out we went – forty Pathans, Tertius, and me, looking up the road-parties. Macnamara’s – ‘member old Mac, the Sapper, who played the fiddle so damnably at Umballa? – Mac’s party was the last but one. The last was Stalky’s. He was at the head of the road with some of his pet Sikhs. Mac said he believed he was all right.”

“Stalky is a Sikh,” said Tertius. “He takes his men to pray at the Durbar Sahib at Amritzar, regularly as clockwork, when he can.”

“Don’t interrupt, Tertius. It was about forty miles beyond Mac’s before I found him; and my men pointed out gently, but firmly, that the country was risin’. What kind o’ country, Beetle? Well, I’m no word-painter, thank goodness, but you might call it a hellish country! When we weren’t up to our necks in snow, we were rolling down the khud. The well-disposed inhabitants, who were to supply labor for the road-making (don’t forget that, Pussy dear), sat behind rocks and took pot-shots at us. ‘Old, old story! We all legged it in search of Stalky. I had a feeling that he’d be in good cover, and about dusk we found him and his road-party, as snug as a bug in a rug, in an old Malot stone fort, with a watch-tower at one corner. It overhung the road they had blasted out of the cliff fifty feet below; and under the road things went down pretty sheer, for five or six hundred feet, into a gorge about half a mile wide and two or three miles long. There were chaps on the other side of the gorge scientifically gettin’ our range. So I hammered on the gate and nipped in, and tripped over Stalky in a greasy, bloody old poshteen, squatting on the ground, eating with his men. I’d only seen him for half a minute about three months before, but I might have met him yesterday. He waved his hand all sereno.

“‘Hullo, Aladdin! Hullo, Emperor!’ he said. ‘You’re just in time for the performance.’”

“I saw his Sikhs looked a bit battered. ‘Where’s your command? Where’s your subaltern?’ I said.

“‘Here – all there is of it,’ said Stalky. ‘If you want young Everett, he’s dead, and his body’s in the watch-tower. They rushed our road-party last week, and got him and seven men. We’ve been besieged for five days. I suppose they let you through to make sure of you. The whole country’s up. ‘Strikes me you’ve walked into a first-class trap.’ He grinned, but neither Tertius nor I could see where the deuce the fun was. We hadn’t any grub for our men, and Stalky had only four days’ whack for his. That came of dependin’ upon your asinine Politicals, Pussy dear, who told us that the inhabitants were friendly.

“To make us quite comfy, Stalky took us up to the watch-tower to see poor Everett’s body, lyin’ in a foot o’ drifted snow. It looked like a girl of fifteen – not a hair on the little fellow’s face. He’d been shot through the temple, but the Malots had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to us – a rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. ‘Member the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? ‘Member when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked as if he was alive?”

“Ye-es,” said Tertius, with a shudder. “‘Member the beastly look on Stalky’s face, though, with his nostrils all blown out, same as he used to look when he was bullyin’ a fag? That was a lovely evening.”

“We held a council of war up there over Everett’s body. Stalky said the Malots and Khye-Kheens were up together; havin’ sunk their blood feuds to settle us. The chaps we’d seen across the gorge were Khye-Kheens. It was about half a mile from them to us as a bullet flies, and they’d made a line of sungars under the brow of the hill to sleep in and starve us out. The Malots, he said, were in front of us promiscuous. There wasn’t good cover behind the fort, or they’d have been there, too. Stalky didn’t mind the Malots half as much as he did the Khye-Kheens. He said the Malots were treacherous curs. What I couldn’t understand was, why in the world the two gangs didn’t join in and rush us. There must have been at least five hundred of ‘em. Stalky said they didn’t trust each other very well, because they were ancestral enemies when they were at home; and the only time they’d tried a rush he’d hove a couple of blasting-charges among ‘em, and that had sickened ‘em a bit.

“It was dark by the time we finished, and Stalky, always serene, said: ‘You command now. I don’t suppose you mind my taking any action I may consider necessary to reprovision the fort?’ I said, ‘Of course not,’ and then the lamp blew out. So Tertius and I had to climb down the tower steps (we didn’t want to stay with Everett) and got back to our men. Stalky had gone off – to count the stores, I supposed. Anyhow, Tertius and I sat up in case of a rush (they were plugging at us pretty generally, you know), relieving each other till the mornin’.

“Mornin’ came. No Stalky. Not a sign of him. I took counsel with his senior native officer – a grand, white-whiskered old chap – Rutton Singh, from Jullunder-way. He only grinned, and said it was all right. Stalky had been out of the fort twice before, somewhere or other, accordin’ to him. He said Stalky ‘ud come back unchipped, and gave me to understand that Stalky was an invulnerable Guru of sorts. All the same, I put the whole command on half rations, and set ‘em to pickin’ out loopholes.

“About noon there was no end of a snow-storm, and the enemy stopped firing. We replied gingerly, because we were awfully short of ammunition. Don’t suppose we fired five shots an hour, but we generally got our man. Well, while I was talking with Rutton Singh I saw Stalky coming down from the watch-tower, rather puffy about the eyes, his poshteen coated with claret-colored ice.

“‘No trustin’ these snow-storms,’ he said. ‘Nip out quick and snaffle what you can get. There’s a certain amount of friction between the Khye-Kheens and the Malots just now.’

“I turned Tertius out with twenty Pathans, and they bucked about in the snow for a bit till they came on to a sort of camp about eight hundred yards away, with only a few men in charge and half a dozen sheep by the fire. They finished off the men, and snaffled the sheep and as much grain as they could carry, and came back. No one fired a shot at ‘em. There didn’t seem to be anybody about, but the snow was falling pretty thick.

“‘That’s good enough,’ said Stalky when we got dinner ready and he was chewin’ mutton-kababs off a cleanin’ rod. ‘There’s no sense riskin’ men. They’re holding a pow-wow between the Khye-Kheens and the Malots at the head of the gorge. I don’t think these so-called coalitions are much good.’

“Do you know what that maniac had done? Tertius and I shook it out of him by instalments. There was an underground granary cellar-room below the watch-tower, and in blasting the road Stalky had blown a hole into one side of it. Being no one else but Stalky, he’d kept the hole open for his own ends; and laid poor Everett’s body slap over the well of the stairs that led down to it from the watch-tower. He’d had to move and replace the corpse every time he used the passage. The Sikhs wouldn’t go near the place, of course. Well, he’d got out of this hole, and dropped on to the road. Then, in the night and a howling snow-storm, he’d dropped over the edge of the khud, made his way down to the bottom of the gorge, forded the nullah, which was half frozen, climbed up on the other side along a track he’d discovered, and come out on the right flank of the Khye-Kheens. He had then – listen to this! – crossed over a ridge that paralleled their rear, walked half a mile behind that, and come out on the left of their line where the gorge gets shallow and where there was a regular track between the Malot and the Khye-Kheen camps. That was about two in the morning, and, as it turned out, a man spotted him – a Khye-Kheen. So Stalky abolished him quietly, and left him —with the Malot mark on his chest, same as Everett had.

“‘I was just as economical as I could be,’ Stalky said to us. ‘If he’d shouted I should have been slain. I’d never had to do that kind of thing but once before, and that was the first time I tried that path. It’s perfectly practicable for infantry, you know.’

“‘What about your first man?’ I said.

“‘Oh, that was the night after they killed Everett, and I went out lookin’ for a line of retreat for my men. A man found me. I abolished him —privatim– scragged him. But on thinkin’ it over it occurred to me that if I could find the body (I’d hove it down some rocks) I might decorate it with the Malot mark and leave it to the Khye-Kheens to draw inferences. So I went out again the next night and did. The Khye-Kheens are shocked at the Malots perpetratin’ these two dastardly outrages after they’d sworn to sink all bleed feuds. I lay up behind their sungars early this morning and watched ‘em. They all went to confer about it at the head of the gorge. Awf’ly annoyed they are. Don’t wonder.’ You know the way Stalky drops out his words, one by one.”

“My God!” said the Infant, explosively, as the full depth of the strategy dawned on him.

“Dear-r man!” said McTurk, purring rapturously.

“Stalky stalked,” said Tertius. “That’s all there is to it.”

“No, he didn’t,” said Dick Four. “Don’t you remember how he insisted that he had only applied his luck? Don’t you remember how Rutton Singh grabbed his boots and grovelled in the snow, and how our men shouted?”

“None of our Pathans believed that was luck,” said Tertius. “They swore Stalky ought to have been born a Pathan, and – ‘member we nearly had a row in the fort when Rutton Singh said Stalky was a Pathan? Gad, how furious the old chap was with my Jemadar! But Stalky just waggled his finger and they shut up.

“Old Rutton Singh’s sword was half out, though, and he swore he’d cremate every Khye-Kheen and Malot he killed. That made the Jemadar pretty wild, because he didn’t mind fighting against his own creed, but he wasn’t going to crab a fellow Mussulman’s chances of Paradise. Then Stalky jabbered Pushtu and Punjabi in alternate streaks. Where the deuce did he pick up his Pushtu from, Beetle?”

“Never mind his language, Dick,” said I. “Give us the gist of it.”

“I flatter myself I can address the wily Pathan on occasion, but, hang it all, I can’t make puns in Pushtu, or top off my arguments with a smutty story, as he did. He played on those two old dogs o’ war like a – like a concertina. Stalky said – and the other two backed up his knowledge of Oriental nature – that the Khye-Kheens and the Malots between ‘em would organize a combined attack on us that night, as a proof of good faith. They wouldn’t drive it home, though, because neither side would trust the other on account, as Rutton Singh put it, of the little accidents. Stalky’s notion was to crawl out at dusk with his Sikhs, manoeuvre ‘em along this ungodly goat-track that he’d found, to the back of the Khye-Kheen position, and then lob in a few long shots at the Malots when the attack was well on. ‘That’ll divert their minds and help to agitate ‘em,’ he said. ‘Then you chaps can come out and sweep up the pieces, and we’ll rendezvous at the head of the gorge. After that, I move we get back to Mac’s camp and have something to eat.”

“You were commandin’?” the Infant suggested.

“I was about three months senior to Stalky, and two months Tertius’s senior,” Dick Four replied. “But we were all from the same old Coll. I should say ours was the only little affair on record where some one wasn’t jealous of some one else.”

“We weren’t,” Tertius broke in, “but there was another row between Gul Sher Khan and Rutton Singh. Our Jemadar said – he was quite right – that no Sikh living could stalk worth a damn; and that Koran Sahib had better take out the Pathans, who understood that kind of mountain work. Rutton Singh said that Koran Sahib jolly well knew every Pathan was a born deserter, and every Sikh was a gentleman, even if he couldn’t crawl on his belly. Stalky struck in with some woman’s proverb or other, that had the effect of doublin’ both men up with a grin. He said the Sikhs and the Pathans could settle their claims on the Khye-Kheens and Malots later on, but he was going to take his Sikhs along for this mountain-climbing job, because Sikhs could shoot. They can, too. Give ‘em a mule-load of ammunition apiece, and they’re perfectly happy.”

“And out he gat,” said Dick Four. “As soon as it was dark, and he’d had a bit of a snooze, him and thirty Sikhs went down through the staircase in the tower, every mother’s son of ‘em salutin’ little Everett where It stood propped up against the wall. The last I heard him say was, ‘Kubbadar! tumbleinga! [Look out; you’ll fall!] and they tumbleingaed over the black edge of nothing. Close upon 9 p.m. the combined attack developed; Khye-Kheens across the valley, and Malots in front of us, pluggin’ at long range and yellin’ to each other to come along and cut our infidel throats. Then they skirmished up to the gate, and began the old game of calling our Pathans renegades, and invitin’ ‘em to join the holy war. One of our men, a young fellow from Dera Ismail, jumped on the wall to slang ‘em back, and jumped down, blubbing like a child. He’d been hit smack in the middle of the hand. ‘Never saw a man yet who could stand a hit in the hand without weepin’ bitterly. It tickles up all the nerves. So Tertius took his rifle and smote the others on the head to keep them quiet at the loopholes. The dear children wanted to open the gate and go in at ‘em generally, but that didn’t suit our book.

“At last, near midnight, I heard the wop, wop, wop, of Stalky’s Martinis across the valley, and some general cursing among the Malots, whose main body was hid from us by a fold in the hillside. Stalky was brownin’ ‘em at a great rate, and very naturally they turned half right and began to blaze at their faithless allies, the Khye-Kheens – regular volley firin’. In less than ten minutes after Stalky opened the diversion they were going it hammer and tongs, both sides the valley. When we could see, the valley was rather a mixed-up affair. The Khye-Kheens had streamed out of their sungars above the gorge to chastise the Malots, and Stalky – I was watching him through my glasses – had slipped in behind ‘em. Very good. The Khye-Kheens had to leg it along the hillside up to where the gorge got shallow and they could cross over to the Malots, who were awfully cheered to see the Khye-Kheens taken in the rear.

“Then it occurred to me to comfort the Khye-Kheens. So I turned out the whole command, and we advanced a’ la pas de charge, doublin’ up what, for the sake of argument, we’ll call the Malots’ left flank. Even then, if they’d sunk their differences, they could have eaten us alive; but they’d been firin’ at each other half the night, and they went on firin’. Queerest thing you ever saw in your born days! As soon as our men doubled up to the Malots, they’d blaze at the Khye-Kheens more zealously than ever, to show they were on our side, run up the valley a few hundred yards, and halt to fire again. The moment Stalky saw our game he duplicated it his side the gorge; and, by Jove! the Khye-Kheens did just the same thing.”

“Yes, but,” said Tertius, “you’ve forgot him playin’ ‘Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby’ on the bugle to hurry us up.”

“Did he?” roared McTurk. Somehow we all began to sing it, and there was an interruption.

“Rather,” said Tertius, when we were quiet. No one of the Aladdin company could forget that tune. “Yes, he played ‘Patsy.’ Go on, Dick.”

“Finally,” said Dick Four, “we drove both mobs into each other’s arms on a bit of level ground at the head of the valley, and saw the whole crew whirl off, fightin’ and stabbin’ and swearin’ in a blindin’ snow-storm. They were a heavy, hairy lot, and we didn’t follow ‘em.

“Stalky had captured one prisoner – an old pensioned Sepoy of twenty-five years’ service, who produced his discharge – an awf’ly sportin’ old card. He had been tryin’ to make his men rush us early in the day. He was sulky – angry with his own side for their cowardice, and Rutton Singh wanted to bayonet him – Sikhs don’t understand fightin’ against the Government after you’ve served it honestly – but Stalky rescued him, and froze on to him tight – with ulterior motives, I believe. When we got back to the fort, we buried young Everett – Stalky wouldn’t hear of blowin’ up the place – and bunked. We’d only lost ten men, all told.”

“Only ten, out of seventy. How did you lose ‘em?” I asked.

“Oh, there was a rush on the fort early in the night, and a few Malots got over the gate. It was rather a tight thing for a minute or two, but the recruits took it beautifully. Lucky job we hadn’t any badly wounded men to carry, because we had forty miles to Macnamara’s camp. By Jove, how we legged it! Half way in, old Rutton Singh collapsed, so we slung him across four rifles and Stalky’s overcoat; and Stalky, his prisoner, and a couple of Sikhs were his bearers. After that I went to sleep. You can, you know, on the march, when your legs get properly numbed. Mac swears we all marched into his camp snoring and dropped where we halted. His men lugged us into the tents like gram-bags. I remember wakin’ up and seeing Stalky asleep with his head on old Rutton Singh’s chest. He slept twenty-four hours. I only slept seventeen, but then I was coming down with dysentery.”

“Coming down? What rot! He had it on him before we joined Stalky in the fort,” said Tertius.

“Well, you needn’t talk! You hove your sword at Macnamara and demanded a drum-head court-martial every time you saw him. The only thing that soothed you was putting you under arrest every half hour. You were off your head for three days.”

“Don’t remember a word of it,” said Tertius, placidly. “I remember my orderly giving me milk, though.”

“How did Stalky come out?” McTurk demanded, purling hard over his pipe.

“Stalky? Like a serene Brahmini bull. Poor old Mac was at his Royal Engineers’ wits’ end to know what to do. You see I was putrid with dysentery, Tertius was ravin’, half the men had frost-bite, and Macnamara’s orders were to break camp and come in before winter. So Stalky, who hadn’t turned a hair, took half his supplies to save him the bother o’ luggin’ ‘em back to the plains, and all the ammunition he could get at, and, consilio et auxilio Rutton Singhi, tramped back to his fort with all his Sikhs and his precious prisoners, and a lot of dissolute hangers-on that he and the prisoner had seduced into service. He had sixty men of sorts – and his brazen cheek. Mac nearly wept with joy when he went. You see there weren’t any explicit orders to Stalky to come in before the passes were blocked: Mac is a great man for orders, and Stalky’s a great man for orders – when they suit his book.”

“He told me he was goin’ to the Engadine,” said Tertius. “Sat on my cot smokin’ a cigarette, and makin’ me laugh till I cried. Macnamara bundled the whole lot of us down to the plains next day. We were a walkin’ hospital.”

“Stalky told me that Macnamara was a simple godsend to him,” said Dick Four. “I used to see him in Mac’s tent listenin’ to Mac playin’ the fiddle, and, between the pieces, wheedlin’ Mac out of picks and shovels and dynamite cartridges hand-over-fist. Well, that was the last we saw of Stalky. A week or so later the passes were shut with snow, and I don’t think Stalky wanted to be found particularly just then.”

“He didn’t,” said the fair and fat Abanazar. “He didn’t. Ho, ho!”

Dick Four threw up his thin, dry hand with the blue veins at the back of it. “Hold on a minute, Pussy; I’ll let you in at the proper time. I went down to my regiment, and that spring, five mouths later, I got off with a couple of companies on detachment: nominally to look after some friends of ours across the border; actually, of course, to recruit. It was a bit unfortunate, because an ass of a young Naick carried a frivolous blood-feud he’d inherited from his aunt into those hills, and the local gentry wouldn’t volunteer into my corps. Of course, the Naick had taken short leave to manage the business; that was all regular enough; but he’d stalked my pet orderly’s uncle. It was an infernal shame, because I knew Harris of the Ghuznees would be covering that ground three months later, and he’d snaffle all the chaps I had my eyes on. Everybody was down on the Naick, because they felt he ought to have had the decency to postpone his – his disgustful amours till our companies were full strength.