El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (73 page)

And O’Donnell yelled like a hungry wolf and began jerking the trigger of his pistol.

A sentinel spun on his heel and crumpled, discharging his rifle wildly in the air. Others were howling and staggering like drunken men, reeling and falling in the lurid glare. Yar Muhammad was blazing away with O’Donnell’s rifle, shooting down his former companions as cheerfully as if they were ancient enemies.

A matter of seconds elapsed between the time the blaze sprang up and the time when the men were scurrying about wildly, etched in the merciless light and unable to see the two men who crouched in the shadow of the far wall, raining them with lead. But in that scant instant there came another sound —
a swift thudding of feet, the daunting sound of men rushing through the darkness in desperate haste and desperate silence.

Some of the Pathans heard it and turned to glare into the night. The fire behind them rendered the outer darkness more impenetrable. They could not see the death that was racing fleetly toward them, until the charge reached the wall.

Then a yell of terror went up as the men along the wall caught a glimpse of glittering eyes and flickering steel rushing out of the blackness. They fired one wild, ragged volley, and then the Turkomans surged up over the wall in an irresistible wave and were slashing and hacking like madmen among the defenders.

Scarcely wakened, demoralized by the surprise, and by the bullets that cut them down from behind, the Pathans were beaten almost before the fight began. Some of them fled over the wall without any attempt at defense, but some fought, snarling and stabbing like wolves. The blazing thatch etched the scene in a lurid glare.
Kalpaks
mingled with turbans, and steel flickered over the seething mob. Yataghans grated against tulwars, and blood spurted.

His pistol empty, O’Donnell ran toward the tower. He had momentarily expected Afzal Khan to appear. But in such moments it is impossible to retain a proper estimate of time. A minute may seem like an hour, an hour like a minute. In reality, the Afghan chief came storming out of the tower just as the Turkomans came surging over the wall. Perhaps he had really been asleep, or perhaps caution kept him from rushing out sooner. Gunfire might mean rebellion against his authority.

At any rate he came roaring like a wounded bull, a rifle in his hands. O’Donnell rushed toward him, but the Afghan glared beyond him to where his swordsmen were falling like wheat under the blades of the maddened Turkomans. He saw the fight was already lost, as far as the men in the inclosure were concerned, and he sprang for the nearest wall.

O’Donnell raced to pull him down, but Afzal Khan, wheeling, fired from the hip. The American felt a heavy blow in his belly, and then he was down on the ground, with all the breath gone from him. Afzal Khan yelled in triumph, brandished his rifle, and was gone over the wall, heedless of the vengeful bullet Yar Muhammad sped after him.

The Waziri had followed O’Donnell across the inclosure and now he knelt beside him, yammering as he fumbled to find the American’s wound.

“Aie!” he bawled. “He is slain! My friend and brother! Where will his like be found again? Slain by the bullet of a hillman! Aie! Aie! Aie!”

“Cease thy bellowing, thou great ox,” gasped O’Donnell, sitting up and shaking off the frantic hands. “I am unhurt.”

Yar Muhammad yelled with surprise and relief. “But the bullet, brother? He fired at point-blank range!”

“It hit my belt buckle,” grunted O’Donnell, feeling the heavy gold buckle, which was bent and dented. “By Allah, the slug drove it into my belly. It was like being hit with a sledge hammer. Where is Afzal Khan?”

“Fled away in the darkness.”

O’Donnell rose and turned his attention to the fighting. It was practically over. The remnants of the Pathans were fleeing over the wall, harried by the triumphant Turkomans, who in victory were no more merciful than the average Oriental. The
sangar
looked like a shambles.

The hut still blazed brightly, and O’Donnell knew that the contents had been ignited. What had been an advantage was now a danger, for the men at the head of the valley would be coming at full run, and in the light of the fire they could pick off the Turkomans from the darkness. He ran forward shouting orders, and setting an example of action.

Men began filling vessels — cooking pots, gourds, even
kalpaks
from the well and casting the water on the fire. O’Donnell burst in the door and began to drag out the contents of the huts, foods mostly, some of it brightly ablaze, to be doused.

Working as only men in danger of death can work, they extinguished the flame and darkness fell again over the fortress. But over the eastern crags a faint glow announced the rising of the moon through the breaking clouds.

Then followed a tense period of waiting, in which the Turkomans hugged their rifles and crouched along the wall, staring into the darkness as the Pathans had done only a short time before. Seven of them had been killed in the fighting and lay with the wounded beside the well. The bodies of the slain Pathans had been unceremoniously heaved over the wall.

The men at the valley head could not have been on their way down the valley when the fighting broke out, and they must have hesitated before starting, uncertain as to what the racket meant. But they were on their way at last, and Afzal Khan was trying to establish a contact with them.

The wind brought snatches of shouts down the valley, and a rattle of shots that hinted at hysteria. These were followed by a furious bellowing which indicated that Afzal Khan’s demoralized warriors had nearly shot their chief in the dark. The moon broke through the clouds and disclosed a straggling mob of men gesticulating wildly this side of the rocks to the east.

O’Donnell even made out Afzal Khan’s bulk and, snatching a rifle from a warrior’s hand, tried a long shot. He missed in the uncertain light, but his warriors poured a blast of lead into the thick of their enemies which accounted for a man or so and sent the others leaping for cover. From the
reeflike rocks they began firing at the wall, knocking off chips of stone but otherwise doing no damage.

With his enemies definitely located, O’Donnell felt more at ease. Taking a torch he went to the tower, with Yar Muhammad hanging at his heels like a faithful ghoul. In the tower were heaped odds and ends of plunder — saddles, bridles, garments, blankets, food, weapons — but O’Donnell did not find what he sought, though he tore the place to pieces. Yar Muhammad squatted in the doorway, with his rifle across his knees, and watched him, it never occurring to the Waziri to inquire what his friend was searching for.

At length O’Donnell paused, sweating from the vigor of his efforts — for he had concentrated much exertion in a few minutes — and swore.

“Where
does
the dog keep those papers?”

“The papers he took from Ahmed Shah?” inquired Yar Muhammad. “Those he always carries in his girdle. He cannot read them, but he believes they are valuable. Men say Ahmed Shah had them from a
Feringi
who died.”

Dawn was lifting over the valley of Khuruk. The sun that was not yet visible above the rim of the hills turned the white peaks to pulsing fire. But down in the valley there was none who found time to wonder at the changeless miracle of the mountain dawn. The cliffs rang with the flat echoes of rifle shots, and wisps of smoke drifted bluely into the air. Lead spanged on stone and whined venomously off into space, or thudded sickeningly into quivering flesh. Men howled blasphemously and fouled the morning with their frantic curses.

O’Donnell crouched at a loophole, staring at the rocks whence came puffs of white smoke and singing harbingers of death. His rifle barrel was hot to his hand, and a dozen yards from the wall lay a huddle of white-clad figures.

Since the first hint of light the wolves of Afzal Khan had poured lead into the fortalice from the reeflike ledge that broke the valley floor. Three times they had broken cover and charged, only to fall back beneath the merciless fire that raked them. Hopelessly outnumbered, the advantage of weapons and position counted heavily for the Turkomans.

O’Donnell had stationed five of the best marksmen in the tower and the rest held the walls. To reach the inclosure meant charging across several hundred yards of open space, devoid of cover. All the outlaws were still among the rocks east of the
sangar
, where, indeed, the broken ledge offered the only cover within rifle range of the redoubt.

The Pathans had suffered savagely in the charges, and they had had the worst of the long-range exchanges, both their marksmanship and their
weapons being inferior to the Turkomans’. But some of their bullets did find their way through the loopholes. A few yards from O’Donnell a
kaftaned
rider lay in a grotesque huddle, his feet turned so the growing light glinted on his silver boot heels, his head a smear of blood and brains.

Another lay sprawled near the charred hut, his ghastly face frozen in a grin of agony as he chewed spasmodically on a bullet. He had been shot in the belly and was taking a long time in dying, but not a whimper escaped his livid lips.

A fellow with a bullet hole in his forearm was making more racket; his curses, as a comrade probed for the slug with a dagger point, would have curdled the blood of a devil.

O’Donnell glanced up at the tower, whence wisps of smoke drifting told him that his five snipers were alert. Their range was greater than that of the men at the wall, and they did more damage proportionately and were better protected. Again and again they had broken up attempts to get at the horses in the stone pen. This pen was nearer the inclosure than it was to the rocks, and crumpled shapes on the ground showed of vain attempts to reach it.

But O’Donnell shook his head. They had salvaged a large quantity of food from the burning hut; there was a well of good water; they had better weapons and more ammunition than the men outside. But a long siege meant annihilation.

One of the men wounded in the night fighting had died. There remained alive forty-one men of the fifty with which he had left Shahrazar. One of these was dying, and half a dozen were wounded — one probably fatally. There were at least a hundred and fifty men outside.

Afzal Khan could not storm the walls yet. But under the constant toll of the bullets, the small force of the defenders would melt away. If any of them lived and escaped, O’Donnell knew it could be only by a swift, bold stroke. But he had no plan at all.

The firing from the valley ceased suddenly, and a white turban cloth was waved above the rock on a rifle muzzle.

“Ohai
, Ali el Ghazi!” came a hail in a bull’s roar that could only have issued from Afzal Khan.

Yar Muhammad, squatting beside O’Donnell, sneered. “A trick! Keep thy head below the parapet, sahib. Trust Afzal Khan when wolves knock out their own teeth.”

“Hold your fire, Ali el Ghazi!” boomed the distant voice. “I would parley with you!”

“Show yourself!” O’Donnell yelled back.

And without hesitation a huge bulk loomed up among the rocks. Whatever his own perfidy, Afzal Khan trusted the honor of the man he thought a Kurd. He lifted his hands to show they were empty.

“Advance, alone!” yelled O’Donnell, straining to make himself heard.

Someone thrust the butt of a rifle into a crevice of the rocks so it stood muzzle upward, with the white cloth blowing out in the morning breeze, and Afzal Khan came striding over the stones with the arrogance of a sultan. Behind him turbans were poked up above the boulders.

O’Donnell halted him within good earshot, and instantly he was covered by a score of rifles. Afzal Khan did not seem to be disturbed by that, or by the blood lust in the dark hawklike faces glaring along the barrels. Then O’Donnell rose into view, and the two leaders faced one another in the full dawn.

O’Donnell expected accusations of treachery — for, after all, he had struck the first blow — but Afzal Khan was too brutally candid for such hypocrisy.

“I have you in a vise, Ali el Ghazi,” he announced without preamble. “But for that Waziri dog who crouches behind you, I would have cut your throat at moonrise last night. You are all dead men, but this siege work grows tiresome, and I am willing to forgo half my advantage. I am generous. As reward of victory I demand either your guns or your horses. Your horses I have already, but you shall have them back, if you wish. Throw down your weapons and you may ride out of Khuruk. Or, if you wish, I will keep the horses, and you may march out on foot with your rifles. What is your answer?”

O’Donnell spat toward him with a typically Kurdish gesture. “Are we fools, to be hoodwinked by a dog with scarlet whiskers?” he snarled. “When Afzal Khan keeps his sworn word, the Indus will flow backward. Shall we ride out, unarmed, for you to cut us down in the passes, or shall we march forth on foot, for you to shoot us from ambush in the hills?

“You lie when you say you have our horses. Ten of your men have died trying to take them for you. You lie when you say you have us in the vise. It is
you
who are in the vise! You have neither food nor water; there is no other well in the valley but this. You have few cartridges, because most of your ammunition is stored in the tower, and
we
hold that.”

The fury in Afzal Khan’s countenance told O’Donnell that he had scored with that shot.

“If you had us helpless you would not be offering terms,” O’Donnell sneered. “You would be cutting our throats, instead of trying to gull us into the open.”

“Sons of sixty dogs!” swore Afzal Khan, plucking at his beard. “I will flay you all alive! I will keep you hemmed here until you die!”

“If we cannot leave the fortress, you cannot enter it,” O’Donnell retorted. “Moreover you have drawn all your men but a handful from the passes, and the Khurukzai will steal upon you and cut off your heads. They are waiting, up in the hills.”

Afzal Khan’s involuntarily wry face told O’Donnell that the Afghan’s plight was more desperate than he had hoped.