Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling (sad books to read txt) š
But it was characteristic of the boy that he did not approach his allies till he had met and conferred with little Hartopp, President of the Natural History Society, an institution which Stalky held in contempt, Hartopp was more than surprised when the boy meekly, as he knew how, begged to propose himself, Beetle, and McTurk as candidates; confessed to a long-smothered interest in first-flowerings, early butterflies, and new arrivals, and volunteered, if Mr. Hartopp saw fit, to enter on the new life at once. Being a master, Hartopp was suspicious; but he was also an enthusiast, and his gentle little soul h
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āDonāt interrupt, Tertius. It was about forty miles beyond Macās before I found him; and my men pointed out gently, but firmly, that the country was risinā. What kind oā country, Beetle? Well, Iām no word-painter, thank goodness, but you might call it a hellish country! When we werenāt 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 (donāt forget that, Pussy dear), sat behind rocks and took pot-shots at us. āOld, old story! We all legged it in search of Stalky. I had a feeling that heād 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 Maloāt 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 gettinā 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. Iād only seen him for half a minute about three months before, but I might have met him yesterday. He waved his hand all sereno.
āāHullo, Aladdin! Hullo, Emperor!ā he said. āYouāre just in time for the performance.āā
āI saw his Sikhs looked a bit battered. āWhereās your command? Whereās your subaltern?ā I said.
āāHereāall there is of it,ā said Stalky. āIf you want young Everett, heās dead, and his bodyās in the watch-tower. They rushed our road-party last week, and got him and seven men. Weāve been besieged for five days. I suppose they let you through to make sure of you. The whole countryās up. āStrikes me youāve walked into a first-class trap.ā He grinned, but neither Tertius nor I could see where the deuce the fun was. We hadnāt any grub for our men, and Stalky had only four daysā whack for his. That came of dependinā upon your asinine Politicals, Pussy dear, who told us that the inhabitants were friendly.
āTo make us quite comfy, Stalky took us up to the watch-tower to see poor Everettās body, lyinā in a foot oā drifted snow. It looked like a girl of fifteenānot a hair on the little fellowās face. Heād been shot through the temple, but the Maloāts had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to usāa rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. āMember the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? āMember when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked as if he was alive?ā
āYe-es,ā said Tertius, with a shudder. āāMember the beastly look on Stalkyās face, though, with his nostrils all blown out, same as he used to look when he was bullyinā a fag? That was a lovely evening.ā
āWe held a council of war up there over Everettās body. Stalky said the Maloāts and Khye-Kheens were up together; havinā sunk their blood feuds to settle us. The chaps weād seen across the gorge were Khye-Kheens. It was about half a mile from them to us as a bullet flies, and theyād made a line of sungars under the brow of the hill to sleep in and starve us out. The Maloāts, he said, were in front of us promiscuous. There wasnāt good cover behind the fort, or theyād have been there, too. Stalky didnāt mind the Maloāts half as much as he did the Khye-Kheens. He said the Maloāts were treacherous curs. What I couldnāt understand was, why in the world the two gangs didnāt join in and rush us. There must have been at least five hundred of āem. Stalky said they didnāt trust each other very well, because they were ancestral enemies when they were at home; and the only time theyād tried a rush heād hove a couple of blasting-charges among āem, and that had sickened āem a bit.
āIt was dark by the time we finished, and Stalky, always serene, said: āYou command now. I donāt suppose you mind my taking any action I may consider necessary to reprovision the fort?ā I said, āOf course not,ā and then the lamp blew out. So Tertius and I had to climb down the tower steps (we didnāt want to stay with Everett) and got back to our men. Stalky had gone offāto 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 mornlnā.
āMorninā came. No Stalky. Not a sign of him. I took counsel with his senior native officerāa grand, white-whiskered old chapāRutton 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, accordinā to him. He said Stalky āud 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 āem to pickinā out loopholes.
āAbout noon there was no end of a snow-storm, and the enemy stopped firing. We replied gingerly, because we were awfully short of ammunition. Donāt 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.
āāNo trustinā these snow-storms,ā he said. āNip out quick and snaffle what you can get. Thereās a certain amount of friction between the Khye-Kheens and the Maloāts just now.ā
āI 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 āem. There didnāt seem to be anybody about, but the snow was falling pretty thick.
āāThatās good enough,ā said Stalky when we got dinner ready and he was chewinā mutton-kababs off a cleaninā rod. āThereās no sense riskinā men. Theyāre holding a pow-wow between the Khye-Kheens and the Maloāts at the head of the gorge. I donāt think these so-called coalitions are much good.ā
āDo 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, heād kept the hole open for his own ends; and laid poor Everettās body slap over the well of the stairs that led down to it from the watch-tower. Heād had to move and replace the corpse every time he used the passage. The Sikhs wouldnāt go near the place, of course. Well, heād got out of this hole, and dropped on to the road. Then, in the night and a howling snow-storm, heād 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 heād discovered, and come out on the right flank of the Khye-Kheens. He had thenālisten to this!ācrossed 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 Maloāt and the Khye-Kheen camps. That was about two in the morning, and, as it turned out, a man spotted himāa Khye-Kheen. So Stalky abolished him quietly, and left himāwith the Maloāt mark on his chest, same as Everett had.
āāI was just as economical as I could be,ā Stalky said to us. āIf heād shouted I should have been slain. Iād never had to do that kind of thing but once before, and that was the first time I tried that path. Itās perfectly practicable for infantry, you know.ā
āāWhat about your first man?ā I said.
āāOh, that was the night after they killed Everett, and I went out lookinā for a line of retreat for my men. A man found me. I abolished himāprivatimāscragged him. But on thinkinā it over it occurred to me that if I could find the body (Iād hove it down some rocks) I might decorate it with the Maloāt 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 Maloāts perpetratinā these two dastardly outrages after theyād sworn to sink all bleed feuds. I lay up behind their sungars early this morning and watched āem. They all went to confer about it at the head of the gorge. Awfāly annoyed they are. Donāt wonder.ā You know the way Stalky drops out his words, one by one.ā
āMy God!ā said the Infant, explosively, as the full depth of the strategy dawned on him.
āDear-r man!ā said McTurk, purring rapturously.
āStalky stalked,ā said Tertius. āThatās all there is to it.ā
āNo, he didnāt,ā said Dick Four. āDonāt you remember how he insisted that he had only applied his luck? Donāt you remember how Rutton Singh grabbed his boots and grovelled in the snow, and how our men shouted?ā
āNone of our Pathans believed that was luck,ā said Tertius. āThey swore Stalky ought to have been born a Pathan, andāāmember 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.
āOld Rutton Singhās sword was half out, though, and he swore heād cremate every Khye-Kheen and Maloāt he killed. That made the Jemadar pretty wild, because he didnāt mind fighting against his own creed, but he wasnāt going to crab a fellow Mussulmanās chances of Paradise. Then Stalky jabbered Pushtu and Punjabi in alternate streaks. Where the deuce did he pick up his Pushtu from, Beetle?ā
āNever mind his language, Dick,ā said I. āGive us the gist of it.ā
āI flatter myself I can address the wily Pathan on occasion, but, hang it all, I canāt make puns in Pushtu, or top off my arguments with a smutty story, as he did. He played on those two old dogs oā war like aālike a concertina. Stalky saidāand the other two backed up his knowledge of Oriental natureāthat the Khye-Kheens and the Maloāts between āem would organize a combined attack on us that night, as a proof of good faith. They wouldnāt drive it home, though, because neither side would trust the other on account, as Rutton Singh put it, of the little accidents. Stalkyās notion was to crawl out at dusk with his Sikhs, manoeuvre āem along this ungodly goat-track that heād found, to the back of the Khye-Kheen position, and then lob in a few long shots at the Maloāts when the attack was well on. āThatāll divert their minds and help to agitate āem,ā he said. āThen you chaps can come out and sweep up the pieces, and weāll rendezvous at the head of the gorge. After that, I move we get back to Macās camp and have something to eat.ā
āYou were commandinā?ā the Infant suggested.
āI was about three months senior to Stalky, and two months Tertiusās senior,ā Dick Four replied. āBut we were all from
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