Philip Barry, limping ever so slightly, walked over to the spot where his troop was drawn up. The glow of pleasure was still upon his face, and his eyes were bright with excitement and emotion. "How the incident would have pleased the dear old dad!” he was thinking. As he neared the ranks, Mir Akhbar stepped quietly forward. All eyes were fixed upon him. His action was quite against the regulations, but the circumstances were peculiar. Even the iron-handed Colonel, men thought, would forgive lack of discipline inspired by a desire to pay a personal tribute to the man who had saved his life, since he could not be supposed to be satisfied by a single share in the roar of approval in which all his fellows had joined. Philip smiled at him, half in amusement, half in embarrassment. "Get back to your place, Mir Akhbar," he said. But Mir Akhbar halted with his hand at the salute. For an instant he gazed with wild despairing eyes at the face of the young Englishman. Then, very quietly and deliberately, he raised his carbine and shot him through the head. Without a sound, save the clash and jingle of his accoutrements, Philip collapsed upon the ground in a limp heap. From every side men darted forward to seize the murderer, but Mir Akhbar, his grim duty done, stood rigidly to attention, and made no resistance when the angry excited troopers, handling him after the manner of their kind with brutal roughness, dragged him away to the cells. "Mad, of course," said everybody; for did not Mir Akhbar owe his very life to the man whom he had killed, and neither then nor later could he be induced to furnish any explanation of the motives that had actuated him. Madness of this type, however, is not a healthy thing to encourage in a native regiment, wherefore, when the preliminaries dear to the heart of modern British justice had been enacted, Mir Akhbar was hanged by the neck until he was dead. To a little house, with its sweep of smooth lawn, and its clustering rose-bushes above the red lane, in the soft West Country, the tidings of that morning's work upon the parade-ground in Northern India came. to dim the sunshine and to bow a grey head in sorrow towards the grave. Here General Sir Rupert Barry, after a strenuous life of action, had retired to spend the evening of his days in drowsy rest, while he lived again in the son who was the centre of all his hopes and dreams. Now, during a few dreary months, ere the shock of his trouble killed him, he sat, an old and feeble man, broken-hearted and borne down with sorrow, fumbling ever with shaking fingers those letters bearing Indian post-marks which sought to comfort him by praises of his dead boy. Grief had bewildered him, but he wondered dimly why God had seen fit to pluck that bright young life and leave his world so empty. He never thought to trace the calamity that had overwhelmed him to an act of his own, wrought five-and-twenty years before, in that hour when justice was not only blind, but drunken with passion, and pity had shrunk away fearful and ashamed. One man only possessed the key of the enigma, and that man held his peace. The murder was a ninedays' wonder, and the newspapers wrote acre-long screeds of rubbish concerning it, interspersed with hopelessly crude speculations the obscurity of Oriental motives, and the difficulties surrounding any attempt to comprehend the psychology of the Asiatic. But the secret, the true explanation, was hidden for ever from official inquirers and from the public press, for, as the report of Mir Akhbar's carbine rang out, telling that the deed was done, a Muhammadan mendicant, sitting alone in expectation, fumbled in his breast, and drew forth a foul string that had hung about his neck for a quarter of a century. There was a knot upon his cord, worn hard and round as a strung bean, and this, after much struggling, the priest unravelled with his teeth. Then, casting the twine aside as a thing whose use was ended, he performed his ablutions with scrupulous care, and rising up with his face turned toward Mecca, burst forth into resonant praises of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate God. |