King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📗

that rushed out of a rock fissure and gurgled out of sight down another one--examined the servants' cave and saw that they had been amply provided with blankets. There was nothing lacking that the most exacting traveler could have demanded at such a distance from civilization. There was more than the most exacting would have dared expect.

“Why isn't it damp in here?” he wondered, returning to his own cave. And then he noticed long fissures in the cavern walls, and that the smoke from the lamps drifted toward them. He could not guess what made it do that, unless it were the suction of the enormous river hurrying underground; and then he remembered that at the entrance air had rushed downward into the hole down which the horse had disappeared, which partly confirmed his guess.

“Ismail!” he shouted, and jumped at the revolver-crack--like echo of his voice.

Ismail came running.

“Make the men carry the mule's packs into this cave. You and Darya Khan stay here and help me open them. Remember, ye are both assistants of Kurram Khan, the hakim!”

“They will laugh at us! They will laugh at us!” clucked Ismail, but he hurried to obey, while King wondered who would laugh.

Within an hour a delegation came from no less a person than Yasmini herself, bearing her compliments, and hot food savory enough to make a brass idol's mouth water. By that time King had his sets of surgical instruments and drugs and bandages all laid out on one of the beds and covered from view by a blanket.

It was only one more proof of the British army's everlasting luck that one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back a lock of greasy hair.

There followed an oath like flint struck on steel ten times in rapid succession.

“Does it pain thee, brother?” asked Kurram Khan the hakim.

“Are there devils in Tophet! Fire and my veins are one!”

The man did not notice the eagerness beaming out of King's horn-rimmed spectacles, but Ismail did; it seemed to him time to prove his virtues as assistant.

“This is the famous hakim Kurram Khan,” he boasted. “He can cure anything, and for a very little fee!”

“Nay, for no fee at all in this case!” said King.

The man looked incredulous, but King drew the covering from his row of instruments and bottles.

“Take a chance!” he advised. “None but the brave wins anything!”

The man sat down, as if he would argue the point at length, but Ismail and Darya Khan were new to the business and enthusiastic. They had him down, held tight on the floor to the huge amusement of the rest, before the man could even protest; and his howls of rage did him no good, for Ismail drove the hilt of a knife between his open jaws to keep them open.

A very large proportion of King's stores consisted of morphia and cocaine. He injected enough cocaine to deaden the man's nerves, and allowed it time to work. Then he drew out three back teeth in quick succession, to make sure he had the right one.

Ismail let the victim up, and Darya Khan gave him water in a brass cup. Utterly without pain for the first time for days, the man was as grateful as a wolf freed from a trap.

“Allah reward thee, since the service was free!” he smirked.

“Are there any others in pain in Khinjan?” King asked him.

“Listen to him! What is Khinjan? Is there one man without a wound or a sore or a scar or a sickness?”

“Then, tell them,” said King.

The man laughed.

“When I show my jaw, there will be a fight to be first! Make ready, hakim! I go!”

He was true to his word and left the cave like a gust of wind, followed by the three who had come with him. King sat down to eat, but he had not finished his meal--he had made the last little heap of rice into a ball with his fingers, native style, and was mopping up the last of the curried gravy with it--when the advance guard of the lame and the halt and the sick made its appearance. The cave's entrance became jammed with them, and no riot ever made more noise.

“Hakim! Ho, hakim! Where is the hakim who draws teeth? Where is the man who knows yunani?”

Ten men burst down the passage all together, all clamoring, and one man wasted no time at all but began to tear away bloody bandages to show his wound. The hardest thing now was to get and keep some kind of order, and for ten minutes Ismail and Darya Khan labored, using threats where argument failed, and brute force when they dared. It was like beating mad hounds from off their worry. What established order at last was that King rolled up his sleeves and began, so that eagerness gave place to wonder.

The “Hills” are not squeamish in any one particular; so that the fact that the cave became a shambles upset nobody. The surgeon's thrill that makes even half-amateurs oblivious of all but the work in hand, coupled with the desperate need of winning this first trick, made King horror-proof; and nobody waiting for the next turn was troubled because the man under the knife screamed a little or bled more than usual.

When they died--and more than one did die--men carried them out and flung them over the precipice into the waterfall below.

Ismail and Darya Khan became choosers of the victims. They seized a man, laid him on the bed, tore off his disgusting bandages and held their breath until the awful resulting stench had more or less dispersed. Then King would probe or lance or bandage as he saw fit, using anaesthetics when he must, but managing mostly without them.

They almost flung money at him. Few of them asked what his fee would be. Those who had no money brought him shawls, and swords, and even clothing. Two or three brought old-fashioned fire-arms; but they were men who did not expect to live. And King accepted every gift without comment, because that was in keeping with the part he played. He tossed money and clothes and every other thing they gave him into a corner at the back of the cave, and nobody tried to steal them back, although a man suspected of honesty in that company would have been tortured to death as an heretic and would have had no sympathy.

For hour after gruesome hour he toiled over wounds and sores such as only battles and evil living can produce, until men began to come at last with fresh wounds, all caused by bullets, wrapped in bandages on which the blood had caked but had not grown foul.

“There has been fighting in the Khyber,” somebody informed him, and he stopped with lancet in mid-air to listen, scanning a hundred faces swiftly