The Black Mask - E. W. Hornung (10 best books of all time txt) 📗

knack came back to us both, though I believe that I alone was conscious of it at the time; and we were leaving the house, splendidly supplied, when we almost ran into the arms of an infantry officer, with a scowl upon his red-hot face, and an eyeglass flaming at us in the sun.

“Peter Bellingham!” gasped Raffles under his breath, and then we saluted and tried to pass on, with the bottles ringing like church-bells under our khaki. But Captain Bellingham was a hard man.

“What have you men been doin’?” drawled he.

“Nothing, sir,” we protested, like innocence with an injury.

“Lootin’ ’s forbidden,” said he. “You had better let me see those bottles.”

“We are done,” whispered Raffles, and straightway we made a sideboard of the stoop across which he had crept at so inopportune a moment. I had not the heart to raise my eyes again, yet it was many moments before the officer broke silence.

“Uam Var!” he murmured reverentially at last. “And Long John of Ben Nevis! The first drop that’s been discovered in the whole psalm-singing show! What lot do you two belong to?”

I answered.

“I must have your names.”

In my agitation I gave my real one. Raffles had turned away, as though in heartbroken contemplation of our lost loot. I saw the officer studying his half-profile with an alarming face.

“What’s your name?” he rapped out at last.

But his strange, low voice said plainly that he knew, and Raffles faced him with the monosyllable of confession and assent. I did not count the seconds until the next word, but it was Captain Bellingham who uttered it at last.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Now you see I am not.”

“But you are at your old games!”

“I am not,” cried Raffles, and his tone was new to me. I have seldom heard one more indignant. “Yes,” he continued, “this is loot, and the wrong ’un will out. That’s what you’re thinking, Peter⁠—I beg your pardon⁠—sir. But he isn’t let out in the field! We’re playing the game as much as you are, old⁠—sir.”

The plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous look. “Is this the fellah who was taken when you swam for it?” he inquired, relapsing into his drawl. Raffles said I was, and with that took a passionate oath upon our absolute rectitude as volunteers. There could be no doubting him; but the officer’s eyes went back at the bottles on the stoop.

“But look at those,” said he; and as he looked himself the light eye melted in his fiery face. “And I’ve got Sparklets in my tent,” he sighed. “You make it in a minute!”

Not a word from Raffles, and none, you may be sure, from me. Then suddenly Bellingham told me where his tent was, and, adding that our case was one for serious consideration, strode in its direction without another word until some sunlit paces separated us.

“You can bring that stuff with you,” he then flung over a shoulder-strap, “and I advise you to put it where you had it before.”

A trooper saluted him some yards further on, and looked evilly at us as we followed with our loot. It was Corporal Connal of ours, and the thought of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant captain who only that day had joined our division with the reinforcements. I could not stand the man myself. He added soda-water to our whiskey in his tent, and would only keep a couple of bottles when we came away. Softened by the spirit, to which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer was soon convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once, and for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles talked cricket without a break. On parting they even shook hands; that was Long John in the captain’s head; but the snob never addressed a syllable to me.

And now to the gallows-bird who was still corporal of our troop: it was not long before Raffles was to have his wish and the traitor’s wicket. We had resumed our advance, or rather our humble part in the great surrounding movement then taking place, and were under pretty heavy fire once more, when Connal was shot in the hand. It was a curious casualty in more than one respect, and nobody seems to have seen it happen. Though a flesh wound, it was a bloody one, and that may be why the surgeon did not at once detect those features which afterwards convinced him that the injury had been self-inflicted. It was the right hand, and until it healed the man could be of no further use in the firing line; nor was the case serious enough for admission to a crowded field-hospital; and Connal himself offered his services as custodian of a number of our horses which we were keeping out of harm’s way in a donga. They had come there in the following manner. That morning we had been heliographed to reinforce the C.M.R., only to find that the enemy had the range to a nicety when we reached the spot. There were trenches for us men, but no place of safety for our horses nearer than this long and narrow donga which ran from within our lines towards those of the Boers. So some of us galloped them thither, six-in-hand, amid the whine of shrapnel and the whistle of shot. I remember the man next me being killed by a shell with all his team, and the tangle of flying harness, torn horseflesh, and crimson khaki, that we left behind us on the veldt; also that a small red flag, ludicrously like those used to indicate a putting-green, marked the single sloping entrance to the otherwise precipitous donga, which I for one was duly thankful to reach alive.

The same evening Connal, with a few other light casualties to assist him, took over the charge for which he had volunteered and for which he was so admirably