The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [218]
The dawn light was flooding across the plain by the time he reached his tent, and Mahdoo, snoring peacefully, did not stir as he stepped over him. The lamp that hung from the tent pole had burned out, but he did not need it now; there was enough light to see by, and he stowed the rifle and the broken lathi under the bed, and having removed his shoes and coat, lay down in his shirt sleeves and was instantly asleep.
There had seemed no point in arousing Mahdoo, and it had not occurred to Ash that he would give the old gentleman the fright of his life, for he had not yet seen his own face in a looking-glass and had no idea of the spectacle he presented. But Mahdoo, waking half an hour later in the clear light of early morning and entering the tent to see if the Sahib had returned, imagined for one nightmare moment that he was looking at a corpse, and very nearly suffered a heart-attack on the spot.
Reassured by the sound of breathing, he tottered out to fetch Gul Baz, who came running and after a short inspection declared that there was no need for anxiety, as the Sahib was obviously not badly hurt.
‘I think he has only been in a brawl,’ observed Gul Baz reassuringly. ‘Those marks on his cheeks are such as are made by finger-nails and little stones. Also there is not much blood on the cloth about his head, and he is sleeping peacefully. It would be wiser not to wake him, and later we will get a piece of raw goat's meat to bind over his eye to reduce the discoloration and the swelling.’
The raw meat had been duly applied to an eye that by then had turned every colour of the rainbow, and may conceivably have done it some good. The rest of Ash's injuries were equally superficial and faded quickly, and within a week there was nothing to show that he had been in a fight but the ghost of a black eye and a faint scar that might have been mistaken for a frown line on his forehead. But however quickly these faded, the marks had been there and the man he had fought must have had similar ones: gravel rash, at least, and with luck an impressive collection of bruises, which should make it a simple matter to identify him.
It had not, however, been at all simple, because Ash had overlooked something: the fact that in a camp as vast as this one, any number of men incurred minor injuries every day of the week, and though the majority of cuts and bruises were due to carelessness or the normal hazards of daily life, a great many were acquired as a result of arguments that had ended in fights: ‘and as for Gunga Dass,’ reported Mahdoo, ‘it seems that his wife and his wife's mother, finding that he had spent much money on one of the harlots, attacked him with cooking pots and broke a chatti on his head. Then there is Ram Lalla who…’
There were many such tales; too many. ‘Were there only a hundred men in the camp, it would be a different matter,’ said Mulraj. ‘But there are thousands, and even if we should find the man we seek, he is sure to have a tale ready and a dozen witnesses to swear to its truth and tell how he came by such injuries; and who could disprove it?’
The only thing that had been easily proved was the ownership of the rifle, because as Ash had surmised, it was no old-fashioned musket but a modern, precision-made weapon, a Westley-Richards sporting rifle, capable of great accuracy up to a range of four hundred yards. He had felt sure that there could be few weapons of this type in the camp, and in this too he had been right: there was only one. His own.
To find that he had very nearly been murdered by his own rifle annoyed him even more than the attempt itself. The colossal impertinence of it added insult to injury, and he promised himself that when he found the man he would give him the thrashing of a lifetime. But the fact that the rifle had been removed from his tent under Mahdoo's very nose, and without one of his servants hearing a sound, was perhaps the most disturbing part of the affair, for it showed that he