Benefit of Doubt/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
“Tonight I will write down how ye did.”
It was no mean accomplishment that Ommony had undertaken. Among those rival and fiercely jealous Moplah villages he himself could probably go unchallenged at any time. But it was “another thousand of bricks” to take with him an officer and eleven men—even an unarmed officer and men on good behavior, with full permission granted by three chiefs.
The trouble was that the chiefs' authority was largely local. Their influence, and Ommony's own, varied with the points of the compass. With distance from their village theirs diminished, although Ommony's actually increased in some respects as he went further from his home. Locally they knew him as a friend through thick and thin, fire, drought and famine—a mediator between them and the Government—a scoffer like themselves at lawyers' law, but a masterful upholder of first principles. At a distance he was less well known but more rumored about. Men came from a long way off to submit their quarrels to him rather than go to court and be ruined with fines and fees, and they, returning well content told stories about him, invented mainly on the way home, that made King Solomon of legend seem in comparison rather a cheap and silly potentate. In far outlying villages Ommony was almost a myth. They used his name to frighten children with and as a threat conclusive when the younger members of the village council would not see sense.
So, although the chiefs provided an escort of four men whose business was to emphasize the sacredness of the flag of truce under which the party marched, and although they all carried little white flags nailed to sticks, it was Ommony's person that was really sacred. The white flags did not mean much, and the chiefs' representatives meant less and less as they drew near rival villages.
Entered another distinction, with its fine edge widening progressively. Ommony had lived among them for more than twenty years, through internecine outrage and occasional rebellion, with never an armed man to protect him. There had never been a man in uniform attached to Ommony's scant staff. He had been policeman, lawyer, judge, adviser, forest king and friend so intimately and with so little friction that he was in a class by himself, apart from the military arm—which to the Moplah is incomprehensible if not a direct invitation to fight. words worked either way.
And the ways of a rumor are wonderful. It turns on itself like a whorl of smoke blown in the wind, until the outside becomes the inside and sense is nonsense. Moreover, it grows, even as smoke grows covering more ground as the particles o fact grow thinner. And in a forest that is even more the case, because the range of view is limited and the eye can seldom check up what the ear exaggerates.
So word was sent echoing from tree to crag by the Moplahs' outposts, and it became known for a fact in the village where Mahommed Babar was busily evolving his plan of campaign that Ommon-ee was a prisoner of war, and was being marched through the jungle by a British officer and ten men. Ommony was riding and the others were on foot, but it was described with how many knots Ommony's feet were tied beneath the horse's belly.
Naturally, the village wise-heads had to invent a reason for any such extraordinary turn of affairs, and having no facts to go on they depended wholly on imagination, which is the secret of most news anyhow. They decided that the British were bringing in Ommony with the purpose of exchanging him against the judge and his wife who were close prisoners at Podanaram.
Whereat was laughter. Who would hold Ommony prisoner for a day? Should they let the two prisoners go, whom they certainly could hold for ransom, and accept in exchange the one, whom they would have to release instantly because of friendship and past favors? Moreover, Ommony had dealings with the forest devils, and might inflict disasters on them. Who knew? Such things have happened. How much simpler in any event to release Ommony and obtain his everlasting good-will, incidentally increasing their own stock of British prisoners, who would no doubt be very useful when the time for talking peace should come.
That was the argument, and action follows very close on argument in Moplah-land. Every step was easy except one, which was impossible. There was no way of surrounding the party in the forest without Ommony's junglis becoming aware of it.
So a jungli came hurrying to Ommony's stirrup and made noises with his mouth. Ommony wheeled his pony and addressed Linkinyear, who had refused the offer of a mount because it would make the men feel better if he marched with them. They were all swinging along at a good three miles an hour, carrying their tunics and brushing off flies with bits of twig and stuff—not sorry to halt—rather expecting to laugh, because Ommony's jokes seemed inexhaustible.
“Whatever happens next, don't show resentment or offer to hit back!” said Ommony unexpectedly, however. He spoke to Linkinyear, but at his men. “Our escort are acting in good faith, but we're surrounded, and we might be attacked if there were any hastiness.”
They surrounded Ommony to hear his explanation, not that he had much to say, although Linkinyear shot question after question at him.
“If you'll let me keep about fifty yards ahead,” Ommony suggested, “that will look less as if I were relying on you for protection. The great thing is to show them from the first that we rely absolutely on their respecting a flag of truce.”
He rode on. They allowed him nearly a hundred yards. So there was plenty of room, and the pony was hardly aware of disturbance behind him when fifty men rushed between Ommony and Linkinyear's party. It was over so swiftly that Ommony did not even see what took place. He wheeled his pony and spurred back; but when he got there and forced his way through the yelling crowd, beating them over the head right and left with his hunting crop, most of the men were already dead and Linkinyear was struggling under half-a-dozen Moplahs, who were trying to tie him and at the same time to murder a private whom he was protecting.
It was amazing what they took from Ommony without retaliation. He beat them off as a huntsman whips hounds off a kill, cracking open more than one skull with the butt of his loaded whip. But he was too late to save the lives of more than Linkinyear and three men. Two more were so badly wounded as to be obviously in their death throes, and the rest lay with their throats cut Moplah-fashion, which is right back to the spine.
Then the escort of four men, who had been leading considerably in advance for the express purpose of preventing a surprize, came running back and swore with good reason that their honor was involved. They were perfectly ready to fight about it, and would have been killed in turn if Ommony had not threatened to do murder and force them to do violence to himself. Whether Ommony guessed it or not, they had peremptory orders from their chiefs to do him no injury on any pretext, and he made the most of his immunity as it developed.
Linkinyear was nearly off his head—just not quite mad enough to fling himself on the Moplah knives.
“You swine!” he yelled at them in English. “You rotten, dirty blackguards! You know what a white flag means, you! Oh, you swabs! Look what you've done, you stinkers! Good, decent fellows marching under flag of truce and—just you wait, that's all! A hundred of you swine for every decent one of my men you've murdered! Say, they don't understand that. You tell them, Ommony. One hundred of the swine for—”
“Better give those men decent burial,” Ommony suggested. “Do you know the funeral service?”
“No. Good God! How does it begin? Any of you men know the funeral service?”
“I'm sorry to say I know it by heart,” said Ommony. He turned on the Moplahs, resting the whip on his thigh and speaking as if disobedience were unimaginable.
“Dig graves for those gentlemen!” he ordered.
The Moplahs demurred. They are not proponents of hard labor at the best of times. This was war—their war. There had recently arrived hugely exaggerated stories of a British victory somewhere down between Ooticamund and the sea, in which a raiding party of Moplahs had left their own dead on the field. There were stories that Hindus were burning the bodies by British order, and burning is everlasting shame and desecration to the Moslem. To be made to bury fallen British soldiers in the circumstances was something of an imposition, as they viewed it.
But not for nothing had Ommony been unofficial judge of all that land for twenty years. In their own tongue he could rake their very consciences over the coals of Eblis better than their mullahs could. For every argument that they could hurl at him he knew ten texts—could cite ten instances where they had come to him for help and had received it. Besides, they were afraid of him, and he feared nothing but his own opinion of himself.
They dug the graves—not one trench, but a separate grave for each dead man in a row along the jungle lane; and Ommony recited the funeral service seated on his pony, who behaved as if he had attended that kind of ceremony scores of times—motionless until the end.
“ them, they've got fire-arms! Let them salute my men!” exploded Linkinyear when Ommony had finished.
Ommony looked at him a moment and decided on heroic means to prevent worse trouble later.
“This was a horrible mistake,” he said to the Moplahs, who had stood viewing the performance sulkily, waiting to push in the covering dirt with their hands when Ommony should give the word. “Honorable men who make mistakes make just acknowledgment. How many of you bear a grudge against the dead ye killed?”
That was the kind of Solomon-like question with which he always had his way with them. None answered.
“If these men had come to fight, ye had a right to kill. But they came peacefully, observing peace. If they had died in fair fight, there would have been others of their own race, with fire-arms, to pay them final honors. But they died by your mistake, unfairly. Will ye rob as well as kill?”
They, whose notion of life was organized robbery, denied that imputation hotly.
“But the dead are dead!” exclaimed one of them.
“Ye can honor the dead like honorable men, and so yourselves be honored!” answered Ommony.
“How then?”
He told them. So the unbelievable took place. Four and fifty Moplahs, some with the blood of murdered soldiers on their hands, fired a salute at the tree-tops, not knowing what it meant exactly but understanding that in some way they were wiping out a stain on their own honor and a score that would otherwise have increased against themselves with interest. They fired across the graves exactly as Ommony told them, and the scared crows winging from a tree near by looked like the souls of dead men.
Moslems—very ignorant Moslems—living among Hindus pick up by hearsay and observation innumerable Hindu superstitions, rail their mullahs how they may. The Moplahs glanced at the crows, met one another's eyes and stared at Ommony with new respect.
“By ! You know—by ! I say—you tell them, will you, in their own confounded bat—by ! They've done the right thing, ! Say that, will you, please,” demanded Linkinhurst. “ them! They've done the decent thing!”
But Ommony had not quite finished. He made the Moplahs fell two big trees straight across the path, so that all would go around in future, making a new track, and none would tread on the graves until the forest had blotted them out completely, along with the thousands of others that dot the earth unmarked. Then:
“Tonight I will write down how ye did,” said Ommony. “It shall be set down that ye slew like dogs and fools, but that ye honored the dead like decent men.”
“Let it be set down that we did not rob the dead, but buried them in their uniforms,” called out one of them.
“That, too, shall be written down,” said Ommony.