The Camp of the Snake/Chapter 6

FTER a little while it occurred to me that Anim Dass must know something about the death of Cobden. In a curious way the account Moorcroft gave of the man's end fitted in with my doubts, when I had studied the chimney. I found the overseer walking alone in the grove, which was a little surprising, at that hour of the day.

A quarter of an hour later I had him sized up as a chap who could tell as many lies to the minute as I could think of questions. He had not seen Cobden fall, he swore, but some of his men had. And they said the feringhi—the white man—had seen a ghost. Anim Dass, being educated, scoffed at the idea of spirits, and was certain that Cobden had stumbled at the edge of the declivity leading into the chimney and had lost his head.

"Did Cobden sahib find the shrine in this wood?" I asked the babu suddenly, having a theory of my own I wanted to test.

"Indeed not, sahib," responded Anim Dass promptly. "He found no sign of it."

I might have believed the fellow if he had said he did not know. How could he be certain if Cobden had located it or not?

"I have heard this grave has gold or—jewels in it," I remarked casually, having heard no such thing. Anim Dass looked incredulous, too incredulous to satisfy me.

"Quite impossible!" he cried. "Or his highness the rajah, Babur el-Sulaiman, of Chitral, would have removed the stones and dug them up." And Anim Dass shrugged his plump shoulders, looking sleekly indifferent to the whole thing. He was too clever for me to get anything out of, and a bit too clever to be honest. I thought he knew where the grave or shrine was, also that it was placed under some stones, maybe statues or tombstones. But I wouldn't have trusted the babu with a pocketful of German marks.

My theory was not a pleasant one, but it stuck like the latest Tin Pan Alley jazz. Moorcroft, having a mania against white men who intruded on native no-trespassing ground, had managed to dump Cobden down the chimney; Anim Dass knew what had happened, pretty well, but was keeping his mouth shut, and was probably being paid to do it. The fact that there were several versions of how Cobden had died proved that someone was lying.

Just as I had reasoned thus far, the big deodar the men were working on swayed and began to roar down to the ground. I saw Anim Dass turn and look and his skin grew several shades lighter when the tree thudded on earth. He licked his lips and his brown eyes flickered all around, like a snake when a stick is poked at it. If ever a man was scared, Anim Dass was that man.

He soon recovered when nothing more happened and we rambled over to the spot and watched the coolies lop off the branches, which were small compared to the great bole. Then they cut off the top and cleared a place near the butt, where Anim Dass painted the mark of the Dixon company.

As soon as this was done the trunk was worked to the edge of the steep slope with skids and tackle and shoved off. It crashed down, crushing the undergrowth, and boomed off a ledge of rock. By the time it reached the valley bed it looked the size of a match and it was split in two parts.

I saw that Anim Dass was staring at it; and the coolies muttered a lot. A high wind came up of a sudden and I turned back to the wood, where it was warmer, and where I hoped to find signs of Arnold or the tomb that was making all this trouble. Neither one was to be seen. I've a pretty good pair of eyes and I quartered all the area under the deodars and even pushed into the thickets without uncovering any headstone or marker. It was getting dark by then and I struck back to the camp and found Arnold Carnie sitting by an open fire polishing the stock of his pet rifle. He had been asleep most of the day.

That wind was still sweeping over us, and I could feel the tree tops weaving in and out, though down by the fire the air was hardly stirring. Somehow or other, I kept looking up, as if I could see something up there. Because I was restless, perhaps, it struck me all of a sudden that there was something over our heads that was coming along with the wind.

This restlessness must have been on account of the heights all around us, also because of the elevation of the grove itself. Six or eight thousand feet above sea level always affects a man a bit; the blood doesn't run normally.

Anyway I had a hunch that the Carnies ought not to be in that camp. When I told Arnold that I did not feel easy about Moorcroft, he laughed.

"Rot, Smithy. The doctor is one of the learned heads of India. His book on the customs and legends and—and so forth, of the hill tribes is classic. He's as sane as you are."

He wiped the oil off the rear sight and glanced across the clearing at the huts of Moorcroft's followers.

"The Chitralis may turn ugly, 'count of this sacred wood. If so, you'll see something worth while my lad—Larry Dixon stirred up. He could handle the whole tribe and the rajah thrown in. But if you're seeing ghosts, I'll ask Gordon to come with us tonight. She's game for bears and moonlight."

BOUT an hour after the moon had climbed over the peaks we set out again, Miss Carnie with us. Captain Dixon stayed behind to go over accounts with Anim Dass, and Moorcroft's tent was dark when we passed it. It grew colder as we worked up the edge of the gorge, moving slowly after the two natives who did not seem as keen about bears as they were about deer.

In fact there was nothing stirring along the gorge. Miss Carnie had kept quiet, like a good hunter, for an hour or so, until we came out on a knoll and the two natives joined us. Then she chuckled and asked Arnold where his black bears were. Her brother ordered the men on, but they insisted they were too chilled to go up the gorge any further, and I noticed that they were shivering.

"Why, it's not cold," whispered Gordon Carnie, "now that the wind has gone down."

I hadn't noticed until then that the gale had stopped, because the underbrush was still swaying and rustling around the hillock. But the girl was right. No air was stirring. The steep slope of the gorge lay just behind us, and the tops of the cedars that lined the silver of the river were absolutely still. I remember this because I wondered what was moving the bushes.

"Here comes one," Arnold whispered to me eagerly. "Your first shot, Smithy."

He raised the muzzle of his rifle and I knocked it down with my left arm. The thing advancing toward us through the high grass and bushes was on two legs and when it came out into clear moonlight we recognized Anim Dass. The babu was half running, half staggering and he was panting as if he'd come a long way with the throttle wide open.

"Great Scott!" cried Arnold softly. "Look at his face!"

I had been watching the swaying bushes, figuring that a bear or something similar was at his heels. When I looked at his face I thought the moonlight was playing tricks with my eyes. It does, sometimes. Anim Dass was as white as the girl beside me. And his mouth was twisted into a kind of fixed, crooked grin.

"Stop, man!" I shouted. "Back up—sit down! Look ahead of you!" He was running toward the slope that led down into the chimney where Cobden had fallen to his death. Our knoll overlooked the chasm, about a hundred yards away. Anim Dass stumbled to his knees, got up and plunged forward jerkily. Arnold shouted and began to run down, toward the edge of the drop. Either the babu did not hear us or he was too frightened to understand what we said. Nothing came out of the bushes after him, and he would have been perfectly safe if he stayed where he was.

He stumbled and trotted forward as if he was being pulled by something we could not see. Men caught out in the open in a hurricane might have rolled along like that. Carnie took a desperate chance in skirting the edge of the drop to reach him. He was stretching out his hand to grip the man, when Anim Dass, with that fixed, silly grin on his face, leaped forward and down the chasm.

Loose stones poured down with him, and a piece of rock crashed loose. It seemed like a whole minute later that I saw the last of the babu whirling down the face of the cliff half a mile below.

E WENT back to the camp in the grove and found it dark. After lighting the stove and a small lantern in the girl's tent she asked us to find Larry Dixon and tell him what had happened. Gordon was a little shaken by the fall of the overseer, still she did not make a wild fuss the way some women do when anything unpleasant has happened.

We found the captain on his cot in his tent which was at the other end of the line from Gordon's. Arnold and I shared one of the middle pair, and the other served as a combined dining and store shelter.

Dixon was there all right but completely useless.

"Whew!" Arnold sniffed several times. "Never knew Larry drank—like that!"

I flashed the electric torch in his face and shook him until he opened his eyes. They were sunk in the sockets and kind of glazed, and he went right back into a heavy sleep, breathing like a man under ether. The whole tent reeked of whisky, and of something else that I couldn't place. Carnie noticed it, too, and told me it was no use trying to rouse Dixon, for a while.

"I don't know if it's opium or hasheesh smoke that smells like that, Smithy," he whispered. "Someone put Larry out of commission." .

It was hard to say whether the captain had been soaking up whisky or whether a liberal quantity of it had been poured around his cot. We looked at each other, and I saw that Arnold was worried for the first time. Up to now we youngsters had let Dixon do the worrying, and now that we had to act for ourselves we realized how much we had depended on him.

"He won't sleep it off before morning, Carnie," I pointed out. "The first thing is to put your sister to bed without letting her know how he is laid up. Second, is to keep a watch at her tent until daylight."

Arnold lied like a gentleman and told the girl Dixon had started to walk to Chitral, some six miles away, and would not be back until noon. Said he'd left a note with his servant.

Gordon looked at me quickly, with a woman's instinct for getting at the truth. Her fine eyes were dark with anxiety, and I knew she must care a whole lot about Dixon.

"Is Larry—hurt, Mr. Smith?"

I started to say that he was hale and well and checked myself just in time. Anim Dass had taught me a lesson or two in lying, and I remembered that I couldn't very well be supposed to know how a man was, six miles away.

"If you want, Miss Carnie," I offered, "I'll hike over to Chitral and find out. He can't be with us until after breakfast."

She shook her head and thought for a moment. "Captain Dixon ought to know about the—the accident. Poor Anim Dass! Arnold, you must call his servant and send the boy with a message to Chitral."

This would have been the logical thing to do, if Dixon had been in the native town, instead of slumbering off a sweet mixture of dope and booze in his tent. If we told the girl the truth, she'd have thought we were making up another story, and, anyway, she'd want to go to Dixon and convince herself he was not in need of nursing.

We were all a bit shaken by watching that babu take a flying leap over the cliff, but it took more than that to put Arnold down for the count. He pushed his sister into the open flap of the tent and explained that Dixon had found something wrong with the accounts of Anim Dass that evening and had gone off at once to Chitral to check up with the rajah. He said he'd find Dixon's servant and send him off with the message.

It was a good half hour before he came back and remarked, with a perfectly straight face, that the boy had gone. Meanwhile I'd been explaining to Miss Carnie how Anim Dass must have been disturbed by the discrepancy in his accounts and had come out to look for us and had been frightened when he found himself at the edge of the chimney, and had stumbled over the edge in the bad light.

She smiled at me without saying anything, and busied herself brewing some tea and toasting some of the biscuits they call scones over the stove. Arnold and I ate up all she had and said good night, betaking ourselves to the embers of the camp fire, which we stirred up to a good blaze. Here we could keep an eye on all the tents, and Moorcroft's portable house. I was hoping the doctor would show up because I wanted to ask him a few questions, but he failed to appear.

"I'd hate to hold a good poker hand against you, Carnie," I told him when my pipe was going good. "Your face is too good a bluff. I'd have sworn you were telling the truth about that boy."

He borrowed my tobacco pouch and filled his briar.

"I was, Smithy. The boy is gone. So are the bearers and all the other servants." After puffing until the pipe was going to his satisfaction he smiled. "Also Moorcroft's men have departed this place. Also, Dixon's Hindus have folded their tents and silently passed away. And the curious thing is that nothing seems to be stolen."

I thought this over for a while, looking from the dark bulk of the doctor's tent-house to the shrouded auto, and the line of empty shacks in the shadows under the trees. That evening, when we left to go after bears, about thirty natives had been quartered in the grove. Now, when I checked up, Arnold and myself were the only souls awake and able bodied and alive.

"Then this camp isn't what you might call thickly populated," I remarked. "Where did your men go?"

"Haven't the faintest idea, old chap."

"Why did they leave?"

"Ask the Hindu gods—they ought to know why two score dependable natives forsook a month's pay and a magnificent chance to loot." He bent forward to toss some more wood on the fire. "Frighten these Punjabi budmashes of mine a little and they just naturally steal whatever they can lay hand on. Afterward they confess and are forgiven and the stolen articles charged up to their pay."

"Meaning?"

"They must have been more than a little scared, Smithy. Hullo, whatever became of our two shikars?"

When we came to consider it, neither of us had seen the hunters after Anim Dass jumped down the chimney. Arnold had an explanation that fitted in pretty well with my theory. During our absence the hillmen from Chitral had visited the camp to stage a demonstration in revenge for the felling of a tree in the sacred grove. They must have put our men to flight because Dixon had been dead to the world at the time. In fact the Chitrali crowd might have drugged him to keep him out of the way.

"Which brings us to Anim Dass," concluded Carnie. "Any ideas about that poor blighter, Smithy?"

I had several. Moorcroft, sane or insane, was trying his best to frighten us into leaving the grove. For what reason I didn't know, but that would keep. He was working with the Chitrali gang; the fact that he had been talking with them that morning proved he was in communication with them. The doctor had managed to scare Anim Dass stiff, and the babu, after finding Dixon laid neatly to sleep, had run after us.

"Good, Smithy!" nodded Carnie. "But how did he come to run off the khud?"

I didn't say anything because guessing isn't my long suit. I had seen a healthy man walk into a chasm that he knew was there. Outside of suicide, what explanation was there? And it was a cinch that Cobden and Anim Dass had not decided to commit suicide at the same spot within a couple of weeks.

"He acted as if he was drunk, Smithy."

"Maybe, but I don't think he was," I grunted, remembering that they had said that about Cobden, too.

"The wind might have made him lose his balance on the slope." "Might have. There was no wind."

"But, confound it, Smithy, the undergrowth was rustling all around."

"Something was in it."

That left us about where we started. Neither of us had seen anything moving except Anim Dass. And I wasn't worrying about what we hadn't seen. Arnold was. He had a quick brain, better than mine, and he was as keen on this mystery as he had been for getting a deer the night before.

After a long while he spoke up.

"Smithy, only two explanations can possibly fit. Either the babu was so badly frightened he couldn't see what was in front of him, or he thought that the cliff was level ground."