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I was told by Abraham that during the conversation following Ranjoor Singh's seizure of the papers the word Wassmuss was bandied back and forth a thousand times, the Turk growing rather more amenable each time the word was used. Finally the Turk resigned himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and was left in his tent with a guard of our men at each corner.
After another talk with me Ranjoor Singh was to horse and away with his forty an hour before daybreak, the Turkish officer riding bareback in Syrian clothes between the four who had been set to guard him. And the sound of the departing hooves had scarcely ceased drumming down the valley when the men left behind with me began to put me to a test.
Every move she ever made was poetry expressed, but framed in a golden aura shed by the lamp, and swaying in the velvet blackness of the pit's mouth, she was, it seemed to Ranjoor Singh, as no man had ever yet seen woman. "Come, sahib!" she called again; and he moved toward her. "Food and water wait! Thy trooper has drunk his fill. Come, sahib!" She made no move at all to protect herself from him.
If I had not been his enemy, I had not been true to him, and who is not true is false. I fought with a sense of shame as I have since then fought with thirst and hunger. All the teachings of our Holy One accused me. Above all, Ranjoor Singh's face accused me.
He was born a buffalo he has been trained to be one by the British he likes to be one and he will die one, with a German bullet in his belly, unless this business prove too much for him and he dies of fretting before he can get away to fight! "I look at me, sahib! I have tempted Ranjoor Singh, and he did not yield a hair! I stood closer to him than I am to you, and his pulse beat no faster!
It is only ingratitude that a man can swallow unconcerned. No man spoke. We rode like graven images, and I think the French women wondered at our silence. I know that I, for one, felt extremely willing to die for France; and I thought of Ranjoor Singh and of how his heart, too, would have burned if he had been with us.
"There will be two regiments of Tommees drunken Tommees, presentlee. They will take your men to jail. The Tommees are already on the way. Should they get there first your men will be everlastinglee disgraced as well as muleted. You should hurry." Ranjoor Singh ceased from frowning and looked satisfied.
When they came under fire later on they made no effort to desert with the carts to their own side; and when we asked them why, they said because we fed them! They added they had not been paid for more than eighteen months. Why did not Ranjoor Singh make this arrangement sooner, you ask. Why did he wait so long, and then choose the night of all times?
Yet we made the circuit unseen and, as far as we knew, unheard certainly unchallenged. Doubtless, as Ranjoor Singh said afterward, the Turks were too overriden by Germans and the Germans too overconfident to suspect the presence of an enemy.
"Is my word not enough?" said he. "Was Ranjoor Singh's enough?" said I, and he went, muttering to himself. I slept until dawn the first night I had slept in three and before breakfast they all clustered about me, urging me to be the one to keep close watch on Ranjoor Singh. "God forbid that I should be stool pigeon!" said I. "Nay, God forbid!
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