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There was disturbance among the fighting pairs; some staying with each other, some changing running to and fro charging at odd angles. But when the confusion cleared more fresh ones had come in! Now Nut Kut was a whirl-wind he was unbelievable. One broke away from him and ran demoralised. One died fairly defeated.
In Persia, too, the Russians occupied Kermanshah and descended the pass to Khanikin and the Mesopotamian plain; but it was an adventurous body of cavalry rather than a substantial military force which joined hands with the British on the Tigris some weeks after the fall of Kut. The Russians had to some extent redeemed their failure in Europe, but others they had not been able to save.
"Step on the gentleman's neck and see if he's dead. While yer gamming away here ye don't know how many more are in the bushes hereabout with guns ready to chip ye. Stir him up and let's see what happened to the Kut Sang that he's here at all. It's plain she didn't go down."
I had supposed a steamer sailed every day or two, and my temper was ruffled at my mistake and the prospect of fretting away a week in the heat of Manila. A little item in the Times gave me hope. It told of the steamer Kut Sang coming out of dry dock to sail for Hong-Kong that very afternoon with general cargo.
Now Nut Kut lowered him quickly holding him before his own red eyes. The touch of the elephant was the touch of a master. But the eyes of the man were mastership itself. . . . They were just so, when Ram Yaksahn with a ghastly haggard face lurched from behind Nut Kut, fairly sobbing. "Now easy, Majesty, go easy with me indeed I am very ill!"
The moaning ascended and broke like wind going up a mountain khud. There was nothing certain to the mahouts, but that this man of courage would be dashed to death before their eyes. Skag squirmed in the grip about his body as Nut Kut held him high. It looked as if he were being crushed. But when he got his hands on the trunk again, he laughed.
Within a week from the fall of Kut the advance on Baghdad began, and at Azizie half-way between the two, the Turks were routed again as they had been at Kut. By 12 November, Townshend was in front of Ctesiphon, about twenty-four miles from Baghdad. Here the Turks were strongly entrenched.
So she abode with him awhile and he assigned her daily an hundred dinars for her maintenance; till, one day, he absented himself from the Divan and the Caliph said to Ja'afar, "O Watir, I gave not Kut al-Kulub unto Ala al-Din but that she might console him for his wife; why, then, doth he still hold aloof from us?"
"They'll report the Kut Sang lost, and Thirkle'll figure on getting back here before folks are suspicious. Of course the people who shipped that gold may smell a rat and keep tab on him, but he'll see that he gets clear. He'll report her foundered far from here leave that to him. I doubt if he'll quit this place as long as he sees a foot of the Kut Sang above water.
No sooner would I set about putting certain facts together than I would laugh at myself for manufacturing a mystery; and, after I had tried to shake off the impression that the Kut Sang and all of us in her were more than mere travellers and seamen, the fantastic ideas insisted upon running through my head.
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