‘I didn’t exactly
‘Mm,’ said Ledley thoughtfully. ‘Not definitive, but good enough in the circumstances.’
‘Bee stings, then?’ asked Hervey, anxious for confirmation so that they could decide their course.
‘Near enough.’ By now the surgeon had had a close look at French’s face — plumped and red like a gourd on a scarecrow. ‘Not bees, though,’ said Ledley, shaking his head. ‘Hornets, jungle hornets. Brutish little devils by all accounts and the evidence before us.’
Even Armstrong looked appalled at the transformation of the dragoon’s features by so small an agent and in so rapid a manner. Only the thick black curls gave away its owner. ‘Will he live, sir?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the surgeon briskly. ‘If he lives the next quarter of an hour then he ought to be safe.’ He reached into his saddlebag. ‘Water, if you please.’
Private Rudd unslung his canteen and handed it to the surgeon. Ledley poured a cupful into an enamelled bowl and added five drops of clear liquid from a glass phial. He lifted French’s head with one hand and put the bowl to his lips. ‘Drink this, my lad. All of it.’
French, who had hitherto shown no sign of sentience, began at once to sip.
‘What is it?’ asked Hervey.
‘Digitalis. To stimulate the heart. That’s his greatest need at present.’
Hervey took Armstrong to one side. ‘I’ll leave one man with him — Rudd — and a surgeon’s orderly, but even them we can scarcely spare.’
Armstrong nodded. ‘But Rudd’s too good a man when we’re short already. The orderly ought to be able to mind him on his own. Why not make the woman stay an’ all?’
If Dodds had not stolen away in the night like some— Hervey bit his lip and nodded. ‘You’re right. Just the orderly and the woman. And Boy Porrit. You’d better see to it, then. I’ll get the troop moving.’
At the next halt, French’s misfortune was retailed through the ranks from the back of the column to the front, and by the time it reached the pointmen hornets were no longer the culprit but giant batlike creatures which tore at the flesh and sucked blood more voraciously than a dozen bull leeches. Hervey had to walk the length of the column again to allay the consternation. With some difficulty he managed also to inform the Skinner’s sowars of the affair, but they knew full well what had been the cause, and revealed that they had left powdered cow dung with the orderly, to be made into a paste and applied to the swollen parts. Hervey, whose respect for native medicine had been settled during his previous sojourn in India, hoped the orderly would not scruple to use it.
At three o’clock, at the scouts’ bidding, they halted. Hervey went forward to see what had prompted them.
‘The cover’s changing, sir,’ said Serjeant Collins. ‘It’s getting thicker. It must mean we’re coming to the edge.’
Hervey smiled thankfully to himself. There were but half a dozen men in the troop who would have drawn such an inference. He checked his map and his calculations. It was certainly possible.
‘And it’s been flat going for a full two hours,’ he said, pleased to be able to corroborate Collins’s observation.
‘I think I’d like to scout forward a little more, sir. Can the troop hold a while?’
‘I think I’ll gamble on a bivouac, Sar’nt Collins,’ said Hervey, sensing they might make contact with the Burmans sooner rather than later. But how he wished the Chakma were with him, for it was now that their intimate knowledge would be of most use. To stumble on outposts, or make camp too close, would be the devil of a thing after all they had been through. He turned to his trumpeter. ‘Storrs, my compliments to Mr Seton Canning, and we’ll bivouac where they stand now. I shall go forward with Serjeant Collins to spy things out. Have the pointmen sent up to join Corporal Ashbolt here as picket, and have the daffadar reassemble the guns.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Storrs, closing his notebook.
Hervey laid down his carbine and pistol. ‘And yours too,’ he said to Collins and Stent. ‘If we come upon an outpost we shall have to carry it with steel. One shot and it might be the death of us all.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. IMMEDIATE ACTION
‘It’s a fine-balanced thing, Sar’nt-Major, but I think it best to attack at first light. The camp had the look of receiving troops at any minute, but they’re not likely to be marching in during the night, so there’s nothing to lose in that respect.’ Hervey sipped gratefully at the hot sweet tea which Johnson had waiting for him. He took out his watch again: they had been gone for the best part of two hours, and there were but two more until darkness.
Armstrong relit his pipe, sat back on the fallen tree which served as the troop orderly room, and put his heel on a tiny scorpion emerging from under a dead leaf. ‘About half a mile, you say, sir? We could just about do it before dark. At least we’d have the night to burn the boats.’
Hervey was conscious of going against every cavalry precept. ‘We couldn’t be sure they’d not march in once we began the fight, though. No matter how afeard they were of moving about the jungle by night, if they heard the sound of a fight they’d surely make for it? You would!’
‘Ay, and it’s as well never to suppose the enemy’s any less canny.’
‘Just so. In daylight we surely have a better chance of holding them off, if only to make good our escape.’
‘Ay, you’re right, sir. How many do you reckon there are there now?’
‘Three hundred, perhaps four. Most of those are bargees, but there are lines laid out for a thousand more, and I reckon the boats will carry twice that number.’
Armstrong did not so much look dismayed at the numbers as incredulous. ‘And they would assemble that many men in the forest and paddle ’em all that way to Chittagong? What a business when they could be on the place from the sea with not a fraction of the trouble.’
Hervey had rehearsed the same doubts with Somervile. ‘They couldn’t do it unnoticed, though, and if there were one frigate in sight then they’d be blown from out of the water. No, Sar’nt-Major, I think this is a deuced clever plan, and I think we have come on it not a day too soon.’
Armstrong took his pipe from his mouth and looked at the bowl in despair. He hoped the troop’s powder was drier than his tobacco. ‘Just so I’m sure, which side of the river do we come out of the forest on?’
Hervey smiled to himself: Armstrong the world-weary NCO, resigned to whatever his officer had embroiled him in! ‘The Avan side, Sar’nt-Major — just as we’d always intended.’
‘No more wet feet, then?’
‘I can’t promise that, but there is a bridge.’
Armstrong was not inclined to dispute it further. ‘And so how shall we go at them?’
Hervey had yet to finish writing his orders. ‘The whole assembly area is open grass and planting, nothing that I could see above four feet high, and firm going. It’s not rice planting or the like.’ He cleared the ground of leaves in front of where they sat, and took up a stick to make a sketch in the earth, drawing two lines like the letter X. ‘Here’s the river,’ he began, pointing to the line which ran right to left. ‘It’s not much more than a chain across, two dozen yards at most, and no deeper than an elephant’s ears.’
Armstrong raised an eyebrow. ‘Are there many of them?’
‘I’m coming to that. But no, half a dozen. And I should say the water’s no less sluggish than where we crossed.’ He now pointed to the other line in the earth. ‘
