It was the outbuilding of which our refuge was the cellar, and it was half filled with light. Not a soul was there, and I hunted about till I found what I wanted. This was a ladder leading to a sort of loft, which in turn gave access to the roof. Here I had to be very careful, for I might be overlooked from the high buildings. But by good luck there was a trellis for grape vines across the place, which gave a kind of shelter. Lying flat on my face I stared over a great expanse of country.
Looking north I saw the city in a haze of morning smoke, and, beyond, the plain of the Euphrates and the opening of the glen where the river left the hills. Up there, among the snowy heights, were Tafta and Kara Gubek. To the east was the ridge of Deve Boyun, where the mist was breaking before the winter’s sun. On the roads up to it I saw transport moving, I saw the circle of the inner forts, but for a moment the guns were silent. South rose a great wall of white mountain, which I took to be the Palantuken. I could see the roads running to the passes, and the smoke of camps and horse-lines right under the cliffs.
I had learned what I needed. We were in the outbuildings of a big country house two or three miles south of the city. The nearest point of the Russian front was somewhere in the foothills of the Palantuken.
As I descended I heard, thin and faint and beautiful, like the cry of a wild bird, the muezzin from the minarets of Erzerum.
When I dropped through the trap the others were awake. Hussin was setting food on the table, and viewing my descent with anxious disapproval.
“It’s all right,” I said; “I won’t do it again, for I’ve found out all I wanted. Peter, old man, the biggest job of your life is before you!”
XIX
Greenmantle
Peter scarcely looked up from his breakfast.
“I’m willing, Dick,” he said. “But you mustn’t ask me to be friends with Stumm. He makes my stomach cold, that one.”
For the first time he had stopped calling me “Cornelis.” The day of make-believe was over for all of us.
“Not to be friends with him,” I said, “but to bust him and all his kind.”
“Then I’m ready,” said Peter cheerfully. “What is it?”
I spread out the maps on the divan. There was no light in the place but Blenkiron’s electric torch, for Hussin had put out the lantern. Peter got his nose into the things at once, for his intelligence work in the Boer War had made him handy with maps. It didn’t want much telling from me to explain to him the importance of the one I had looted.
“That news is worth many a million pounds,” said he, wrinkling his brows, and scratching delicately the tip of his left ear. It was a way he had when he was startled.
“How can we get it to our friends?”
Peter cogitated. “There is but one way. A man must take it. Once, I remember, when we fought the Matabele it was necessary to find out whether the chief Makapan was living. Some said he had died, others that he’d gone over the Portuguese border, but I believed he lived. No native could tell us, and since his kraal was well defended no runner could get through. So it was necessary to send a man.”
Peter lifted up his head and laughed. “The man found the chief Makapan. He was very much alive, and made good shooting with a shotgun. But the man brought the chief Makapan out of his kraal and handed him over to the Mounted Police. You remember Captain Arcoll, Dick—Jim Arcoll? Well, Jim laughed so much that he broke open a wound in his head, and had to have a doctor.”
“You were that man, Peter,” I said.
“Ja. I was the man. There are more ways of getting into kraals than there are ways of keeping people out.”
“Will you take this chance?”
“For certain, Dick. I am getting stiff with doing nothing, and if I sit in houses much longer I shall grow old. A man bet me five pounds on the ship that I could not get through a trench-line, and if there had been a trench-line handy I would have taken him on. I will be very happy, Dick, but I do not say I will succeed. It is new country to me, and I will be hurried, and hurry makes bad stalking.”
I showed him what I thought the likeliest place—in the spurs of the Palantuken mountains. Peter’s way of doing things was all his own. He scraped earth and plaster out of a corner and sat down to make a little model of the landscape on the table, following the contours of the map. He did it extraordinarily neatly, for, like all great hunters, he was as deft as a weaver bird. He puzzled over it for a long time, and conned the map till he must have got it by heart. Then he took his field-glasses—a very good single Zeiss which was part of the spoils from Rasta’s motorcar—and announced that he was going to follow my example and get on to the housetop. Presently his legs disappeared through the trap, and Blenkiron and I were left to our reflections.
Peter must have found something uncommon interesting, for he stayed on the roof the better part of the day. It was a dull job for us, since there was no light, and Blenkiron had not even the consolation of a game of Patience. But for all that he was
