India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
"Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing twenty
men with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was fair
men--fairer than you or me--with yellow hair and remarkable well built.
Says Dravot, unpacking the guns--'This is the beginning of the business.
We'll fight for the ten men,' and with that he fires two rifles at the
twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from the rock where
we was sitting. The other men began to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits
on the boxes picking them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. Then
we goes up to the ten men that had run across the snow too, and they fires
a footy little arrow at us. Dravot he shoots above their heads and they
all falls down flat. Then he walks over them and kicks them, and then he
lifts them up and shakes hands all round to make them friendly like. He
calls them and gives them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all
the world as though he was King already. They takes the boxes and him
across the valley and up the hill into a pine wood on the top, where there
was half a dozen big stone idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest--a fellow
they call Imbra--and lays a rifle and a cartridge at his feet, rubbing his
nose respectful with his own nose, patting him on the head, and saluting
in front of it. He turns round to the men and nods his head, and
says,--'That's all right. I'm in the know too, and all these old jim-jams
are my friends.' Then he opens his mouth and points down it, and when the
first man brings him food, he says--'No;' and when the second man brings
him food, he says--'No;' but when one of the old priests and the boss of
the village brings him food, he says--'Yes;' very haughty, and eats it
slow. That was how we came to our first village, without any trouble, just
as though we had tumbled from the skies. But we tumbled from one of those
damned rope-bridges, you see, and you couldn't expect a man to laugh much
after that."
"Take some more whiskey and go on," I said. "That was the first village
you came into. How did you get to be King?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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