Path of the Tiger, стр. 424
‘How much do you want for him?’ Bingham asked abruptly.
Kelly’s smile quickly morphed into a combative look of flat defiance.
‘He’s not for sale,’ he growled, his fingers tightening their grip on the tumbler of brandy.
‘Oh, I think with the price my employers would be willing to offer for him you will quickly change your mind on that.’
‘Your “employers”, Bingham? I thought you owned your own tea exporting company?’
Now it was Bingham’s turn to smile slyly.
‘That is merely a front, Kelly. My actual employment is of far greater consequence – and profit – than mere tea trading. I work for a very, very powerful and spectacularly wealthy company called the Huntsmen. We are active all over the world.’
Kelly’s eyes lit up at the mention of the words ‘spectacularly wealthy’. Suddenly it seemed that he was not so stubborn on the point of keeping his mysterious horseman to himself.
‘Tell me, Bingham,’ he murmured, leaning forward, ‘just what sort of an offer would your employers be prepared to make to enlist the services of my most exquisite equine master?’
Bingham leaned over and whispered a sum into Kelly’s ear … and the fop’s hands immediately began to tremble. He swallowed a gulp of brandy, and then raised a balled fist to his mouth and bit intensely on the knuckle of his forefinger. Eventually he looked up at Bingham and nodded.
‘Done,’ he said quietly. ‘The sum will be paid in cash?’
‘It will be, yes.’
‘Done I say. Done!’
Kelly let out a fit of mad giggles, and he stood up, cupped his hands together and shouted out across the field.
‘William! William Gisborne, my dear friend! Come over here! There’s someone you just have to meet!’
66
WILLIAM
November 1856. Darjeeling Himalayas, India
‘Good God, what was that sound?!’ Kelly cried shrilly, sitting bolt upright in his bedroll and fumbling for his revolver.
‘Put it away Kelly, you don’t even know how to use that thing,’ Bingham grumbled.
The older man rolled over in his bedroll and yawned, and then pulled the blanket back over his head to shut out the night chill that trickled down through this hilly forest from the distant mountains. Kelly’s eyes, however, remained wide and white in the darkness, and his hands trembled with fright.
‘Didn’t anybody else hear that sound?!’ he whimpered, his gaze darting frantically from shadow to shadow as he clutched his revolver tightly with both trembling hands. ‘Why aren’t any of you alarmed?!’
‘It’s a tiger,’ rumbled Ajit Sanyal, a burly middle-aged Bengali with a great bushy beard and a prominent, eagle-hooked nose. Against the backdrop of the night forest, the deep brown skin of his face melted almost entirely into the shadows, leaving only the whites of his eyes visible, stark against the dark, while his black greatcoat camouflaged his body completely. He yawned, nonchalantly flicked a twig into the undergrowth, and shifted his huge elephant gun idly in his hands. ‘It’s not the tiger we’re after though,’ he added as an afterthought before turning around and staring calmly into the shadows again.
‘Roll over and get some dang shuteye, Kelly,’ Jeffrey Milton, a fellow Confederate, sneered in a throaty voice. ‘You’re such a goddamned Mary-Anne I’m downright ashamed t’ call you my countryman! Ain’t no goddamned tigers gon’ come near this camp. They don’ like fire, an’ they don’ like us with our guns. I done shot enough a’ the bastards t’ know that much about ‘em.’
‘He’s right,’ Ajit said, stroking the stock of the rifle. ‘I’ve lived my whole life in this region. Tigers – those who become man-eaters anyway – only take people who are alone in the dark, and even then the man-eaters are usually old, desperate beasts who are too weak to hunt their normal prey. Look, we’ve got a big campfire here, we’ve got guards on watch, and we’ve got plenty of rifles too. I’ve shot many a tiger, often while being charged by them. It’s nothing to me. Trust me Mr Kelly, if a tiger comes within a mile of our camp, I’ll know. And I’ll kill it.’
‘Not if I get it first,’ growled Milton, who was polishing, almost to an obsessive degree, the stock of his Winchester repeating rifle. ‘Last year I bagged fifty-seven lions in Southern Africa. Got sixteen leopards too, but them bastards are way more elusive. This year, I’m after tigers, and lots of ‘em! Bring the sum’bitches out, I’ll bag ‘em I will, yessirree!’
‘Gentlemen please!’ Bingham protested from his bedroll. ‘Some of us are trying to get some sleep! Keep the banter to a minimum outside of daylight hours, will you? For God’s sake, we’ve got many miles to cover still, over steep hills and through forest that’s nigh on impenetrable. I don’t know about you lot, but I certainly need my rest for such endeavours.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Milton muttered. ‘Tell that curly-haired dandy over there to keep his damned trap shut, then I’ll do the same.’
‘I should never have come here,’ Kelly whimpered to himself as he pulled his blankets up around his acne-reddened cheeks. He then began to gnaw anxiously on his knuckles. ‘I should’ve stayed in Calcutta, and let them take William by himself. Oh God, the noises, the insects, the pitch-black darkness of the forest … it’s all too much! It’s too much for me, I say!’
At the other end of the campsite, William was sitting in a circle around a smaller bonfire with the luggage porters. The porters were diminutive, wiry young men hired from nearby villages to haul the expedition’s cache of food, weapons, and other heavy equipment on the long trek through the hilly and densely forested terrain. William had picked up a fair amount of Bengali during his time in India, and as he drew in the sickly-sweet smoke of the herb the locals called ‘ganja’, he smiled and chatted with the porters in their language. The smoke, inhaled through a chillum pipe, brought