Free Bhowani Junction by John Masters Page A

bridge approach. We began to search the line. A gang from Malra was already on the job, and after an hour they reported to us that nothing was wrong with the line and rails. They thought the bridge was all right too, though it would have been much easier to hide something there.
    Savage had been standing on the top of the cutting, looking all round through his binoculars. To the west the country was thick, dry jungle; to the east it was mostly fields. He checked against his map the positions of two villages we could see in the fields. Then he pointed into the jungle to the west and said that another village, which his map said was less than a mile away, must be in there. The Gurkhas were searching in the fields and along the edge of the jungle.
    The sun went down. The railway gang walked back together, singing, toward Malra. The Gurkhas trotted in, and we all gathered round the trolley. The Gurkhas began to eat chupattis and drink a little out of their water-bottles. I got hungry, and I wanted to go back to Bhowani. We couldn’t do anything more out there.
    But Savage pointed to his map and said, ‘We’ll go to these three villages in turn and ask the headmen if any strangers have been seen since midday. It’s quite possible that the people the Wimpy saw might be hiding in one of the villages.’
    I said, ‘But Colonel——’ and he looked at me, his eyes gleaming in the twilight, and I shut my mouth. What the hell good was it for me, the District Superintendent of Traffic, to go crashing round in the dark through the jungles and across the fields, when my job was in the office in Bhowani?
    Savage said, ‘Haven’t you got anything to eat?’
    I said, ‘No.’
    He said, ‘You are a bloody fool. I warned you. Here.’ He gave me some of his. He had a tin of bully beef and a few cold chupattis that looked as if they’d been floating round in his haversack for several days, or perhaps in Birkhe’s. They were gritty and dusty and tasted of tobacco; he didn’t seem to notice but ate them quickly. While we were eating he said, ‘I understand the Collector has told you why my battalion has been sent here in such a hurry.’
    I said, ‘Yes. Because of K. P. Roy.’ I had Roy on my mind whenever I thought of the railway.
    Savage said, ‘Partly him. Would you know him by sight if we happened to see him in one of these villages?’
    I said, ‘No.’
    All of a sudden it came over me what we were really up to. I had thought that the men the plane had seen on the line might be K. P. Roy and his followers trying to do something bad. But I had never thought we would go chasing them, and perhaps finish up facing K. P. Roy in a dark corner of a smelly village in the middle of the night. K. P. Roy would fight for his life with everything he had, and he would shoot first.
    When it was quite dark we set off. Savage used his compass.There was about half a moon, and the leaves crackled under our feet. It was like some of my shooting expeditions, only we were after a man instead of an animal, and the trees seemed alive and frightening. Dogs began to bark before we got to the first village, and Savage sent two Gurkhas slipping round through the trees to get behind the village before we walked up to it.
    We saw the lights, and then, when we went forward, a gun exploded with a tremendous roar. I dropped to my stomach, and slugs of lead and old bits of glass and nails whistled through the branches above us. It was the village watchman, wide awake and very nervous. Savage shouted, ‘Don’t shoot. We’re soldiers.’
    We went into the village. No one had gone to sleep there yet, and I could see they were all ill at ease. Savage was suspicious and cross-examined the headman for some time. But if they had seen any strangers they weren’t going to tell us, and we hadn’t got the time or the authority to search every house.
    We left there about ten and marched back through the jungle, across the railway, and across the empty fields to the