Sharpe's Tiger Read Online Free PDF

now, reformed into a solid column, they were readying to advance again. Their ranks and files were ramrod straight. Their officers wore waist sashes and carried highly curved sabres. One of the flags was being waved to and fro and Sharpe could just make out that it showed a golden sun blazoned against a scarlet sky. Vultures swooped lower. The galloper guns, unable to resist the target of the great column of infantry, poured solid shot into its flank, but the Tippoo’s men stoically endured the punishment as their officers made certain that the column was tight packed and ready to deliver its crushing blow on the waiting redcoat line.
    Sharpe licked his dry lips. So these, he thought, were the Tippoo’s men. Fine-looking bastards they were, too, and close enough now so that he could see that their tunics were not plain pale purple, but were instead cut from a creamy-white cloth decorated with mauve tiger stripes. Their cross-belts were black and their turbans and waist sashes crimson. Heathens, they might be, but not to be despised for that, foronly fifteen years before these same tiger-striped men had torn apart a British army and forced its survivors to surrender. These were the famed tiger troops of Mysore, the warriors of the Tippoo Sultan who had dominated all of southern India until the British thought to climb the ghats from the coastal plain and plunge into Mysore itself. The French were these men’s allies, and some Frenchmen served in the Tippoo’s forces, but Sharpe could see no white faces in the massive column that at last was ready and, to the deep beat of a single drum, lurched ponderously forward. The tiger-striped troops were marching directly toward the King’s 33rd and Sharpe, glancing to his left, saw that the sepoys of the East India Company regiments were still too far away to offer help. The 33rd would have to deal with the Tippoo’s column alone.
    â€œPrivate Sharpe!” Hakeswill’s sudden scream was loud enough to drown the cheer that the Tippoo’s troops gave as they advanced, “Private Sharpe!” Hakeswill screamed again. He was hurrying along the back of the Light Company and Captain Morris, momentarily dismounted, was following him. “Give me your musket, Private Sharpe!” Hakeswill bellowed.
    â€œNothing wrong with it,” Sharpe protested. He was in the front rank and had to turn and push his way between Garrard and Mallinson to hand the gun over.
    Hakeswill snatched the musket and gleefully presented it to Captain Morris. “See, sir!” the Sergeant crowed. “Just as I thought, sir! Bastard sold his flint, sir! Sold it to an ‘eathen darkie.” Hakeswill’s face twitched as he gave Sharpe a triumphant glance. The Sergeant had unscrewed the musket’s doghead, extracted the flint in its folded leather pad, and now offered the scrap of stone to Captain Morris. “Piece of common rock, sir, no good to man or beast. Must haveflogged his flint, sir. Flogged it in exchange for a pagan whore, sir, I dare say. Filthy beast that he is.”
    Morris peered at the flint. “Sell the flint, did you. Private?” he asked in a voice that mingled derision, pleasure, and bitterness.
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œSilence!” Hakeswill screamed into Sharpe’s face, spattering him with spittle. “Lying to an officer! Flogging offence, sir, flogging offence. Selling his flint, sir? Another flogging offence, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.”
    â€œIt is a flogging offence,” Morris said with a tone of satisfaction. He was as tall and lean as Sharpe, with fair hair and a fine-boned face that was just beginning to show the ravages of the liquor with which the Captain assuaged his boredom. His eyes betrayed his cynicism and something much worse: that he despised his men. Hakeswill and Morris, Sharpe thought as he watched them, a right bloody pair.
    â€œNothing wrong with that flint, sir,” Sharpe