The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lion of Petra, by Talbot Mundy

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Title: The Lion of Petra

Author: Talbot Mundy

Release Date: September 17, 2006 [EBook #19307]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LION OF PETRA ***




Produced by Mark R. Jaqua





THE LION OF PETRA

       by Talbot Mundy





CONTENTS


I.    "Allah Makes All Things Easy!"
II.   "Trust in God, But Tie Your Camel!"
III.  "Ali Higg's Brains Live in a Black Tent!"
IV.   "Go and Ask the Kites, Then, At Dat Ras!"
V.    "Let That Mother of Snakes Beware!"
VI.   "Him and Me--Same Father!"
VII.  "You Got Cold Feet?"
VIII. "He Cools His Wrath in the Moonlight, Communing with Allah!"
IX.   "I Think We've Got the Lion of Petra on the Hip!"
X.    "There's No Room for Two of You!"
XI.   "That We Make a Profit from This Venture?"
XII.  "Yet I Forgot to Speak of the Twenty Aeroplanes!"
XIII. "There is a Trick to Ruling!"

------------




CHAPTER I

"Allah Makes All Things Easy!"



This isn't an animal story. No lions live at Petra nowadays,
at any rate, no four-legged ones; none could have survived
competition with the biped. Unquestionably there were tamer,
gentler, less assertive lions there once, real yellow cats with
no worse inconveniences for the casual stranger than teeth,
claws, and appetites.

The Assyrian kings used to come and hunt near Petra, and brag
about it afterward; after you have well discounted the lies they
made their sculptors tell on huge stone monoliths when they got
back home, they remain a pretty peppery line of potentates. But
for imagination, self-esteem, ambition, gall, and picturesque
depravity they were children--mere chickens--compared to the
modern gentleman whom Grim and I met up with A.D. 1920.

You can't begin at the beginning of a tale like this, because its
roots reach too far back into ancient history. If, on the other
hand, you elect to start at the end and work backward the
predicament confronts you that there wasn't any end, nor
any in sight.

As long as the Lion of Petra has a desert all about him and a
choice of caves, a camel within reach, and enough health to keep
him feeling normal--never mind whose camel it is, nor what power
claims to control the desert--there will be trouble for somebody
and sport for him.

So, since it can have no end and no beginning, you might define
this as an episode--a mere interval between pipes, as it were, in
the amusing career of Ali Higg ben Jhebel ben Hashim, self-styled
Lion of Petra, Lord of the Wells, Chief of the Chiefs of the
Desert, and Beloved of the Prophet of Al-Islam; not forgetting,
though, that his career was even supposed to amuse his victims or
competitors. The fun is his, the fury other people's.

The beginning as concerns me was when I moved into quarters in
Grim's mess in Jerusalem. As a civilian and a foreigner I could
not have done that, of course, if it had been a real mess; but
Grim, who gets fun out of side-stepping all regulations, had
established a sort of semi-military boarding-house for junior
officers who were tired of tents, and he was too high up in the
Intelligence Department for anybody less than the administrator
to interfere with him openly.

He did exactly as he pleased in that and a great many other
matters--did things that no British-born officer would have dared
do (because they are all crazy about precedent) but what they
were all very glad to have Grim do, because he was a bally
American, don't you know, and it was dashed convenient and all
that. And Grim was a mighty good fellow, even if he did like
syrup on his sausages.

The main point was that Grim was efficient. He delivered the
goods. He was perfectly willing to quit at any time if they did
not like his methods; and they did not want him to quit, because
there is nothing on earth more convenient for men in charge
of public affairs than to have a good man on their string
who can be trusted to break all rules and use horse-sense on
suitable occasion.

I had been in the mess about two days, I think, doing nothing
except read Grim's books and learn Arabic, when I noticed signs
of impending activity. Camel saddles began to be brought out from
somewhere behind the scenes, carefully examined, and put away
again. Far-sighted men with the desert smell on them, which is
more subtly stirring and romantic than all other smells, kept
coming in to squat on the rugs in the library and talk with Grim
about desert trails, and water, and what tribal feuds were in
full swing and which were in abeyance.

Then, about the fourth or fifth day, the best two camel saddles
were thrown into a two-wheeled cart and sent off somewhere,
along with a tent, camp-beds, canned goods, and all the usual
paraphernalia a white man seems to need when he steps out of his
cage into the wild.

I was reading when that happened, sitting in the arm-chair facing
Grim, suppressing the impulse to ask questions, and trying to
appear unaware that anything was going on. But it seemed to me
that there was too much provision made for one man, even for a
month, and I had hopes. However, Grim is an aggravating cuss when
so disposed, and he kept me waiting until the creaking of the
departing cart-wheels and the blunt bad language of the man who
drove the mules could no longer be heard through the open window.

"Had enough excitement?" he asked me then.

"There's not enough to be had," said I, pretending to continue reading.

"Care to cut loose out of bounds?"

"Try me."

"The desert's no man's paradise this time o' year. Hotter than
Billy-be- ----, and no cops looking after the traffic. They'll
shoot a man for his shoe-leather."

"Any man can have my shoes when I can't use 'em."

"Heard of Petra?"

I nodded as casually as I could. Everybody who has been to
Palestine has heard of that place, where an inaccessible city was
carved by the ancients out of solid rock, only to be utterly
forgotten for centuries until Burkhardt rediscovered it.

"Heard too much. I don't believe a word of it."

"There's a problem there to be straightened out," said Grim.
"It's away and away beyond the British border; too far south for
the Damascus government to reach; too far north for the king of
Mecca; too far east for us; much too far west for the Mespot
outfit. East of the sun and west of the moon you might say.
There's a sheikh there by the name of Ali Higg. I'm off to tackle
him. Care to come?"

"When do we start?"

"Now, from here. Tonight from Hebron. I'll give you time to make
your will, write to your lady-love, and crawl out if you care to.
Ali Higg is hot stuff. Suppose we leave it this way: I'll go on
to Hebron. You think it over. You can overtake me at Hebron any
time before tonight, and if you do, all right; but if second
thoughts make you squeamish about crucifixion--they tell me
that Ali Higg makes a specialty of that--I'll say you're wise
to stay where you are. In any case I start from Hebron tonight.
Suit yourself."

Any man in his senses would get squeamish about crucifixion if he
sat long enough and thought about it. I hate to feel squeamish
almost as much as I hate to sit and think, both being sure-fire
ways of getting into trouble. The only safe thing I know is to
follow opportunity and leave the man behind to do the worrying.
More people die lingering, ghastly deaths in arm-chairs and in
bed than anywhere.

So I spoke of squeamishness and second thoughts with all the
scorn that a man can use who hasn't yet tasted the enmity of the
desert and felt the fear of its loneliness; and Grim, who never
wastes time arguing with folk who don't intend to be convinced,
laughed and got up.

"You can't come along as a white man."

"Produce the tar and feathers then," said I.

"Have you forgotten your Hindustani?"

"Some of it."

"Think you can remember enough of it to deceive Arabs who never
knew any at all?"

"Narayan Singh was flattering me about it the other day."

"I know he was," said Grim. "It was his suggestion we should take
you with us."

That illustrates perfectly Grim's way of letting out information
in driblets. Evidently he had considered taking me on this trip
as long as three days ago. It was equally news to me that the
enormous Sikh, Narayan Singh, had any use for me; I had always
supposed that he had accepted me on sufferance for Grim's sake,
and that in his heart he scorned me as a tenderfoot. You can no
more dig beneath the subtlety of Sikh politeness than you can
overbear his truculence, and it is only by results that you may
know your friend and recognize your enemy.

Narayan Singh came in, and he did not permit any such weakness as
a smile to escape him. When great things are being staged it is
his peculiar delight to look wooden. Not even his alert brown
eyes betrayed excitement. Like most Sikhs, he can stand looking
straight in front of him and take in every detail of his
surroundings; with his khaki sepoy uniform perfect down to the
last crease, and his great black bristly beard groomed until it
shone, he might have been ready for a dress parade.

"Is everything ready?" asked Grim.

"No, sahib. Suliman weeps."

"Spank him! What's the matter this time?"

"He has a friend. He demands to take the friend."

"What?" I said. "Is that little ---- coming?"

Two men in all Jerusalem, and only two that I knew of, had any
kind of use for Suliman, the eight-year-old left-over from the
war whom Grim had adopted in a fashion, and used in a way that
scandalized the missionaries. He and Narayan Singh took delight
in the brat's iniquities, seeing precocious intelligence where
other folk denounced hereditary vice. I had a scar on my thumb
where the little beast had bitten me on one occasion when I did
not dare yell or retaliate, and, along with the majority, I
condemned him cordially.

"Who's his friend?" asked Grim.

"Abdullah."

Now Abdullah was worse than Suliman. He had no friends at all,
anywhere, that anybody knew of. Possibly nine years old, he had
picked up all the evil that a boy can learn behind the lines of a
beaten Turkish army officered by Germans--which is almost the
absolute of evil--and had added that to natural depravity.

"Let Abdullah come," said Grim. "But beat Suliman first of all
for weeping. Don't hit him with your hand, Narayan Singh, for
that might hurt his feelings. Use a stick, and give him a grown
man's beating."

_"Atcha, sahib."_

Two minutes later yells like a hungry bobcat's gave notice to
whom it might concern that the Sikh was carrying out the letter
of his orders. It was good music. Nevertheless, quite a little of
the prospect was spoiled for me by the thought of keeping company
with those two Jerusalem guttersnipes. I would have remonstrated,
only for conviction, born of experience, that passengers
shouldn't try to run the ship.

"What shall I pack?" I asked.

"Nothing," Grim answered. "Stick a toothbrush in your pocket.
I've got soap, but you'll have small chance to use it."

"You said I can't go as a white man."

"True. We'll fix you up at Hebron. The Arabs have scads of
proverbs," he answered, lighting a cigarette with a gesture
peculiar to him at times when he is using words to hide his
thoughts. "One of the best is: `Conceal thy tenets, thy treasure,
and thy traveling.'

"The Hebron road is not the road to Petra. We're going to
joy-ride in the wrong direction, and leave Jerusalem guessing."

Five minutes later Grim and I were on the back seat of a Ford
car, bowling along the Hebron road under the glorious gray walls
of Jerusalem; Narayan Singh and the two brats were enjoying our
dust in another car behind us. There being no luggage there was
nothing to excite passing curiosity, and we were not even envied
by the officers condemned to dull routine work in the city.

Grim was all smiles now, as he always is when he can leave the
alleged delights of civilization and meet life where he likes
it--out of bounds. He was still wearing his major's uniform,
which made him look matter-of-fact and almost commonplace--one of
a pattern, as they stamp all armies. But have you seen a strong
swimmer on his way to the beach--a man who feels himself already
in the sea, so that his clothes are no more than a loose shell
that he will cast off presently? Don't you know how you see the
man stripped already, as he feels himself?

So it was with Grim that morning. Each time I looked away from
him and glanced back it was a surprise to see the khaki uniform.

The country, that about a week ago had been carpeted with flowers
from end to end, was all bone-dry already, and the naked hills
stood sharp and shimmering in heat-haze; one minute you could
see the edges of ribbed rock like glittering gray monsters'
skeletons, and the next they were gone in the dazzle, or hidden
behind a whirling cloud of dust. Up there, three thousand feet
above sea-level, there was still some sweetness in the air, but
whenever we looked down through a gap in the range toward the
Dead Sea Valley we could watch the oven-heat ascending like fumes
above a bed of white-hot charcoal.

"Some season for a picnic!" Grim commented, as cheerfully as if
we were riding to a wedding. "You've time to crawl out yet. We
cross that valley on the first leg, and that's merely a sample!"

But it's easy enough to be driven forward in comfort to a new
experience, never mind what past years have taught, nor what
imagination can depict; if that were not so no new battles would
be fought, and women would refuse to restock the world with
trouble's makings. A reasoning animal man may be, but he isn't
often guided by his reason, and at that early stage in the
proceedings you couldn't have argued me out of them with anything
much less persuasive than brute force.

We rolled down the white road into Hebron in a cloud of dust
before midday, and de Crespigny, the governor of the district,
came out to greet us like old friends; for it was only a matter
of weeks since he and we and some others had stood up to death
together, and that tie has a way of binding closer than
conventional associations do.

But there were other friends who were equally glad to see us.
Seventeen men came out from the shadow of the governorate wall,
and stood in line to shake hands--and that is a lengthy business,
for it is bad manners to be the first to let go of an Arab's
hand, so that tact is required as well as patience; but it was
well worth while standing in the sun repeating the back-and-forth
rigmarole of Arab greeting if that meant that Ali Baba and his
sixteen sons and grandsons were to be our companions on the
adventure. They followed us at last into the governorate, and sat
down on the hall carpet with the air of men who know what fun the
future holds.

Narayan Singh stayed out in the hall and looked them over. There
is something in the make-up of the Sikh that, while it gives
him to understand the strength and weaknesses of almost any
alien race, yet constrains him more or less to the policeman's
viewpoint. It isn't a moral viewpoint exactly; he doesn't
invariably disapprove; but he isn't deceived as to the possibilities,
and yields no jot or tittle of the upper hand if he can only once
assume it. There was scant love lost between him and old Ali Baba.

_"Nharak said,_* O ye thieves!" he remarked, looking down into
Ali Baba's mild old eyes. [* Greeting!]

Squatting in loose-flowing robes, princely bred, and almost
saintly with his beautiful gray beard, the patriarch looked frail
enough to be squashed under the Sikh's enormous thumb. But he
wasn't much impressed.

"God give thee good sense, Sikh!" was the prompt answer.

"Fear Allah, and eschew infidelity while there is yet time!"
boomed a man as big as the Sikh and a third as heavy again--Ali
Baba's eldest son, a sunny-tempered rogue, as I knew from
past experience.

"Whose husband have you put to shame by fathering those two
brats?" asked a third man.

Mahommed that was, Ali Baba's youngest, who had saved Grim's life
and mine at El-Kerak.

They all laughed uproariously at that jest, so Mahommed repeated
it more pointedly, and the Sikh turned his back to consider the
sunshine through the open door and the rising heat within.
Suliman and the other little gutter-snipe proceeded to make
friends with the whole gang promptly, giving as good as they got
in the way of repartee, and nearly starting a riot until Grim
called Ali Baba into the dining-room, where de Crespigny was
shaking up the second round of warm cocktails in a beer-bottle.

Ali Baba chose to presume that the mixture was intended for
himself. The instant de Crespigny set the bottle on the table the
old rascal tipped the lot into a tumbler and drank it off.

"It is good that the Koran says nothing against such stuff as
this," he said, blinking as he set the glass down. "I have never
tasted wine," he added righteously.

"Are the camels ready?" asked Grim.

"Surely."

"What sort are they? Mangy old louse-food, I suppose, that had
been turned out by the Jews to die?"

"Allah! My sons have scoured Hebron for the best. Never were such
camels! They are fit to make the pilgrimage to Mecca."

"I suppose that means that the rent to be charged for each old
camel for a month is more than the purchase-price of a really
good one?"

"The camels are mine, Jimgrim. I have bought them. Shall there be
talk of renting between me and thee?"

"Not yet. After I've seen the beasts. If they're as good as you
say I'll pay you at the government rate for them per month."

"Allah forbid! The camels are yours, Jimgrim. For me and mine
there will no doubt be a profit from this venture without
striking bargains between friends."

Grim smiled at that like a merchant listening to a salesman. It
is not often that you can tell the color of his eyes, but on
occasions of that sort they look iron-gray and match the bushy
eyebrows. He turned to de Crespigny.

"Have you finished the census, 'Crep?"

"Pretty nearly."

"Have you got Ali Baba's property all listed?"

"Yes."

"And that of his sons and grandsons?"

"Every bit of it that's taxable."

"Good. You hear that, Ali Baba? Now listen to me, you old rascal.
When you complained to me the other day that there was no more
thieving left to do in Hebron, I told you you're rich enough to
quit, and you admitted it, you remember? You agreed with
me that jail isn't a dignified place for a man of your years
and experience."

_"Taib._* Jail is not good." [* All right]

"But you complained that you couldn't keep your gang out
of mischief."

"Truly. They are young. They have talent. Shall they sit still
and grow fat like a pasha in the harem?"

"So I said I'd find them some honest employment from time
to time."

"That was a good promise. Here already is employment. But you
know, Jimgrim, they are used to rich profits in return for
running risks. Danger is meat and drink to them."

"They shall have their fill this trip!" said Grim.

_"Taib._ But the reward should be proportionate."

"Government wages!" Grim answered firmly. The old Arab smiled.

"Under the Turks," he answered, "the officer pocketed the pay,
and the men might help themselves."

"D'you take me for a Turk?" asked Grim.

"No, Jimgrim. I know you for a cunning contriver--an upsetter
of calculations--but no Turk. Nevertheless, as I understand
it, we go against Ali Higg, who calls himself the Lion of Petra.
Sheikh Ali Higg has amassed a heap of plunder--hundreds of
camels--merchandise taken from the caravans; that should be ours
for the lifting. That is honest. That is reasonable."

"Not a bit of it!" said Grim. "Let's get that clear before we
start. I know your game. You've got it all fixed up between
yourselves to stick with me until Ali Higg is _mafish_* and
then bolt for the skyline with the plunder. Not a bit of
use arguing--I know. You shouldn't talk your plans over in
coffee-shop corners if you don't want me to hear of them."

---------
* Lit., nothing--corresponds to "na-poo" in Army slang.
---------

"Jimgrim, you are the devil!"

"Maybe. But let's understand each other. Your property in Hebron
is all listed. We'll call that a pledge for good behavior. You
and your men are going to have government rifles served out to
you that you'll have to account for afterward. Every rifle
missing when we get back, and every scrap of loot you lay your
hands on, will be charged double against your Hebron property. On
the other hand, if any camels die you shall be reimbursed. Is
that clear?"

"Clear? A camel in the dark could understand it! But listen, Jimgrim."

The venerable sire of rogues went and sat crosslegged on the
window-seat, evidently meaning to debate the point. If an Arab
loves one thing more than a standing argument it is that same
thing sitting down.

"We go against Ali Higg. That is no light matter. He will send
his men against us, and that is no light matter either. They are
heretics without hope of paradise and bent on seeing hell before
their time! Surely they will come to loot our camp in the dark.
Shall we not defend ourselves?"

But Grim was not disposed to stumble into any traps.

"Does a loaded camel on the level trouble about hills?" he asked.

But Ali Baba waved the question aside as irrelevant.

"They come. We defend ourselves. One, or maybe two, or even more
of Ali Higg's scoundrels are slain. Behold a blood-feud! Jimgrim
and his friends depart for El-Kudz* or elsewhere; Ali Baba and
his sons have a feud on their hands. [* Jerusalem]

"Now a feud, Jimgrim, has its price! It would do my old heart
good to see the blood of Ali Higg and his heretics, for it is
written that we should smite the heretic and spare not. But we
should also despoil him of his goods, or the Prophet will not be
pleased with us!"

"That is the talk of a rooster on a dung-hill," Grim answered. "A
rooster crows a mile away. Another answers with a challenge, but
the camels draw the plow in ten fields between them. That is like
a blood-feud between you and Ali Higg. Five days' march from here
to Petra and how many deserts and tribes between?"

"So much the easier to keep the loot when we have won it!"
answered Ali Baba.

"There's going to be no loot!" said Grim.

"Allah!"

"Would you rather have me send back to Jerusalem for regular police?"

"Nay, Jimgrim! That would be the end of you, for those police
would bungle everything. You need clever fellows with you if you
go to sup with Ali Higg."

"Well? Are you coming?"

_"Taib._ We are ready. But--"

"On my terms!"

"But the pay is nothing!"

"So is my pay nothing! This man"--he pointed to me--"gets no pay
at all. Narayan Singh, the Sikh, gets less pay than a policeman."

"Then what is the profit?"

"For you? The honor of keeping your word. The privilege of making
fair return for past immunity. Why aren't you and all your sons
in jail this minute? Why did I invite you to come with me on this
occasion? Because a man looks for friends where he has given
favors! But if you consider you owe the administration nothing
for forgiving all past offenses, very well; I'll look for
friends elsewhere."

"As for the administration, Jimgrim, may Allah turn its face
cold! But you are another matter. We will come with you."

"On my terms?"

_"Taib."_

You would have thought that settled it, especially as Ali Baba
had already stated that he and his gang were prepared for the
journey. But the East, that is swift to wrath, is very slow over
a bargain, and it is a point of doctrine besides, all the way
from Gibraltar to Japan, to keep an American waiting if you hope
to get the better of him. Ali Baba settled down for a nice long
talk; and you would have thought, to judge by Grim's expression,
that he could ask for nothing better.

The old rogue wanted to know among other things who would have
the task of cleaning rifles on the journey. It seemed that he was
long on sanctity, and not allowed by his religion to touch grease
in any shape or form. Grim satisfied him on that point. Narayan
Singh should clean the rifles.

But that started him off on a new trail. He tried to see how much
more he could impose on the Sikh, and suggested such matters as
pitching tents, cooking, gathering firewood, cleaning pots and
pans, leading the pack-camels, and a host of other necessary evils.

"I shall issue all needful orders to each man," Grim told him
bluntly at last.

"And what is to be done to Ali Higg?"

"That remains to be seen."

"He is a devil with a cold face."

"So I'm told."

"He has more than a hundred armed men."

"I heard twice that number."

"And we shall be twenty?"

"Twenty."

"Oh, well, Allah makes all things easy!"

But that was not the last word. There was still a custom of the
country to be met and overcome.

"Are the camels watered?" Grim asked.

"Surely."

"Packs all ready?"

"All tied up-everything."

"You're all ready to start, then?"

_"Inshallah bukra."_ * [* Tomorrow, if God is willing.]

"Tomorrow won't help me," said Grim. "We start tonight, at
sundown. I'll go with you and look the camels over now."

"But, Jimgrim, that is impossible. My son Mahommed's second wife
is sick--"

"Leave him behind, then, to look after her."

"He will not consent to be left! Two of the camels are not paid
for. The man comes in the morning for his money."

"Leave the money here for him with Captain de Crespigny. We
start tonight."

"But what if the camels are not satisfactory?"

"I shall see about other ones at once in that case. There'll be
time if we look them over now. We start tonight."

"I was thinking about some mules to carry an extra load or two."

"No. Don't want mules. Too hot for them. Besides, there's no time
for changing the loads over. We start tonight."

"Tomorrow will be a better moon, Jimgrim."

"We want a full moon when we get to Petra. We start tonight. Come
along; show me the camels."

"It is hot now. There is a bad stink in the stables. Better see
them when it gets cooler."

"I'm going now. Are you coming with me?"

_"Taib._ I will show them to you. They are good ones. They
will make you proud. Better give them another night's rest,
though, Jimgrim."

"Come along. Let's look at them."

"One has a little girth-gall that--"

"Ali Baba, you old rogue, we start tonight!" said Grim.







CHAPTER II

"Trust in God, But Tie Your Camel!"



Do you believe in portents? I do. Whenever in the East the first
two statements that a man has made in my presence, and that I
have a chance to test, prove accurate, I go ahead and bet on all
the rest. I don't mean by that that because a man has told the
truth twice he won't lie on the third and fourth occasion; for
the East is like the West in that respect, and usually seeks to
turn its virtue into capital. But in a land where, as old King
Solomon, who knew his crowd, remarked, "All men are liars," you
must have some sort of weathervane by which to guide your
national optimism, so I settled on that one long ago.

Ali Baba had said there was a bad stink in the camel stables. A
natural expert in hyperbole, he had not exaggerated in the least.
And he had said that they were good camels; it was true. You did
not need to be a camel expert to know those great long-legged
Syrian beasts for winners. They looked like the first pick of a
whole country-side, as he maintained they were--twenty-five of
them in one string, representing an investment at after-war
prices of the equivalent of five or six thousand U.S. dollars.

"Who has been looted to pay for these?" asked Grim.

"Allah! You have put an end to our proper business, Jimgrim. What
could we do? We took our money and bought these camels, thinking
to take a hand in the caravan trade."

Grim looked into the old rogue's eyes and laughed.

"In the land I come from," he said, "a capitalist with your
predatory instincts would pay a lawyer by the year to tell him
just how far he could safely go!"

"A _wakil?"_ sneered Ali Baba. "The _wakils_ are all scoundrels.
May Allah grind their bones! No honest man can have the advantage
of such people."

Grim looked the loads over, but there was nothing that any one
could teach that gang about desert work. The goat-skin water-bags
were newly patched and moist; the gear was all in good shape,
none new, but all well-tested; and there was food enough in
double sacks for twenty men for a month. Mujrim, Ali Baba's giant
oldest son, picked up the loads and turned them over for Grim
to examine with about as much apparent effort as if he were
tossing pillows.

Presently Grim laughed again, and looked at the line of fifteen
other sons and grandsons, all squatting in the shadow of the wall
watching us.

"Which is the chief Lothario?" he asked; only he used a much more
expressive word than that, because the East is frank where the
West deals in innuendo, and vice versa.

"They are all grown men," said Ali Baba. "There's a woman named
Ayisha--a Badawi (Bedouin)--who has lately come from El-Maan with
a caravan of wheat merchants."

"How did you know that, Jimgrim?"

"I'm told she has been buying things in the _suk_* that no Badawi
could have use for, and has sent to Jerusalem for goods that
could not be obtained here. I want to speak with her. Has any
of your"--he smiled at the line of placidly contented sons
again--"fathers of immorality made her acquaintance by some
chance?" [* Bazaar]

Every one of the sixteen sons instantly assumed an expression of
far-away meditation. Ali Baba looked shocked.

"I see!" said Grim. "Um-m-m! Well--none of my business. But one
of you go fetch her to the governorate. You may tell her she's
not in trouble, but an officer wants first-hand information
about El-Maan."

"Shall my sons be seen dragging a woman through the streets?"
asked Ali Baba.

"Let's hope not. But I don't care to send the police. I don't
want to put her to indignity, you understand. Suppose you arrange
it for me, eh?"

"Listen, Jimgrim; that woman is a strange one! Men have spoken
evil of her, but none can prove it. I have heard it said she has
a devil. `Trust in God, but tie your camel!' says the Book.* The
wisest among wise men would be he who let that woman alone!"

------------
* The Moslems attribute all their favorite proverbs to the
Koran, whether they are in the book or, as in this case, not.
------------

"I suppose I'll have to get Captain de Crespigny to arrange it
for me."

_"Tfu!_* There is no need for a man like you to appeal to the
governor. _Taib._ It shall be done. Have no doubt of it."

----------
* An exclamation of contempt
----------

"All right. Send her up to the governorate--and no delays, mind!
We start tonight at sundown."

On our way back we met Narayan Singh returning from the _suk_
with parcels under his arm. That in itself was a sure sign of the
lapse of contact with law and order; in Jerusalem he would have
had an Arab carry them, because dignity is part of a Sikh's
uniform. You realized without a word said that the uniform
would be discarded presently. He looked me up and down as the
quartermaster eyes a new recruit, and nodded in that exasperating
way that makes you feel as if you had been ticketed and numbered.
If Grim had not told me that the Sikh had been first to suggest
taking me to Petra I would have insulted him painstakingly there
and then; but you learn a certain amount of self-restraint, I
suppose, before such a man as Narayan Singh ever approves of you
for any purpose.

He undid the parcels on the dining-room table in the governorate,
and the next half-hour was spent in rigging me up as an
ascetic-looking Indian Moslem, with the aid of a white turban
wound over a cone-shaped cap, great horn-rimmed spectacles, and
the comfortable, baggy garments that the un-modernized _hakim_
wears over narrow cotton pantaloons.

Over it all they put a loose, brown Bedouin cloak of camel-hair
such as any man expecting to travel across deserts might invest
in, whatever his nationality; it was hotter than Tophet, but, as
the Arabs say, what keeps the heat in will also keep it out. It
gives you a feeling of carrying your home around with you
on your back, the way a snail totes its shell, and there are
worse sensations.

"Now consider yourself a while in the mirror, sahib," said
Narayan Singh. "When a man knows how he looks he begins to
act accordingly."

Have you ever stopped to think how true that is? There was a
full-length mirror upstairs in de Crespigny's bedroom, left
behind by a German missionary's wife when the Turks and their
friends stampeded, and Narayan Singh watched while I posed in
front of it. Before many minutes, without any deliberately
conscious effort on my part, gesture and attitude were molding
themselves to fit the costume, in somewhat the same way, I
suppose, that a farm-hand from Montenegro shapes himself into a
new American store suit.

"But it is necessary to remember!" warned Narayan Singh. "We
should have done this sooner. There should be a photograph to
carry with you, because a man forgets his own appearance where
there are no mirrors and none others resembling himself.
Henceforward, sahib, sleeping or waking, be a _hakim!_ There is a
chest of medicines downstairs."

By the time I had got down Grim had already changed into Bedouin
dress--stepped simply out of one world into another. All he does
is to stain his eyebrows dark, put on the clothes, and cease to
resemble anything on earth except a desert-born Arab. I don't
know how long he was learning to make the transformation, but no
man could learn the trick in twenty years unless he loved the
desert and the sinewy men who live in it.

He looked me over again narrowly, and then decided I must return
upstairs and shave my head. "The only chance you've got of not
being pulled apart between four camels, or pushed over a
precipice, is to look like darwaish. Have Narayan Singh stain the
back of your neck with henna--not too much of it--just a
little--you're from Lahore, you know--a university product."

By the time I had carried out that order I could not even
recognize myself without the turban on. "No matter how many
mistakes now, Sahib!" grinned the Sikh. "None but a crazy Moslem
would travel in this sun with his head shaved. Better put a cloth
inside the cap, thus, for greater safety."

The only other thing Grim did to me was to throw away my toothbrush.

"They're suspicious in these parts," he said. "They'd figure it
was hog-bristles. You'll have to make shift with a chewed stick,
and pick your teeth between times with a dagger the way the rest
of us do. Hello! Here she comes. You do the honors, 'Crep; we're
in the game from now on."

De Crespigny went to the door and Grim and I squatted cross-legged
in the window-seat. I tried to feel like a middle-aged native
of the East under the rule of that twenty-six-year-old governor;
but it couldn't be done. I don't know yet what the sensations
are of, say, a bachelor of arts of Lahore University who has
to take orders from a British subaltern. I expect you have
to leave off pretending and really be an Indian to find out
that; otherwise your liking for the fellow himself offsets
reason. No white man could have helped liking young de Crespigny.

He came in after a minute perfectly self-possessed, leading a
young woman who took your breath away. I have heard all the usual
stories about the desert women being hags, but every one of them
was pure fiction to me from that minute. If all the rest were
really what men said of them, this one was sufficiently amazing
to redeem the lot. De Crespigny addressed her as Princess, and
she may have really ranked as one for all I know.

She sat on a chair, rather awkwardly, as if not used to it, and
we stared at her like a row of owls, she studying us in return,
quite unabashed. The Badawi don't wear veils, and are not in the
least ashamed to air their curiosity. She stared uncommonly hard
at Grim.

Of middle height, supple and slender, with the grace of all
outdoors, smiling with a dignity that did not challenge and yet
seemed to arm her against impertinence, not very dark, except
for her long eyelashes--I have seen Italians and Greeks much
darker--she somewhat resembled the American Indian, only that her
face was more mobile.

Part of her beauty was sheer art, contrived by the cunning arrangement
of the shawl on her head, and kohl on her eyelashes.  That young
woman knew every trick of deportment down to the outward thrust
of a shapely bare foot in an upturned Turkish slipper. Her clothing
was linen, not black cotton that Bedouin women usually wear, and
much of it was marvelously hand-embroidered; but all the jewelry
she wore was a necklace made of gold coins. It gave a finishing
touch of opulence that is the crown of finished art.

But it was her eyes that took your breath away, and she was
perfectly aware of it; she used them as the desert does all its
weapons, frankly and without reluctance, sparing no consideration
for the weak--rather looking for weakness to take advantage of
it. They were wise--dark, deadly wise--alight with youth, and yet
amazingly acquainted with all evil that is older than the world.
She was obviously not in the least afraid of us.

"You are from El-Maan?" asked de Crespigny, and she nodded.

"Did you come all this way alone?"

"No woman travels the desert alone."

"Tell me how you got here."

"You know how I got here. I came with a caravan that carried
wheat--the wife of the sheikh of the caravan consenting."

She spoke the clean concrete Arabic of the desert, that has a
distinct word for everything, and for every phase of everything
--another speech altogether from the jargon of the towns.

"Are they friends of yours?"

"Who travels with enemies?"

"Did you know them, I mean, before you came with them?"

"No."

"Then you are not from El-Maan?"

"Who said I was?"

"I thought you did."

"Nay, the words were yours, khawaja." * [* Lit., gentleman-sir]

"Please tell me where you come from."

"From beyond El-Maan."

She made a gesture with one hand and her shoulder that suggested
illimitable distances.

"From which place beyond El-Maan?"

She laughed, and you felt she did it not in self-defense, but out
of sheer amusement.

"Ask the jackal where his hole is! My people live in tents."

"Well, Princess, tell me, at any rate, what you are doing here in
El-Kalil." [Hebron]

"Ask El-Kalil. The whole _suk_ talks of me. I have made purchases."

"That's what I'm getting at. You've made some unusual purchases,
and you've sent to Jerusalem for things that people don't use as
a rule in tents out in the desert--silk stockings, for instance,
and a phonograph with special records, and soft pillows, and
writing-paper, and odds and ends like that. Do you use those things?"

"Why not?"

"Do you use books in French and English?"

She hesitated. It was the first time she had not seemed perfectly
at ease.

"Can you even read Arabic?"

She did not answer.

"Then the books, at any rate, are meant for some one else? Tell
me who that some one is."

"Allah!" she exploded "May I not buy what I will, if I pay
for it?"

But that was a false move. You can't upset the young British
officer by storming at him. De Crespigny smiled, and came back at
her with his next question suddenly.

"Are not those things for the wife of Ali Higg, and are you not
from Petra?"

"If you know so surely whence I come, why do you ask me?"

"Are you a slave?"

"Allah!"

"How many wives has Ali Higg?"

"How should I know?"

"Because I think you are one of his wives. Is that not so?"

"I am Ayisha. I claim Your Honor's protection."

That was no false move. It was so nearly a checkmate that de
Crespigny went to the sideboard for the silver box of cigarettes,
to offer her one and gain time for thought.

Ever since the days of Ruth, and no doubt long before that, it
has been the first law of the desert that man or woman claiming
protection can no longer be treated as an enemy. It is possibly
the earliest form of freemasonry, and it survives.

Arab history is full of instances of a warrior laying down his
life for an enemy who has claimed protection from him. And young
de Crespigny was ruler of the most unruly city in the Near East
because he understood better than most men how to respect Arab
prejudices. Ayisha accepted a cigarette, fitted it into a long
amber tube, and watched him.

"Very well," he said at last. "If I protect you you must answer
questions. Are you Ali Higg's wife?"

"Have I Your Honor's promise of protection?"

"Yes. Are you Ali Higg's wife?"

"I am his second wife."

"Thought so! And you've been sent to make purchases for
number one?"

She nodded.

"How do you propose to convey all these things back to Petra?"

"Surely it is not difficult now that I am promised Your
Honor's protection!"

"My district extends half-way to Beersheba and to the eastward as
far as the shore of the Dead Sea--no farther," said de Crespigny.

"I can wait. I must wait for the purchases from Jerusalem. Sooner
or later there will be a caravan across the desert to El-Maan. I
have two servants here to make inquiries for me."

"Yes, and two more who went to Jerusalem. Four men. Tell me this,
Princess Ayisha: how came Ali Higg to trust you, alone with four
men, on such a long and difficult journey?"

"Is he not my lord?"

"But the men?"

"Is he not also their lord? And he holds their wives and sons in
trust at Petra."

"You'll admit it's unusual?"

"Do you find it strange that a woman should be faithful to
her lord?"

"But to Ali Higg? He has a name--a reputation! How many wives
has he?"

"The Koran permits but four. The others are not wives."

"And you're going back?"

_"Inshallah."_ [If God is willing.]

It was obvious that no alternative would have the least appeal
for her.

"Well, your movements have all been known to me. Your men have
been watched. The word from Jerusalem is that the two you sent
there have made their purchases. I heard over the telephone that
they are on their way here. A suggestion has been made to me
that you five might be held here as hostages to bring Ali
Higg to terms."

She laughed. "He would raid, and make prisoners, ten for one. If
an exchange were not made promptly his prisoners would be put to
torture, and--"

De Crespigny saw fit to bring the conversation back to its other
foot, as it were. Not the whole British Army was in a position
just then to impose its will on Ali Higg, so certainly de
Crespigny was not; and if you are any kind of real diplomatist,
with a career in front of you, you don't talk fight unless you
mean it.

"But of course, as you've claimed my protection I couldn't dream
of that," he assured her. "Now, is there anything else you want
after those men get here from Jerusalem?"

"Nothing else."

"They'll be here in an hour or so. Would you be ready to leave at
once for Petra?"

"As soon as I can join a caravan."

"Today? This evening, for instance?"

"Allah provide it!"

"That's settled, then."

He turned toward Grim.

"This is Sheik Hajji,* Jimgrim bin Yazid of El-Abdeh, who has
twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He is my honored friend. He
starts tonight with a caravan toward Petra. You may travel with
him and be in safe hands all the way."

----------
* One who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca
----------

She eyed Grim curiously, startled, it seemed to me. Then her
expression changed slowly to excitement, followed by a look of
baffling wisdom, as much as to say she knew something and would
not tell. I don't think it was his name that startled her; that
sounded Arabic enough.

"What business has he at Petra?" she asked.

De Crespigny let Grim answer that conundrum.

_"Ya sit Ayisha,"_* said Grim, "I carry a letter to Sheikh Ali
Higg from some one in Arabia. I will deliver you along with the
letter. You may have a place in my caravan--provided you have
camels, provisions, and a litter," he added; for the surest way
to increase her already alert suspicion would have been to offer
to provide everything. [* O lady Ayisha.]

"Let me see the letter!"

Grim produced one instantly--an envelop with a big red seal on
it. It was marked across the top in large letters "On His
Majesty's Service," but addressed in Arabic to somebody, and as
she could not read she was satisfied.

"Ali Higg will hold you answerable for my safety if he has to
destroy armies to reach you!" she said simply.

_"Ya sit Ayisha,"_ Grim answered solemnly, "may Allah turn my
face cold if Sheikh Ali Higg shall have fault to find with me in
this matter!"

"How many is in your caravan?" she asked. "Twenty armed men."

She nodded. "I will pay for my place in the caravan, according to
the custom--the half now and the other half on arrival."

Without gesture, without moving a muscle of his face, Grim
turned down that proposal desert-fashion, that is emphatically,
with a reservation.

_"Ya sit Ayisha,_ may Allah do so to me, and more, if I will
accept a price for this. Between Ali Higg and me let this
thing be."

_"Taib,"_ she answered. "My men shall look for camels. I will go
with you tonight."

She went away then, leaving a smile behind her that would have
coaxed the Sphinx, and rode down-street toward the ancient city
on a big gray donkey guarded by two Bedouins armed with swords
and spears.

"Did I do all right?" asked de Crespigny.

"Fine!" Grim answered. "You'll be ruling England one of these
days, 'Crep. Good job I had that letter to show her, though,
wasn't it?"




CHAPTER III

"Ali Higg's Brains Live in a Black Tent!"


I hate to have to admit that there was any virtue in Suliman, or
anything other than vice in his new chum Abdullah. The two little
devils stole my cigarettes, and deviled me unmercifully about my
disguise, making improper jokes, at which Ali Baba and his sons
laughed uproariously, and which they recalled at intervals for
days afterwards.

But almost immediately after the "lady Ayisha" had left the
governorate I was forced to admit that the brats were useful. In
their own way they served Grim as a pair of hounds work for a man
out hunting rabbits, for they could penetrate places and be
welcome where a grown man would be killed--at the very least--for
intruding or attempting to intrude. Harems, for instance. And
they could be naive and wheedling toward a woman when they chose.

They came in with their tongues hanging out like a pair of pups,
and sticky with the awful stuff men sell for candy in the
El-Kalil bazaars. Evidently some woman had been pumping them
for information, and Grim made them stand in front of him
on the carpet.

"Well?"

They both spoke at once. Now and then one paused for breath and
then the other, but on the whole it was a neck-and-neck race to
tell the tale first.

"There was a woman in the _suk_ who had heard of Jimgrim but
never saw him, and she bought us sweets and took us to her house,
and she asked us questions about Jimgrim, and we told lies, and
she asked us what we were doing in El-Kalil, and we said nothing,
and she said _wallah!_ That was very little, and then she asked
us all over again about Jimgrim. (_Gasp_)

"So we said Jimgrim has already gone back to Jerusalem, and she
did not believe; but we swore by the beard of the Prophet, so she
said what were we going to do now, and we said we would go to the
governorate and beg for bread. (_Gasp_)

"So she said what next, and we said there is a great sheikh here
from Arabia, who makes a journey to Petra, and _inshallah_ he
will take us with him, and she said why did we want to go to
Petra, and we said because our mothers were carried off by the
Turks and sold to the Arabs and _inshallah_ we should find them
near Petra. (_Gasp_)"

"So far, good!" said Grim. "That's what she got out of you. Now
what did you get out of her?"

"She said _wallah!_ There is Ali Higg at Petra and he grinds the
face of the poor and is a great chief and will make us prisoners
and sell us for slaves or have us turned into eunuchs, and we
said (_gasp_) that we are _msakin_* and not afraid of Ali Higg
and he may as well have us as anybody, and if it is written that
we shall be eunuchs then it is written and who shall change it?
(_Gasp_) [* Poverty-stricken]

"And she said what made us think that the great sheikh will take
us to Petra, and we said because he had promised, but he may be a
big liar and we don't know yet."

"What kind of woman is she?" Grim asked.

"A big fat woman with a belly like two waterbags one on top of
the other, thus!"

"What is her name?"

"She is the wife of Ismail ben Rafiki, the wool-dealer."

"Uh-huh. Yes. Go on."

"So she said we should come back here and find out if the sheikh
will really take us and say to the sheikh (_gasp_) there is a
lady in the city who can be of service to him in a certain matter
and he should come back with us and we should lead him to the
house and she will give us money and the sheikh will understand."

"Good!" pronounced Grim. "Not half bad. Just for that I'll go
with you."

He winked at de Crespigny, nodded to me, pulled on a black-and-white
striped Bedouin cloak, and went off with them at once. Whereat
Narayan Singh came in, looking like another person altogether,
although, if anything, bigger than before. He had got out of
uniform and was dressed in a medley of Indian and Arab costume
that made him look like one of those slaves in the "Arabian Nights"
who cut off the heads of women. All he needed was a big curved
simitar to fill the bill.

"Henceforth I am the _hakim's_ servant," he said, showing his
teeth in an enormous grin. "Only," he added, "since it will be I
who instruct the _hakim,_ in secret the sahib must listen to me."

He got out the medicine-chest, and being a Sikh with all of a
soldier's opinion of civilians proposed to teach me what the
labels on the little bottles stood for. Even he laughed after a
minute or two, when he had got himself thoroughly sewed up and
called each bottle by its wrong name.

"Ah! What does it matter!" he exclaimed at last.  "Sore
eyes--broken leg--boils--knife-wound--let it be all one. Give
episin salts--always episin. Then, if we are long in one place,
so that a sick man comes a second time, swearing grievously
because of episin, give croton. That person will not come again,
but the fame of the _hakim_ will spread far and wide."

"You'd much better teach me how a _hakim_ sits a camel,"
I suggested.

"All ways, sahib, for the _hakim_ is not seldom a _bunnia_ whose
parents bought him education. Softer than wax is the rump of a
_bunnia_ and one who reads books. He sits this way until the
boils break out, and then that way until the skin chafes. Then
presently he lies across the saddle on his belly and either prays
or curses, according as his spirit is pious or otherwise. But the
camel continues to proceed, since that is its nature."

"Well, go on, instruct the _hakim,_ then. The sahib listens."

"It is well to remember there will be with us, besides those
seventeen thieves of this place, who know who we truly are, four
sons of the desert and a woman. Now the woman, being woman, and
they are all alike, will take note of the _hakim_ and pretend to
little sickness for the sake of making talk. Whereas the men,
being, as it were, the guardians of the woman, will be seized
with pride and jealousy. So that what with the woman's curiosity
and the men's watchfulness there will be great need for discretion."

"How would you define discretion?"

"In the case of the woman, insolence. In the case of the men, a
good humor--with perhaps some such physic for quarrelsomeness as
croton oil administered in their food on suitable occasion.
Whenever they get suspicious, sahib, drench their food!

"When the woman makes great eyes and shams complaints, tell her
what their cursed Prophet said of women. Never mind whether he
said it or not, sahib, for she will not know the truth of it,
never having read the book. Only speak evil of all women, and so
we shall come to Ali Higg's nest in good repute."

"All right. I'll try not to flirt with the lady. What next?"

"The sahib will be accused of being a Persian, and will be
insulted accordingly, for none loves a Persian in this land,
Islam having two chief sects, of which the Persians chose to
adopt the Shia faith, which is not in favor with the Sunni, who
are most numerous and most fanatic. The less the Sunni knows of
his religion the more he despises a Shia; and when these people
despise they steal, strike, abuse, and act otherwise unseemly."

"But I'm not supposed to be a Persian, am I?"

"No, for you could never act a Persian's part. But they will
accuse you of being a Persian because you are an Indian, as I
have heard a man called a dago because he was born somewhere
south of a certain line. When it has been established that you
are no Persian, but an Indian, it must be remembered that there
are only two kinds of Indians whom they do not despise, and they
are Sikhs and Pathans--Sikhs, because a Sikh can smite three
Arabs with one hand, and the Pathan for much the same reason.

"But I must not go as a Sikh because of the religious difficulty;
neither may you be a Pathan, because you in no way resemble one,
nor do you speak the Pushtu tongue. But I will be a Pathan,
because I can speak that language; therefore they will respect me
as a man prone to fight readily and well. And knowing that no
Pathan would demean himself by being servant to a man of no
account, they will more readily respect you, although you are
neither Sikh nor yet Pathan but are supposed to be a Punjabi
Mussulman. Therefore, sahib, you must take a middle course
between peace and pugnacity, pretending on the one hand to
restrain my quarrelsomeness, yet on the other depending for
safety on my readiness to take offense--as a man who is
accustomed to a servant of mettle."

The rest of his lecture was about niceties of behavior, religious
observances, and so on. It was a mystery how that man had never
been promoted. He seemed to have eyes for everything and a memory
for everything that he had ever observed. The Sikh despises the
religion of Islam quite as fervently as the follower of the
Prophet scorns Sikhism; yet he seemed familiar with every detail
of Moslem custom, and knew to what extent geography affected it.
The point he seemed to understand best was how to turn the flank
of ignorant fanaticism.

"Whenever you make a mistake, sahib, remember this: you are
Darwaish, which is a man who is privileged, having set behind him
all unimportant matters. So when you are accused of not observing
this or that, or of acting with impropriety, confound the Bedouin
always by sneering at their ignorance, saying that where you come
from men know what is proper. And Jimgrim, having truly made
the pilgrimage to Mecca, will confound them likewise, having
knowledge, whereas most of these rascals only know by hearsay."

I suppose he lectured me for two hours, until Grim came in
looking pleased with himself, followed by the two infants looking
much more pleased. You can't mistake the adventurous air of an
eight-year-old with money hidden on his person, whatever his
nationality may be. De Crespigny followed them in to learn
the news.

"Know anything about old Rafiki, the wool-merchant?" Grim asked.

"Steady-going old party," said de Crespigny. "Says his prayers,
cheats his customers, keeps the curfew law, and runs a three-wife
establishment, I believe, in three parts of town, all according
to the Book. Why, have you run foul of him?"

"He has offered me ten thousand piastres to poison Ali Higg"

"Show me the money!" laughed de Crespigny.

"He was hardly as previous as that. His head wife bribed these
kids to bring me to the house, and the old boy met me in the
wool-store. Said he'd been told I was going to Petra.

"First suggestion he made was that I should take my time on the
road and waylay a caravan that's sure to follow. He'd no idea,
of course, that the lady Ayisha is to travel with me. His
little scheme is to provide her with camels and men on his own
account--mean camels and his own men, who would run away at the
first sign of trouble.

"He assumes that I'm a gay Lochinvar who'd like nothing better
than to carry off the lady. He wants her carried off and ravished
as a spite for Ali Higg.

"Well, I didn't exactly fall for that; said I couldn't very well
approach Ali Higg afterward, and he admitted that relations in
that case might be kind o' strained. So he proposed next that I
should meet up with Ali Higg and poison him. He offered to
supply the poison--stuff that he said would make him die slowly
in agony."

"What's his quarrel with Ali Higg?"

"Seems the old boy had a daughter who was the apple of his
eye--or so he said. She was on her way down to Egypt; and I
suspect she did not travel by train because she's been bought by
some beast of a pasha. They didn't want inquiries by passport
people, or any interfering bunk like that.

"Anyhow, Ali Higg is quite a ladies' man, and he happened to be
crossing the map with part of his gang of thieves somewhere down
Beersheba way. He agreed with the pasha on the point of taste and
carried off the girl. So old wool-merchant Rafiki had to refund
the purchase-price--not that he admitted that to me, of course.

"I suspect that's where the rub comes. If he hadn't been selling
the girl illegally he'd surely have complained to you about the
rape in the first instance. As it was he couldn't think of
anything except revenge.

"I asked him if he'd take the girl back, and he said no, what
should he do with her? What he wants is money, or else the
lingering death of Ali Higg; and seeing it's about as easy to get
money out of that gentleman as cream cheese out of the moon,
he's willing to part with a hundred pounds for either of two
things--the rape of Ayisha or the death of Ali Higg. On those
terms he vows he'd die contented."

"If he finds out that Ayisha goes with you tonight he'll try to
corrupt old Ali Baba or one of his sons," said de Crespigny.

"Yes, and he probably will find it out. But corrupting Ali Baba
would take time and a lot of money; and none of his sons dares do
a thing without the old man's approval. I feel fairly sure of
the gang. Point is, do you know of any other gang that the
wool-merchant could hire right now to attack us somewhere
on the road?"

"There's none in Hebron that would dare. Plenty outside in
the villages."

"The lady Ayisha has probably told that she's going tonight,"
said Grim. "Old Woolly-wits might not find it out until too late,
but I suspect his wives get all the gossip that's going. Then
he'll have to work fast, because we shall move fast. What
villages does he trade with chiefly?"

"The Beni-Assan and the Beni-Khor."

"Small crowds, both of them. Counting her four fanatics, we'll be
four-and-twenty armed men, and tough in the bargain. Is there any
outlying sheikh who owes old Rafiki money? Who are his wives,
for instance?"

"Now you're on the track," said de Crespigny. "One of his
wives--the third, I think--is the daughter of Abbas Mahommed of
the Beni-Yussuf tribe. Abbas Mahommed is always in debt to him."

"Where's his place?"

"Down near the lower end of the Dead Sea. Right near where you'll
want to pitch your first camp. Abbas Mahommed sells him camel
wool and hides, and goes in debt in advance regularly. This
spring, for some reason, he delivered very little, and is still
heavily in debt to Rafiki."

"How many men has he?"

"Might turn out fifty strong."

"That's where we're due for our first trouble, then," said Grim.
"We'll have to put one over on him. I know one way of spoiling
friend Rafiki's game; old Woolly-wits'll fall sure. Suppose you
go and see him, 'Crep, or send for him, and ask him straight out
to provide camels for the lady Ayisha. He'll send his own men
along with them, of course, and give them private instructions.
Let's see--four men and a woman plus provisions, and he'll
probably send five men with them--twelve camels, eh? Who else can
raise seven good camels in this place?"

"Easy. I know where to get 'em."

"Good. Hire them then. Tie them in two strings and send them out
with two policemen to wait for us ten miles along the road. Be
sure they start ahead of us. Soon as we overtake them I'll
dismiss Rafiki's men, who'll be nothing but his spies, swap the
princess and her four men and their loads on to the fresh beasts,
and leave the police to chase Rafiki's experts home again. Will
you do that?"

It was getting well along toward sunset, and de Crespigny had to
hurry; but one of the advantages of being short-handed as
administrator of a district is that you have to keep in intimate
personal touch with all essentials, and there was not much that
young de Crespigny did not know about getting what he wanted done
in quick time. Within half an hour seven pretty good camels were
sauntering southward out of Hebron, with a couple of phlegmatic
Arab policemen perched on the two leaders, and the noses of the
others tied to the empty saddles of the beasts ahead. They were
neither as big nor in as good condition as old Ali Baba's
wonderful string, but very likely better than any that the
wool-merchant would provide, and by that much less likely to
reduce our speed after we should make the change.

"You see how easy it is," said Grim, "for a rascal like Ali Higg
to upset a whole country-side. Here we are getting the crime of
Palestine running in grooves, as it were, so's to regulate it
first and then reduce it to reasonable proportions, and all that
beast needs do is steal a woman and start civil war."

But I did not see that the wool-merchant's private plans for
vengeance amounted to civil war, and said so.

"Hah! Wait and see!" said Grim. "Woolly-wits goes after vengeance.
Somebody gets killed. That means a blood-feud. All the relatives
of the slain man--whether it's Ali Higg or one of his retainers
doesn't matter--take up arms; and all the relatives of Woolly-wits
do ditto. For each man killed in the war that follows the other
side is out for the equivalent in life or goods.  Village after
village gets drawn in.

"Suppose that sheikh at the south end of the Dead Sea who's in
debt to Woolly-wits jumps at the chance to loot our caravan and
bag the lady, we'll be lucky if one or two of our men don't get
scuppered. That means a blood-feud between that village and all
old Ali Baba's clan.

"But that isn't nearly all, nor nearly the worst of it. Ali Higg
learns next that the Dead Sea outfit have tried to waylay his
wife; so he takes the warpath. And instead of that making a
three-cornered fight of it, it might mean an offensive alliance
between Ali Higg and Ali Baba's gang.

"Civil war would be a very mild name for that. There'd be brains
brought to bear on it. The administration might have to spend
twenty or thirty thousand pounds and jail a lot of estimable
Arabs. The thing to do is to stop that kind of thing before
it happens."

"By corraling Ali Higg, I suppose?" said I.

"Can't very well do that. He's a free man. Of course he's got no
right to cross our border and steal women, but, on the other
hand, he's made himself boss of a district that no other
government pretends to control.

"If we can catch him our side of the line he's our meat; but
that's reciprocal; if he can catch us on his side there's no law
to prevent his doing what he likes with us. We've got to use our
heads with Master Ali Higg."

I think that was the first time it really dawned on me that this
venture was going to be dangerous. Even so, the calmness with
which Grim considered leaving law and all the means of its
enforcement behind and crossing deserts with a gang of known
thieves for accomplices took most of the edge off it.

You simply couldn't feel scared when that fellow smiled and
exposed the risks in detail, even with dark coming on and the
sound of camels being made to kneel outside the window. For Ali
Baba had become convinced at last that Grim really intended to
start that night, and, making a virtue of necessity, was better
than punctual. The camels were groaning and swearing, as they
always do at the prospect of a night's work.

"As I see it, any tribe out there has as much right to elect Ali
Higg leader as you and I have to elect a president," said Grim.
"I don't suppose they did elect him, but they'll claim they did.
The point is, he's got himself elected somehow. We've no veto. I
don't hold with murder; it sets a bad example and turns loose a
horde of individual trouble-makers who were under something like
control before. It might be easy to have him murdered; you see
how easy old Woolly-wits thought it might be. Murder has always
been the solution of politics in the Old World right down to
date; and look where they're at in consequence!"

"You must have some idea to go on," I suggested.

"What's your plan?"

"They say I look a bit like Ali Higg."

"But what then? Haven't you a plan--nothing you mean to try
first?"

"Oh yes. _Chercher la femme."_

"So there's a woman in it?"

"You bet! Ali Higg's no born statesman. His brains live in a
black tent, and he keeps 'em encouraged with French and English
books bought in Jerusalem--silk stockings--gramophones--all kinds
of things."

"What is she--a Turk? I've heard some of them are educated nowadays."

"No. And she never was a Turk. She was born in Bulgaria of
Greco-Russo-Bulgar parents, educated at Roberts College and
Columbia University, New York, married to a drummer in the
shredded-codfish business, divorced--on what grounds I don't
know--divorced him, though, I believe came out here as war
worker-teacher in refugee camps in Egypt--made the acquaintance
of Ali Higg when he was prisoner of war down there--he was
fighting for the Turks at one time--and helped him to escape.

"I've never set eyes on her, but they say she's a rare
good-looker and has more brains in her little finger than most
men keep under their hats. I'm told she has designs on the throne
of Mesopotamia."

"Mespot? I thought the League of Nations was going to let the
Arabs choose their own king."

"Sure. And as soon as she sees that Ali Higg's pretensions don't
amount to a row of shucks I wouldn't give ten piastres for that
gentleman's lease of life! Borgia had nothing on her, they
tell me."

"So we're out to play chess with a white woman. Why didn't you
tell me this before?"

"What's your hurry?" asked Grim. "If you find out too much all at
once you'll lose your bearings. I'll introduce you to the lady if
we ever reach Petra right side up. Now let's eat, and get a move
on. A full belly for a long march! Come."







CHAPTER IV

"Go and Ask the Kites, then, At Dat Rasi"



So far everything worked out strictly according to plan. We had
hardly finished a hurried meal when the lady Ayisha and her men
arrived on mean baggage camels provided by old Rafiki; and they
were not in the least pleased with their mounts, for a baggage
camel is as different from a beast trained to carry a rider as an
up-to-date limousine is from a Chinese one-wheel barrow. Perched
on top of the lady Ayisha's beast was a thing they call a
_shibrayah_--a sort of tent with a top like an umbrella, resting
on the loads slung to the camel's flanks. From inside that she
was busy abusing everybody.

There was only one good camel with her outfit--a small, blooded
looking Bishareen, a shade or two lighter in color than the
rest, ridden by a wiry, mean rascal with a very black face.
He seemed anxious not to assert himself, for he kept his
mount well away in the shadows, and moved off when any one
approached him.

It was growing pitch-dark. Grim counted noses and gave the order
to be off. Two or three men mounted, and that brought all the
kneeling camels to their feet. One of Ali Baba's sons caught the
beast assigned to me, brought him round to the gate, and began
_nakhing_ him to make him kneel again. But I know one or two
things about Arabs and their ways of assessing humanity.
Knowledge is for use.

"Do you mistake me for a cripple?" I asked, and instead of
continuing to _nakh_ in the camel language he pulled the beast's
head down.

The trick is simple enough. You put your foot on the hollow of
the camel's neck and swing into the saddle as he raises his head
again. Men used to the desert despise you if you have to make
your mount kneel in order to get on his back, pretty much as
horsemen of other lands despise the tender foot who can't rope
and saddle his own pony. There's no excuse for that, of course;
it stands to reason that lots of first-class men can't mount a
camel standing, never having done it; but, according to desert
lore, whoever has to make his camel kneel is a person of
no account.

So I started off with at least one minus mark not notched against
me. There was also an enormous feeling of relief, because I heard
those two brats blubbering at being left behind.

And oh, what a start that was before the moon-rise, with the
great soft-footed beasts like shadows stringing one behind
another into line through the streets of a city as old as
Abraham! Utter silence, except for three camel bells with
different notes. Instant, utter severance from all the new world,
with its wheels that get you nowhere and conventions that have no
meaning except organized whimsy.

Peace under the stars, wholly aloof and apart from the problem
that had sent us forth. And the feel under you of league-welcoming
resilience, whatever the camels might say by way of objection.
And they said a very great deal gutturally, as camels always do,
yielding their prodigious power to our use with an incomprehensible
mixture of grouchiness and inability to do less than their best.

Grim rode in advance. His was the first camel bell that jangled
with a mellow note somewhere in the darkness around the turn of a
narrow street, or in a tunnel, where house joined house overhead.
The lady Ayisha's was the second bell, three beasts ahead of me;
she being the guest of honor as it were, or, rather, the prize
passenger, it was important to know her whereabouts at any given
moment. And last of all came old Ali Baba with the third bell
announcing that all were present and correct. He and his men sat
their camels with a stately pride more than half due to the
rifles and bandoliers that had been served out.

That black-faced fellow on the little Bishareen did not trouble
himself about position in the line as long as we wound through
the city streets. He was next in front of me, and I saw him
exchange signals with a fat man in a house door, who may have
been Rafiki the wool-merchant. Narayan Singh was next behind me,
and I looked back to make sure that he had seen the signal too.

But when we passed out of the city at the south end and began to
swing along a white road at a clip that was plenty fast enough
for the baggage beasts, the man in front of me urged his beast
forward, thrusting others out of the way and getting thoroughly
well cursed for it, until he rode next behind Grim.

Seeing that, Narayan Singh rode after him, flogging furiously,
and got well cursed too. But nothing else in particular happened
for several miles until we began to descend between huge hills of
limestone and, just as the moon rose, came on the reserve camels
waiting for us in the charge of two policemen in a hollow.

Then there began to be happenings. First there was shrill delight
from Ayisha and a chorus of approval from her four men at the prospect
of changing to reasonably decent mounts. Then a tumult of indignation
from the wool-merchant's crowd--blunt refusal by them to consent
to any change at all--threats--abuse--arguments--the roaring of
camels who object on principle to everything, whatever it is,
even to a chance to rest, because it hurts their backs to stand
still loaded and over it all presently Grim's voice issuing
orders in a tone he had when things go wrong.

Strange that they don't choose leaders more often for their
voices! It's the most obvious thing in the world that a man with
a silver tongue, as they call it, can swing and sway any crowd.
If that man knows his own mind and has a plan worth spending
effort on he can trumpet cohesion out of tumult and win against
men with twenty times his brains. I don't doubt Peter the Hermit
had a voice like a bellbuoy in a tide-rip. Grim pitched his above
the babel so that every word fell sharp, clear, and manly. They
began to obey him there and then.

But he could not attend to everything at once, and while he
oversaw the changing of pack-saddles, and gave orders to the
policemen to ride back on the camels behind Rafiki's men and see
them safely into the city, that black-faced fellow on the
Bishareen edged away, and in a moment was off at full gallop
headed southwards. Narayan Singh was the first to see him go, but
it was half a minute before he could get near Grim and call his
attention to it.

Grim ordered three of Ali Baba's men in pursuit at once.

"Shall we shoot? Shall we slay?" asked one of them.

"No, no. He hasn't committed any crime yet. Catch him and bring
him back."

"Crime? What is crime out here? We can kill him. But overtake him
on that beast? _Wallah!"_

They wasted another minute arguing for leave to shoot, and by the
time they were off the deserter had a long start; but they rode
with a will when they did go.

If anything on earth looks more absurd than a ridden camel
galloping away in the moonlight, with his neck stretched out in
front of him and his four ungainly legs in the air all together,
it is three more camels doing the same thing. They looked like a
giant's washing blown off the line flapping before a high wind,
and made hardly more noise. The whack-whack-whack of sticks on
the beasts' rumps was as distinct as pistol-shots, but you hardly
heard the galloping footfall.

Grim went on about his business, for changing loads in the dark
is a job that needs attention, unless you choose to have a good
beast lose heart before morning and lie down in the middle of the
road. A camel in pain from a badly cinched girth will endure it
without argument for just so long; after which he quits, and
not all the whacking or persuading in the world will get him
up again.

At the end of twenty minutes we were under way once more. Peace
closed down on us, and we swayed along under the stars in
majestic silence. There have been better nights since, I
think;  but until then that was the most glorious experience
of a lifetime.

It is my peculiar delight to read and relive ancient history, and
of all history books the Old Testament is vastly the most
absorbing--far and away the most accurate. There is a school of
fools who set themselves up to scoff at its facts, but every new
discovery only confirms the old record; and here were we
sauntering through the night on camels over hills where the
fathers of history fought for the first beginnings of each man's
right to do his own thinking in his own way.

After a while Ali Baba gave his camel bell to his oldest son
Mujrim, and forced his beast up beside mine, seeming to think
silence might ruin the nerve of such a raw hand as myself. Or
perhaps it was pride of race and country that impelled him. Even
the meanest Arab thrills with emotion when he contemplates his
ancient heritage, just as he rages at the prospect of seeing the
Jews return to it, and Ali Baba, though a prince of thieves, was
surely not a man without a heart.

But the trouble with Arab as distinguished from Jewish history is
that too little of it was written down, and too much of it
invented to prove a theory--much like the stuff they put between
the covers of school history books--so Ali Baba's lecture,
although gorgeous fiction in its way, hardly enriched knowledge.
Not that he was free from the latterday craving for accuracy
whenever it might serve to bolster up the rest of the fabric.

"Yonder," he said, for instance, pointing toward the sky-line
with a dramatic sweep of his arm, "they say that Adam and Eve are
buried. But they lie!"

And having denounced that lie, he expected me to believe
everything else he told me.

According to him every rock we passed had its history of jinn and
spirits as well as battles, and he knew where the tomb was of
every national saint and hero, every one of whom had apparently
died within a radius of twenty miles. Some of them had died in
two or three different places as far as I could make out from his
account of them.

And what Abraham had not done on those hillsides in the way of
miracles and war would not be worth writing in a book; whatever
cannot be otherwise explained is set down to the Ancestor, the
Arabs ranking Abraham next after Mohammed, because the patriarch
built the Kaaba, or Mosque, at Mecca, that Mohammed centuries
later on adopted for his new religion.

But even Ali Baba grew tired of acting historian at last, and
once more silence settled down, broken only by the bells and the
camels' gurgling, until about midnight we overhauled the three
men who had been sent in chase of the fellow on the Bishareen.
They had lost him, and were angry; for what should a man do
except be angry in such a circumstance, unless he is willing to
accept blame?

"You should have let us shoot, Jimgrim! Once I got close enough
to have cut his beast's legs with my sword! You think this is
like the city, where a policeman holds up a hand and men halt?
Hah! Wallah! It was he who drew sword, and behold my camel's nose
where he slashed at it! One finger's breadth closer and I would
have had a sick beast on my hands--but he proved a blundering pig
with his weapon and only made that scratch after all.

"However, it is your fault, Jimgrim! You have made us to be
laughed at by that father of dunghills! His beast was the faster,
and he got away, and vanished in the shadows."

So there we halted and held a conference, letting the camels
kneel and rest for half an hour, while each man said his say
in turn.

"That man is Rafiki's messenger," said Grim. "He is on his way to
Abbas Mahommed, Sheikh of the Beni Yussuf, who owes Rafiki money.
I think Rafiki is offering to forgo the debt if Abbas Mahommed
will lie in wait for us and carry off this woman."

He did not ask for suggestions. There was no need. Every one of
those cloaked and muffled rascals had a notion of his own on the
spur of the moment, and was eager to get it adopted.

"Allah!" said Ali Baba. "Let us fight, then, with Abbas Mahommed,
and plunder his harem instead! It is simple. We come on his
village before dawn when those sons of Egyptian mothers* are
asleep. We set fire to the thatch, and thereafter act as seems
fit, slaying some and letting others escape!"

-----------
* To call any one an Egyptian is an Arab's notion of a perfect insult.
-----------

_"Wallah!_ Let us ride straight through the village, set a light
to it, and run," suggested Mujrim. "There isn't a woman in that
place I would burden a camel with."

"Nevertheless, we should take some women to keep as hostages
against the time when a blood-feud begins."

"And surely we shall carry off some camels."

"Aye! They have a horse or two as well. Abbas Mahommed trades
with El-Kerak, and only last month acquired a fine brown mare
that caught my eye."

"What are fifty men! We can fight twice fifty of such spawn as
the Beni Yussuf."

_"Wallah!_ They ran when the police paid them a visit. Ran from
the police!"

"Yes, and were afraid to kill the Jew who sued Abbas Mahommed in
the court for arrears of interest. They are cowards who dare not
take their sheikh's part in a dispute."

"Better wait until dawn, and then ride by their village and
defy them."

But the lady Ayisha had the most astonishing suggestion. She came
out from under the curtains of the _shibrayah_ and sat against
her camel's rump to face the circle of armed men and instruct them.

_"Taib!"_ she said scornfully. "Let this Abbas Mahommed come and
take me. I have a knife for his belly in any event. You go on to
Ali Higg and say his wife is in the hands of that scum. Ali Higg
can cross the desert in three days, and by the evening of the
fourth day there will be no village left, nor a man to call Abbas
Mahommed by his name. If I haven't killed him already Abbas
Mahommed will be carried off to Petra with the women, who shall
watch what is done to him before they are apportioned with the
other loot. That is simplest. Let Abbas Mahommed lift me if
he dares!"

She was clearly a young woman not averse to experiences, as well
as confident of her lord's good will. But Grim had the peace of
the border in mind; and the gang were not at all disposed to
stand by meekly while Abbas Mahommed paid a debt so easily to a
mere wool-merchant.

"I am an old man," said Ali Baba, "and must die soon. May He Who
never sleeps* slay me before I see my sons afraid to fight Abbas
Mahommed and all his host!" [* A synonym for Allah]

"Let's talk like wise men and not fools," proposed Grim at last,
and since he had let them have their say first they heard him in
silence now. "The difficulty is that Abbas Mahommed's village
lies at the corner of the Dead Sea. We must turn that corner. If
we pass between him and the sea he has us between land and water.
If we journey too far south to avoid him we lose at least a day
and tire our camels out. A forced march now would mean that we
must feed the camels corn, and we have none too much of it with
us; whereas tomorrow the grazing will be passable, and farther
on, where the grazing is poor, we shall need the corn."

_"Wallah!_ The man knows."

_"Inshalla,_ let there be a fight then!"

"Wait!" counseled Ali Baba. "I know this Jimgrim. There will be a
deception and a ruse, but no fight. Listen to him. Wait and see!"

"I think we will travel to the southward," said Grim, "and halt
at dawn out of sight of Abbas Mahommed's village. There let the
camels graze. But I, and a few of us, will take the lady Ayisha's
camel with the _shibriyah,_ and draw near to the village. That
black-faced rogue of Rafiki's will point us out to them, for he
will recognize the _shibriyah._

"Then when they come to seize the lady Ayisha they will find no
woman in the litter. So they will believe that Rafiki's messenger
has told lies that are blacker than his face, and will beat him
and let us go."

"But if they do not let you go? They are ruffians, you know, Jimgrim."

"Then I shall find another way."

"And how will you account for being so few men, when Rafiki's
messenger will have said we are at least a score?"

"Will that not be further proof that the man is a liar?"

"If I did not know you of old I would say that is a fool's plan,"
remarked Ali Baba, and his sons grunted agreement. "But you have
a devil of resourcefulness. _Taib!_ Let us try this plan and see
what comes of it."

So we started off again to a running comment of contemptuous
disapproval from the lady Ayisha, who seemed to think that no
plan could be a good one unless it entailed murder. The farther
we headed eastward, the nearer we came to the pale beyond which
her lord and master's word was summary law, the more openly she
advocated drastic remedies for everything, and the less she was
inclined to take no for an answer.

However, her monologue was wasted on the moon, for no one argued
with her. Grim led the way-off the highroad now, and down dark
defiles that set the camels moaning, while their riders yelled
alternately to Allah and apostrophized their beasts in the
monosyllabic camel language. Camels hate downhill work, especially
when loaded, and fall unless told not to in a speech they
understand, in that respect strangely like children.

You had to look out in the dark, too, for the teeth of the camel
behind, because they don't love the folk who drive them headlong
into gorges full of ghosts, and one man's thigh or elbow makes as
easy biting as the next.

Camels are no man's pets, and there is no explaining them. The
fools will graze contentedly with shrapnel and high explosives
bursting all about them, but go into a panic at the sight of a
piece of paper in broad daylight. And when they think they see
ghosts in the dark they act like the Gadarene swine, only making
more noise about it.

I wouldn't have been the lady Ayisha going down some of those
dark places for all the wealth of ancient Bagdad. Her _shibrayah_
pitched and rolled like a small boat in a big sea, and whenever a
rock leaned out over the narrow trail, or a scraggy old thorn
branch swung, it was by a combination of luck and good carpentry
that she was saved from being pitched down under the following
camel's feet. Whoever made that _shibrayah_ could have built
the Ark.

But we came down through one last terrific gorge on to a level
plain, where the camel-thorn grew in clumps and the heat
radiating from the hills was like the breath from an oven door
behind us. There the animals went best foot forward, as if they
smelled the dawn and hoped to meet it sooner by hurrying. We had
quite a job to keep back for the loaded beasts, and three or four
men, instead of one, brought up the rear to prevent straggling.

Then, about an hour before dawn, in a hollow between sparsely
vegetated sand-dunes, Grim ordered camp pitched, and in very few
minutes there was a row of little cotton tents erected, with a
small fire in front of each.

Most of the camels were turned out at once to graze off the
unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the
field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of
their wandering too far, for if the camel ever was wild, as many
maintain that he never was, that was so long ago that the whole
species has forgotten it, and he wouldn't know what to do without
his owner somewhere near.

He has to be used at night, because he will not eat at night; on
the other hand, he refuses to sleep in the daytime; so there is a
limit to what you can do with a camel, in spite of his endurance,
and once in so many days he has to be given a twenty-four hour
rest so that he may catch up on both food and sleep.

But on the dry plains such as where we were then they give less
trouble than anywhere. For though they soon go sick on good corn,
which a horse must have, they thrive and grow fat on desert
gleanings; and whereas sweet water will make their bellies ache
oftener than not, the brackish, dirty stuff from wells by the
Dead Sea shore is nectar to them.

Have you ever seen twenty camels rolling all at once with their
legs in the air, preparatory to making breakfast off dry thorns
that you wouldn't dare handle with gloves on? If so, you'll
understand that they're the perfect opposite of every other
useful beast that lives.

But not all the camels were turned out. Grim chose Mujrim--Ali
Baba's eldest son--a black-bearded, forty-year-old giant--two of
the younger men, Narayan Singh and me; and with the lady Ayisha's
beast in tow with the empty _shibrayah_ set off directly the sun
was a span high over the nearest dune.

We rode almost straight toward the sun, and in five minutes it
appeared how close we were to the village whence danger might be
expected. It was a straggling, thatched, squalid-looking cluster
of huts, surrounded by a mud wall with high, arched gates. Only
one minaret like a candle topped with an extinguisher pretended
to anything like architecture, and even from where we were you
could see the rubbish-heaps piled outside the wall to reek and
fester. There was a vulture on top of the minaret, and kites and
crows--those inevitable harbingers of man--were already busy with
the day's work.

The village Arabs are perfunctory about prayer, unless unctuous
strangers are in sight, who might criticize. So, although we
approached at prayer-time, it was hardly a minute after we rose
in view over a low dune before a good number of men were on the
wall gazing in our direction. And before we had come within a
mile of the place the west gate opened and a string of camel-men
rode out.

The man at their head was the sheikh by the look of him, for we
could see his striped silk head-dress even at that distance, and
he seemed to have a modern rifle as against the spears and
long-barreled muskets of the others. There were about two-score
of them, and they rode like the wind in a half circle, with the
obvious intention of surrounding us. Grim led straight on.

They rode around and around us once or twice before the man in
the striped head-gear called a halt. He seemed disturbed by
Grim's nonchalance, and asked our business with not more than
half a challenge in his voice.

"Water," Grim answered. "Did Allah make no wells in these parts?"

It doesn't pay to do as much as even to suggest your real reason
for visiting an Arab village, for they won't believe you in
any case.

"What have you in the _shibriyah?"_

"Come and see."

The Sheikh Mahommed Abbas drew near alone, suspiciously, with his
cocked rifle laid across his lap. His men began moving again,
circling around us slowly--I suppose with the idea of annoying
us; for that is an old trick, to irritate your intended victim
until some ill-considered word or gesture gives excuse for an
attack. But we all sat our camels stock-still, and, following
Grim's example, kept our rifles slung behind us.

The sheikh was a rather fine-looking fellow, except for smallpox
marks. He had a hard eye, and a nose like an eagle's beak; and
that sort of face is always wonderfully offset by a pointed black
beard such as he wore. But there was something about the way he
sat his camel that suggested laziness, and his lips were not thin
and resolute enough to my mind, to match that beard and nose. I
would have bet on three of a kind against him sky-high, even if
he had passed the draw.

He drew aside the curtain of the _shibrayah_ gingerly, as if he
expected a trick mechanism that might explode a bomb in his face.

_"Mashallah!_ Where is the woman?" he exclaimed.

I found out then that I was right as to the way to play that
supposititious poker hand. Grim had doped him out too, and
answered promptly without changing a muscle of his face.

_"Wallahi!_ Should I bring my wife to this place?"

"Allah! Thy wife?"

"Whose else?"

"It was Ali Higg's wife according to the tale!"

"Some fools swallow tales as the dogs eat the offal thrown to
them! By the beard of God's Prophet, whom do you take me for?"

_"Kif?_* How should I know?" [* What?]

"Go and ask the kites, then, at Dat Ras!"

"You are he? You are he who slew the--_Shi ajib!_* Now I think of
it they did say he was beardless. Nay! Are you--Speak! Who are
you?" [* This is strange!]

"Does your wife wander abroad while you herd cattle?" Grim
asked him.

"Allah forbid! But--"

"Is my honor likely less than yours?"

"Then you are Ali Higg?"

"Who else?"

"And these?"

"My servants."

"Your honor travels abroad with a scant escort!"

"Let us see, then, whether it is not enough! A tale was told me
of a black-faced liar on a Bishareen dromedary who fled hither
from El-Kalil last night to persuade the dogs of this place to
bark in some hunt of his. There was mention made of a woman. My
men pursued him along the road, but fear gave him wings. Hand
him over!"

"Allah! He is my guest."

"Or let us see whether I cannot fire one shot and summon enough
men to eat this place!"

"That is loud talk. They tell me you travel with but twenty."

"Try me!"

You didn't have to be much of a thought-reader to know what was
passing in that sheikh's mind. Supposing that Grim were really
the notorious Ali Higg, he might easily have left Hebron with
twenty men and have been joined by fifty or a hundred others in
the night. Or there might be others on the way to meet him now.
It was a big risk, for Ali Higg's vengeance was always the same;
he simply turned a horde of men loose to work their will on the
inhabitants of any village that defied him. The sheikh was
not quite sure yet that he really sat face to face with the
redoubtable robber, yet did not dare put that doubt to the test.

"Is that all Your Honor wants?" he asked. "Just that messenger?"

"Him and his camel--and another thing."

"What else, then? We are poor folk in this place. There has been
a bad season. We have neither corn nor money."

"If I needed corn or money I would come and take them," Grim
answered. "I have no present need. I give an order."

"Allah! What then?"

"It pleases me to camp yonder."

He made a lordly motion with his head toward the west.

"This side your village, then, all this day until sundown, none
of your people venture."

"But our camels go to graze that way."

"Not this day. Today yours graze to the eastward."

"There is poor grazing to the eastward."

"Nevertheless, whoever ventures to the westward all this day does
so in despite of me, and the village pays the price!"

"Allah!"

"Let Allah witness!" answered Grim.

And his face was an enigma; but half the puzzle was already
solved because there was no suggestion of weakness there. It was
the best piece of sheer bluffing on a weak hand that I had
ever seen.

"Will Your Honor not visit my town and break bread with me?"
asked Mahommed Abbas.

"If I visit that dung-hill it will be to burn it," Grim answered.
"Send me out that black-faced liar and the Bishareen. I am not
pleased to wait long in the sun."

"If we obey the command do we not merit Your Honor's favor?"

That was a very shrewd question. A weak man with a weak hand
would have walked into that trap by betraying the spirit of
compromise. On the other hand an ordinary bluffer would have
blundered by overdoing the high hand.

"Consider what is known of me," Grim answered. "How many have
disobeyed me and escaped? How many have obeyed and regretted it?
But by the beard of Allah's Prophet," he thundered suddenly, "I
grow weary of words! What son of sixty dogs dares keep me waiting
in the desert while he barks?"

Mahommed Abbas did not like that medicine, especially in front of
all his men. But they had ceased circling long ago and were
waiting stock-still at a respectful distance; for the name of Ali
Higg meant evidently more to them than the honor of their own
sheikh--which at best depends on the sheikh's own generalship. It
was a safe bet that if he had called on them to attack that
minute they would have declined.

So he gave the dignified Arab salute, which Grim deigned to
acknowledge with the slightest possible inclination of the head,
and led his men away.

"What would you have done if he had called your bluff?" I asked
Grim, as soon as they were all out of earshot.

"Dunno," he said, smiling. "I've learned never to try a bluff
unless I'm pretty sure of my man. That guy doesn't own many
chips. As a last resort I'd have to admit I'm a government
officer--if they hadn't killed us all first!"

We sat our camels there for about three quarters of an hour
before half a dozen of Mahommed Abbas' men appeared with Rafiki's
messenger riding the Bishareen between them. His face when they
handed him over was the color of raw liver, and if ever a man was
too scared to try to escape it was he. Ali Baba's two sons got
one on either side of him without making him feel any better, for
he too was a Hebron man and knew them and their reputation. There
was nothing improbable about their throwing in their lot with the
greater robber Ali Higg.

Then the sheikh's men tried to load gifts on Grim--chickens, a
live sheep, melons, vegetables, and camel milk in a gourd. Grim
did not even deign to acknowledge them in person, but made a
gesture to Narayan Singh, who promptly took charge of the
prisoner himself and sent Ali Baba's sons back for the presents.
They had the good grace to find fault with everything, vowing
that the sheep especially was only fit for vultures. However,
with a final sneer or two anent the donor's manners they bore
sheep and all along behind us back to camp.

"Is it well?" called Ali Baba, watching on the ridge of a dune,
and coming to life like a heron as soon as we drew near.

"All's well," said Grim.

"Father of cunning! What now?" the old man answered.







CHAPTER V

"Let that Mother of Snakes Beware"



The terms that Grim had imposed on Abbas Mahommed were perfectly
well understood by every one concerned. The Arab is an individualist
of fervid likes and dislikes and the thing that perhaps he hates
most of all is to be observed by strangers; he does not like
it even from his own people. So there was nothing incomprehensible,
but quite the reverse, about that requirement that none from
the village should trespass in our direction all that day. And,
of course, only a bold robber conscious of his power to enforce
them would have dared to insist on such terms.  But it was a
good thing that Mahommed Abbas did not call the bluff.

As it was, we slept all morning undisturbed, with only four
watchers posted, relieved at intervals of one hour. And the only
disturbance we suffered was from the lady Ayisha, who insisted
that the black-faced prisoner was hers, camel and all, and that
he should be taken to Petra for summary execution. She threatened
Grim with all sorts of dire reprisals in case he should let the
man go.

But setting every other consideration aside the man would have
been dangerous company on the journey. He was putting two and two
together in his own mind, and was not nearly as frightened as he
had been. But in Hebron he could do no harm, for once the Dead
Sea should be behind us it would not matter how many people knew
of Grim's errand, since we should travel faster than rumor
possibly could across the desert.

But if he should get one chance to talk with the lady Ayisha's
men, and even cause them to suspect that Grim might be in league
in some way with the British authorities, it would be all up with
our prospect of deceiving folk in future. There was danger enough
as it was that one of Ali Baba's men might make some chance
remark that would inform Ayisha or her escort.

Grim decided finally to let the man escape and gave Narayan Singh
and me instructions how to do it. But first he satisfied Ayisha
by giving loud orders to every one to watch the man, and by
telling her that he didn't care what she did with him after we
reached Petra. Then, late in the afternoon, when Mujrim had
rounded up the camels, a dispute was intentionally started about
an old well, and whether a good trail to the southward did not
make a circuit past it. The prisoner was asked, and he said he
knew the well. Grim called him a father of lies, which he
certainly was, and sent him off on the worst of the camels
between Narayan Singh and me to prove his words. Ali Baba kept
the Bishareen.

He led us a long way out into the desert among lumpy dunes in
which the salt lay in strata, and where no sweet-water well could
possibly be, or ever could have been. It was pretty obvious that
all he wanted was a chance to escape from us, and he began
offering bribes the minute we were out of sight of the camp.

The bribes were all in the nature of promises, however. He hadn't
a coin or a thing except the clothes he wore, Ali Baba's gang
having attended to that thoroughly.

"The wool-merchant--my master--is a rich man," he urged. "Let me
go and he will be your friend for ever after."

"We have no need of friends," Narayan Singh answered. "This man
and I, being spies in the government service, on the other hand,
are men whose friendship is of value. You can serve us in a
certain matter."

"Then give me money!" he retorted instantly. "He who serves the
government nowadays receives pay."

"The way to receive pay," said I, "is to take this letter to the
governor of Hebron, who will then know that a certain man is
pretending to be Ali Higg. Thus you will do the government a
great service, and may receive the difference in price between
the Bishareen camel and that mean brute you ride now."

"We waste time. There is no well out here. Give me the letter!"

He was gone in a minute, headed straight for Hebron, and Narayan
Singh and I fired several shots in the air to let Ayisha know
what a desperate pursuit we had engaged in. When we rode into
camp again, trying to look shamefaced, they had about finished
packing up, so Grim had time to call us terrible names for
Ayisha's benefit--names that it would not have been safe to apply
to any of Ali Baba's men if he had chosen them for the job.

Those thieves would stand for any kind of devilry, and were
willing to undertake all risks at Grim's bidding. Jail, fighting,
hardship, meant to them no more than temporary inconvenience. But
to have asked them to let a prisoner escape, and submit to
shameful abuse for it afterward in the presence of a woman and
strangers, would have been more than Arab loyalty could stand.

And, mother of me, how that woman Ayisha did revile us! If ever
she had doubted we were Indians she was sure of it now. She swept
with her tongue the whole three hundred million Indians into one
vile horde and de-sexed, disinherited, declassed, and damned the
lot of us. Before you think you know anything about abuse,
wholesale or retail, you should hear a lady of the desert
proclaim displeasure. I wouldn't be surprised to know that the
very camels blushed.

It was all Narayan Singh could stand, for Ali Baba and his gang
laughed derisively, and no true son of the East can endure to be
laughed at.

"Let that mother of snakes beware!" he growled in my ear; and
as it turned out in the end, he did not forget the grudge he
owed her.

We were off again a good hour before sundown, and Mahommed Abbas
sent out a screen of camel-men to follow us for several miles.
They fired about twenty shots when we were well out of range, and
boasted, as we learned afterward, of having put Ali Higg and a
hundred men to rout.

But that did no harm. It reduced the real Ali Higg's prestige for
a while all over the countryside; and in these days of League of
Nations and mandates and whatnot it is hard enough in all
conscience for brave villagers with muskets to find something to
make up songs about. De Crespigny knew the truth about it as soon
as our "escaped" man got to Hebron.

Before midnight we were well south of the Dead Sea and far beyond
the border up to which the British mandate was supposed to be
going to extend whenever the League of Nations Council should
stop arguing. We were something like two thousand feet below
sea-level now; but although the heat all day long under the tents
had been almost intolerable, the night air was actually chilly
because of the tremendous evaporation. The earth was throwing off
the heat it had absorbed all day, and chill drafts crept from the
mountaintops to take its place.

And as we crossed the imaginary border in pure, mellow moonlight,
with our three bells clanging, you could have told its approximate
whereabouts by the change that came over the gang.  Even Grim's
back, away ahead on the leading camel, assumed a jauntier
swing. Old Ali Baba, next ahead of me, began to look ten
years younger, and his sons and grandsons started singing--about
Lot's wife acceptably enough, for we were near the fabled site of
Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Prophet of Islam, who had nothing if
not an eye for local color, incorporated that old story in
the Koran.

The pillar of salt that used to be called Lot's wife, and that
"stood there until this day," when the Old Testament writer
penned his narrative, has fallen into the Dead Sea in recent
memory. But all that did was to set loose imagination that had
hitherto been tied to one landmark, and Ali Baba pointed out to
me a dozen upright piles of argillaceous strata glistening in
moonlight, every one of which he swore was either Lot's wife or
one of her handmaidens.

"Such should be the fate of many other women," he asserted
piously. "It would save a great deal of trouble."

The lady Ayisha heard that remark, and the things she said for
the next ten minutes about men in general and old Ali Baba in
particular were as poisonous as the brimstone that once rained
down on Sodom and Gomorrah. She seemed to have no sense of being
under obligation for the escort, but rather to think we were all
in her debt for the privilege--a circumstance which appeared
to me to bode ill for the manners of the gentry we proposed
to visit.

Thereafter--I suppose since she considered she had utterly routed
and reduced me to submission after the messenger's escape she
summoned me to her side, thrusting the _shibrayah_ curtains apart
and beckoning with the fingers turned downward, Bedouin fashion.
We conversed quite amicably for more than an hour, she mocking my
Arabic pronunciation, but asking innumerable questions about
India--who my mother was, for instance, and whether my father
used to beat her much; what physic was used in India for
date-boils; why I had not stayed at home; wasn't I afraid of
meeting Ali Higg; and were there such great ones as he in India?

So, as there wasn't one chance in ten million of her knowing
anything at all about India, I saw fit to explain that as a
cockroach is to Allah so was Ali Higg to dozens of Indian bandits
I had known. I told her tales of men's head piled mountains high,
and of roads of corpses over which rajahs drove their chariots;
of arenas full of tigers into which living prisoners were thrown
once a week; and of a sheer cliff more than a mile high, over
which women were tossed to alligators.

She took it all in, but doubted demurely at the end of it whether
all those princely Indian terrorists added together could, as she
put it, "reach to the middle of the thigh of Ali Higg"!

I asked her how she had come to marry the gentleman, and she
answered with becoming pride that he had plundered her from the
Bagdad caravan; but I think she meant by that a caravan of
Bedouin on their way from Bagdad to wherever the grazing and
thieving were good. She had a way of her own of enlarging things.
Finally she asked me whether I carried good poison in my chest of
medicines, and I told her I had some that could reach down to
hell and kill the ifrits.

"Wallah!" she answered. "If you two eunuchs hadn't lost that
prisoner we could have tested some of it on him!"

After that she dismissed me, I suppose that she might meditate on
poison in the moonlight. I rode forward to take counsel with
Grim, and some time during the night she got word with one of Ali
Baba's younger sons. We had hardly camped an hour after dawn in
the red-hot foothills east of the Dead Sea when Narayan Singh
caught him rifling my chest, and he had the impudence to ask
which were poisons and which not. Narayan Singh threatened an
appeal to Grim, and the man apologized; but I saw Ayisha giving
him sweetmeats in her tent not long afterward.

She had none of the ordinary Moslem woman's notions of privacy. A
whole Bedouin family will live in a black tent ten by twelve, and
though she had picked up wondrous ideas of high estate since her
infancy, the desert upbringing remained. Her tent was pitched
each day in the midst of ours, and she ordered every one about,
Grim included, as if we were her husband's purchased slaves. And
because it was Grim's idea to make use of her to gain access to
her husband we all put up with it, fetching and carrying without
a murmur--that is to say, all except one of us.

Whenever Narayan Singh had to do her bidding his great black
beard rumbled with discontent; and as that only amused her she
ordered him about more than any one, the others aiding and
abetting by inventing things for him to be told to do. But it
hardly paid her in the long run.

On the third day, when we camped by an old well that Ali Baba
swore was the identical one made by the angel Gabriel to provide
water for Hagar and Ishmael--there are twenty or thirty of those
identical wells in Palestine alone, to say nothing of Arabia--she
began to take a particular fancy to Grim and to treat him with
more respect, giving him the title of prince on occasion, and
abusing the men for not attending more swiftly to his needs.

Now, whatever the alleged custom of other lands may be--and I
refuse to be committed on that point--there is no doubt whatever
about the East. There it is the woman who makes the first
advances. Grim took to sleeping in a tent with Mujrim and
Ali Baba.

Considering the customs of that land--the savage, accepted
way in which women swap owners when tribes are at war, and
between times when the raids are made on caravan routes--it
would be altogether wide of the mark to blame her too severely.
Grim is a good-looking fellow, even in the khaki officer's
uniform that makes most Christians look alike. Disguised as
an Arab he takes the eye of any man, to say nothing of women.

The lines of his face are just deep enough to accent the powerful
curve of his nose and chin; and his eyes, with their baffling
color, arrest attention. Then he stands, too, in that gear like a
scion of an ancient race, firmly, on strong feet, with his head
held high and arms motionless--not fidgeting with one or both
hands, as white men usually do. The wonder really is that Ayisha
did not betray her designs on him sooner.

Narayan Singh grew as nervous as a hen in the presence of snakes,
for he foresaw how Grim's star would surely wane from the moment
any such woman as Ayisha should establish a claim on him; and he
did not quite realize the full extent of Grim's resourcefulness
in making the most of a situation. Old Ali Baba's advice, on the
other hand, was just what he would have given to any of his sons.

"Let Ali Higg keep his wives within reach if he hopes to call
them his! _Wallahi!_ I would laugh to see the Lion of Petra
tearing his clothes with rage for such a matter as this!"

And all the gang agreed.

Ayisha began to question Grim openly about his home and belongings.
She wanted to know how many wives he had, and he told her none,
which made her all the more determined. If he had affected
squeamishness she would have despised him, and that would
have been the end of her usefulness; for scorn is very close
indeed to hate, and hate to spitefulness in the land where
she was raised. But he did nothing of the sort. He was as frank
as she was, and did his fencing, as you might say, with a club.

"The desert is full of women!" he told her on one occasion when
she made more than usually open overtures.

"But not such as I am!"

"A woman's heart lies under her ribs, and who shall read it?"
he answered.

"A pig can read some things!" she retorted; for he always managed
to keep just clear of the point where frankness might have merged
into poetry.

Her own four armed attendants seemed to take the whole affair
rather speculatively. She was probably in position to have them
crucified on her return to Petra in case they should offer
unacceptable advice. And it may be they would have looked
favorably on the chance to transfer allegiance from Ali Higg to
Grim, who had crucified nobody yet; as Ayisha's servants they
would doubtless go with her, should she change owners.

She asked me repeatedly for love potions, to be slipped into
Grim's food or into his drink, and was so importunate about it
that, after consulting Grim, I gave her some boric powder. The
next morning Grim told her that her eyes were like a young
gazelle's, so my reputation as a _hakim_ rose several degrees.

"Is he mad?" growled Narayan Singh. "Ah, each man has his
weakness! He and I have played with death a dozen times, but I
never knew him lose his head. So he is woman-crazed? What next,
I wonder!"

The girl had lots of encouragement, for, not counting the younger
men, who were hell bent for any kind of mischief, and constantly
egged her on, old Ali Baba spent half of each day in the tent
expounding to Grim the ethics of such situations; and they were
as simple as the code of Moses.

"Love thy neighbor's wife if she will let you. Defeat thy
neighbor in all ways whenever possible. On these two hang all
amusement and prosperity."

And Grim was much too wise to pretend to Ali Baba any other
motive than expedience. It would not have paid to take the old
rascal too much into his confidence, because most Arabs overplay
their hand; but he did drop a hint or two; and from what he told
me I should say it was Ayisha's persistent love-making that
provided the first suggestion of a plan in his mind for bringing
Ali Higg to terms.

But I'm sure the plan did not really take shape until we reached
the sun-baked railway-line that drags its rusty length behind
wild hills all the way from Damascus down to Mecca.

Some say that the very steel of the rails is sacred because it
was built to carry pilgrims to the Prophet's tomb. But some say
not. And those who lost the carrying trade on account of it, and
the tribes that used to lie in wait in mountain-passes for the
Damascus caravan in the month of pilgrimage, say distinctly not.
Between these two opinions there is a third, that of the gentry
who declare it is a curse, to be turned back on the heads of
those who use it.

During four nights we climbed unlovely hills, avoiding villages--to
the disgust of Ali Baba's gang, who would dearly have loved to
pick a quarrel somewhere and loot. They had a thousand excuses
for taking another trail, declaring that Grim had lost the way
or would lose it; that there was sweeter water elsewhere; or
that the hills were not so steep and hard on the camels. But
the moon was nearly full by then, and Grim seemed to carry a
map of the district in his head.

Whether he went by guesswork, or really knew, we turned up
finally a few miles from El-Maan at the exact spot he had aimed
for, and pitched camp soon after dawn within fifty yards of the
track. There was no water in that place and the gang grumbled
badly; but it was not long before the reason of his choice was
fairly obvious.

Tracks across the desert have a way of curving from point to
point, no more following a straight course than the cow-paths
do in other lands. Where there is a rock, or some peculiar
conformation of the ground to attract attention, men and beasts
will head for it, attracted somewhat after the fashion of a
compass-needle by a lodestone or lump of iron.

There was a rock shaped like a flattened egg beyond the track,
two or three hundred yards away from us. It stood all alone in a
dazzling wilderness that was doubtless green at certain seasons
of the year, but now was bone-dry and glittering with flakes of
mica. Close beside that ran a track worn by camels and horses,
and the shadow of that great rock in a weary land was plainly a
halting-place.

Our men wanted to cross over and take advantage of the shade it
would give as the sun climbed higher, but Grim refused to let
them; whereat Ayisha went into a shrewish rage, and ordered her
four men to take up her tent and pitch it over by the rock
whether Grim permitted it or not. So they obeyed her, and Grim
said nothing.

The rest of us set about cooking breakfast after the morning
prayers were over. My prayer-mat was next Narayan Singh's, and it
was interesting to hear him curse the Prophet _sotto voce_ while
pretending to vie with those robbers in fervid protestations of
faith in Islam. But more than the Prophet he cursed Ayisha,
praying to his Hindu pantheon to wreak all wrath on her.

It was a diluted pantheon, of course, because he was a Sikh; he
wasn't able to call on as many animal-shaped gods with as many
arms and teeth as a Bengali could have urged into action; but he
did his best with the technical resources at his disposal.

Without pretending to be a judge of other men's creeds, I thought
at the time that he made a pretty workman-like hash of that
lady's prospects, so far as his particular formula could do
it. I jotted down some of his suggestions to the gods for
future reference, and purpose to teach them to the U.S. Army
mule-skinners next time this country goes to war.

While we were eating breakfast in a circle in front of the tents,
all sticking our right hands into a common mess-pan and eating
like wolves--you have to be awfully careful not to use your
left hand, and unless you eat fast you'll get less than your
share--there came five men on camels out of a wady--a shallow
valley that lay like a cut throat with red rocks on its edge
something over a mile away beyond the egg-shaped rock. They were
armed--as everybody is in those parts who hopes to live--and
in a hurry.

Ayisha and her people did not see them, because the great rock
was in the way, but we left off eating to watch, and Grim went
into his tent to use field-glasses without being seen. It is not
unheard of for an Arab sheikh to use Zeiss binoculars, but it
might make a stranger suspicious.

The five men came on at a gallop, sending up the dust in clouds
like a cruiser's smoke-screen. They seemed to take it for
granted that we were friends, for we were in full view and far
outnumbered them, yet they did not check for an instant, and that
in itself was a suspicious circumstance.

They came to a halt ten yards away from Ayisha's tent, and stared
at her in silence, realizing, apparently for the first time, that
they had come within rifle-shot of strangers. We could see her
talking to them, but could not hear what she said. Perhaps that
was as well. I think that even Grim with his poker face in
perfect working order would have been flustered if he had been
given time to think. The surprise, when it came, made him brace
himself to meet it; and, once committed, he played with the sky
for a limit as usual.

One thing was quite clear: Ayisha had made herself known to them,
and they were properly impressed. They dismounted from their
camels, and, after bowing to her as respectfully as any lord of
the desert decently could do to a woman, they left their beasts
kneeling and started all together toward us.

So Grim went out to meet them, even outdoing their measured
dignity, striding as if the desert were his heritage. But he went
only as far as the railway track, and waited; to have gone a step
farther would have made them think themselves his superiors. Ali
Baba, Mujrim, Narayan Singh, and I, went out and stood behind him
at a properly respectful distance.







CHAPTER VI

"Him and Me--Same Father!"



Every detail of a man's bearing is watched carefully in that
land. Every action has its value. The etiquette of the desert is
more strict, and more dangerous to neglect, than that of palaces,
although it is simpler and more to the point, being based on the
instinct of self-preservation.

The Arabs who approached us, having ridden straight into a trap
for all they knew, for they had expected friends and found
strangers, were even more than usually observant of formality.
They were fierce, fine-looking fellows, possessed of that dignity
that only warfare with the desert breeds, and they saluted Grim
with the punctilio of men who know the meaning of a fight to him
who doubtless understands it too. A very different matter, that,
to raising your Stetson on Broadway, with two cops on the corner
and the Stars and Stripes floating from the hotel roof. They eyed
Grim the while in the same sort of way that men who might be
charged with trespass look at the game warden, waiting for him to
speak first.

_"Allah ysabbak bilkhair!"_ he rolled out at last.

_"Allah y'a fik, ya Ali Higg!"_ they answered one after the other.

And then the oldest of them--a black-bearded stalwart with
extremely aquiline nose and dark-brown eyes that fairly gleamed
from under the linen head-dress, took on himself the role
of spokesman.

"O Ali Higg! May Allah give you peace!"

"And to you peace!" Grim answered.

I could not see Grim's face, of course, since I stood behind
him, but I did not detect the least movement of surprise or
nervousness. He stood as if he were used to being called by
that name, but the rest of us did not dare look at one another.
Once across that railway-line we were in the real Ali Higg's
preserves. It occurred to me at the moment as vastly safer to
pose as the U.S. President in Washington.

Still, Grim had not actually accepted the situation yet. I
held my breath, trying to remember to look like a product of
Lahore University.

"We were on our way to El-Maan, O Ali Higg, not knowing that your
honor had a hand in this affair."

"Since when is a lion not called a lion?" demanded Grim. "Who
gave thee leave to name me?"

"Pardon, O Lion of Petra! But the woman yonder, boasting with
proper pride that she is Your Honor's wife, bade us approach and
pay respect."

On my left I heard Narayan Singh muttering obscenities through
set teeth. On the right old Ali Baba wore a twinkle in a wicked
eye; the rest of his face was as emotionless as the face of the
desert; but when an old man is amused not even the crow's-feet
can do less than advertise the fact.

"A woman's tongue is like a camel bell," said Grim. "It clatters
unceasingly, and none can silence without choking it. But art
thou a woman?"

"Pardon, O Lion of Petra!"

There followed a long pause. When men meet in the desert it is
only those from the West who are in any hurry to betray their
business. There being an infinity of time, that man is a liar who
proclaims a shortage of it.

"Will the sun not rise tomorrow?" asks the East.

Grim stood like a statue; and, judging by my own feelings, who
had nothing at all to do but look on, I should say that was a
test of strength.

"Last week the train was punctual at El-Maan--three hours after
sunrise," said the spokesman at last.

On lines where there is only one train a week it is not unusual
for its arrival to be the chief social event on the country-side,
but that hardly seemed to me to account for the way those five
men had been driving their camels. However, as Grim knew no more
of their business than the rest of us, and needed desperately to
find out, he was careful to ask no questions.

No desert responds to the inquisitive folk who camp on its edge
and demand to be told; but it will tell you all it knows if you
keep quiet and govern yourself in accordance with its moods. The
men who live in the desert are of the same pattern--fierce, hot,
cold, intolerant, cruel, secretive, given to covering their
tracks, and yet not without oases that are better than much fine
gold to the man who knows how to find them. They enjoy a proverb
better than some other men like promises.

"Allah marks the flight of birds. Shall He not decree a train's
journey?" said Grim.

_"Inshallah,_ Lion of Petra! The train will come, when that is
written, and that which is written shall befall. It is said
there are sons of corruption on the train, who bear much wealth
with them.

"It were a pity to leave all the looting to those who got to
El-Maan soonest. They who slay will claim the booty.

"Or does Your Honor intend to arrive afterward and claim a share,
leaving the labor to those who seek labor? In that case we crave
permission to join Your Honor's party. It may be we can help
enforce Your Honor's just demands, and be recompensed accordingly?"

_"Wallahi!"_ Grim answered after a long pause. "Who sets himself
to plunder trains without my leave? Have I been such short time
in Petra that men doubt who rules here? Have I not said the train
shall pass El-Maan and come thus far? Who dares challenge me? Do
I wait here for nothing? Shall I be satisfied with a string of
empty cars?"

The Arab turned and conferred for a moment with his four friends.
They shook their heads.

"O Lord of the Desert," he said after a minute, "none has heard
of this decree. Your Honor's messenger may have failed or have
fallen into bad hands on the way. Word has not come that you
reserve this train for your own profit. There will be fifty
men at El-Maan now waiting to slay certain passengers and
plunder others."

Grim had evidently made up his mind and had set full sail on the
course indicated. I confess I shuddered at the prospect; but I
never saw a man look more pleased than Ali Baba, and Narayan
Singh's face betrayed militant admiration. Nor have I ever heard
such a streak of fulminous bad language as Grim swore then,
calling earth and all its elements to witness the brimstone anger
of a robber chief.

"Go ye," he thundered, "and tell those sons of swine that I say
the train shall pass to this point. And as to what happens
thereafter that is my affair. Bid any and all who chose to
dispute my word to look first to their wives and goods. I
have spoken."

The five men fell back a pace in consternation, no doubt
partly affected for the sake of flattery; but they were quite
obviously disconcerted.

_"Wallahi!_ If we go on such an errand who shall save our lives?
Who are we to come between wolves and their prey?"

"Say ye are my messengers," retorted Grim. "Let any touch a
messenger of mine who dares."

"But they will not believe us."

"That is their affair. It is Allah's way to make blind those who
it is written are to be destroyed."

"Nay, Lion of Petra, give a man to go with us--one whom they will
know and recognize. Then all shall be well."

Have I ever said that Grim is a genius? He can take longer
chances in a crisis with a more unerring aim than any man I ever
knew. Surely he took one then.

"Nay," he laughed. "I will send them a woman. Let us see who will
dare gainsay the woman."

That was simply supreme genius. It even pleased Narayan Singh,
since the tables were turned on Ayisha. The only reason she could
possibly have had for telling these men that Grim was Ali Higg
was to score off him, either by capturing him for herself, or in
the alternative by ruining him for rejecting her advances. It was
not clear yet which of the two she hoped to accomplish; perhaps,
little savage that she was, she would have been content with
either alternative and had simply chosen to force the issue.

At any rate Grim had passed the buck back to her. He sent me over
to the rock to fetch her, and I found her smiling serenely, like
the Sphinx, only with more than a modicum of added mischief.

"Woman, the Lion of Petra summons you," said I.

She laughed at that as if the world were at her feet--got up, and
stretched herself, and yawned like a lazy cat that sees the milk
being set down in a saucer--straightened her dress, and nodded
knowingly to her four men. She had evidently reached an
understanding with them.

"I hasten to do my lord's bidding," she answered, and followed
me back.

It calls for all your presence of mind to remember to walk in
front of a woman who is addressed as often as not as princess;
but if I had walked behind her they would have suspected me at
once of being no true Moslem.

I returned and stood behind Grim, and she stood in front of him,
so that I was able to see her face. It was as good as a show to
see her swallow back surprise and wonder at him open-eyed, as he
played the part she had foisted on him and loaded her with
the responsibility.

"Go with these men, Ayisha, and tell those swine at El-Maan that
I say the train shall pass unharmed as far as this point.
Moreover, say that none may trespass. What shall take place here
is my affair. The range of my rifle is the measure of the line
across which none may come.

"Stay with them, Ayisha, until the train leaves El-Maan. Then you
may leave your camel and return hither on the train. That is
my order."

She was bluffed. And she recognized it with a sort of dog-like
glance of admiration. We had all her baggage, for one thing, and
it represented more wealth than any Bedouin woman would let
go willingly.

Now if she were to reverse what she had said, and refuse to
advertise Grim as Ali Higg, these five men and probably others
would surely denounce her to her real husband. She had no choice.
But she was sharp-witted, and made the most of the situation
even so.

"Shall I go alone, my lord? Alone with these strangers?"

"Take two of your servants."

But what she wanted to make sure of was that Grim might not
decamp with her baggage and leave her to face the consequences.
It seems you can fall in love in the desert without putting too
much faith in masculine nature.

"Nay, give me two men I can trust. Give me that and that one."

She selected old Ali Baba and me; and it was a shrewd choice, for
unless Grim was a more than usually yellow-minded rascal he was
surely not going to leave the captain of his gang behind. And no
doubt she supposed I was valuable to Grim because of the
friendly, confidential way in which he always treated me. In
other words, she proposed to have two first-class hostages.

Grim gave her three. He sent Ali Baba, me, and Mujrim, and
mounted her on the Bishareen dromedary, that men might know she
was one whom her lord delighted to honor. She tried to get a
chance to whisper to him, but he was too alert and acted exactly
as if he had known her all his life, needing no explanations
or assurances.

So off we nine rode beside the railway track, she leading, since
she was chief emissary, and the last I saw of Grim for a few
hours he was squatting in the circle of remaining men, talking to
them as calmly as if nothing had happened.

Well, there was nothing for me to do but ride forward and watch
points. I was a hostage without responsibility.

If Ayisha should chose to turn on us and hand me over to the
crowd at El-Maan I believed I would have wit enough to denounce
her in return; and it might be that as a Darwaish I could claim
immunity. Failing that, I found myself able to hope with a really
acute enthusiasm that my shrift at the crowd's hands might be
short. I did not want to be crucified, or pulled in pieces by
camels; but if mine was to be the casting vote, of the two the
camels had it.

There were other points to be considered. I had a rifle slung
behind me, and two bandoliers. However, it was highly unlikely I
would have a chance to use the rifle, which is an awkward weapon
at close quarters when surrounded.

But hidden under my coat I had two repeating-pistols and a knife.
Since a man can't prevent himself from making plans when there is
nothing else to think about, I made up my mind finally in case of
trouble to let them take the rifle and the knife; they might then
suppose me to be disarmed. After that, if the trouble should be
due to Ayisha's treason, I would execute her, and shoot myself in
the head with the same pistol rather than submit to torture.

At the end of the first mile I drew alongside Ali Baba and passed
him my second pistol. It did not seem any of my business to
advise him what to do with it beyond hiding it under his clothes.
The old rascal's eyes glittered as his hand closed on it, and
it seemed to me he understood; and so he did, but not what
I intended.

I never got the pistol back. He understood that a fool and his
repeater are soon parted. When I asked him for it afterward he
vowed he had lost it, and called his son Mujrim in addition to
Allah and Mohammed and all the saints to witness that he spoke
virgin truth, and, moreover, that he never lied, and would rather
die ten times over than play a trick on me. I have heard since
that he has become a very good shot with a repeating-pistol, but
has difficulty in stealing suitable ammunition.

Ayisha wasted no breath on conversation on the way, but whipped
her camel to its utmost speed after the first mile, so that we
had our work cut out to keep up with her. It is aggravating to
ride a big beast and try in vain to overtake a little one; but
she had been born to the game, and there wasn't a man in the
party who could have won a race against her, whichever of the
animals she rode; for the camel knows quicker than a horse
whether his rider understands the art or not. And art it is, as
surely as painting or music--art that can be tediously learned in
a degree, but must be born in you if you are ever to excel at it.

The desert was all red sand now and dreary beyond human power to
imagine. The clouds of dust we kicked up followed us, and even
the cloths we kept across our mouths and nostrils did not keep it
out. You felt like a mummy riding a race in hell, and how the
camels managed to breathe I can't guess. The sun on our right
hand was just at the angle where it struck your eyes under
the _kuffiyi._

But I was the only one who seemed at all distressed by any of
those inconveniences; the others accepted them as in the natural
order of things, and my camel, realizing how I felt, galloped
last in the worst of the dust.

El-Maan itself was a picture of green trees above a mud wall; but
we did not visit it, for the station, with its hideous red
water-tanks, was a mile and a half to the eastward of the
place--a miserable, bleak, unpainted iron roof and buildings,
with a place alongside that had once been a Greek hotel.

At present it looked like a camel-mart; but there were dozens of
horses there too, gaudily turned out like the camels with red
worsted trimmings on saddles and bridles. And as for the fifty
men our five new acquaintances had spoken of, there were a
hundred and fifty if one, all herded in groups, each with
a rifle over his arm or slung across his shoulder. Their talk
ceased as we rode along the track, and those who were on the
platform--about half of them--eyed Ayisha with as much curiosity
as a Bedouin taken by surprise ever permits himself to betray.

She did not give them much time for reflection, and wasted none
whatever on conciliation, but affronted them from camel-back,
having learned that method, no doubt, from her rightful lord and
master. It was obvious from the first that they all knew her
by sight.

_"Wallahi!_ Good meat for the crows ye will all be presently! Has
the Lion of Petra lost his teeth that jackals hunt ahead of him?
Did the men of Dat Ras profit by coming between him and his prey?
Go, look at Rat Das and count the splinters of men's bones! So
shall your bones lie--ye who tempt the wrath of Ali Higg!"

She rode along the line, showing her little teeth like pomegranate
seeds in a sneer that would have made a passport clerk take notice;
and her voice was raised to a shrill, harpy scream that rasped
under the iron roof, so that none could have pretended he did
not hear.

"The Lion claims this train! The Lion of Petra lies in wait for
it at a place of his own choosing! Who dares forestall him? Who
dares slay one passenger, or loot one truck? Who dares? Stand
out, whoever dares, that I may take his name back to the
Lion of Petra!"

Nobody did stand out. They all herded closer together, as if in
fear that any one left on the edge of the crowd might be assumed
to challenge her authority. Yet they looked capable of plundering
a city, that company of stately cutthroats. Perhaps some of them
had seen what actually happened when Ali Higg raided Dat Ras.
Certainly they came from scattered settlements, on which Ali Higg
could take detailed vengeance whenever it suited him.

"Ye know me! I wait here for the train. I shall ride on it to
where the Lion of Petra waits. Who dares interfere with me or
follow? Let him name himself! Who dares?"

Her savagery fed itself on threats, and increased as she felt
herself grow mistress of the situation. Partly the primitive love
of power, partly the animal instinct to subject and oppress--pride
on top of that, and something of her sex, too, glorying in
giving orders to the self-styled sterner members--drove her
to increasing frenzy.

And it was not fear alone that impressed the crowd and impelled
it to obedience, for those highland Bedouins are, after all, too
practical for that. We were but nine all told, to their seven or
eight score, and they might have enforced the logic of that
first, and left the threatened consequences for afterward, but
for the appeal of the spectacular.

It bewildered them to be harangued confidently by a woman--they
who were used to watching women carry loads. There was something
revolutionary about it that took their breath away, and swept
their own determination into limbo.

As always, the men in the background, who felt they could avoid
recognition, were the only ones who ventured to raise objection.
One or two of them started to laugh, that being the best answer
all the world over to any threat, and if the laugh had spread
that would likely have been the end of us. I had unslung my rifle
and held it in full view resting on my thigh, being minded to
look as murderous as possible, but she stole all my thunder by
suddenly snatching the rifle away and drawing back its bolt to
cock the spring with that almost effortless adroitness that comes
of long use.

"Who laughs at the Lion of Petra's threat?" she screamed, raising
herself in the saddle to survey the crowd. "Who laughs? He shall
die by the hand of a woman! Who laughs, I say?"

But nobody wanted to die by a woman's hand; and nobody chose to
slay the woman, because of the certainty of vengeance dealt by an
expert in terrorism. I know I didn't doubt she would have used
the rifle, and I don't suppose they did. If she couldn't be
laughed out of countenance the only alternative was bloodshed,
and none dared show fight.

Old Ali Baba worked his camel closer, and, because an Arab must
boast at every opportunity, began to whisper in my ear.

_"Wallahi!_ Was I not wise? It was I who told her if she wanted
our Jimgrim she should tell the world she is his wife and he the
veritable Ali Higg! It takes an old man's tongue to guide the
cleverest woman!"

The train screamed then in the distance, and a Syrian station
agent in tattered khaki uniform went through the wholly
unnecessary process of letting down a signal. We got off the
track and rode our camels round on to the platform. The crowd
gave way before us, and Ayisha thrust herself this and that way
among them, breaking up groups, striking me over the wrist with
the stick she had for flogging the camel because I tried to
regain the rifle.

By the time the rusty, creaking, groaning rattletrap of a train
drew up there was not an element of cohesion left in the crowd.
She knew too much to drive them away to where they might have
regained something of determination, but let them stand there
under her eye where they could see in herself the ruthless symbol
of Ali Higg's ruthlessness. And not even the sight of the
frightened passengers, in a panic because of tales that had been
told them up the line, could restore their plunder-lust.

As a matter of fact that was a romantic little mixed train when
you come to think of it. The Arab engine-driver, piloting his
charge through no-man's land, where the bones of former train
crews lay bleaching, simply because he was an engine-driver and
that was his job; the freight in locked steel cars consigned by
optimists who hoped it might reach its destination; the four
guards armed with worn-out rifles that they did not dare use; the
four passenger-cars with their window-glass all shot away; the
half-dozen Arab artisans carried along for makeshift repairs en
route; and the more than brave--the too-fatalist-to-care-much
passengers wondering which of their number had an enemy at every
halting-place; and along with that the formalism--the observance
of conventions such as blowing the whistle and pulling down the
signal, on a track that carried one train one way once a week; it
made you feel like taking off your hat to it all, reminding me in
a vague way of those Roman legionaries who kept up the semblance
of their civilization after the power of Rome had waned.

I rode over beside the engine-driver and warned him to pull out
before trouble started. But he had to take in water first. And he
seemed to be an expert in symptoms of lawlessness. Leaning his
grimy head and shoulders out of the cab, he looked the crowd
over, spat, and showed his yellow teeth in a grin that vaguely
reminded me of Grim's good-humored smile.

_"Mafish!"_ he remarked, summing up the situation in two
syllables. "Nothing doing!"

I would have given, and would give now, most of what I own for
that man's ability to pass such curt, comprehensive judgment
without reservation, equivocation, or hesitation. I rather
suspect that it can only be learned by sticking to your job when
the rest of the world has been fooled into thinking it is making
history out of talk and treason.

There was nothing whatever but water for the train to wait for.
Nobody had business at El-Maan, for the simply sufficient reason
that you can't do business where governments don't function,
where all want everything for nothing, and whoever could pay won't.

The engine-driver's grimier assistant swung the water-spout
clear and climbed back over the cab, cursing the view, crowds,
coal-dust, prospect--everything. He meant it too. When he said he
wished the devil might pitch me into hell and roast me forever he
wasn't exaggerating. But I got off my camel and boarded the
engine nevertheless. Ayisha had handed over her mount to Ali Baba
and entered the caboose, ignoring the protests of the uniformed
conductor who, having not much faith in fortune, did not care
whom he offended. But he might as well have insulted a camel as
Ayisha, for all he would have gained by it.

My friend the engine-driver blew the whistle; somebody on the
platform tooted a silly little horn; a signal descended in the
near distance and we started just as I caught sight of Mujrim
coming to take my camel.

Then it occurred to some bright genius that even if they might
not loot the train there was no embargo on rejoicing; and there
was only one way to do that. What they saw fit to rejoice about I
don't know, but one shot rang in the air, and a second later
fifty bullets pierced the dinning iron roof.

That made such a lovely noise and so scared the passengers that
they could not resist repeating it, and by the time we had
hauled abreast of the distance-signal there was not much of
the roof left.

I saw Ali Baba and Mujrim take advantage of the excitement to
start back with the camels; and two minutes later about twenty
men decided to follow them at a safe distance. The rest had begun
to scatter before the train was out of sight, and I never
again saw one of the five gentry who had introduced us to the
whole proceedings.

Then my friend the engine-driver found time to be a little curious.

"What'n hell?" he asked, in the _lingua franca_ that all Indians
are supposed to understand.

So I answered him in the mother argot at a venture, and he bit.

"There's a man down the line a piece who'll blow your train to
hell," said I, "unless you pull up when he flags you."

"Son of a gun, eh?"

"Sure bet!"

"Where you learn English?"

"States," said I. "You been there too?"

"Sure pop! Goin' back some time."

"Not if you don't stop her when you get the hint, you won't. That
guy down there ahead means business."

I don't think he would have dared try to run the gauntlet in any
case, for the best the engine could do with that load behind it
was a wheezy twenty miles an hour, and the track was so out of
repair that even that speed wasn't safe. I was willing to bet
Grim hadn't lifted a rail or placed any obstruction in the way,
but the driver had no means of knowing that.

"Son of a gun, eh?" he repeated. "What in 'ell's 'e want?"

"Nothing, if you pay attention to him. All he hankers for is
humoring. He wants to talk."

"Uh! What in 'ell's a matter with him?"

"Nothing, but he'll put a crimp in your machinery unless you stay
and chin with him."

"I give him dry steam. He'll run like the devil."

"Don't you believe it. He's wise. Better humor him."

"Shucks! I shoot him. I shot lots o' men."

"No need to shoot," said I. "This is love stuff. He's got a lady
in the last car."

"Oh, gal on the train, eh? All right. You climb back along the
cars an' kick her off soon as you see him."

"Gosh! I'd sooner kick a nest of hornets!"

"You her brother?"

"Not so's you'd notice it."

"What then?"

"She's got my gun. Barring that we're not real close related."

"Uh! Those damned Bedouin fellers can't shoot for nuts. Let 'em
fire away. I take a chance."

"Ever hear of Ali Higg?" I asked him.

He turned his head from peering down the blistering hot track,
wiped the sweat from his face and hands with a filthy rag, and
looked at me keenly.

"Why? You know him?"

"Yes. I asked if you do."

"Son of a gun! Him and me--same father!"

"You mean he's your brother?"

He nodded.

"He's the man you've got to pull up for."

"His gal on the train?"

"Sure thing."

He resumed his vigil, leaning over the side of the engine with
one hand on the throttle-lever.

"All right," he said. "I stop for him. Son of a gun! If he bust
my train I kill the sucker!"

I never posed as much of a diplomatist, but it seemed wise to me
in the circumstances not to offer any further information or ask
questions. But I was curious. It was possible that Ali Higg's
brother had been given the task of running that train for the
reason that no lesser luminary would have one chance in a
thousand of reaching the destination.

I never found out whether my guess was right or not, and never
left off rating that engine-driver in any case as one of the
world's heroes. I've a notion there is a book that might be
written about him and his train.

A polished black dot in the distance soon increased into the
flattened egg-shaped rock, and then we saw Grim standing on the
track with all his men.

That is the safest place to stop a train from, because you avoid
a broadside from the car-windows. True to his word the driver
came to a standstill, and Grim came up to speak with him just as
I jumped off. I waited, expecting to see a contretemps.

"Ya Ali Higg! You fool!" said the driver. "You would kill your
own brother? You let me go!"

"Hah! You recognize me, then?" said Grim, coolly enough on
the surface.

But his poker mask was off. In that land of polygamy and
deportations it is frequent enough that one brother does not know
the other by sight; but it must be disconcerting, all the same,
to have a supposititious brother sprung on you. He gave a
perceptible start, as he had not done when first addressed as Ali
Higg that day.

_"Mashallah!"_ swore the driver. "I would know thine evil face
with the meat stripped off it! Nevertheless, thou and I are
brothers and this is my train. So let me go!"

Grim watched Ayisha jump out of the caboose with my rifle in her
hand, and turn to take aim at the open door, through which the
conductor's voice came croaking blasphemy.

"All right," he said. "Since thou and I are brothers, go thy way!
_Allah ysallmak!"_

The driver did not wait for a second hint, but shoved the lever
over so hard that the wheels spun and the whole train came within
an ace of bucking off the track. And before the caboose had
passed us Ayisha was alongside Grim abusing him for not having
broken the locks off the steel freight-cars.

"I am a robber's wife!" she said, stamping her foot indignantly.
"What sort of robber are you that let such loot pass free?"

"Shall I rob my mother's son?" Grim asked her. "God forbid!"

Then he turned to me, wondering.

"Can you beat it?" he said.







CHAPTER VII

"You Got Cold Feet?"



We did not have to wait long for Ali Baba, Mujrim, and the
camels, for they had not been fools enough to dawdle, with a
hundred and fifty balked freebooters within rifle-shot, whose
resilient pride was likely to breed anger. You can't lead camels
any more than horses as fast as you can ride them; unless
stampeded they tow loggily; but the fact that two or three dozen
mounted Arabs had elected to follow along behind and watch
from a safe distance what might happen to the train had lent
Ali Baba wings.

And the same fact gave us wings too. We were up and away at once,
headed eastward toward Petra, I perched on top of a baggage beast
until Ali Baba could cut across at an angle and overtake us.

So those who watched no doubt confirmed the story of Ali Higg's
presence on the scene. Had they not from the horizon seen the
train stopped? Did they not with their own eyes see us scoot for
Petra? And who else than the redoubtable Ali Higg would be likely
to own such a string of splendid camels--he who could take what
he coveted, and never coveted anything except the best?

The evidence of identity was strong enough for a judge and jury.
Men have been hanged in America on less.

But that didn't help make the rest of our course any clearer than
a fog off Sandy Hook. The real Ali Higg was in Petra like a
dragon in a cave, and from all accounts of him he was not the
sort of gentleman likely to lavish sweet endearments on a rival
who had stolen not only his thunder, but his name as well.

"When in doubt go forward" is good law; but which is forward and
which backward when you stand in the middle of a circle of doubt
is a point that invites argument; and as soon as I could get my
own camel I rode up beside Grim to find out whether our leader
had a real plan or was only guessing.

But he seemed in no doubt at all, only satisfied, with the air of
a scientist who has at last found the key to a natural puzzle. I
found him chuckling.

"That explains a hundred things," he said.

"What does?"

"Why, my likeness to Ali Higg. It's evidently so. I've often been
kept awake wondering why strangers--Bedouins mostly--would show
me such deference until they found out who I really am, and after
that would have to be handled without gloves. It bothered me. It
looked as if I had some natural gift that I couldn't identify,
and that got smothered as soon as I put mere brains to work.

"But I see now; they mistook me for the robber, and the reaction
when they found out I was some one less like the devil made them
act like school-kids who think they can guy the teacher. Now I
understand, I'll do better."

"The point is," said I, "that you're established as the robber
now, and here we are riding straight for his den. Can we fight
him and his two hundred?"

"Fighting is a fool's game ten times out of nine," he answered.
"That's to say, it's always a fool who starts the fight. The
wise man waits until fighting is the only resource that's
left to him."

"Why not wait, then, and watch points?"

"Because we're not dealing with a wise man; he's only clever and
drastic. If we wait word's bound to reach him that some one's
posing as himself, and he'll sally forth to make an example of
us--do a good job of it too!

"I'd hate to be caught out in the desert with twenty men by Ali
Higg! He's a rip-roaring typhoon. But the worst typhoon the world
ever saw had a soft spot in the middle.

"You know what the Arab say? `A dog can scratch fleas, but not
worms in his belly!' We've got to be worms in the belly of Ali
Higg, and where the man is there will be his belly also. We've
got to stage what the movie people call a close-up."

Almost every one in the outfit had a different view of the
situation, although all agreed that Grim was the man to stay
with. Narayan Singh, growling in my ear incessantly, scented
intrigue, and his Sikh blood tingled at the thought; he began to
look more tolerantly on Ayisha as a mere instrument whom Grim
would find some chance of using.

"For the cleverest woman whom the devil ever sent to ruin men is
after all but a lie that engulfs the liar. I know that man
Jimgrim. She will dig a pit, but he will not fall into it. It may
be that we shall all die together, but what of that?"

Ayisha, on the other hand, was getting nervous. Grim avoided her.
She was reduced to questioning others, edging the little
Bishareen alongside each in turn. She seemed no longer able to
suffer the close confinement of the _shibriyah,_ but endured the
scorching sun and desert flies with less discomfort than the rest
of us betrayed, camels included.

"What will he do? Is he mad? Does he think that the Lion of Petra
is a camel to be managed with a rope and a stick?

"I have given him his chance; because of my words men already
fear him. Why doesn't he plunder, then, and run to his own home?
Why doesn't he talk with me and let me tell him what to do next?
I know all these people--all their villages--everything!"

"All women know too much, yet never what is needful," Ali
Baba answered.

He was frankly jubilant. Son and grandson of robbers by
profession, father and grandfather of educated thieves, life
meant lawlessness to him, and he could see nothing but honest
pleasure and the chance of profit in Grim's predicament. He loved
Grim, as all Arabs do love the foreigner who understands them,
deploring nothing except that unintelligible loyalty to a Western
code of morals that according to Ali Baba's lights consisted of
pure foolishness. And now, as he saw it, Grim stood committed to
a course that could only lead to trickery. And all trickery must
pave the way for plunder. And plundering was fun.

His sons and grandsons in varying degree saw matters from the old
man's viewpoint, although, having had rather less experience of
it, they were not quite so confident of Grim's generalship; but
they made up for that by perfectly dog-like devotion to "the old
man, their father," whose word and whose interpretation of the
Koran was the only law they knew.

What tickled their fancy most was Ali Baba's cleverness in egging
on Ayisha to advertise Grim as Ali Higg. Again and again on the
march that day, in spite of the grilling heat, and thirst and
flies, they burst into roars of laughter over it, chaffing
Ayisha's four men unmercifully.

And after a while Mahommed, the youngest of Ali Baba's sons,
regarded by all the others as the poet of the band and therefore
the least responsible and most to be humored in his whims, made
up a song about it all. It called for something more than
boisterous spirits; it needed the fire of enthusiasm and
ingrained pluck to set them all singing behind him in despite of
the desert heat and the dazzling, bleak, unwatered view. They
sang the louder in defiance of the elements.

   "Lord of the desert is Ali Higg!
       _Akbar! Akbar!_ *
   Lord of the gardens of grape and fig.
       _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Lord of the palm and clustered date.
   _Mishmish,_** olive and water sate
   Hunger and thirst in Ali's gate!
       _Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!_

   "Lion of lions and lord of lords!
       _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Chief of lances, prince of swords!
       _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Red with blood is the realm he owns!
   Bzz-u-wzz-uzz the blood-fly drones!
   Crack-ak-ak-ak! The crunching bones!
       _Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!_

   "Jackals feed on Ali's trail!
       _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Speed and strength and numbers fail!
        _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Swooping along in a cloud of sand,
   Killing and conquering out of hand
   Hasten the slayers of Ali's band!
        _Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!_

   "Camel and horse and fat-tail sheep,
        _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Ali's kite-eyed herdsmen keep!
        _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Gold and silver and gems of the best,
   Amber and linen and silks attest
   What are the profits of Ali's quest!
       _Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!_

   "Fair are the fortunes of Ali's men!
        _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Each has slave-women eight or ten!
        _Akbar! Akbar!_
   Ho! Where the dust of the desert swirls
   Over the plain as his cohort whirls,
   Oho! the screams of the plundered girls!
       _Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!_"

-------------
* Akbar means "great."

** Mishmish--apricot. In that land of drought and desolation the
highest compliment you can pay a man is to call him lord of water
and ripening fruit.
-------------

There was any amount more of it, but most of the rest was not
polite enough for print, because the Arab likes to enter into
details. It sounded much better in Arabic, anyhow. And more and
more frequently as the song grew lurid and they warmed to the
refrain they made their point by changing the third Akbar
into Jimgrim:

   _"Akbar! Akbar! Jimgrim Ali Higg!"_

It suited their sense of humor finely to announce to the wind and
the kites that Grim, the strict, straight, ethical American was a
ravisher of virgins and a slitter of offenseless throats, who
knew no mercy--a man without law in this world or prospect of
peace in the next.

When we reached an oasis about noon--sweet water and thirty or
forty palm-trees--and simply had to camp there because the camels
were exhausted after a night and half a day of strenuous
marching, they were still so full of high spirits that they had
to work them off somehow; and unwittingly I provided the excuse.

I was on the lee side of a camel, opening a boil in Mujrim's leg
with his razor, when I caught sight of one of the younger men
trying to burgle the medicine-chest. I yelled at him, and
naturally gashed my patient's leg, who rose in giant wrath and
with enormous fairness smote the real culprit.

The resulting blasphemous bad language brought Ali Baba to the
scene at once as peacemaker, with all the gang behind him; and in
a minute they had all joined hands, with Mahommed standing in the
center, and were dancing like a lot of pouter-pigeons, singing a
new song about Mujrim's leg, and a razor, and blood on the sand,
and palm-trees, and a saint, and my superhuman ability to let
daylight into the very heart of boils. You don't have to believe
any one who tells you that Arabs haven't humor.

There were the ruins of half a dozen mud-walled huts near the
spring in that oasis. There had once been a sort of rampart and a
gate, but there was hardly enough of that left to show where it
stood. The only building still quite intact was a stone tomb of
about the height of a man, with a plastered cupola roof; and Ali
Baba, who always knew everything, swore that was a great saint's
grave, and that there was much virtue and good luck to be gained
by praying inside the tomb. So they all took turns to go in and
pray fervently--two-bow prayers as they called them--reciting
thereafter such scripture as Ali Baba thought suitable and
could remember.

Hunting about in the ruins I found indubitable human bones.
Ayisha, when asked about it, said that Ali Higg had raided the
place several months ago and killed or captured every one.

"Because he is lord of the waters," she explained, and seemed to
think that reason unassailable.

There was quite a dispute at that place as to who should stand
first guard while the rest of us slept, but Grim settled it by
casting lots with date-stones in a way that was new, but that
seemed to satisfy every one--especially as the first watch fell
to Narayan Singh and me.

"That is because the rest of us said our prayers," explained Ali
Baba piously.

But I think it was really because Grim knew how to play tricks
with the date-stones.

The Sikh and I kept making the circuit of the palm-trees and
talking to keep each other from getting too sleepy, for there is
no time when desire to sleep so loads you down as in the noon
heat after a long march. You very often can't sleep then because
of the very heat that makes you drowsy; but the glare has been so
trying to your eyes that you yearn to shut them, and inertia sits
on your spine and shoulders like a load of lead.

"Thou and I must watch that woman, sahib," said Narayan Singh.
"Our Jimgrim will make use of her; but how shall he do that if
her heart changes? As long as she hopes to snare him I am not
afraid of her. But what if it should be she who grows afraid as
we get nearer to Ali Higg's nest? A woman afraid is worse than a
man with a dagger in the dark. Suppose she bolts to Ali Higg and
lays information against us--what then?"

I tried to argue him out of his anxiety, because I wanted to
sleep when my turn came. My habit of never looking for trouble is
a lovely one until trouble starts; but the Sikh, being only a
heathen, could not be persuaded; so I had to promise him that,
turn about, four hours on and four off, he and I would watch
Ayisha faithfully until such time as Grim should make other
disposition of our services or there should be no more need.

"And I think, sahib, that it will be best to shoot or stab her
without argument if she turns treacherous."

But I never stabbed or shot a woman yet. I have a loose-kneed
prejudice against it. I said so.

"Then, sahib, if it be your turn on watch, and you detect
treachery, summon me, and I will send her to _Jehannum."_ [Hell]

"I think we ought to speak to Jimgrim about it," I objected. "He
might have other plans."

The Sikh turned that over in his mind during one whole circuit of
the palm-trees, stroking his great beard with his right hand the
while as if the friction would inspire his brain.

"Jimgrim will say she is a woman and therefore must not be killed
in any event," he answered at last. "But that is of the nature of
his error, all men suffering delusion in some form, since none is
perfect. If we submit the problem to him he will answer wrongly;
but we shall then have received orders, which, as faithful men,
we must not disobey.

"As concerns ourselves, being men without specific orders on that
point, the question is simple: Of that woman and that man, if the
one must live and the other die, which shall it be? And I say
Jimgrim shall live, if I die afterward even by his hand for it."

It sounded logical. The arguments with which an unselfish, honest
fellow deceives himself into wrong-doing always do bear quite a
lot of investigation. But I was at sea before the mast once,
where I learned painfully that the captain commands the ship; not
even the notions of the buckiest bucko mate amount to as much as
a barnacle's bootlace if the old man disagrees from them.

"What makes you think he doesn't understand the obvious danger of
Ayisha?" said I.

"No man from the West ever understood a woman of the East,"
he answered.

That being obviously true--Adam did not understand Eve, and no
man from anywhere has understood any woman since--I had to rack
my brains for a different argument.

"There are two sure ways of discovering treason," I said at last.
"One way is to pick a quarrel with the person you suspect. But
the safer way is to seem very friendly.

"Now--why don't you make love to her? You're a fine, big,
handsome man. I don't suppose she'll prefer you in her heart to
Jimgrim, but she'll not be ashamed to appear to respond, and if
she has evil intentions she will surely seek to take advantage of
your passion to forward her own plans. Seeking to make use of
you, she will betray herself."

"So speaks the jackal to the tiger. `This way, sahib! That way,
sahib! A broad-horned sambhur to be killed, worthy of your
honor's strength!' Why don't you make love to her?"

"Because I'm afraid," said I quite frankly. "If I thought I could
get away with it I'd try. But she'd laugh at me, whereas your
attentions might flatter her."

"You think so?"

He stroked his great beard again, and twisted his mustache.

"I'm sure of it."

_"Atcha._ We shall see. I will give the trollop that one chance.
It may be she will preserve her head on her shoulders yet by
confiding in me; for if I can forewarn Jimgrim of her plans I
will reckon it beneath my dignity to use a sword on her. So. It
is settled. We shall see."

You know that warm glow of vanity that sweeps over you when
another fellow concedes your plan to be better than his? It is
rather like the effect of certain drugs--a highly agreeable
sensation while it lasts.

But it was tempered in my case by that reference he had made to a
jackal, and I'm still left wondering how much justice there was
in the insinuation. Narayan Singh and I are friends right down to
this minute, but I am none the less conscious of a query that
seems to spoil confidence a little.

He, being master of himself by training, and used to sleeping
when he saw fit, volunteered to take the first four-hour watch on
Ayisha, so I got as much sleep as the flies and the snores of the
rest of the gang would permit, and awoke toward evening to the
sound of unaccustomed voices outside my tent. There was one voice
with a squeak in it like a rusty wheel that I had certainly never
heard before.

It seemed we had made some prisoners. There were three seedy-looking
camels kneeling over by Grim's tent, and three almost as seedy-looking
individuals were talking to Grim in the midst of our camp, with
most of our gang seated in a semicircle listening. Grim had out
his traveling water-pipe for the sake of effect, and was puffing
away at it while he meditated on the information that was being
drawn forth gradually. Ayisha was seated on the mat beside him.

The man with the squeak in his voice, who did most of the
talking, was a very dark-skinned fellow with a short, coal-black,
curly beard. He had little gold rings in his ears, and in spite
of the filthy condition of his clothes he wore an opulent
look--the sort that suggests intimate acquaintance with the
fabled riches of the East. I have seen a Moor, who hadn't a coin
with which to bless himself, create exactly the same impression
by simply being dark and handsome.

He was eating dates while he talked, so I suppose Grim had been
to some pains to make him feel welcome. But he hadn't been
there long.

_"Wallahi!"_ he said as I joined the circle. "But Your Honor is
surely Ali Higg, and that is the lady Ayisha! Your Honor is
pleased to pretend otherwise, but am I blind? I, who come
straight from Petra where Your Honor paid me, am not thus
easily deceived!

"Lo, the good camels! It was easy to make a wide circuit, and
reach this place a day ahead of me; but what is Your Honor's
purpose? What do you want with me, O Lion of Petra?"

"Nevertheless," said Grim, "I am not Ali Higg, who styles himself
Lion of Petra."

"Is that not the lady Ayisha?" he retorted. "True, I have only
seen you in the dark, but have I not seen her at the least ten
times? Was it not she who had my servant flogged on a former
occasion because he likened her to other women?"

Grim said nothing to that. Ayisha drew the embroidered head-cloth
over her face, I suppose to hide a smile.

"For what purpose did you visit Petra?" Grim inquired.

_"Mashalla!_ Did I not receive payment from Your Honor? I do
not understand!"

"It is I who do not understand," said Grim. "Repeat to me what
you did at Petra."

"But Your Honor knows!"

"Very well. Return with me to Petra. I have reasons for asking."

_"Wallahi!_ If it suits Your Honor's humor to make me tell you a
tenth time what I have nine times said already, I have a tongue
that wags. But I see that another has been telling tales of me
behind my back, making me out a liar for his own purposes.
_Inshallah,_ it shall be found that my tale varies by less than
the ten-thousandth part of the width of a hair from what I have
told already."

"Proceed," said Grim. "I listen."

"Thus then: While in Jaffa, having received Your Honor's letter
by the hand of Shabbas Ali, requesting me to spy on the British
troops, I made all haste, laying aside my own affairs and
journeying wherever the trail of information led me. I asked
questions, but was not content with asking. I went and looked. I
made friends with subordinate officials, some of whom I bribed to
show me written orders removed from the desks of commanding officers.

"I ascertained all particulars and found this to be the fact:
That whereas there are small bodies of troops scattered in
certain places, those are needed for local protection of the
places where they are; and that whereas there is at Ludd an army
of more than twenty thousand men, with guns, great store of
supplies, cavalry, and aeroplanes, that army is held in readiness
to go to Egypt and cannot for the present be sent against you.
Moreover, the long march, so difficult for guns and supply-wagons,
from there to Petra, would not be attempted during the hot season.
So Your Honor is safe from attack."

"Uh! So you say!" Grim grunted.

You could almost hear the wheels click inside his head as he
tried to puzzle out what use to make of this man. One thing was
clear enough: the Lion of Petra was well informed. It was
nothing less than fact that on no account could an expedition be
undertaken against him for a long time. And it was fair, therefore,
to presume that in his Petra fastness the robber chief would be
feeling confident, and would be that much more difficult to bluff.

But it is one advantage of that land that you may be deliberate
without causing impatience or losing respect. Rather the
contrary; the Arab values your decisions all the more for
being reached after several minutes of silent thought.

Neither our own gang nor the prisoner was in the least disturbed
by Grim's taking his time, and only Narayan Singh, still
postponing his sleep, was anxious when Ayisha leaned her head
close to Grim's and whispered. Grim did not nod or shake his head
or make any recognition of her presence--for a real Arab would
not have dreamed of doing so--but it was she who gave him the
right suggestion, although her intention was totally different
from his.

"You lie," he said suddenly.

"Allah!"

"There is an army making ready now to march on Petra."

"As Allah is my witness, there is no such thing."

"You shall return to Petra."

"But Your Honor knows I am in great haste. My own small affairs
at Jaffa, God knows, have been neglected. How shall I spare time
to return to Petra?"

"And there you shall reverse your story."

"Allah!"

"You shall tell the very numbers and equipment of the army that
makes ready."

"May He who never sleeps preserve me! Am I mad, or dreaming? In
Petra I have told Your Honor a true tale; shall I return to Petra
in order to tell you a lie? O Lord of the limits of the desert,
listen to me! I have property in Jaffa; I must attend to it."

"I know you have. By the wharf where the Greeks land melons from
Egypt, isn't it? Three godowns and a cafe on the corner? A
nice property."

He paused, and I think he was turning over in his mind just how
far it would be wise to go with all those others listening; for
every word he let fall was sure to be discussed and discussed
again at the next halting-place.

"Which is better--to return to Petra and obey, or to lose
that property?"

"How shall I lose it? Hah! Your Honor is pleased to joke. You
will invade Palestine as far as Jaffa?"

"For those who live under British protection and yet spy against
the British are not so well treated by them as those who spy on
their behalf."

"Maybe. When they are caught! When they have caught a fox they
may skin him."

"And I am not Ali Higg, the Lion of Petra."

"Then who in the name of the Prophet are you, with the Lion's
wife at your side?"

"That is none of your business. You come back to Petra with me.
No, not your men; they go on. You alone. I have spoken."

In vain the man protested. He did not believe for a moment that
Grim was not Ali Higg, and he felt sure that he was being
kidnaped for some frightful fate, although Grim's mildness of
demeanor must have puzzled him; for according to accounts the
real Lion of Petra was a roaring beast.

Grim assigned two men to watch him, and gave the order to strike
camp, refusing to listen to any further argument. And since the
man's camels were too exhausted to march at once he ordered all
three left behind at the oasis and put the prisoner on one of our
baggage animals.

Just as we were ready to start he walked over to the two men and
threatened them with frightful torture unless they hurried
westward the minute the camels were fit to move on. It was pretty
obvious that they were only too glad to obey; and Yussuf, our
prisoner, made obedience more certain by shouting messages to
them to be delivered to friends in Jaffa.

So Narayan Singh cast appraising eyes on the _shibriyah,_ and
curled up in it like a big dog, without troubling to ask Ayisha's
permission. Sleep was his first intention, but he was for killing
two birds with one stone; I did not realize at the time what a
chance that was going to provide for making the first advances to
the lady.

I rode forward beside Grim, who guided us with a compass on his
wrist until the stars came out; and for hours on end we went side
by side, saying nothing, listening to the monotonous jangle of
his camel bell and the obligato of the bells behind. It was music
that suited our mood, harmonizing perfectly with the solemn
marvel of a desert sunset and the velvety, cool silence of the
starlit night.

"That man Yussuf had me guessing," he said at last. "I couldn't
place him. Knew his face, but that was all. Then she whispered
something about his being a wind that carries smells from one
village to the next and back again, spying against both sides at
the same time. Then I remembered. He used to spy for us against
the Turks and sell them information about us at the same time.
Nearly got shot for it, but was let off because his services had
really been valuable. I remember his being sent down to Jaffa and
told to stay put."

"But what in thunder are you going to do with him?" I asked. "He
thinks you're Ali Higg"

Grim chuckled.

"Wonder what Ali Higg will say when he's confronted by Ali Higg!"

"Wonder what he'll do, you mean, don't you!"

"What d'you keep looking back for?"

"Just keeping tabs on Ayisha."

"No need to worry about her. Now we've got Yussuf on our string
it's a cinch we can use her whichever way the cat jumps. She'll
be afraid he'll tell tales about her."

"Hell!" I said. "It seems to me this whole procession's crazy!
The best we've got with us is a gang of professional thieves.

"The farther we go the more we load up with sure-fire traitors.
First Ayisha; she'd cut throats at so much per. Her four men,
who'd change sides once an hour if they were made afraid that
often. Now this Yussuf--a professional spy, whose habit you say
is to betray both sides."

"Pretty good outfit, I'll tell the world," he answered.

"Good for what?"

"You got cold feet?"

"I've got cold judgment. We're crazy. We haven't a chance in a
million of getting the best of an outlaw with two hundred men."

"We can try, can't we?"

"Yes, and die, can't we!"

"Well--we might do worse. I'd sooner croak in harness than have
an eight-horse funeral. But say, if you don't like it you go
back and join those two fellows at the oasis. There'll be no
hard words."

But I felt too afraid of my own opinion of myself to turn back at
that stage of the game.







CHAPTER VIII

"He Cools His Wrath in the Moonlight, Communing with Allah!"



Now the desert at full moon is as light as Broadway, and the only
shadows are those the camels cast, than which there is nothing
more weird in the whole range of phantasmagoria. We looked like a
string of glistening ghosts accompanied by goblins of a fourth
dimension mocking us, and though you couldn't see the details of
men's faces, looking back along the line you could see every
movement and distinguish man from man.

About midnight Ayisha made up her mind to enjoy the _shibriyah,_
more, I suspect, for the sake of annoying the Sikh than because
she really wanted it. So she ranged alongside, and chiefly
because I was curious and chose to be amused, but partly because
of my league with Narayan Singh to keep watch on her, I checked
my protesting camel and let him drop back into place behind them.

I knew Narayan Singh was awake, for I had seen the glow of his
cigarette through the curtains ten minutes before; but he
pretended to be asleep, so that she had to get the camels flank
to flank and put her hand inside the curtains to awake him. Then
he did the obvious thing and seized her hand, and I heard his
bass voice answering her shrill protests. I don't know why, but
the moonlight that made all things clear seemed also to make
words more than usually distinct.

"Ah!" he boomed. "I dreamed of paradise. I awake and find a houri
with her hand in mine! Il-hamd'ul-illah!* I Enter, beloved! Why
waste the moonlight hours?" [* Thanks be to God!]

"Pig!" she retorted. "Father of bristles! Let my hand go!"

"Nay, lovely one! I awake--I see--I understand; thou art not a
houri after all, but that same Ayisha I have loved in secret all
these burning days! I, who had resolved that gold and honor were
as feathers in the scale against thy kisses, am I blessed as last?"

"Cursed by black ifrits, thou son of an Afghan pig! Let me go,
and get out of that _shibriyah!"_

"Such eyes! Behold, the moon is pale beside them, and the stars
mere drops of sweat on the sky's dull cheek! Such loveliness as
thine, beloved, needs a warrior to worship it--such a man as I,
who would cut the throats of kings for a kind word from thee!"

Don't forget, you fellows who have to call on a girl a dozen
Sunday evenings in succession before she will go to the movies or
condescend to sit out a dance with you, that east of the
fifteenth meridian the situation is reversed, and the man who
wasn't swift about his wooing would stand no chance at all.
Modesty of approach is reckoned a sure sign of unworthiness, and
deference as cowardice that fears to seize an opportunity.

"An Indian lover and a boasting louse are one," she answered;
but she laughed as she said it, and her voice had lost the
shrill note.

"Hah! Try me!" he retorted, tugging at her hand again, and
whether or not she tried really hard to release it she failed.
"Boasts should be put to the test, beloved! We of the North have
a way of understanding our performance. I would burn and lay
waste cities for thy sake! Come!"

Her laugh struck a bell-like note now. There was a hint of
pleasure in it, and more than a hint of thoughtfulness. You know
those overtones of a bell that go fading away into the infinite,
in touch, somehow, with thoughts that haven't reached any of us
yet except the man who made the bell.

"Ah! Afghans are all alike!"

Sikhs say that of Afghans too, and Afghans say the same thing of
the Sikhs.

"You would say anything for me; but as for cutting throats and
laying waste, I myself would be the very first victim. Thy love,
I think, would burn up and be ashes faster than the cities I
should never see."

"Cities! I will take you to all the cities! You shall have your
will of the richest! Covet pearls, and I will burn the feet of
jewelers until they beg you to take their costliest! Covet
rubies, and I will plunder them from the eyes of temple gods!
Covet gold, and I will melt down the throne of a maharajah to
make bracelets for your ankles!"

_"Wallahi!_ You speak like a braggart."

"Braggart? I? Nay, I am a lover whose words go lamely. They are
but chaff blown along the wind of great accomplishment. With thee
to fight for I would dare the very rage of Ali Higg!"

He still held her hand. She waited about a minute before answering.

"Which Ali Higg?" she asked at last.

"Any Ali Higg! All Ali Higgs! As lions go down beneath the feet
of elephants so shall the Lion of Petra fail before me!"

"One at a time!" she laughed. "There is one Ali Higg who could
command you with a word--another who could order your carcass
thrown to the vultures. Words first, since your boastings are all
words! I say that, for all your brave words, this Ali Higg who
rides ahead of us can make you slay me for a word of praise
from him."

"You mean, beloved, you could make me slay him for a word of
praise from you!" the Sikh lied glibly.

"But I might not want him slain."

"Have him made into a cripple, then--a ruin of a man, for daring
to displease you!"

"But he pleases me!"

"Aha! I am jealous! By the beard of the Prophet, Ayisha, beware
of my jealousy! I am a man of few words but sudden deeds! Is
there a man who stands in my way? May Allah show compassion on
him, for he is like to need it!"

He was so fervid in his avowals that he almost convinced
me--almost made me believe that his private agreement with
me had been a camouflage for his real intentions.

There is precious little of which my friend Narayan Singh isn't
capable in the way of romantic soldiering; he ought to have been
born two or three hundred years ago as, in fact, according to his
reincarnating creed, he was. Perhaps he remembers past lives so
vividly that he lives them over again. I wish I could remember a
past life or two.

Ayisha was about to answer him when Grim's shrill bosun's whistle
that he keeps for emergencies whined from in front, and the
sleepy-looking line awoke with a start. Every single rifle down
the length of the caravan, including mine, was unslung in a
second and the click of the sliding bolts was as businesslike as
if we had been a squad on the parade-ground. Narayan Singh, rifle
in hand, sprang on to Ayisha's little Bishareen, and she jumped
into the _shibriyah,_ like a pair doing stunts at the circus.

So far good. But the rest was amateurish. We milled badly. Grim
away in front had halted to let the line close, and we swarmed
around him like a herd of steers that smell wolves, and nobody
seemed to know which way to look, or what to do next.

I was right in the midst of the mess, with a camel on either side
trying to get its teeth into me, and what with Grim's shouting to
get the tangle straightened, and our all trying to obey at once,
it was some minutes before I got the hang of things. In fact, I
think I understood last.

We were already surrounded perfectly on three sides by camel-men
who kept out of reasonable rifle-range and stalked us like dark
ghosts from the rear. They resembled a drag-net, drawing us in
the direction of Petra, and the only unblocked segment of the
circle was exactly in front of us. Every time I tried to count
them there seemed more than before, and there were certainly over
a hundred.

I got one close look at Grim's face, and knew he had made his
mind up what to do; but all the men were shouting different
advice and it was a question whether he would be able to get
control before a disaster happened. I said nothing and did
nothing but kept fairly close to him. Narayan Singh found his
proper place alongside me, with the halter of Ayisha's camel in
his hand; and he said nothing either.

Suddenly Grim reached out and seized old Ali Baba by the
shoulder, drawing him close and growling into his ear. I could
not catch the words, but he repeated them again and again, and
Ali Baba nodded vehemently. Not a shot had been fired yet, for
Grim had forbidden it, and the other side showed no disposition
to do other than surround us at a safe distance. But I noticed
they were reducing their estimate of safety and seemed to be
gradually closing in for a concerted rush from all sides at once.

Then two things happened suddenly. Out of the open horizon in
front, from between two great mounds that looked like ant-heaps,
three figures emerged on camels, apparently all alone and
unsupported. The one in the middle on the tallest camel made a
signal with a long strip of cloth waved like a semaphore against
the moonlight.

Instantly the opposing force began to close in, and Ali Baba
proved his mettle. Those sons and grandsons obeyed his order as
efficiently as he did Grim's. They made a feint all in a cluster
together straight for the widest gap in the circle behind us.

The enemy drew off to a safer distance, whereat Ali Baba wheeled
and charged another segment of the circle, widening it again.
Still not a shot had been fired by either side.

Around Grim now were Narayan Singh, Ayisha, and myself with our
prisoner Yussuf, and Ayisha's four. Grim watched his chance and
sent me to bring back four of Ali Baba's men, and by the time I
had done that he had lessened the distance perceptibly between
himself and the three lone individuals in front. He was leaning
low over his camel, peering at the three like a seaman staring
from a crow's-nest in a fog.

It was a weird business--a swiftly played chess game, almost
noiseless; for wherever Ali Baba charged the enemy drew off,
while the rest came closer until they were charged in turn.

"It's obvious we're intended to be made prisoners," Grim said to
me at last. "But I think it's obvious we're not going to be."

Nevertheless, I understood nothing of his plan, except that our
little group kept drawing closer to the three, one of whom seemed
in command of the other side. At the moment I suspected that Grim
was one of those officers who are splendid at intelligence work
and at playing a lone hand, but less than ordinary in the field;
Ali Baba looked like the man of action.

Why, with all that brave old man's ability to swing and spur his
gang in absolute control, had not the lot of us burst through the
circling enemy and made a bolt for it? That was what I should
have done.

But suddenly Grim turned and pushed the muzzle of his pistol into
Ayisha's face as she leaned out of the _shibrayah_ to watch. It
caught her under the jawbone, so that she could not see what his
finger was doing, and did not dare try to move away.

"Now shout!" he ordered her. "Tell 'em your name _Wallahi!_ Yell,
or I'll kill you."

She let out a bleat like a frightened goat, that might have been
audible thirty yards away if there were no other noise.

"Louder! I'll blow your brains out if you disobey!"

So she screamed at the top of her lungs, making her voice carry
as all desert people can. And after she had called three times
she was answered by a clear, contralto woman's voice.

"Ay-ish-a! O Ay-ish-a!"

"Jael! Jael!" she called back; and at that the rider of the
middle camel waved the cloth again.

As fast as they caught sight of it--in tens and twenties--the
oncoming riders halted.

But Ali Baba did not stand still. Neither did we. The three lone
individuals in front of us began to approach.

"Come on!" said Grim. "Now's our chance!"

And at last I saw his idea. I did not know which to admire more,
the man who had thought of it in that sudden crisis, or Ali Baba
who had understood so swiftly and carried out his part so well.
But there was no time for admiration then.

All together--Ali Baba and his men along one side of a
right-angle and we from the other--we swooped on the three. And
there were nine or ten shots fired before we closed on them,
though none by our side.

My camel went down under me twenty yards before we reached them.
Two other camels were killed, and one of Ali Baba's sons was
grazed. But in another second we had captured two men and a
woman, and it was too late for the spectators to do anything,
unless they cared to risk killing their own leader.

I thrust my way on foot through the milling camels, for I wanted
to be in at the death, as it were, and I saw Grim take the
woman's rifle away. She looked more surprised than any one I have
ever seen--more so than a man I once saw shot in the stomach who
looked suddenly into the next world and did not like it.

"Shout to 'em, Jael!" he ordered in plain English. "Call 'em off,
or I'll kill you! Shout to 'em; d'you hear!"

"Ayisha! What does this mean? Ali? Ali Higg? You here? I
don't understand!"

"You'll be dead before you understand if you don't call those men
off," Grim answered; and his pistol demonstrated that he meant
it, for her men were closing in on us.

So she knelt up on her camel and cried out that Ali Higg was
there, bidding them keep their distance.

"But what does this mean, Ali? And you speak English? Since when?
Oh, I must be mad! You are not Ali Higg! No! I see now you are
not, but . . ."

She turned on Ayisha and spoke in Arabic: "Ayisha, what does this
mean? Answer me!"

But Ayisha said nothing. She chose to get back between the
curtains of the _shibriyah,_ and I saw Narayan Singh on the far
side whispering to her.

"For," as he told me afterward, "the time to persuade a woman you
are her friend is when she is afraid or distracted by doubt. At
all other times she is like a leopard; but then she is like a
lost sheep!"

The silence was at an end now. Every one was shouting; the
real Ali Higg's men wanting to know what had happened, and
Ali Baba's answering them with threats if they dared disobey
and come closer. The effect was exactly as if the figures on a
motion-picture screen could be heard calling back and forth.

The two men whom we had captured with the woman Jael were silent,
staring hard at Grim as if they saw a vision; and Yussuf, the
prisoner we had made at the oasis, tried to talk to them, but
they would not listen to him; the drama was too absorbing. Jael
herself, inclined to be panicky at first, was recovering
self-possession by rapid stages, and grew silent.

She hardly looked like a woman until you came quite close to her,
for she was dressed like a man, in the regular Bedouin cloak and
head-gear, with a bandolier full of cartridges. But her hair
had come unbound, and one long reddish lock of it was over
her shoulder.

She had a good-looking, strong face, badly freckled, and was
probably about forty years old, although that much was hard
guessing in the moonlight; for the rest, she looked like the
incarnation of activity--standing still, but only by suppression.

"Now Jael Higg," said Grim, "we'll have no squeamishness about
sex. I'm in a tight place, and you'll obey orders or take the
consequences. We're going to Petra, the lot of us."

"You! Are coming with me? To Petra?"

"Yes. And we've escort enough. Who commands those men?"

"I!"

"Yes, yes. But who's at the head of them now?"

"Ibrahim ben Ah."

"Call out for Ibrahim ben Ah to come here to speak with Ali Higg,
and watch that he comes alone," Grim ordered, and two or three of
Ali Baba's men went off to obey. "Now, Jael, you do the talking.
Understand me, though; this pistol has a way of going off quite
suddenly when the trigger is pressed. Answer: What village were
you intending to raid?"

"None."

"No use lying. Ali Higg's spy brought word to him that the
British are engaged elsewhere. Raid follows promptly, of course.
Now, out with it! I don't need you at Petra; Ayisha will serve my
purpose there. You've ten seconds before I pull the trigger.
Where was this raid headed for?"

"El-Maan." "Why?"

"That place has become too independent. The tribes meet there and
plan raids on their own account."

"Uh-huh. That sounds fairly credible. Now, observe--I pass my
pistol to this Indian."

He handed it to me.

"He will shoot you dead if you make one false move. You will tell
Ibrahim ben Ah to take all his men at once to that next oasis on
the way to El-Maan, and to wait there for yourself and Ali Higg,
to wait as long as three days if necessary. Say you will join
them there and lead the raid. You understand me?"

"Yes."

"You understand that you will die immediately if you disobey?"

"Yes."

"He will ask what the shooting meant just now. You will answer
that there was a mistake owing to the darkness, and that Ali Higg
is in a great rage, and he had better make himself scarce. If he
asks others questions, curse him and tell him to be off.

"And one last warning, Jael Higg! Obey me exactly, and you shall
see your husband in Petra. Disobey by as much as a word or a sign
and you're dead. Do we understand each other?"

"You really mean it? You will go to Petra?"

"Yes."

"I have seen fools, and men in love, and gamblers, but you are
the greatest madman of them all," she answered. "Very well, I
will speak to him as you say."

Grim mounted his camel and rode to the top of a ridge of sand
about twenty yards away, where he halted and sat motionless. If
he really looked so much like Ali Higg, as seemed to be the case,
no one at that distance could have doubted his identity. I hauled
off two or three paces, so as not to betray the fact that I was
to be Jael's executioner in a certain contingency, and the long
sleeve of my cloak concealed the pistol.

As I am setting down the facts exactly as they happened I may as
well record here that I laughed. She thought I laughed at her in
cold-blooded delight at the prospect of murder, and I think that
tightened her resolution not to give me the least excuse.

But I was not feeling in the least cold-blooded. I was laughing
at myself, who might be forced to shoot a woman after all.

Perhaps Grim gave the job to me because he knew I would not shoot
her in any case. I don't know. Nor do I myself know now whether I
would have shot her; sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. My
guess is that I would have failed to do it, and that Narayan
Singh, who was standing by and heard every word that passed,
would have wiped my eye, as the saying is.

Then Ibrahim ben Ah came striding into our midst like an old-time
shepherd with a modern rifle in place of crook, looking neither
to the right nor the left of him, but fixing his eyes on the man
he thought was Ali Higg on the camel beyond us. He seemed
surprised when Jael Higg stopped him, and told him to take all
his men at once to that oasis, where he was to wait, if
necessary, three days.

"I was told to speak with the Lion himself," he objected. _"Ya
sit Jael,_* there is wrath for those who disobey him!" [* O
lady Jael.]

"Go, taste his wrath then!" she retorted. "There was shooting
because of a mistake in the darkness. Good camels were killed. He
is more enraged than at the loss of twenty men. He would have it
the blame is yours--"

_"Mashallah!_ Mine!"

"But I persuaded him. He cools his wrath in the moonlight,
communing with Allah. Better go, Ibrahim, before his mood
changes again."

"But how came he to be here ahead of us? We left him in
Petra.  How--"

"How old beards love to wag! Fool! Go ask him then! I call these
men to witness I have given the order that he told me to give to
you. I wash my hands!"

She began to make the gesture of washing hands, but thought
better of it, for I might have mistaken that for a signal. Old
Ibrahim ben Ah looked straight into her eyes, read resolution
there, and bowed like a courtier to a queen. Then he turned on
his heel, strode back to his camel, mounted, and returned to his
men without another word to any one. Yet I dare bet that he had
counted us, and knew we were all strangers, and dare say his
thoughts would fill a good long chapter of a book.

Grim continued to sit his camel motionless until the raiders
under Ibrahim ben Ah had formed into four long lines and ridden
away westward, towing enough baggage-animals behind them for a
week or two's supplies.

"One hundred and forty men," he announced when they were gone.
"The Lion of Petra can't have many left."







CHAPTER IX

"I Think We've Got the Lion of Petra on the Hip!"



Grim is one of those fellows who tell you their principles as
grudgingly as they let out facts. He would make the poorest sort
of propagandist or politician, for he doesn't advertise, and
hates long arguments. What he knows he knows is so because it
works; and he proceeds to put it to work.

Nor is he much of a teacher. He takes people as he finds them and
adapts his plans accordingly. So it is only from observation
extended over a considerable period in all sorts of circumstances
that I can say I believe his first and underlying principle is to
look for the positive, concrete usefulness in any one with whom
he is associated, whether friend or enemy. And this I have heard
him say several times.

"In secret service you limit yourself if you make plans. The game
is to listen and watch. Presently the other fellow always tells
his plans or else betrays them."

And he is no such fool as to be caught in the act of listening,
or to forewarn his enemy by seeming to wish to listen.

He gave the order to march at once. Some of the men doubled up
uncomfortably on the riding-camels, because of the three that had
been killed, and the Bishareen fell to me.

I ranged alongside Jael Higg, with Narayan Singh on the other
side of her. At that we were off, Grim leading, well in advance,
with Ali Baba and six men in attendance.

The moon was a bit behind us by that time, so that I did not have
much chance to observe Jael Higg narrowly until she turned her
face to speak to me. But she was not long about doing that--say
fifteen minutes--nine hundred seconds; suppressed curiosity can
work up a pretty high pressure in that time.

"Who is this man who looks like Ali Higg?" she asked me suddenly,
and I had a good look at her face; you don't have to answer
questions without thinking, just because they are asked by a
woman in a friendly tone of voice.

Her nose was Roman and very narrow, and her dark eyes looked
straight at you without their pupils converging, which produced a
sensation of being seen through. She had splendid teeth; and her
mouth, which was humorous, turning upward at the corners when she
smiled, had nevertheless a certain suggestion of stealthy
strength--perhaps cruelty. Her chin was firm and practical. So
were her freckled hands. I decided that the less I said the better.

"He is a sheikh," said I pretty abruptly.

She turned that empty information over in her mind for a minute,
and decided to turn her guns on me. Conversation was not easy,
for we were swinging along at a great pace, and my camel was a
lot smaller than hers.

"And you are an Indian? How is it that you speak English?"

"Many of us speak it. We pass our college examinations in English."

"How do you come to be with that--that sheikh?" she asked next.

"It pleases me to follow him. _Inshallah,_ I may help him in case
of sickness."

"You are a _hakim?"_

I admitted that, although secretly pitying any poor devil who
might pin faith to the claim.

"Ali Higg--the real one, who is known as the Lion of Petra--believes
in Indian _hakims,_ like all these Arabs who have no use for
European doctors. And this big man on my left, who is he?"

"My servant."

"An Afghan?"

"A Pathan."

She turned that over in her mind, too, for several minutes.

"And how does Ayisha come to be with you?" she asked at last.

At that Narayan Singh broke silence, and although he denied it
afterward I know that his only motive was to get a little
preliminary vengeance on Ayisha for the names she had called him.
He maintains that he was "casting a stone, as it were, into a
pond to see which way the ripples went."

"Few women will refuse to follow a Pathan when honored by his
admiration," he boomed.

I could not see her face then, because she was staring at
Narayan Singh.

"Do you realize whose wife you are tampering with?" she
asked him.

"Hah! Where I come from a man must guard his women if he hopes to
keep them."

"Where you are going to, such a man as you will find his own life
hard enough to keep," she retorted.

_"Bismillah!_ I have kept it thus far," said Narayan Singh.

She turned to me again.

"What does the sheikh of yours call himself?"

"Hajji Jimgrim bin Yazid of El-Abdeh."

"Jimgrim. Jimgrim. Where have I heard that name?"

"The stars have heard it," roared Narayan Singh loud enough for
the stars to hear him boast. "He has taken the Lion of Petra's
shape. He has taken his name. He has taken his wife. And now he
will take his den. _Akbar,_ Jimgrim Ali Higg of Petra!"

Mahommed the poet was riding two or three behind us in the line,
and heard that. He took the cue and began his song. In a minute
the whole line was roaring the refrain, and it broke like volleys
on the night:

   _"Akbar! Akbar! Jimgrirn Ali Higg!"_

Jael Higg laughed. "He has a fool's luck and a lusty band of
followers," she said. "It was only because Ayisha called out
that he caught me. But a fool's luck is like a breath of wind
that passes--"

Suddenly she sat bolt upright and raised her right hand.

"Oh, this night! This madness! Of all the dreams, of all the
hallucinations, this is the wildest! I warned Ali Higg! I told
him my foreboding, and he laughed!"

She looked down at me again, and studied me for half a minute.

"Tell me," she went on, "is that Sheikh Jimgrim of yours mad, or
am I mad?"

"If you ask my opinion, as a _hakim,"_ I answered, "you were
mad to sit your camel alone, with only two men, within reach
of our Jimgrim."

"What does he think he will do with me at Petra?"

"He thinks silently," said I.

Whereat she too was silent for a few minutes, and then broke out
into a new tirade of exclamations, but this time in a language of
which I knew not one word--perhaps Russian, or Slovak, or
Bulgarian. I think she was praying in a sort of wild way to
long-neglected saints.

She gave me the impression of being mentally almost unhinged by
the sudden anticlimax of helplessness after over-confidence. Yet
when she spoke again her voice was calm, and not without a ring
of rather gallant humor.

"I suppose he thinks he has stolen the queen bee, and so has the
swarm in his power. But the swarm can sting, and will come for
the queen bee."

"So they bring their honey with them, who minds that?" Narayan
Singh retorted.

He was enjoying himself, acting the part of a bandit's follower
with perfect gusto.

"Oh, so it is honey you are after? And you two are Indians--a
Pathan and--"

"From Lahore," said I.

"Five thousand pounds would buy your services?"

"Five thousand promises would make us laugh," said the Sikh.

"How much will your sheikh ever pay you? In an hour I will show
you a _wady_ down which we three can escape. Agree to that and
you shall have five thousand each the same hour that we
reach Petra."

_"Wallahi!_ Doubtless!" laughed Narayan Singh. "Five thousand
bastinados each from Ali Higg, while the queen bee laughs at us
for fools! Nay, lady Jael, you are Jimgrim's prisoner."

"Jimgrim!" she said. "Somewhere I have heard that name."

And she turned it over in her mind again like a taster trying
wine, not speaking again for nearly an hour, until we drew
abreast of a chaos of irregular great boulders that partly
concealed the mouth of a gorge as dark and ugly as the throat
of Tophet.

"There is your chance!" she said. "Will you take it? You shall
have employment with the Lion of Petra! Come!"

But neither of us answered, and I kept a bright lookout for a
pistol she still might have concealed on her; for she had not
been searched--there was none who could do that with decency
except Ayisha, who was not to be trusted.

I knew Grim would not halt again before morning because the
camels would not feed properly until after daylight, even if you
put corn in front of them. We were likely in for a forced march
on Petra, and he would not choose to halt twice if it could be
helped. And I supposed that when we did halt he would look to
Narayan Singh and me for information.

Yet Mrs. Ali Higg number one was hardly a person you could expect
to answer questions truthfully; and even until the stars began to
grow pale in the east ahead of us I possessed my soul in patience.

Then: "Is it money your Sheikh Jimgrim wants?" she asked at last.
"Does he hold me to ransom? If so, I will give him a draft on
the Bank of Egypt. I have Ali Higg's seal here, and I write
all his letters."

I did not answer, but Narayan Singh checked his camel a stride or
two to make a signal to me behind her back.

"Hah!" he remarked with an air of triumph. And I took that to
mean that in his judgment Jimgrim could find use for Ali
Higg's seal.

But of course she heard him, and she took it to mean that she had
guessed rightly. She turned to Narayan Singh; and because in that
land, as an almost invariable rule, no business with a chief can
be accomplished without bribing his minions, she worked off a
little spite and offered largesse with the same hand.

"Arrange good terms for me and you shall have Ayisha."

"But I have her," said Narayan Singh with a great laugh.

"Maybe. But you haven't settled yet with Ali Higg. Arrange good
terms for my ransom, and I will see that Ali Higg wipes off
Ayisha's score."

"We shall see about that; we shall see," he answered.

"Yes, yes! You go and see! Go to him now!"

"When we halt," the Sikh answered.

"In an hour it may be too late," she insisted. "If Ali Higg is
prowling and should swoop down on you who would bargain then?"

By that time it was light enough to see clearly at close range,
and Narayan Singh caught my eye behind her back. I nodded. If
there were any likelihood of Ali Higg being on the prowl why
should she be in such a hurry to make terms?

Right then Grim called a halt--none too soon for the camels--in a
semicircular space protected by a low cliff that might have been
a quarry-face two thousand years ago; what might have been a pit
was all filled in by drifted sand. But he had his own mat spread
on the top of the cliff, whence he could keep an eye on the
surrounding country, and gave none of the prisoners a chance to
talk to him.

Nobody helped Jael Higg from her camel, for she jumped down like
an acrobat and stood staring about her at Ali Baba's gang, and
being stared at as they went about the business of off-loading
the complaining beasts. I saw Ayisha get out of the _shibriyah,_
face around slowly, and meet Jael's eyes.

Neither woman spoke for a minute, or made any sign, but you could
almost see the alternating current of scorn and hate that passed
between them. Then Ayisha fell back on insolence and walked past
Jael deliberately, with dark eyes flashing and a thin smile on
her lips.

"So you are now a Pathan's light o' love?" Jael sneered in Arabic.

At that Ayisha turned again and faced her.

"Who speaks? She whom the Lion could not trust to go to Hebron?
_Um Kulsum!"_*

------------
* Um Kulsum was a lady in Arabic legend whose immoralities have
made her name a byword.
------------

Ayisha passed on with a scornful shoulder movement. Narayan Singh
grinned with malicious amusement. And I was just in time to catch
two of the men again attacking my medicine-chest. Instead of
trying to open it they were dragging it along the ground, and
they were as pleased with themselves as two small dogs caught
burying a boot.

"She has given us money!"

"Who has?"

"The lady Ayisha. We are to bring her this, and she will take
poison from it and put it in the other woman's food! So Jimgrim
will be rid of her, and all will be well!"

I got Narayan Singh to keep his eye on the chest, and walked up
to where Grim was going through the form of Moslem prayer, facing
Mecca on his mat on the low hilltop. That was for the benefit of
the prisoners, no doubt.

To save time I got down on my knees beside him and went through
the same motions, keeping a bright lookout for interruptions and
telling him in low tones all that had taken place, repeating
conversations word for word as well as I could recall them.

At last we both squatted, facing each other, and he lighted a
cigarette; but it was several minutes yet before he answered.

"Wants to make terms in a hurry, eh? And has the Lion's seal with
her?" he said at last.

"Well, as old Ali Baba keeps repeating, Allah makes all things
easy! It's a little soon to talk yet, but I think we've got the
Lion of Petra on the hip!"







CHAPTER X

"There's No Room for the Two of You!"



Of course, no committee in the world ever yet did more than cloud
an issue with argument. It takes one man to lead the way through
any set of circumstances, and the only wise course for a
committee is to make that man's decision unanimous and back
it loyally. But men have their rights, as Grim is always the
first to admit.

Ali Baba came and joined us on the cliff-top, and Narayan Singh
was not long following suit. The Sikh said nothing, but Ali Baba
was conscious of the weight that years should give to his
opinion, as well as justly proud of his night's work, and not
at all disposed to sit in silence.

"Now the right course, Jimgrim, is to make a great circuit and
carry these two women back across the British border," he began
at once. "The Lion of Petra will then pay us all large sums of
money, without which you will refuse to intercede with the
government on his behalf for their return. Thus every one will be
satisfied except the Lion, who will be too poor for a long time
afterward to have much authority in these parts. Moreover, it
will be told for a joke against him, and he will lose in
prestige. I am an old man, who knows all about these matters."

"What do you think, Narayan Singh?" Grim asked.

"Sahib, what are we but a flying column? Swiftness and surprise
are our two advantages. We should be like a javelin thrown from
ambush that seeks out the enemy's heart. If we fail we are but a
lost javelin--an officer, a sepoy, a civilian and a handful of
thieves--there are plenty more! If we succeed there is a deed
done well and cheaply! I never hunted lions, but I have seen a
tiger trapped and beaten. Have we not good bait with us?"

There followed a hot argument between Arab and Sikh, each
accusing the other of ulterior motives as well as ignorance and
cowardice; in fact, they acted like any other committee, growing
less and less parliamentary as their views diverged. Ali Baba
seemed to consider it relevant to call Narayan Singh a drunkard,
and the Sikh considered it his duty in the circumstances to refer
to Ali Baba's jail record. In the midst of all that effort to
solve the problem at Petra, Grim asked me to go and invite Jael
Higg to join us.

In that hard, uncharitable desert daylight she did not impress me
very favorably. The lines of her freckled face suggested too much
ruthlessness, as though she was positively handsome in a certain
way--as long as you observed the whole effect and did not study
details--there was a look of cold experience about her brown eyes
that chilled you. Of course, she was tired and that made a
difference; but I did not find it easy to feel sympathetic, and I
thought she was hardly the woman to win a jury's verdict on the
strength of personal appeal.

Nevertheless, with all the odds against her, she accomplished
that morning what I had never done, or seen done, although many
have attempted it and failed. She contrived to tear away Grim's
mask and to expose the man's real feelings.

He was always an enigma to me until that interview, at which they
squatted facing each other on Grim's mat, with me beside Grim and
the Sikh and Ali Baba glaring daggers at each other on either
hand. The early sun seemed to edge everybody with a sort of aura,
but it also showed every detail of a face and made it next to
impossible to hide emotion.

She opened the ball. I imagine she had been doing that most of
her life.

"Jimgrim," she said. "Jimgrim. Are you by any chance the American
named James Grim, who fought with Lawrence in Allenby's campaign?"

Grim astonished us all by admitting it at once. The name Jimgrim
sounds enough like Arabic to pass muster; and we wondered why he
should have gone to all that trouble to disguise himself, only to
confess his real name when there seemed no need. Even Ali Baba
left off cursing the Sikh under his breath.

"I am glad to know that," she said. "It will save my wasting
words. No man could ever get your reputation without being
ruthless. I won't annoy you by pleading for mercy."

And she looked at once as merciless as she expected him to be.

"Now, Jael Higg," he answered, "let's talk sense."

"You're a rare one, if you can!" she retorted.

"Let's do our best," he said kindly.

She looked very keenly at him for thirty seconds, and seemed to
make up her mind that she had no chance against him.

"Very well," she said. "I'll begin by being sensible. How much
money do you want?"

It is true that the more you analyze Grim's face the more he does
impress you as a keen business man. But there are modifying
symptoms. He did not appear to have heard the question.

"I want you to be straightforward and tell me all you know of Ali
Higg's circumstances."

"Yes. I'd expect you to want that. As an American hired by the
British to help them exploit this country, that's what you would
ask. After you know all about him you can fix the ransom. That
right? Well, I won't tell."

"I hoped we were going to talk sense," he answered quietly.

"How can any one talk sense with a man like you? What are you
doing in this country? `Horning in' is what they'd call it in
America. You've got no business here. It's different in my case.
I'm married to Ali Higg. I've thrown in my lot with these people.
I've a right to help them to independence. But what right have
you got to interfere? Bah! Name your price. I'll pay if I can."

"Well, Jael," he answered with a rather whimsical smile. "I'll
try to disillusion you to begin with. Perhaps if you understand
me better you'll be reasonable.

"All I know is Arabic and Arabs. I've no other gifts, and I like
to be some use in the world. I'm real fond of Arabs. It 'ud
tickle me to see them make good. But I can see as far through a
stone wall as any blind horse can, and I know--better maybe than
you do, Jael--that all they'll get by cutting loose and playing
pirates is the worst end of it. I hate to see them lose out, so I
use what gifts I've got in their behalf."

"Do you call it helping us to come out against Ali Higg and
kidnap his wives?" she retorted. "Ali Higg is a patriot. He's
against all foreign control of Arab country, and he's man enough
to fight.

"These British and French and Italians promised us an independent
Arab country. Where is it? Have you seen any of it? No. And
you're helping the British break their promise!

"Ali Higg is doing his best to redeem what Arabs fought for in
the war, and I'm his wife. You ask me to betray him? Never!"

"Ali Higg is doing his worst, not his best, Jael."

"He is creating unity among these tribes," she retorted.

"He is practically forcing the British to come out and smash
him," said Grim. "Now, see here, Jael, I don't want him smashed.
I don't hold with his method, but that's the Arab's business; if
being crucified and shot for differences of opinion suits them,
why, no doubt Ali Higg's the right man for them. They tell me he
delivers the goods. But he can't go starting a new war out here,
not while I've any say he can't."

"Who are you that should say or not say?" she demanded.

"Same as Ali Higg, Jael; I'm a human. He's from Arabia, you're
from the Balkans, I'm from the U.S. We're all three foreigners,
aren't we?"

"Yes. But he and I are foreigners who will drive the British out--"

"And let French or Italians in."

"Ali Higg is a fighter, I tell you! He's an Arab, and he knows
how to control Arabs just as the Prophet Mohammed did. He has
only begun in a small way, but--"

"But he'll wind up like a small-town sport in the lock-up, the
way he's going," said Grim. "Now, see here, Jael, I'm just as set
on doing my bit in the world as Ali Higg is. Maybe I'm a mite
more tolerant, but there isn't a man or woman living who can
shift me off a course once I'm set on it.

"Ali Higg considers the Arabs need a holy war. I'm hell bent for
peace. I'm going to stop him. I'm not arguing that point, for it
won't bear arguing, and I'm not trying to convert you. But you're
in my power, and though I sure would hate to inconvenience a
lady, I'm that plumb remorseless I'd separate you from Ali Higg
for ever unless you helped me call him off the warpath."

"Help you!" she exclaimed with horror.

"Sure. You've got to! There's no law this side of the border,
Jael, that can make me hand you over to authority. There's no
mandate out here yet. There never will be one if I can prevent
it. I'm here to keep a foreign army from trespassing across the
Jordan, it being my crazy notion that Arabs can evolve their own
government, if let. You've got to help me keep that foreign army
out, or take the consequences."

She laughed at last. It was rather a hard laugh without much
mirth in it.

"Your words are a liar's, but your voice rings true," she said.
"I think you're only another of these diplomatists."

"I'm that diplomatic I'm chancing my hide to save other peoples,"
he answered. "Let's be quite frank, Jael. I'm in danger out here.
All I've got with me besides two respectable men are thieves from
El-Kalil. That little army of Ali Higg's lies between me and the
border, and I'm no kind of a darn-fool optimist when it comes to
figuring on Ali Higg's hospitality in Petra. Nor am I kidding
myself I can persuade His Dibs by a theological argument or any
cheap advice.

"But I've reasoned it out this way--if Ali Higg sends Ayisha to
El-Kalil rather than trust you to do your shopping, that's
because he sets a value on you. Since he sends you out in charge
of a raid on El-Maan I guess he sets a high value on you. That's
as good as saying you've got influence. Believe me, Jael,
you'll use that influence to suit my plans or we're not going
to be friends!"

"Friends?" she said, and stared at him.

"Sure. Why not? Look at the men I've got with me; they're all my
friends. I'm right proud to say it. I might have hanged most of
them once, but I never knew it do much good to a man to hang him;
so we get acquainted, and one way and another we contrive to keep
on good terms.

"See my point? Nobody'd hang you if I scooted back over the
border with you, Jael. There isn't a law that would cover your
case. But they'd deport you, and you'd be an outcast with tabs
kept on you, and I've seen your sort come to a bad end. I never
liked to see it. I never saw anybody gain by it. I'd sooner see
you winning every one's respect by sticking to Ali Higg and
schooling him to play safe."

Her pale face actually blushed under the freckles. She had not
lived in America for nothing. As the wife of a polygamist she
knew exactly what he meant about winning respect. Her sort enjoys
to be patronized by reformers and social uplifters about as much
as an eagle likes a cage.

"You talk well," she said, "but you must be a fool at bottom, or
you wouldn't suggest friendship with me. Can you imagine me not
pushing you into Ali Higg's clutches at the first chance?"

"Sure I can, or I wouldn't waste time talking. You've got more
sense than that, Jael. You might trick me. It has been done. Ali
Higg might scupper me and the crowd--he mighty likely would. But
that 'ud be the end of Ali Higg's prospects, for as sure as my
name's Grim the British would smash him to avenge me, and you
know it! If they didn't get you they'd get him, and you'd become
the property of the first petty chief who could lay his hands on
you. So let's talk like two sensible people."

"You'll find me sensible," she answered. "I shall just do
nothing--tell you nothing."

"You've told too much already to be able to stop now, Jael," he
answered, smiling. "I'm sure you won't put me to the necessity of
searching you; you've too much pride for that. So suppose you
pass me Ali Higg's seal--the one you sign all his letters with.
No, don't try to hide it in the sand; put it here."

He held his hand out, and she bit her lip in mortification. It
was too bad that she had made that slip of boasting to Narayan
Singh and me about the seal, but there was nothing else for it
now and she gave it to him--a gold thing as big as a silver
half-dollar, marvelously engraved.

"That settles the financial end of it," said Grim. "We can
impound all that money in the Bank of Egypt--although I'm free to
admit I wouldn't take such a seal away from a friend of mine."

"Give it back, then," she answered with a bitter little laugh. "I
see I'll have to be your friend."

He smiled--wonderfully gently. There wasn't the least offense in
it, although there wasn't any credulity either.

"I always aim to prove myself a man's friend--or a woman's," he
said, "before expecting to be trusted out of sight. I dare say
that's your code too?"

"If ever Ali Higg catches you with that seal--"

"He won't catch me, Jael; he won't catch me. But you shall have
it back, and the money shan't be touched, if you play straight."

She shrugged her shoulders petulantly, admitting defeat but
resenting it. There came a time, months later, when she understood
Grim's peculiar altruism and respected it, but she was a long
way just then from admiring him.

"You force me," she said. "Name your terms."

"Well, then, suppose we speak of Ali Higg to begin with. Is his
temper uneven? Is there any way to catch him in a specially
good humor?"

"He's the most even-tempered man I know," she laughed. "He's
always in a rage."

"So much the easier for us," Grim answered. "That kind always
make mistakes. He must have counted on your brains exclusively to
keep him on top; and now your brains are in my pocket, so to
speak. How's his health? Boils? Indigestion?"

She nodded.

"Ah! Most angry men have indigestion. Dislikes European doctors,
I dare say? Thought so; most fanatical Moslems do that. But an
Indian _hakim?_ Now, many an Indian _hakim_ knows how to relieve
indigestion--in between the bouts of rage. D'you suppose he'd
entertain a _hakim?"_

She nodded again.

"Well, we'll fix it so a _hakim_ can relieve his boils and
indigestion. But let you and me understand each other first,
Jael. I can be a mean man when I must, but I'll always take a
heap of trouble to find a white man's way of accomplishing the
same purpose. I can act mean toward you--sheer plug-ugly if you
force my hand--but I'd sooner not; and I'd just as lief help
you as hinder you, provided you don't upset what I'm seeking
to build."

She laughed again, and not so bitterly.

"You're on the wrong side of the wall to build much," she
answered. "You should come over into our camp. You're so like Ali
Higg in certain lights and in some of your gestures, and so
unlike him in other things, that if you came across the Jordan
for good I think you could show us something."

Her eyes said far more than her lips did. She was studying him
from a new angle--a thoughtful, speculative angle that vaguely
excited her.

"What I mean is just this," he said; "that you and I had better
decide to be real friends, and not half-open enemies, each
looking for a chance to spoil the other's game. There are men in
this camp who'll tell you that I keep my word. I'm willing to
pledge it not to hurt you or Ali Higg, provided you pledge yours
to be equally friendly and to help me in taming Ali Higg so's
he'll be useful and not just an ordinary trouble-maker."

"Would you accept my word?" she asked him--ready to consider him
fool or liar, according to how he answered.

"I'll accept it, Jael. Sure. For you'll have to give it, and it's
all you've got to trade with. And I'll watch you just about
twice as carefully as examiners watch the bank directors of
New York State.

"Knowing you're watched, like them you're going to be too proud
to cheat; and after you've found how it pays to play straight
with me you're going almost to enjoy being watched for the sake
of the advertisement."

Her face did not soften in the least; but it changed expression,
like a woman buyer's who has decided to make a purchase but has
not done bargaining.

"I think I'm going to like you," she said. "Of course, you're a
liar, like all men, but you've a finer touch than most."

At that point Ali Baba made his first contribution to the
argument. The old man did not know much English, but there are
certain words--such as liar, cheat, swine, thief, and the list of
oaths--that find their way like water to the common level and are
known from Spitzbergen to the Horn.

"He is no liar!" he exclaimed in Arabic. "A cunning man with the
brain of three, who can use the truth for his own ends! A keeper
of secrets! An upsetter of plans! But he is no liar, and I will
not hear him called one by a woman! Peace, thou fool! It is
written that a woman's tongue is worse than water dripping
through a roof!"

It is manners in that country to sit silent while an old man
speaks, and even Jael Higg did not offer to rebuke him for the
interruption. When he had quite finished Grim took up the
argument again.

"Now let's know where we stand. Are you and I to be friends, Jael?"

She nodded.

"I'm no half-way adventurer. I'll make your fortune," she said,
"if you'll come the whole way with me, and stay this side
of Jordan."

He shook his head and smiled back at her.

"You've your work cut out to keep Ali Higg off the rocks, Jael."

"There's no room for two of you," she answered darkly.

"I guess not."

She looked hard at me, and back from me to Grim. I don't know
yet whether she was setting a trap for us or really in earnest
about what she said next. Grim thinks she was drawing a bow
at a venture.

"Is this the _hakim?_ One of the two respectable persons you have
with you? Hm! Respectability is a mask--often a safe mask, often
an offensive one, always a lie. All really dangerous criminals
are respectable people.

"And a _hakim,_ eh? An Indian physician? I have heard of Indian
physicians being poisoners--although, of course, they're
respectable people and give the poison by mistake! Now if he
should go to Ali Higg and poison him, while pretending to cure
boils and indigestion--"

"But he won't," said Grim, "so why suppose?"

"Of course he won't, unless you tell him to!" she snapped.

"I dare say he's as much in your power as I am. But suppose you
tell him to--"

"I won't, Jael."

"Now don't you be a fool, James Grim! You can't deceive me into
thinking you're above such things. That haughty attitude is
British, not American; you've been defiled by contact with
them.  Come out into the open like an unhypocritical American.
Talk business.

"I've tried to make a man of Ali Higg, but he's only an animal
after all. The best I can ever do with him will be failure
compared to what I could make of you, James Grim. You look enough
like him to make it possible to substitute you with care. Go
ahead and send your _hakim."_

Grim smiled with perfect good humor, but a blind man could not
have mistaken his refusal.

"Oh, you're all hypocrites, you men--Americans, English,
French--you're all alike; glad to see a man die, if he's a
nuisance, but afraid to admit you'd a hand in it. But you needn't
fear. You can send your _hakim_ uninstructed. He's an Indian,
isn't he? Well, Ali Higg is sure to insult him to the very marrow
of his bones, and you can safely leave Indian revengefulness to
do the rest."

Grim shook his head.

"He'd be too afraid he might meet me some day. He knows I'd not
stand for it. No, Jael; I invited you to talk sense. You've got
to make shift with Ali Higg `as is'. If you don't like it say so
now and I'll tell off three or four of my thieves to escort you
over the border into British territory while I play this game
without you.

"What you've got to understand first and last is that I'm dead
set on clipping Ali Higg's claws. I don't care a row of imitation
pewter shucks about any man's ambition, or any woman's past. My
job in the world is to do what I'm able to do, and I'm going to
prevent war in this land if I get killed doing it and have to
ruin you in the bargain! Now, are we set?"

"I think you're a fool," she said, "and you think me a villain.
We're strange partners! Very well, let's try."

Promptly he handed her an envelop, sheet of paper, and his
fountain-pen.

"Write first, then, to Ibrahim ben Ah. He knows your hand, I
suppose? Tell him there is news of a British force coming over
the border, and that he must stay at that oasis in readiness to
attack after Ali Higg has taken steps to draw the British in the
right direction.

"Say he may have to stay there a week or ten days, and that
he is to enforce the death penalty on any of his men who dares
try to leave the oasis. Tell him that secrecy as to his present
whereabouts is the all-important point. For that reason strangers
may be made prisoner and held until further orders. The messenger
who bears this is to be sent back with an answer immediately."

"How much of that is true about a British force?" she demanded.
"Are you trying to trap those men?"

"None of it's true. No, they're safe. You write, and I'll sign it
with your seal."

She hesitated, but I don't know whether from caution or from a
genuine dislike to deceive her husband's loyal henchman. But
there was no way of getting out of it except by blunt refusal,
involving the threatened escort into British territory and
deportation. So she wrote, and Grim sealed the letter: He handed
it to Ali Baba.

"Select the most trustworthy of your sons, O King of Thieves,
give him the fastest camel, and let him ride with that to the
oasis. Bid him ride hard and overtake us with the answer."

"Do you think my sons have wings?" asked Ali Baba.

"Not unless devils are winged!" laughed Grim. "It is a simple
matter--just there and back again."

"Not so simple, Jimgrim! It is written that in the desert all men
are enemies. What if he should meet a dozen men?"

"The letter will be his pass. He must take a chance returning."

_"Wallahi!_ A letter? A pass into Jehannum possibly! By Allah,
Jimgrim, a man needs more than a letter in these parts. He needs
brains--age--influence--experience. Nay! If any is to take that
letter, let me do it. I am old, and they hesitate to kill an old
man. I am wise in the desert ways, not rash. And if they do kill
me, then it is only an old man's body bloating in the sun.

"Besides, I am cunning and can give wise answers, whereas those
sons of mine might take offense at an insult, or recognize a
blood enemy at the wrong moment. Nay, it is I who must take
that letter."

Grim clapped him on the back.

"Good, my father; you shall go. Take one son with you to look
after your comforts."

He turned that suggestion over in his mind for several minutes,
but shook his head finally.

"I go alone. They would ask me why two men bring one letter.
Moreover, they might send the one back with an answer, retaining
the other as hostage; for it is the way of the devil to put
suspicion in men's minds. Two men would double their doubt, just
as two stones weigh the twice of one. And I will not take the
best camel, but the worst one."

"Why?"

"Write me a second letter. Have the woman write it, and you affix
the seal. Give order that they are to provide a swift, fresh
camel in exchange for my weary beast. I shall make a great fuss
about the beast they provide, rejecting this and that one, thus
causing them to believe in me, since men without proper authority
do not act thus, but are content with anything so be they can
only escape unharmed."

So the second letter was written; and in the rising, scorching
heat old Ali Baba set off, mounted on the meanest of the baggage
beasts, whose hump was getting galled, so that he wasn't likely
to be of much use to us within a day or so.

Then we all got under the shelter of the low tents to give the
other camels a rest and wait for evening, and I think Jael Higg
slept, but I don't know, for we gave her a tent to herself; she
refused point blank to share one with Ayisha.

And Ayisha, I know, did not sleep. She came in the noon glare to
the tent I occupied with Narayan Singh and entered without
ceremony, slipping through the low opening with the silent ease
that comes naturally to the Badawi. She squatted down in front of
us, and I awoke the Sikh, who was snoring a chorus from Wagner's
"Niebelungen Ring."

For a moment I thought he was going to resume the night's
flirtation, but there was something in the quiet manner of her
and the serious expression of her face that he recognized as
quickly as I did. All her imperious attitude was gone. She did
not look exactly pleading, nor yet cunning; perhaps it was a
blend of both that gave her the soft charm she had come
deliberately armed with.

Of this one thing I am absolutely sure; whatever that young woman
did was calculated and deliberate; and the more she seemed to act
on impulse the more she had really studied out her move.

Narayan Singh checked a word half-way, and we waited for her to
speak first. Her eyes sought mine, and then the medicine-chest.
Then she looked back at me, and I made a gesture inviting her
to speak.

"You told me," she said at last, "that you have poison in that
box that would reach down to hell and slay the ifrits. Give me
some of it."

_"Ya sit Ayisha._ I need it all for the ifrits," I answered.

"I will make no trouble for you," she said; and for a moment I
suspected she meant to kill herself.

"You are young and beautiful," I told her. "The world holds
plenty of good for you yet."

At that she flashed her white teeth and her eyes blazed.

"Truly! Allah puts a good omen into your mouth, _miyan!_* Yet
little comes to the woman who neglects to plan for it. Give me
the poison. I will pay."

-------------
* _Miyan:_ the rather contemptuous form of address that Arabs use
toward Indian Moslems.
-------------

I was about to refuse abruptly, being rather old-maidish about
some things and not always ready with a smile for what I don't
approve; but Narayan Singh interrupted in time to prevent the
unforgivable offense of preaching my own code of morals uninvited.

"Tell us who is to be poisoned," he demanded.

"That is none of your business," she answered calmly.

"But the poison is our business," said the Sikh. "We make terms.
If the person to be poisoned is an enemy of ours, well and good;
you shall have it and we shall be gainers. But Allah forbid that
we should hasten the death of a friend! Is it for Jael Higg?"

"No, for I see that to poison her would be to incur the enmity of
Jimgrim. Already he takes counsel with her; did he and she not
lay their heads together in your presence after morning prayers?"

"For whom, then? For Jimgrim?"

"God forbid! Shall I woo a dead man? Nay! You say you will give
me the poison if I tell? You swear it? Then it is for the Lion of
Petra. Thus I shall win the love of Jimgrim. And Jael, being
without a man, will run away to Egypt, where her money is."

_"Bismillah!"_ swore the Sikh. "I see no reason why I should not
get an angry husband out of the way so simply! But remember,
Ayisha, you must slay me in turn if you hope to have Jimgrim for
husband. By my beard and the Prophet's feet* it is I who will
have you to wife, if I have to burn kingdoms first!"

----------
* A scandalous piece of blasphemy
----------

"Give me the poison first, and we shall see," she laughed.

"Very well; leave us for a while, Ayisha. I will persuade this
master of mine, who has a vein of caution, since he lacks the
zeal of love. I will bring you the stuff when he and I have
talked it over."

"Strong, strong stuff," she insisted. "Stuff that would eat iron.
Ali Higg's belly is tough."

"It shall come out through his flesh like flame," the Sikh promised.

As soon as she had gone, and he had watched her out of earshot,
he turned to me with a gruff laugh.

"Now, sahib, make her up a potion of some harmless powder for me
to carry to her tent while you go and tell our Jimgrim what has
passed. Give her physic that will purge the Lion of Petra without
doing worse than make his belly burn. Stay; give croton in a
bottle; that is best."







CHAPTER XI

"That We Make a Profit from this Venture!"



Late that afternoon, before they loaded up the camels, there was
another conference between Grim, Jael Higg, Narayan Singh, our
prisoner Yussuf, and myself. The ancient hills of Edom were not
far away, and we were near enough to Petra to feel nervous. Jael
made a pretty good pretense of meeting Grim half-way, and I think
she had made up her mind to let him dig his own pit and tumble
into it.

Yussuf was aware by that time, if not of Grim's identity, at any
rate of the fact that he was an officer in the British pay, and
was rather obviously considering which would likely pay him
best--to side secretly with Ali Higg or openly with Grim, or both.

Having fought over all that country under Lawrence, and knowing
consequently every yard of it, I suppose Grim felt neither
thrilled nor mystified; but in case any scientist reads this and
wants to know how I felt, "fed up and far from home" about
describes it. But there was worse to come!

Grim turned to me at last and smiled in that darned genial
way he has when he means to call on your uttermost patience
or endurance.

"You see, the difficulty is," he said, "to get to Ali Higg
without his getting us first. He has probably got between forty
and fifty men in Petra with him, so we daren't invade the place.
Yet we've got to hurry, because old Ibrahim ben Ah with that army
may get suspicious and send back a messenger on his own account.
Now, do you feel willing to beard the Lion in his den?"

"Alone?" I asked.

I never felt less willing to do anything, and dare say my face
betrayed it.

"No. Narayan Singh will go too, and, of course, Ayisha."

Ayisha seemed about as safe an ambassador to send as an electric
spark to a barrel of powder. I glanced at Narayan Singh and felt
ashamed, for his eyes glowed unmistakably. He was enthusiastic.

Well, it seems I draw a color-line after all. I can't fight like
a Sikh, or be as good a man in lots of ways; but I'm not going to
be outdone by one in daring, while the Sikh is looking.

"All right," I said, "I'll do anything you say."

But I did not have the perfect voice-control I would have liked,
and Jael Higg grinned. That naturally settled it.

"Narayan Singh needn't come if he'd rather stay with you," I
added, and the Sikh raised his eyebrows.

"Do you dare to make love to Ayisha, sahib?" he grinned.

I began to see the general drift of the plan of campaign, and
wondered. Having seen more than a little of the Near East, and
knowing how the peace of the whole world depends on preserving
that unmelted hotpot of nations from anarchy, I was not impressed
by the stability of things in general!

Grim had come out on his hair-raising venture because no army was
available to deal with Ali Higg, and he would not have ventured
unless powers-that-pretend-to-be were sure that Ali Higg was
deadly dangerous. Did the peace of the world, then, depend on the
success or otherwise of a Sikh's mock love-making. It did look
like it.

Narayan Singh got to his feet with a laugh and a yawn, and went
to dance attendance on Ayisha, while Grim reinstructed Yussuf
regarding the ease with which the British could impound his Jaffa
property; but though I listened to all that, and heard Yussuf's
vows of fidelity--heard him promise to reverse his former report
and spread rumors in Ali's camp of a British army getting ready
to advance--the prospect to me looked gloomier and gloomier.

"You can only die once," Grim laughed after a quick glance at my
face, "and we may save a hundred thousand people from the sword."

But I suppose I wasn't cut out to be a willing martyr. It was a
case of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and though
I did go forward on that mad escapade it was fear that drove
me--fear of the Sikh's and Grim's contempt, and of my own
self-loathing afterward.

Grim and Narayan Singh are made of the real hero stuff. I wonder
how many others there are like me, who face the music simply
because one or two others have got guts enough to lead us
up to it.

We didn't move far that night, for there was no need, and Grim
was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We
passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles
wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red
sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of
hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the
heat they had sucked up through the day.

The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or
seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the
ravine. Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us. Even the
great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and
suffered one of his worst defeats there. The Turks made the same
mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he
simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed
Bedouins and women.

Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet
above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track
leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there,
making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and
grumble to one another--safe enough until daylight, unless they
should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the
women and Ayisha's four men up to the caves with only Narayan
Singh to watch them, for there was no way of escape, except by
that twelve-inch goat-track.

Then, because Ali Baba's sons and grandsons were nervous about
the "old man their father," and because the one thing that more
than all other circumstances combined could ruin our slim chance
would be panic, Grim squatted on the sand in the gorge with the
men all around him and began to tell stories.

Right there in the very jaws of death, within a mile of the lair
of Ali Higg, in possession of two of the tyrant's wives, with an
army at our rear that might at that minute be following old Ali
Baba into the gorge to cut off our one possible retreat, he told
them the old tales that Arabs love, and soothed them as if they
were children.

That was the finest glimpse of Grim's real manhood I had
experienced yet, although I could not see him for the darkness.
You couldn't see any one. It was a voice in the night--strong,
reassuring--telling to born thieves stories of the warm humanity
of other thieves, whose accomplishments in the way of cool cheek
and lawless altruism were hardly more outrageous than the task in
front of us.

And he told them so well that even when a chill draft crept along
the bottom of the gorge two hours before dawn, taking the place
of the hot air that had ascended, and you could feel the shiver
that shook the circle of listeners, they only drew closer and
leaned forward more intently--almost as if he were a fire at
which they warmed themselves.

But heavens! It seemed madness, nevertheless. We had no more
pickets out than the enemy had. We were relying utterly on Grim's
information that he had extracted from the women and the
prisoners, and on his judgment based on that.

No doubt he knew a lot that he had not told us, for that is his
infernal way of doing business; but neither that probability, nor
his tales that so suited the Arab mind, nor the recollection of
earlier predicaments in which his flair for solutions had been
infallibly right, soothed my nerves much; and I nearly jumped out
of my skin when a series of grunts and stumbling footfalls broke
the stillness of the gorge behind us.

It sounded like ten weary camels being cursed by ten angry men,
and I supposed at once that Ibrahim ben Ah had sent a detachment
to investigate and that this was their advance-guard. Who else
would dare to lift his voice in that way in the gorge? You could
hear the words presently:

"Ill-bred Somali beast! Born among vermin in a black man's kraal!
Allah give thee to the crows! Weary? What of it? What of my back,
thou awkward earthquake! Thou plow-beast! A devil sit on thee! A
devil drive thee! A devil eat thee!"

_Whack! Whack!_

"Oh my bones! My old bones!"

Mujrim was the first to recognize the voice. He got up quietly
and stood in the gorge; and in another minute a blot of denser
blackness that was a camel loomed above him, and he raised his
hand to seize the head-rope. But the camel saw him first, and,
realizing that the journey was over at last, flung itself to the
ground with the abandon of a foundered dog, and lay with its neck
stretched out straight and legs all straddled anyhow. Mujrim was
just in time to catch his father, who was nearly as tired as the
camel. It was pretty obvious at once that Jael's authority had
failed badly when it came to exchanging camels.

The sons all surrounded the old man and made a fuss over him,
laying him down on a sheepskin coat and chafing his stiff
muscles, calling him brave names, rubbing his feet, patting his
hands, praising him, while he swore at them each time they
touched a sore spot.

They would not even give him a chance to hand over his letter
to Grim, until at last he swore so savagely that Mujrim paid
attention and took the letter out of the old man's waistcloth. It
was in the same envelop in which the other had gone, unsealed,
but with the thumb-mark of Ibrahim ben Ah imprinted on its face.

"To think that I, of all people, should fetch and carry for such
dogs!" swore Ali Baba. "I asked for a good beast in exchange for
mine, and they gave me this crow's meat, and laughed! May Allah
change their faces! May the water of that oasis turn their bowels
into stone!

"Aye, Jimgrim, they will stay there! They are glad enough to stay
there. They are dogs that fear their master's whip. They are so
afraid of him that I think if Ali Higg should bid them roast
themselves alive the dogs would do it. May they roast a second
time in hell for giving me that camel.

"Bah! What kind of sons have I? Are these the sons of my loins
that let me parch? Is there no water-bag?"

Grim struck a match in the dark corner where the camels were; but
all the envelop contained was a piece of jagged paper torn from
the original letter, with Ibrahim ben Ah's thumb-mark done
in ink made from gunpowder by way of acknowledgment. It meant,
presumably, that instructions would be obeyed, and so far, good;
we were not now in danger of trouble from that source.

But Ali Baba found his tongue again, and freed himself from his
sons after he had drank about a quart of water.

"That Ibrahim ben Ah was puzzled," he said. "Allah! But the fool
asked questions; and by the Prophet's beard I lied in answer to
him! Ho! What a string of lies! Who was I but a sheikh from
El-Kalil bringing word to Ali Higg of the movements of a British
force! In what way did I become the friend of Ali Higg? Was I not
always his friend! Was it not I who fed him when he first escaped
from Egypt! Ho-ho-ho! Have I not been working for a year to
gather men for him in El-Kalil! Have I not made purchases in
El-Kalil and El-Kudz for his wife Ayisha! _Il hamdulillah!_ My
tongue was ready! May the lies rot the belly of the fool
who ate them!

"But that was not all. He wanted to know other things--as, for
instance, whether the other force of forty men is still at large,
and if so who shall protect the women in Petra.

"'For,' quoth he, `by Allah, there are men in the neighborhood
who have felt our Ali's heel, and who would not scruple to wreak
vengeance if his back were altogether turned. Convey him my
respectful homage, and bid him look to his rear,' said Ibrahim
ben Ah."

At that Grim called to Narayan Singh, who came down the
goat-track like a landslide. You mustn't whistle your man in
those parts, or the Arabs will say the devil has defiled
your mouth.

"Ask Jael Higg to come here."

"A word first, Jimgrim sahib! While I watched, those women
talked. Jael, the older one, offered Ayisha forgiveness if she
would obey henceforth; but Ayisha gave her only hard words,
saying that in a day or so it will be seen whose cock crows
loudest. So Jael called to two of the men who have been with
Ayisha all this time, and they squatted in the mouth of her cave.
As it was very dark I crept quite close and listened. She bade
them watch their chance and run to Ali Higg.

"'If he is ill and angry, never mind,' she said. `If he beats
you, never mind. He will reward you afterward. Bid him, as he
values life,' she said, `call in those forty men whom he would
send to punish the Beni Aroun people. Tell him I am a prisoner,
but those forty are enough to turn the tables until Ibrahim ben
Ah can come. A camel must leave in a hurry for Ibrahim ben Ah at
the oasis, and bring him and all the men back to straighten
this affair.'

"She promised them money and promotion for success, and sure
death for failure!"

"Good!" said Grim, turning to me. "You see? It always pays to
stage a close-up in a game like this. We've caught our friend Ali
Higg between soup and fish."

"Get in quick, then, and kidnap him," I urged.

"Man alive," he answered, "we've no kind of right to do that.
Bring her down," he told Narayan Singh, "and then have Mujrim tie
those four men of Ayisha's so they've no chance to escape."

Jael Higg came down in a livid passion--altogether too near home
to enjoy taking secondhand orders from an Indian in the dark. She
was still less amused when she discovered that Grim knew her
little scheme.

"Well, Jael," he said, "you weren't quite frank with me after
all, were you? Which will you do now--stay in that hole up
there with a double guard, or come into Petra with us and
behave yourself?"

For, I should say, a whole minute, she did not answer. You could
not tell in the dark, but I think she was fighting back tears,
and too proud to betray it.

"I'm your prisoner," she hissed at last. "Do what you like, and
take the consequences."

"I'll put you to no indignity, Jael, if you'll play fair."

"My God! What? Are you mad, or am I? What are you going to do
with Ali Higg?"

"Make friends with him."

"You swear that?"

"Sure."

She was silent for another minute.

"Very well," she said at last. "I'll do my best."

"Accepted," answered Grim. "Now--bring down Ayisha--fetch out the
camels--mount--and forward all!"

We went forward just as dawn was breaking, and I believe every
man Jack of us except Grim had his heart in his teeth. Grim was
likely too busy conning over the plan in his head to feel afraid,
that being, as far as I could ever tell, the one lone advantage
of being leader, just as the capacity to drive out fear by
steady thinking is as good a reason as exists for placing a
man in command.

Nobody knows how old Petra is, but it was a thriving city when
Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, and for a full five thousand
years it has had but that one entrance, through a gorge that
narrows finally until only one loaded camel at a time can pass.
Army after army down the centuries have tried to storm the place,
and failed, so that even the invincible Alexander and the Romans
had to fall back on the arts of friendship to obtain the key. We,
the last invaders, came as friends, if only Grim could persuade
the tyrant to believe it.

The sun rose over the city just as we reached the narrowest part
of the gut, Grim leading, and its first rays showed that we were
using the bed of a watercourse for a road. Exactly in front of
us, glimpsed through a twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred
feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running
twice that risk, to see--a rose-red temple front, carved out
of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent
hues of morning.

Not even Burkhardt, who was the first civilized man to see the
place in a thousand years, described that temple properly;
because you can't. It is huge--majestic--silent--empty--aglow
with all the prism colors in the morning sun. And it seems
to think.

It takes you so by surprise when you first see it that in face of
that embodied mystery of ancient days your brain won't work, and
you want to sit spellbound. But Grim had done our thinking for
us, so that we were not the only ones surprised. Such was the
confidence of safety that those huge walls and the narrow
entrance to the place inspire that Ali Higg had set only four men
to keep the gate; and they slept with their weapons beside them,
never believing that strangers would dare essay that ghost-haunted
ravine by night.

They were pounced on and tied almost before their eyes were open;
and, catching sight of Jael Higg first, and getting only a
glimpse of Grim, they rather naturally thought their chief had
caught them napping; so they neither cried out nor made any
attempt to defend themselves; and presently, when they discovered
their mistake, the fear of being crucified for having slept on
duty kept them dumb.

Grim led the way straight to that amazing temple, and we invaded
it, camels and all, off-loading the camels inside in a hurry and
then driving them out again to lie down in the wide porch between
the columns and the temple wall. The porch was so vast that even
all our string of camels did not crowd it.

The main part of the interior was a perfect cube of forty feet,
all hand-hewn from the cliff, and there were numerous rooms
leading out of it that had once been occupied by the priests of
Isis, but "the lion and the lizard" had lived in them since their
day. We put the prisoners, including Ayisha's four men, in one
room under guard.

That much was hardly accomplished when the spirit of our
seventeen thieves reacted to their surroundings, and all the
advantage of our secret arrival was suddenly undone. Half of them
had gone outside to tie the camels, under Ali Baba's watchful
eye; and it was he, as a matter of fact, who started it. From
inside we heard a regular din of battle commencing--loud shouts
and irregular rifle-fire--and I followed Grim out in a hurry.

There was no enemy in sight. Old Ali Baba was busy reloading his
rifle fifty paces away in front of the temple door, facing us
with his sons, in a semicircle around him, and they were shooting
at something over our heads. Grim laughed rather bitterly.

"My mistake," he said. "I ought to have thought of that."

So I went out to see.

Surmounting the temple front, at least a hundred feet above the
pavement and perfectly inaccessible, was a beautifully carved
stone urn surmounting a battered image of some god or goddess. It
was in shadow, because the cliff wall, from which the temple had
been carved, overhung it; so it was peculiarly difficult to hit,
even at that range; but they were all firing away at it as if Ali
Higg and all his men were hidden behind the thing. There was no
particular need to stop them, for they had made noise enough
already to awake the very slumbering bones of Petra. Ali Baba
advised me to shoot too, and I asked him why.

"To burst the thing."

"But why?"

"That we make a profit from this venture."

"How?"

He paused to reload once more. He had already fired away about
fifteen cartridges.

"Allah! The very dogs of El-Kalil have heard of Pharaoh's treasure."

"I am neither a dog," said I, "nor an inhabitant of El-Kalil, for
which Allah for his thoughtfulness be praised! Tell me what you
and the dogs know."

"This place was the treasury of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, a bad
king and an unbeliever, whom may Allah curse! In that urn are his
gold and rubies. If we can crack it they will come tumbling down
and we shall all be rich."

_"Mashallah!_ You believe that? Why haven't Ali Higg and his men
cracked it, then?"

_"Shu halalk?_* I have told you Pharaoh was an evil king. He was
in league with devils and bewitched the place. The devils guard
it. May Allah twist their tails! Look--see! We shoot, but the
bullets miss the mark each time!"

--------
* What chatter is this?
--------

"Perhaps you haven't prayed enough to exorcize the devils?" I
suggested, and he dropped the butt of his rifle on the ground to
consider the proposition.

"Out of the mouth of an unbeliever has come wisdom before now,"
he said. "There may be truth in that."

And he called all his sons and grandsons there and then to spread
their mats and pray toward Mecca, performing the prescribed
ablutions first with water from one of the goatskin bags.

Well, there wasn't any further use in trying to keep our
movements secret. Grim beckoned me to where he stood beside
Narayan Singh, with Ayisha looking mischievous in the gloom
behind them, and issued final instructions.

"Present my compliments and these gifts to Ali Higg--I'm busy at
prayer, remember--and say how greatly honored we feel to have
escorted his wife across the desert. If he asks where her four
men are, tell him I'll bring them later. Be sure and make me out
a great sheikh, and say I heard he is sick, so sent my _hakim_ in
advance to give him relief; then do your best for him, if he'll
let you--after Ayisha has done her worst," he added in a whisper.
"Don't forget you're a _darwaish._ The more you jaw religion the
better the old rascal will like you. See you soon. So long!"

So Narayan Singh and I, followed by Ayisha and two of Ali Baba's
sons, left that ancient temple bearing the medicine-chest as well
as presents, and I hope the others did not feel as scared as I did.







CHAPTER XII

"Yet I Forgot to Speak of the Twenty Aeroplanes!"



You can expect anything, of course, of Arabs. People who will
pitch black cotton tents in the scorching sun, and live in them
in preference to gorgeous cool stone temples because of the
devils and ghosts that they believe to haunt those habitable
splendors, will believe anything at all except the truth, and act
in any way except reasonably. So I tried to believe it was all
right to be unreasonable too.

You would think, wouldn't you, that a man who had set himself up
to be the holy terror of a country-side and put his heel on the
necks of all the tribes for miles around, would have made use at
least of the caves and tombs to strengthen his position. There
were thousands of them all among those opal-colored cliffs, to
say nothing of ruined buildings; yet not one was occupied. Ayisha
had told most of the truth when she said in El-Kalil that her
people lived in tents.

We walked down the paved street of a city between oleander bushes
that had forced themselves up between the cracks, toward an
enormous open amphitheater hewn by the Romans out of a hillside,
with countless tiers of ruined stone seats rising one above the
other like giant steps.

In the center of that the tents were pitched, and the only
building in use was a great half-open cave on another hillside,
in which Ayisha told us Ali Higg himself lived, overlooking the
entire camp and directing its destinies.

On the top of the mountain in front of us was the tomb of Aaron,
Moses' brother. On another mountain farther off stood a great
crusader castle all in ruins; and to left and right were endless
remains of civilization that throve when the British were living
in mud-and-wattle huts. The dry climate had preserved it all; but
there was water enough; it only needed the labor of a thousand
men to remake a city of it.

We avoided the amphitheater with its hundreds of tents pitched
inside and all about it, because Ayisha said the women would come
running out to greet her, and she did not desire that any more
than we did. So we turned to the right, and started up a flight
of steps nearly a mile long that led to an ancient place of
sacrifice; two hundred yards up that the track turned off that
led to Ali Higg's cavern.

It was there, where the broken steps and sidetrack met, that the
first men came hurrying to meet us and blocked our way--four of
them, active as goats, and looking fierce enough to scare away
twice their number. But they recognized Ayisha, and stood aside
at once to let us pass, showing her considerable gruff respect
and asking a string of questions, which she countered with
platitudes. They did not follow us, but stayed on guard at the
corner, as if the meeting between Ali Higg and his wife were
something to keep from prying eyes.

So the far-famed Ali Higg was alone in his great cave when we
reached it, sitting near the entrance propped on skins and
cushions with a perfect armory of weapons on the floor beside
him. The interior was hung with fine Bokhara embroideries, and
every inch of the floor was covered with rugs.

There was another cave opening into that in which he sat; and it,
too, was richly decorated; but the sound of women's voices that
we heard came from a third cave around the corner of the cliff
wall, not connected. Ali Higg was apparently in no mood for
female company--or any other kind.

In the shadow of the overhanging rock he looked so like Grim it
was laughable. He was a caricature of our man, with all the
refinement and humor subtly changed into irritable anger. He
looked as if he would scream if you touched him, and no wonder;
for the back of the poor fellow's neck, half hidden by the folds
of his head-cloth, was a perfect mess of boils that made every
movement of his head an agony.

His eyes were darker than Grim's, and blazed as surely no white
man's ever did; and his likeness to Grim was lessened by the fact
that he had not been shaved for a day or two, and the sparse
black hair coarsened the outline of his chin and jaw. In spite of
his illness he had not laid aside the bandolier that crossed his
breast, nor the two daggers tucked into his waist-cloth. And he
laid his hand on a modern British Army rifle the minute he caught
sight of us.

Narayan Singh and I both bowed and, after greeting him with the
proper sonorous blessing, stood aside to let Ayisha approach. We
should have demeaned ourselves in his eyes, and hers as well, if
we had walked behind her. He nodded to us curtly, and almost
smiled at her; but that one wry twist of his lips was his nearest
approach to pleasantry that morning.

She knelt and kissed his hands and feet, waiting to speak until
she was spoken to; and he did not speak to her at all, but signed
to her with a tap on the head and a gesture to take her place on
the rug behind him. Then at a motion from me Ali Baba's two sons
brought forward the presents and the medicine-chest, setting them
down before him in the cave-mouth.

The presents were pretty good, I thought. I would not have minded
owning them myself; but he eyed them dully. There was a set of
Solingen razors, marked in Arabic with the days of the week; a
cloak of blue-and-white-striped cloth, fit for any prince of
Bedouins; and an ormolu clock with a gong inside it that would
have graced the chimneypiece of a Brooklyn boarding-house.

_"Mar'haba!"_* he said at last, by way of acknowledging our
existence, after he had stared at the presents for about two
minutes sourly; and I took that for permission to say my little
piece. [* Greeting]

So I delivered Grim's message, saying that he was a most
God-fearing and hard-fighting sheikh from Palestine, who had had
the honor to escort his mightiness' wife to Petra, and now,
learning of the illness of the famous Lion of Petra, who might
Allah bless for ever, rather than postpone his devotions had sent
me, his _hakim,_ schooled in medicine at Lahore University, and a
_darwaish_ to boot, to offer such relief as my modest skill
might compass.

That was a long speech to get off in Arabic for a comparative
beginner. I rather expected him to smile or say something
pleasant in return, but he didn't.

"By Allah, you have come to poison me!" he growled. "All _hakims_
are alike. There was an Egyptian tried it a month ago. Look
yonder on the ledge, where his skull hangs. May devils burn
his soul!"

It was easy enough to look shocked at that suggestion. He had the
drop on me for one thing; and, for another, Ayisha was whispering
to him, and I couldn't guess whether she was betraying me or not.
It turned out that that young woman was much too bent on swapping
owners to do anything but smooth our path; but I wasn't so sure
of that then as Narayan Singh seemed to be, and as, for that
matter, Grim was too.

But he seemed to grow a little less irascible, until she leaned
too close to him and touched his neck. Then he went off like a
pent-up volcano, and cursed her until she shuddered; and her
fright gave him no satisfaction, because he could not turn his
head to look at her.

"Where is this cursed person?" he demanded, meaning Grim,
of course.

"He rests at the treasury of Pharaoh," said I, hoping that as
Narayan Singh and I both stood exactly in front of him he might
not catch sight of Grim's movements in the valley below.

"How did he enter Petra without my leave?" he demanded.

I took a long pause, for that was an awkward question. I could
not very well admit that Grim had seized and imprisoned his
watchmen. But Narayan Singh strode into the breach.

"The Lion's jackals slept," he announced in a voice of righteous
indignation. "There was none to give our great Sheikh Jimgrim as
much as Allah's blessing. Nevertheless, he sends these presents."

Without answering that Ali Higg clapped his hands twice, and a
woman came around the corner from a near-by cave. By her bearing
she was either a junior wife or a concubine, and she greeted
Ayisha like a sister with a great pow-wow of blessing and reply.
But Ali Higg cut all that short. He was no sentimentalist.

"Find Shammas Abdul," he ordered her. "Order him to take camel
and meet the men returning from the Ben Aroun raid. Let him bid
them hurry. Go!"

She obeyed on the run. There was discipline in that man's camp,
as long as he was looking. But Ayisha followed the woman out, and
whether she herself found Shammas Abdul, or whether she contrived
to pervert the junior wife, Grim presently became aware of that
move to summon forth men, and governed himself accordingly.

For about a minute Ali Higg fixed baleful eyes on me.

"You are a Shia!" he snapped suddenly. "A Persian! A cursed heretic!"

A look of pained surprise was the best retort I could accomplish;
but Narayan Singh came to the rescue again. He thumped a fist on
his chest as if it were a drum, and glared indignantly.

"Would I, a Pathan of the Orakzai, demean myself by being servant
to a Persian?" he demanded. "Lo! We bring gifts. What manner of
desert man are you that reward us with insults!"

"Peace!" I said. "Peace!" remembering the Sikh's counsel about
the middle course I should pursue. "The Lion is sick. May Allah
take pity on him!"

Narayan Singh growled in his beard by way of submitting to the mild
rebuke, and Ali Higg--a little bit impressed perhaps--proceeded
to question me on doctrine and theology, showing a zeal for
splitting hairs that would have done credit to a Cairo _m'allim._
But I had had lots of instruction on those points, and in fact
surprised him with a trite fanaticism equal to his own, ending
with a statement that whoever did not believe every article
and precept of the Sunni faith not only was damned forever
beyond hope, but should be despatched in a hurry to face
the dreadful consequences.

His eyes softened considerably at that; and for the moment I
think he almost approved of me, in spite of the foreign accent
that must have grated on his ears, and his national dislike of
any one who hailed from India. He actually told both of us to be
seated, and clapped his hands again. Another woman came, looking
dreadfully afraid of him.

"Coffee!" he ordered.

We sat down on the ledge of rock in front of him, for although it
was hardly wise to seem too deferent, it would have been most
unwise to move away and give him an unobstructed view of the
valley, where Grim might be in sight or might not be. Our job was
to gain time.

He did not say a word until the coffee came, beyond swearing
scandalously when he moved his head and the boils hurt.

"O Allah, may Your neck hurt You as mine does me!"

I thought that pretty good for such a hard-and-fast doctrinaire,
but it was almost mild compared to some of his other remarks.

The woman brought the coffee on a tray in little silver cups--as
good and as well served as if our host were a Cairene pasha; but
our irascible host took none, for Ayisha called out and warned
him not to, saying it would heat his boils.

She came like the wife of Heber the Kenite, who slew Sisera,
"bringing forth butter in a lordly dish." She held in both hands
a marvelous Persian rose-bowl half filled with clabber, saying
she had prepared it for her lord herself, and offered it to him
on bended knees.

I could not see her face, for her back was toward me and she had
her shawl over her head; but I thought of that little vial of
croton oil Narayan Singh had given her instead of poison, and the
Sikh caught my eye meaningly.

Ali Higg was pleased to condescend. He took the bowl in both
hands, muttered a blessing, and drank deep, swallowing about half
the stuff before he noticed its strange flavor. Then he flung the
priceless bowl away from him, smashing it to atoms, and picked up
his rifle to take an aim at Ayisha.

"By Allah, the bint* has poisoned me!"

---------
* Literally girl; about as respectful as the word "skirt" would
be if used of one's wife.
---------

She screamed and ran. He fired, but she was already past the
corner, and the bullet grazed the rock. Moreover, croton oil is a
drastic cathartic, and waits on no man's convenience. He dropped
the rifle, groaned--and I would rather not set down quite all
the rest.

Sufficient that it gave Narayan Singh and me our opportunity. It
made him too weak to resist, and we took care of him. I let him
go on believing he was poisoned, and gave him harmless doses that
he presently believed had saved his life; so that even the
tyrannical fanatic felt a kind of gratitude.

Held like a baby in the Sikh's enormous arms with no less than
half a dozen terrified women looking on--for they had all run one
way while Ayisha ran the other--he slowly recovered control of
his emotions, while the women loudly praised my medicinal skill.

And since I knew almost nothing at all of medicine, and therefore
could say anything I chose without feeling guilty--like the
fellow on a soapbox who harangues a crowd on politics--I told him
he must have the boils lanced there and then, or otherwise the
poison might get to them and inflame them beyond all hope.

I suppose the men who had met us at the corner of the great
flight of steps did not come and interrupt because they had had
enough of his temper for one morning and did not choose to sample
it again uninvited. The rifle-shot did not bring them, because it
was nothing new for him to vent displeasure by shooting at folk;
and if there were a corpse, and it had not fallen over the cliff
or been kicked over, they would come and remove it when ordered,
but certainly not sooner.

Ali Higg has strength enough left to assure me that if I killed
him he would wait for me in the next world and settle the account
there. I told him what was perfectly true, that I would rather
lose my hand than kill him, so he added that if I hurt him more
than was reasonable four camels should be told off afterward to
hurt me.

Seeing he was to be sole judge of what was reasonable pain, and
having no means of guessing whether Grim was still alive and able
to protect me, I decided to give him a hypodermic, and put a shot
into his arm that would have quieted a _must_ elephant. Maybe I
rather overdid that, but as I have no medical diploma nobody can
call me to account.

And the operation was successful, if unpleasant. I used one of
the presentation razors.

Then Grim came striding up the mountain-ledge, with Ali Baba and
all the rest of the gang at his tail, but no sign anywhere of
Jael Higg. He stood and boomed out a sonorous Arab blessing; and
if ever a man felt and looked like a trapped wild beast it was
that Lord of the Limits of the Desert and Lion of Petra, Ali Higg.

However, Narayan Singh and I had played our part and got him weak
enough; he could not even jump to grab his rifle. The rest was
clearly up to Grim, who looked in no hurry at all.

He stood in the cave entrance with the light behind him, turning
slightly sidewise to let Ali Higg see him in profile. The Lion's
jaw dropped. Grim's very head-dress was striped like Ali Higg's.
His cloak was the same color. He had been dressed rather
differently when I last saw him, so he must have been doing some
pretty careful spy-work.

Of course, a close examination showed a dozen differences between
the two men, but in his weak state following that drastic physic
and the operation Ali Higg believed for a moment that he saw his
own ghost! One or two of the women checked a scream, which helped
matters, and the others shrank into a corner, staring with wild
eyes. One woman laughed, but not from amusement.

_"Salamun alaik,_ O Ali Higg!" said Grim after a full minute's silence.

_"Wa alaik issalam!_ Who are you, in the name of Allah?"

Instead of answering Grim strode in, and Ali Baba lined up his
sons across the cave-mouth. Unless Grim had left undone some
precaution in the camp below it looked as if we had the Lion
caged to rights, and you could tell by the look in Ali Baba's
usually mild old eyes that there would have been short shrift for
somebody if his advice were taken. For a moment I caught sight of
Ayisha peering timidly between the end man and the wall--to see,
I suppose, whether the Lion was dead yet--but the minute I caught
her eye she disappeared.

Grim stooped down over Ali Higg, who was sprawling on his stomach
on a Persian rug.

"Has my _hakim_ relieved Your Honor's pain?" he asked.

The Lion managed to sit upright. Three of the women piled
cushions behind him and ran back again to their corner.

"Who are you in my likeness?"

"A friend, _inshallah,"_ answered Grim.

He squatted down cross-legged on the mat in front of him; for
though the Lion's neck was pretty nicely bandaged and the
hypodermic had not lost its power, yet it hurt him quite a
little to look up.

"I had three brothers, but thou art none of them. I had one
son, but neither art thou he. In the name of the All-Knowing,
name thyself!"

"I am he," said Grim, "who brought Your Honor's wife from El-Kalil."

"Oh! And a million curses on the bint! She tried within the hour
to poison me. But for this Indian of thine I were a dead man now.
Stay! Send for her!"

He clapped his hands.

"Let her be flung over the cliff. Go bring her!" But nobody moved
to do his bidding, and it dawned on him a second time that he was
cornered. He wasn't a man who took such a discovery mildly.

"Ayisha shall be dealt with at the proper time!" he snarled. "I
have not accepted those gifts. Take them up! You who have entered
Petra without my leave shall account to my men presently.
Thereafter we will talk of gifts."

"Which men?" Grim asked him blandly. "Surely not the forty and
four who went to raid the Beni Aroun? Nay, I took the liberty of
sending them a message signed with Your Honor's seal. They will
not come for a day or two, so we can make friends undisturbed."

_"Shu halalk?_ With my seal?"

"With Your Honor's seal. Observe; I have it."

"Then--then--Where is she into whose hands I gave it?"

That was the first sign that Ali Higg had given of the slightest
affection for any one. His face looked ghastly at the thought of
losing that strange, half-western wife of his.

He had called Ayisha by her name in front of strangers, out of
disrespect. Jael he would not name, even when confronted by the
proof that she had broken trust and lost his precious seal.

"I took another liberty," said Grim. "I sent word by messenger,
who bore a letter sealed with that same seal, to Ibrahim ben Ah.
He will neither raid El-Maan nor return to Petra."

"He is defeated?" asked the Lion, dumbfounded. "And she--is
she a prisoner?"

Grim did not answer either question.

"And I met a man named Yussuf. You know him?"

_"Naam."_ (Yes).

"He has been lying to Your Honor. He has said that the British
are helpless. He brought Your Honor a report from Palestine that
was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told
you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing
better; for he is one of those men who say always what the hearer
would like to hear."

"What has that to do with thee?" demanded Ali Higg.

He was looking about him furtively, and Narayan Singh picked up
his rifle off the rug and stood it against the wall. Grim turned
toward Ali Baba.

"Bring Yussuf!" he ordered.

The ranks opened, and Yussuf was thrust forward into the cave,
where he stood looking like a felon awaiting sentence.

"Did you speak the truth, or did you lie to the Lion of Petra?"
Grim demanded.

"Who am I that should know the truth of such matters?" the man
whined, his voice squeaking like a cart-wheel. "I obeyed. I
looked. I asked. Perhaps I did not understand all I saw and what
was told me."

"Is the Lion of Petra with ten-score fighting men able to stand
against the British with twenty thousand?" Grim asked him.

_"Inshallah._ The Lion is brave. Who knows? Yet I forgot to speak
of the twenty aeroplanes at Ludd, each having ten bombs of a
hundred pounds weight that could make short work in an hour or
two of ten score men."

"Why don't they come?" snarled Ali Higg.

"They take no delight in slaying the women and children,"
answered Grim. "Those black tents below there would be an easy
mark to aim at; but who would gain? It is better that peace
were kept."

"Throw that Yussuf over the cliff!" commanded Ali Higg.

But once more nobody moved to obey him, and Yussuf had the indecency
to smirk, for which Grim cursed him with whiplash sarcasm.

Then Ali Higg put both hands before his face and prayed aloud:

"O Allah, Lord of mercies and of wisdom and rebuke, if I am in
the hands of enemies and she who was the mother of good plans is
taken away from me, have I not, nevertheless, smitten the heretic
in thy name and raised thy banner over Petra? Give me, then,
wisdom, that I deal with these men and confound thy enemies. _La
Allah illa Allah!"_

He dropped his hands and looked up with a hard, fanatical frenzy
in his eyes. But they changed almost instantly. The ranks of Ali
Baba's men opened once more; and Jael Higg stepped through,
dressed like a fighting Bedouin, bandolier and all. Grim had even
let her have a rifle and cartridges. As he promised, he had put
her to no indignity.





CHAPTER XIII

"There is a Trick to Ruling!"



Don't you hate a story with a moral in it? I do. This is an
immoral story. And, remember, I said in the beginning that it had
no end, but was no more than an episode in the career of Ali
Higg. I would have liked to tell it from his viewpoint setting
down what he thought of this unexpected stick thrown in his
wheel, omitting most of the bad language for the censor's sake.

His first thought was that Jael had returned from the raid with a
hundred and forty men. You could tell that by the light in his
eyes, even before he spoke.

"Allah reward you; you come in time! Have Ayisha and that Yussuf
thrown over the cliff. Praised be Allah, I shall be obeyed at last!"

It was his worst shock yet when even Jael did not start at once
to carry out his order. Instead, she sat down on the rug, so that
she and Ali Higg and Grim formed a triangle.

"O Lion of Petra," she said--for it would not have been manners
to call him by his right name in front of strangers--"what was
written has come to pass, and my foreboding was a true one. If we
had let the tribes at El-Maan be, and if you had kept those forty
men instead of sending them to raid the Beni Aroun, this could
not have happened. Now twenty men have cornered us, while Ibrahim
ben Ah eats up provisions to no purpose, sitting idly in
the desert."

"Then the El-Maan men were not scattered to the winds?" groaned
Ali Higg. "O Allah, may shame devour you as it tortures me! Those
dogs will have looted a train and will say that Ali Higg no
longer dares interfere! The sun rises, but it sets at evening,
since Allah wills; but is my day so short?"

"By no means," answered Grim. "The El-Maan men saw me and
believed I was the Lion of Petra. I forbade the looting of the
train, and Your Honor's wife Ayisha went to El-Maan to enforce
obedience by her presence.

"Later they saw me start for Petra when the train had passed; and
now they will learn that Ibrahim ben Ah with seven score men is
bivouacking in the desert. The world is round, O Ali Higg, so
that where in one place it seems dark in another they say the sun
is rising."

"In Allah's name, who art thou?" asked the Lion.

"James Schuyler Grim. Men call me Jimgrim."

"Allah! _Wallahi haida fasl!_* Not he who fought under Lawrence
against the Turks? _Wallah!_ I fought on the other side, but we
all feared Lawrence and admired him so that not a man would try
to capture him, although Djemal Pasha put a great price on his
head. And you were known far and wide as his man! There was a
price on your head too--dead or alive--five thousand pounds
Turkish--well I remember it. By the beard of the Prophet, you
might have come here as a friend, O Jimgrim!"

------------
* By Allah, this is a strange happening.
------------

Grim laughed.

"I come here as a friend in any case," he answered. _"Khajjaltni
bima'rufak!_* You brought back a woman to poison me!"

-----------
* You shame me with your friendship!
-----------

And this is where the immorality comes in. I told a lie, and
don't regret it. Nor did Grim regret it; and he backed me up. And
Narayan Singh supported both of us.

The lie was my own idea entirely, invented on the spur of the
moment; and afterward, when old Ali Baba named me The "Father of
Lies" on the strength of it I felt extremely proud, as he
intended that I should do. The lie worked.

I said:

"O Ali Higg, men said of you that you are a fierce man, swift in
wrath and slow to take advice. And others said that you are sick
with burning boils; yet who shall go into the Lion's den and heal
him? And Ayisha said to me:

"'Thou art a _hakim,_ yet he will never listen to thee. But he is
my lord, and shall I see him linger in agony? Give me a potion
that will weaken him. Then in his weakness he will call for help,
and thou shalt heal the boils. And afterward that which is
written shall come to pass. If in great wrath because I mixed the
potion in his drink he shall have me slain, nevertheless the Lion
will be whole again; and who am I compared to him?' So said the
lady Ayisha."

I know Grim would have given a hundred dollars for leave to laugh
then right out in meeting; but he kept a straight face, and he
had so contrived to make Jael Higg afraid of him that though she
looked scandalized she held her tongue. And Narayan Singh, as I
said, supported me.

"These words are true, O Lion of Petra," he boomed out. "I heard
the lady Ayisha speak, and it was I who put the little vial in
her hands. By the beard of the Prophet I swear the words are true."

But as he is a Sikh, and therefore believes that the prophet of
El-Islam was a liar and impostor, with a beard as fit to be
dishonored as his fiery creed, perhaps his perjury was scarcely
technical. Anyhow, I am not the recording angel. And Grim said,
being a more cautious liar than the rest of us:

"Therefore, O Lion of Petra, mercy is due to the lady Ayisha,
seeing that the end in view was good, although the means
were questionable."

But Jael Higg looked daggers at her lord. She had made up her
mind to reduce that establishment by one at least; and Ali Higg,
looking in her eyes, read what all polygamous husbands have had
to face ever since the day when Abraham was forced to drive
out Hagar into the wilderness. So he pronounced one of those
Solomon-like judgments that are the secret of a man's rule over
men in that land, granting to each contender the whole of what he
asked, yet having his own way in the bargain.

"I find she is not worthy of death," he said, "since she played a
trick that brought me comfort. Yet I will not endure a woman's
tricks, nor condone the offense. I divorce her. Before witnesses
I say she is divorced."

It's a simple affair in that land, isn't it?

But there were matters not so simple to attend to, and Grim saw
fit to waste no further time.

"I said I come as a friend," he resumed.

"I heard it!" the Lion answered dryly.

"Without boasting, I have saved you from destruction, while
delivering your purchases from El-Kalil. And I have done your
name no harm, but good on the country-side."

"Allah! How have you saved me from destruction?"

"By preventing that unwise raid on El-Maan."

_"Wallahi!_ Do you think my men could not have accomplished it?"

"Maybe. Do you think the British would be fools enough to let
that go unpunished? The El-Maan people would surely have appealed
to them. Aeroplanes would have been sent to bomb you out of
Petra. Can you fight aeroplanes?"

"The British do not pretend to rule on this side of the Jordan,"
the Lion retorted.

"No. Do you want them to pretend to?"

"Allah forbid!"

"Then take a friend's advice, O Ali Higg, and keep the peace here
rather than make war."

"That is good advice; but will the British make a treaty with me?"

"No," Grim answered, smiling. "By that they would recognize
you as a ruler, which they will not do until they surely know
you rule."

_"Mashallah!_ How shall men know that I am a ruler unless I make
war and enforce my will?"

"Have I made war on you?" asked Grim. "Have I disarmed you, or
killed one man? Yet I enforce my will, as you shall see."

"By a trick! You played a trick on me, or otherwise--"

"There is a trick to ruling," answered Grim.

"By the beard of the Prophet, that is true! But show me a trick
that can defeat eight hundred men. The Sheikh of Abu Lissan plans
to come against me. Those El-Mann dogs had heard of it, and so
had the Beni Aroun; therefore I planned to crush them first
before dealing with Abu Lissan. Show me a trick that can defeat
the Abu Lissan men, and surely I will call thee friend!"

"Suppose we make a bargain, then," said Grim.

_"Taib._ I am ready."

"Giving pledges for fulfilment."

"You mean I shall give pledges to the British?"

"Hardly," Grim answered. "If they took a pledge from you that
would be like signing a treaty, wouldn't it? I have no authority
to sign a treaty. This must be a bargain between me and thee."

_"Taib."_

"It is known," said Grim, "that you have money on deposit with
the Bank of Egypt."

"A lie! A lie!" snapped Ali Higg. "Who said it?"

"Fifty thousand pounds in gold was the exact amount, deposited at
six percent, and interest to be compounded every half-year," said
Grim. "And because the Koran denounces usury by Moslems, and you
are a pious man--and also perhaps because of the risk attached to
using your name in the matter--your wife Jael's name was used.
Nevertheless, your seal was used at the time as a check on her.
Now, at a word from me the British would impound that money,
interest and all."

"A murrian on them! But you spoke of being friends?"

"And of a pledge between you and me. In proof that I speak as a
friend, though I had your seal I have returned it."

Jael Higg confirmed that by displaying it in the hollow of
her hand.

"You can't possibly prevent a message from me reaching British
territory," Grim went on. "A letter is written already, and you
don't know which man has it. You are not my prisoner. I intend to
leave you free and unharmed. It is possible you might attack me
when I go, and kill me and some of my men; but the rest would
escape. And then would come aeroplanes, and you would never see
that money in the Bank of Egypt."

The Lion blinked away steadily, looking so absurdly like Grim
in some respects, and so utterly unlike him in character
nevertheless, that it looked like plus opposing minus, or a
strong man tempted by his baser self.

"Therefore," continued Grim, "if you will promise me to raid no
more villages I will undertake to deal with the Sheikh of Abu
Lissan. But as a pledge, Jael and you must sign and seal a letter
to the Bank of Egypt stipulating that the fifty thousand pounds
shall not be withdrawn for three years. As long as you keep your
promise that money of yours shall be safe, with no questions
asked as to how you came by it; for I shall not say a word about
it to the British Government, making only a sealed report,
which shall be locked away and never opened unless you break
the bargain."

"And at the end of three years?"

"Who knows?" Grim answered. "The years are on the lap of Allah.
By then we may all be dead, or you may be king, or may be weary
of politics--who knows?"

"And if I refuse?"

"Aeroplanes!"

"But how shall I believe you?"

"Do I not pledge my life?" Grim answered. "I have said that I
will go to Abu Lissan."

"Allah! Why don't you send the aeroplanes to Abu Lissan? Blot the
dogs out! Destroy them! Why not?"

"Would it not be easier to send them here?" asked Grim. "This is
only part way. You, who found it easier to crush the smaller
first, tell me why the aeroplanes should not come first to Petra!"

_"Wallahi!_ I wish I had aeroplanes!"

"But you haven't. Choose now: Will you make that bargain with me,
or shall I go straight back from here to Palestine and make my
report to the administrator? Never doubt that I can get back; I
know where your men are, and I know the desert trails as well as
you do. You and your few men that you have here and the women
might attack us in the Wady Musa,* but I would prevent that by
taking you and Jael with me until we reached the open."

----------
* The name of the valley that leads into Petra
----------

"You talk boldly," the Lion sneered. "If you think you can take
us with you that far then why not to Jerusalem? The words of a
boaster are a mask of doubt. Hah! Take us to Jerusalem! Why not?"

"Because then," Grim answered, "there would be ten-score
cutthroats at large without a leader who can hold them. One
Lion can keep a bargain, but ten score jackals would ruin
a country-side."

Ali Higg turned that over in his mind for five full minutes, like
a chess player refusing to admit that he is mated. But there
wasn't a move left to him, and Jael went closer on her knees to
whisper advice in his ear.

"I agree," he said at last. "As Allah is my witness, I agree. Let
us be friends, O Jimgrim!"

Grim shook hands with him and offered him a cigarette, while Ali
Baba's men outside the cave sent up a great shout of victory.
Then to Ali Higg's inexpressible delight Mahommed started to sing
the Akbar song, and they all roared the chorus:

_"Akbar! Akbar! Akbar Ali Higg!"_

The song put everybody in good temper, so that when Jael wrote
out a letter to the bank at Grim's dictation Ali Higg affixed the
seal to it without a murmur and ordered food supplied at once to
all Grim's men; and we had a feast up there on the ledge outside
the cave--in sight of the very spot where Amaziah, King of
Israel, once hurled ten thousand of his enemies into the
gorge below--that, in some respects, was the most enjoyable
I ever shared.

But Grim was not the man to spoil success by lingering in what
might yet turn into a trap. He who sups with the devil should not
sit long at the feast; and I warned you this was a story without
an end to it.

There is the lady Ayisha, and what became of her, and the account
of when and in what way the Lion kept his bargain. Well, have you
heard of those tale-tellers in the East, who sit under a village
tree with the menfolk all around them? They work up to the
climax, and then pause, and pass the begging-bowl for whatever
the tale is worth. I fear those masters of inducement would mock
me as a tyro for having already told too much before the pause!


_The End_

------------------------------






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