Come along, Mary; I believe that I’m going to faint again, and I’ll need you to hold my hand all the way to town—”
So the party broke up.
Two days later I was lying in the hospital, with fever lessening in my shoulder and all bones set, when I heard our new military band go swinging past the place, playing a funeral march amid great tumult of shouting crowds. Lieutenant Ch’en came into the room and grinned at me when I asked him what was going on.
“Well, sir,” he chuckled, “I had them march past here on purpose to give you a bit of pleasure, Captain Breck! And in half an hour or so you’ll hear them come back playing a fox-trot.”
“Hello!” I exclaimed. “The trial convicted him?”
“It did, sir—and on your recommendation his excellency the baron is being hanged.”
I turned my face to the wall, and Ch’en went out. He really thought I would be pleased; that was the Chinaman of it, all over! With the idea of giving me some satisfaction, they had given Rosoff a quick trial, a fair trial, and a damning trial—and hanged him.
I didn’t like it. For a minute I felt pretty sick. Of course, I had intended to hang him, but that was in the heat of things. Now that I had come out on top, it looked different—but they have their own way of looking at things in China.
Then Mary came into the room, and I forgot all about everything else.
DOWN THE COAST OF BARBARY
CHAPTER I
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say
What manner of man art thou?”
In the grounds of a villa outside Algiers, in the year 1730, two men were sitting on a low stone garden seat beneath an orange tree.
“A horse’s head?” said Patrick Spence, and frowned. “With no inscription?”
“It needs none.”
Dr. Shaw peered at the bronze coin in his hand, brushing the fresh earth from it lovingly.
As his spade and the dirt on his strong brown forearms testified, Spence had been at work in the garden when the coin turned up. He drew at his pipe with the quiet satisfaction of one who has labored hard.
He had the piercing, far-seeing eyes of a sailor.
Dr. Shaw had walked from the city. He wore a camel-hair burnoose, which kept the intense sunlight from his lean, spare frame; he was a tall man, erect and muscular. One sensed something sweet and kindly in his smile as he regarded the coin.
“This horse’s head is inscription enough, Patrick,” he mused. “It shows the coin to be of Punic times. I have not a few of them. You will recall the lines:
“Locus in urbe fuit media, laetissimus umbra,
Quo primum jactati undis—”
The younger man broke in upon the sonorously rolling lines with a laugh.
“No, no, doctor! The little Latin I ever knew was forgot in the vortex of navigation. You Oxford men always seem ready to spout Greek and Latinity—but we haven’t time for much of that in America. And you’d better take off that burnoose or you’ll sweat to death before you know it.
Absent-mindedly, Dr. Shaw loosened his garment. His eyes lifted to the sea.
“A sweet spot, Patrick!”
The American nodded. Well outside the tottering walls of Algiers, along the pleasant northern hill-slopes, the white blaze of sunlight was here broken by gardens and villas bordering a winding road. The scent of orange-flowers clustered thickly, the flashing red of pomegranates glimmered among the greenery; here were groves and fountains, flowers and running brooks, in sharp contrast to the squalid heat and crowded city streets.
“Something like this had Virgilius in mind,” observed Shaw, “when he spoke of the old Corycian gardener and his wondrous fruit! By the way”—he glanced at his burnoose—“this garment is most interesting, Patrick! It must have been shaped after the cloak of the little god Telesphorus, straight about the neck, with a Hippocrates’s sleeve for cowl. It answers, I take it, to the pallium, or the cucullus of the Gauls, mentioned by Martial, or to the cloaks wherein the Israelites folded up their kneading troughs, as do the Moors to this day—”
The younger man leaped to his feet.
“Hello!” he cried sharply. “Shaw, something’s happened! Here’s one of the consulate Negroes on the run!”
A man became visible running along the road. He was a black man. His nearly naked skin glistened with sweat. Panting, he turned in at the gate and came to them with a hasty salutation. He addressed Shaw in a chatter of Arabic.
“Bless my soul!”
The good doctor turned. He acted as interpreter, chaplain, and general factotum to the English consulate.
“They want me at once—I know not what has happened! Patrick, remain here, if you will. I am most anxious to have those specimen roots from Egypt laid under the soil before the sun withers them, if it be not imposing on your—”
“It’s the least I can do,” said Patrick Spence. “I’ll be glad to keep busy. Don’t forget the tobacco you promised to bring me! Be sure to get Virginia leaf from that shop next the consulate. All the others sell only Turkish, and I like not the stuff.”
The Rev. Thomas Shaw, D.D., F. R. S., fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, strode away hastily with the Negro. He turned to wave his hand, then vanished from sight.
Patrick Spence knocked out his pipe and leisurely refilled it. He strolled down to the open gates, where the bale of Egyptian roots had been left by a muleteer, and smiled to himself at thought of his friend.
“A rare man enough,” he mused. “Except when the classics fasten on his tongue, he has no more of the parson about him than I have. Lord knows that’s little enough, at present!”
He stood between the open gates and looked out at the sea, in sight over the winding road. A wistful hunger grew in his eyes at sight of a speck of white far out.
“I’d like to be aboard her and heading for Boston town. But here I am, penniless and dependent upon a consul’s charity—hello! We have strangers among us, it seems!”
Coming toward him along the road were two riders, and the gray eyes of Spence dwelt curiously upon them. He knew that these must be new arrivals in Algiers. Attracted first by their remarkable costumes, it was their faces which finally drew the keen interest of the American.
The man was robed in a burnoose of snowy white. Against this, about his neck, hung a most amazing thing—the glorious collar of the Golden Fleece, a jewel worn by kings alone! The woman beside him wore a silken dress of apricot hue; a huge sun-hat shaded her head.
The man’s face was, or had been, extremely handsome. Once it had been full and rotund. Now it was thin and gaunt, lined with folds of empty skin, half hidden by a mustache and goatee of grayish black. Suffering lay in that face, and strange inward pain.
The
