Father of fear! There are other leaders.”
“None fit to touch her garment! You must not kill her!”
“That is my affair!”
“I say you shall not!”
“Son of sixty dogs, let go of me!”
She made a sound between a curse and a scream, as if someone had taken her by the throat, and I judged it time to interfere. It was just two strides around that end of the rock, and I beat Narayan Singh by half a second. The man’s long knife was drawn, and he had his fingers on her throat, as I had guessed. The butt of my rifle sent the knife spinning, the Sikh dragged Ayisha away, and I rushed the fellow before he could draw a second knife. He was prone on his back in an instant, with the weight of my big hams on his chest. Narayan Singh pounced on his rifle, while I searched him diligently for hidden hardware, tossing out a regular armory of weapons on to the sand as I dug them out one by one. When, I was quite sure he hadn’t any kind of weapon left I let him sit up and recover breath.
With his first wind he began to beg for liberty, vowing he had never harmed me, nor intended to.
“May your honors live forever!” he roared out; and I let him roar, for it didn’t seem to matter now whether the whole camp was wakened or not.
Next he offered me a camel as the price of freedom. When I laughed at that, he swore he would pray for me three times daily for a year, if I would let him go. He was dead set on getting away from us; he even offered me his rifle as a souvenir of the occasion. It was too bad to have to entertain such an awfully unwilling guest.
“Come on,” I said, “and learn the worst. Perhaps you won’t be beaten very badly!”
At that he even offered to lie down and let me beat him— anything, in fact, if I would only let him go. On the whole I judged he might prove a pretty important capture, and as he wouldn’t see sense I seized him at last by the scruff of his unwashed neck and forced him along in front of me. He hadn’t strength enough to make me exert myself, but he struggled like a hooked eel all the way.
I felt like a New York cop running in a pickpocket, and the funniest part of it was that Narayan Singh strode along just in front, with his arm around Ayisha’s shoulders, booming titanic love-stuff into her unwilling ears.
“What have I vowed a hundred times, beloved? Hah! If that had been an army hedged in with a sea of fire, I would have jumped the fire and freed you! What are bayonets and guns,” he boomed, “to one who loves as I do! Come closer, jewel of the Desert! Lean on your protector! We Pathans of the Orakzai have hairy arms, but they are strong to nestle in. Let me look into those liquid eyes and see how fairer they are than the moon and stars!”
“Father of pigs!” she retorted. “Get away from me. I choose to walk alone.”
“Nay, beloved; come closer! One danger is enough to run for this night. Next we must face Jimgrim, and you need a protector from his wrath. He will accuse you of treachery while he slept. You must lean on me. You must depend on me to defend you. We Pathans of the Orakzai are wondrous liars. A man’s sword and a man’s tongue should be ready for any occasion, say we. Now put me to the test, O Heart of all Loveliness. What shall we tell Jimgrim?”
But though he called her by a fabulous long string of jeweled names, offered her the hills of Edom for a kingdom and the fairest cities of the earth for plunder, he could get no answer out of her at all, until we came to the brim of the fiumara and were challenged by three separate members of our startled camp. We had to answer the challenge right swiftly, for the click of rifle bolts preceded it. Then Narayan Singh took Ayisha by both arms and swung her in front of him.
“Must I tell him all I heard?” he asked. “Oh, Heart’s Delight, don’t put me to that necessity!”
“Black pig! Let go of me!”
But he held on, and my prisoner—no more aware than I was that the Sikh had not been able to hear the first part of the conversation at all, piped up in support of him.
“I have a tale I shall tell,” he announced. “Listen, Lady Ayisha, this great fellow is a friend of yours. Humor him. He is willing to stand between us and this Jimgrim. Better let me tell the tale, and you confirm what I say. None ever believes a woman, but he will believe me.”
At that Narayan Singh laughed gruffly, and I detected a note of triumph, although he affected defeat.
“Malaish,”* he said, with a shrug of his great shoulders and loosing Ayisha’s arms, “there is nothing for it but to tell the truth. I shall tell Jimgrim every word I overheard from first to last.”
(* No matter)
He had gained his point. Ayisha made up her mind that he had heard everything, and whatever her first intention might have been she decided now to make a virtue of necessity.
“I need no ignorant Pathan to speak for me!” she retorted. “It is I, not you, who will him tell. Get behind me, son of sixty dogs!”
But instead of obeying that command he laughed aloud, picked her up like a child, and carried her down the dark track into the fiumara. She didn’t seem to mind that part of it. In fact, one of the most surprising things anywhere East of, say, the North Sea is the complaisance with which women submit to being seized and carried off. He carried her straight up to Grim, and set her on her feet in front of him on top of the island, and I think that by the time she got that far her private opinion of the Sikh had undergone considerable modification.
I sent my prisoner up between two of our Arabs, and went to have a quiet look at Jael’s tent. There wasn’t a sound. I hardly cared to open the fly and look in, so I counted the camels. The Bishareen dromedary wasn’t there. I returned to her tent, and this time didn’t hesitate to peer inside. It was empty. The sheepskin rug and blankets were gone too.
Several of our Arabs were still asleep among the camels; it wouldn’t have been the slightest use to arouse and question them. The remainder had slept until my prisoner’s bellowing disturbed them, and wouldn’t believe me at first when I said the Bishareen was gone. I went up to Grim with the bad news, but he was aware of it already.
“There she goes,” he said, before I could begin to tell him.
He nodded toward the north-east. The little Bishareen was eating stick and galloping at top speed in the direction of the rock from behind which Ayisha’s visitor had come—silhouetted softly in the moonlight just out of reasonable rifle-shot. It looked exactly like one of those up-to-the-minute motion pictures, especially as there was too much noise in our camp by that time for us to hear the camel’s footfall. Most of our men were clambering out of the fiumara and shouting to Grim to know whether they should open fire or not. He shouted to them to do nothing.
What Jael had accomplished looked remarkably like a miracle to me. It was obvious, of course, now why the camels had been making all that noise when I started to follow Narayan Singh. But how in the world she had saddled that beast and got away without disturbing the men who slept by the picket stakes was the mystery, unless there was a traitor in our camp. The saddle alone was as much as most women could lift. She must have chosen the exact moment when Grim and I were both engaged in climbing out of the river-bed, he in one direction, I in the other, to start up the fiumara and disappear around the nearest bend. The rest would be easy enough; no doubt there were plenty of places higher up where a camel could find footing and negotiate the bank.
We
