swallowing rock.
At last, with a mouth full of food, she sprang on her camel again and departed, just as the sun seemed to rest for an instant on the rim of the western horizon, as if it were a living ball of fire hesitating to make the plunge into the unknown. It was pitch-dark already by the time she reached her men.
Then began about the hardest work I ever lent a hand in. Grim and the rest of us—even old Ali Baba and Ibrahim ben Ah with his silken skirts tucked up about his waist—Ayisha and her men, and the camels all toiled harder than galley slaves to get that wood distributed.
We laid it in great heaps at intervals along the hilltop at the back of the oasis. We carried tons of it to the sugarloaf hill, and stacked it at even distances apart in long lines extending from each side of the hill, with a liberal supply on top (and the men who toted the loads up that hill had to be threatened each time they returned). We sent several tons on camel-back to the place where Ayisha had left her outpost. And we finished the job by midnight.
Lord! and weren’t we tired then. I dare wager that not one man of all those Bedouins, nor even any of our seventeen beaver-active thieves, had ever worked half as hard; no, not if you added all the work they had ever done, and set the total against that one performance. Grim and Ayisha did the whip-work; Grim smiling, and seeming to be everywhere at once; Ayisha cursing, coaxing, laughing, laying on the stick—and they stood it from her, Heaven knows why! They didn’t know of her divorce, and that meant something; they may have reckoned they must square accounts with Ali Higg if they struck back at her, and none of them got a close enough view of Grim in the dark to realize that he wasn’t the Lion of Petra. But there was more than that. She radiated and screamed courage; the spirit was infectious.
When the job was done, we spread and lit the bonfires. And if the Avenger, watching from his roof in Abu Lissan, hadn’t believed that there was an army camped against him then, he would have had less imagination than a piece of protoplasm in the radiolarian ooze. Some of the men were told off to keep moving in the firelight; and, seeing the general theory of the thing now readily enough, they danced and sang. It was pretty easy to imagine the Avenger’s feelings; adding to the anxiety of having to face what he supposed was a force of at least a thousand men, there was the natural disgust at seeing all that good store of wood go up in flame. And, of course, the more they danced around the fires, the more depressed he must have felt.
So far, good. A confident team is half the game; and a dejected opponent is a good proportion of the other half. But we had to be quick; for as surely as dawn should come the Avenger wouldn’t have to exercise his talents much in order to discover the deception. Grim called a midnight council under the stars, consisting of himself, Ayisha, Ibrahim ben Ah, Ali Baba, Narayan Singh and me; and he commenced proceedings by breaking his usual rule of not unfolding more than half of a plan at any time. There wasn’t anything to complain about on that occasion as far as frankness was concerned, although the plan would have suited Huckleberry Finn better than a man of my temperament. I like to be at hand-grips with the details of a thing. If it’s to be a gamble, I prefer to see the cards dealt, as it were; and I’m constitutionally averse to any game in which there is a joker running wild. The joker was Ali Higg, the Lion of Petra. None of us could even guess what he was doing.
However, I was the only member of the party who did not view the whole plan with enthusiasm; and having made up my mind not long before to back Grim to the limit, at least until such time as he should be proven to have lost his flair, I kept my opinion to myself.
Ibrahim ben Ah surprised us all with his oath-embellished praise of the scheme. So much depended on him that I suppose Grim would have had to change the plan in toto if the old pirate had been half-hearted. But he foresaw the opportunity of making a great name for himself as diplomatic peace-maker; and I think, too, that he wasn’t without secret suspicion that circumstances might possibly develop in such fashion as would leave him standing in the Lion of Petra’s shoes.
But nobody was half as enthusiastic as Ayisha. The names she called Grim would have made old King Nebuchadnezzar jealous. They made Ali Baba grunt contemptuously:
“Wallahi! I say that a woman’s flattery and the voice of the devil are one!”
At that, chiefly for the sake of drawing Ali Baba, Narayan Singh came out with one of his ponderous jests: “The woman’s tongue tells no more than the triumph in her heart. Was she not alone and wretched? And is she not now loved to distraction by a Pathan of the Orakzai?” He struck his chest as if it were a war-drum, and Ayisha almost spat at him. I think she would have done, if Grim had not been between them.
“Should I stoop to a pig-Pathan,” she sneered, “with a prince waiting for me?” And she flashed her eyes at Grim in a way that made me almost as uneasy as Ali Baba was. What had Grim promised her? He was not the kind of man to break a promise. I didn’t like the look of it, or of the triumph in her eyes. Neither did Grim’s enigmatic smile look reassuring, as he sat there silhouetted against the crimson of the nearest fire.
However, it was time to be up and doing, and the three of us whose task was to carry the first strategical assault examined our weapons and found our camels. Five minutes later, somewhere about one o’clock of a perfect, starry night, Ibrahim ben Ah, Narayan Singh and I rode out from behind the lines of fires and headed straight for Abu Lissan, with Grim’s last words resounding in our ears in Arabic:
“Peace ride with you! Remember our old friend Ali Baba’s motto: ‘Allah makes all things easy!’ Allah ysallmak! Tammu fi hiraset Allah!”
CHAPTER X
“Wallah! And you say she has a following of fifty men?”
The easiest thing in the world is to affect to look down on savages. We all do it. I’ve traveled, and looked and listened; but I’ve never found the savage yet who didn’t mock at someone, whose emotions he considered more primitive than his own. I never got beyond the firework stage myself, and I’m free to admit that the sight of those bonfires in a wide horseshoe curve thrilled me more thoroughly than any row of old masters that I ever gaped at in a picture-gallery.
Cultural standards are arbitrary anyhow, and mostly poppycock. A stark naked aristocrat, who had nineteen wives and no misgivings up in the Nandi Hills beyond Kapsabit, once told me that I was an obvious Philistine, because I blew my nose on a handkerchief. Ever since then I have chosen my own standard and gone forward under it; and I maintain—in the teeth of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Turner, and all the host who have amused themselves with paint—that what we had staged that night was Art. It was better than theirs, and there was more of it.
It was so good to look at, blazing irregularly up and down the outline of the hills, and in a straight, low string of crimson and orange splashes across the plain, that you couldn’t feel afraid—even though we were quite likely riding to our deaths. It was gorgeous; it was full of color; it made the shadows dance; it suggested the titanic shapes of those raw hills. And it was ours; we ourselves had done it. Even if another fellow had collected the material, it was we who spread that glowing paint.
Lord! How those fires did wink and dance behind us as we rode for Abu Lissan. I don’t see how any man who wasn’t a genius at divination could have guessed our force at as little as a thousand men. Knowing as I did how few we really were, I drew comfort from the sight of all those fires, and felt as if an actual army corps of friends was bivouacked in the hills. Far away over to our right there glowed a minor constellation, where Ayisha’s outpost kept vigil, and if that didn’t represent another thousand men at least, I don’t see how anyone in Abu Lissan was to
