coming one by one. Bag the last one alive. Narayan Singh, gag him; take Suliman’s turban—have it ready in your hand. I’ll pin his arms and get his knife away. I’ll whistle to startle him, and then all three of us spring together, downing him at once in the shadow where his friends can’t see.”
They stowed Suliman in a hollow just over the shoulder of the hill, and crawled into position where a foot-track passed between an anthill and a big cactus in a shallow, spoon-shaped depression of the hilltop. They had hardly hidden themselves when the first man came swinging along at a sort of dog-trot, the pace common to most savage and nearly savage people bent on adventure. He passed so close that they might have touched him, and the reek of cotton clothing soaked in oil was unmistakable.
Six men passed, all going at the same pace, all smelling strongly of the same rancid unguent, with about ten yards between each, dog-trotting to the night’s work and in no particular concern just yet to conceal themselves. The seventh man lagged a little, being heavier than the rest and not so free- breathing.
As he drew abreast of them Jim whistled. But instead of checking his pace to look about him the man sprang into the air like a shot buck, and landed in his stride intent on sprinting.
Jim, Catesby and Narayan Singh all sprang at the same instant, and crashed their heads together. But for Catesby’s Rugby football days they would have missed their man; but instinct, born of following the ball though a whole pack pounce on him, sent Catesby’s right arm shooting out of the scrimmage. Groping wildly at the air, he caught the Arab’s ankle. It was greased, but the check before the Arab freed it tripped him, and before he could recover balance all three captors were on top of him, crashing together into the cactus bush.
The Arab could not yell with agony, because Narayan Singh’s steely wrist clapped on the cotton gag and held it in place, come life come judgment day. And the Sikh, being topmost, got fewest of the cactus stabs, so swore least. Catesby, underneath, with his arms about the fellow’s legs, cursed like a wet cat, hissing canteen blasphemy between his teeth; and Jim, side by side with the prisoner in a bed of inch-long thorns, kept at his task in panting speechlessness that was just as eloquent. There are few points that hurt more acutely than those of a Holy Land cactus.
Jim got the fellow’s knife at last, and dropped it in the murderous mess of pikes they fought among. But to hold his arms was another matter. The Arab was greased from head to foot, and his clothes, which might otherwise have served to hold him by were rotten with the oil, tearing whenever they were seized. As the clothing came away from him in rags his naked skin slipped from the grasp more readily than ever; and he was stronger than a bear—sinewy and lithe and, for all his weight, able to wriggle any section of himself that wasn’t pegged down tight.
Three or four times he seemed about to slip away from them, struggling like an eel. But Narayan Singh’s knee in his stomach combined with the unyielding gag to rob him of breath, so that at last they all rolled out into the open and Jim gasped out a request to Catesby to take his girdle off and bind the fellow’s hands and feet.
Catesby was only in the nick of time at that. Struggling to his knees, he was aware of something flashing brightly in the moonlight from behind the ruined cactus bush. He sprang into the shadow and caught Suliman’s kukri in the act of descending on the Arab’s undefended neck, whirled in both hands like an ax by the eight-year-old. He threw Suliman into the cactus to whimper and recover rectitude.
Then when they had trussed their prisoner and had picked most of the thorns out of him they sat and operated on themselves by moonlight, using pocket-knives and fingernails and hard words, giving the Arab time to get his breath and think up some lies to tell them presently.
It was no use trying to pretend they themselves were Arabs any longer, for they had sworn too lustily in English, to say nothing of Jim’s instructions anent the girdle, and Narayan Singh’s hoarse imprecations in another tongue.
“Perhaps it’s as well,” laughed Jim. “Here, Catesby, be a good chap and dig this thorn out from behind my knee. He’ll be so puzzled that perhaps he’ll lie less, if we can get him to say anything at all. Where’s Suliman?”
“I am here. I look for the kukri. It was not the act of a true khawaja (gentleman) to throw me in that cactus bush. If you are my mutahid (partner), Jimgrim, you will see that I have full vengeance!”
“I’ll avenge you. Wait and see. Let’s ask the prisoner what he thinks about it. Have you found the kukri?”
Suliman flourished it in the moonlight. Jim stooped over the prisoner and lifted him into a sitting attitude; at sight of the kukri whirling near his head he ducked and fell over again sidewise; for his hands were tied under his knees and one can’t keep balance as well as struggle in that position. Jim lifted him again.
“Now,” he said in Arabic, “this child vows you are an iblis; and he has sworn by the beard of the Prophet to kill the first iblis that he sees. We are his friends, here to help him do it. What do you say to that?”
“You have caught the wrong one. I am no iblis.”
“You fight like one, and you smell worse than one. What then are you?”
“I am a thief.”
The man threw such pride into the assertion that Catesby and Narayan Singh both laughed. But Jim was too intent on something else. He shifted his own position so that the moonlight shore directly in the man’s face—then nodded.
“Look at me carefully, Mahommed ben Hamza. Do you know me?”
“Jimgrim! Ilhamdilla! (Thank God!) Now I am all right.”
“No, you’re not, you scoundrel!”
“Man without virtue I may be, since Jimgrim says it, who knows so much; but not for nothing did I help thee at El-Kerak, when a word from me would have ended thy career. I say I am all right. Ilhamdilla!”
“You think I’m easy,” Jim answered, “but I tell you my friends here are ruthless.”
“Then you and I will fight them. I am not afraid.”
“What brought you from thieving in the Hebron suk (market)?”
“What were you doing yonder?”
Jim pointed to the hill two hundred yards away on which the leper had danced.
“What but obtaining magic against bullet and bayonet? What else could a dervish do for me? However, he forgot to bless me for ambushment by the way, or even you, Jimgrim, would not have been clever or strong enough to take me, with twice as many men.”
“Then you think his dance is efficacious?”
“Surely. All the thieves go to him, and how many get caught? A very few get shot, and a very few get stabbed, but those are the ones who scoffed at him. He is a driver of hard bargains, but his magic works.”
“Hard bargains, eh?”
“Leper’s bargains. A man must leave two-thirds of all he steals, or the equivalent at a place appointed, or suffer the curse. None dares fail him.”
“I drive still harder bargains,” Jim answered.
“Aye, and keep them. Loose my bonds, Jimgrim; thou and I are old friends.”
“Not
