sure enough, they came within the hour, bringing torches with them, roaring up the street like bulls turned loose. They paused before the jail to hold a consultation, but after five minutes of noise decided not to open it; then came on again, singing about the swords of El-Kalil. And because it was dark and you couldn’t guess their numbers, it seemed as if the whole East were surging along to swamp and roll over us and surge along forever.
“I’ll take mine on the steps with the police,” said Jones and went out through the front door, where we heard the breech-bolts clicking as he examined the men’s rifles in the window-light.
“Poor old Jonesy’s got the wind up badly!” said de Crespigny. “I’ll go out to the gate and talk to them. Grim, will you do what you can to hold the place if they scough me?”
He followed Jones out through the door and Grim sent me to the roof with a revolver and orders to use my wits if I had any left. So I saw what took place better than any one did.
De Crespigny mounted the wall and stood this time, for they could not have seen him otherwise, while the mob milled and sang songs at him. You could see their eyes by the light of the lanterns they carried—that and the sheen on swords and knives, nothing more. It was a long time before he could make his voice heard and then they laughed at him, which is a very bad sign among Moslems.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Rifles!”
“I have none.”
“Liar! Father of lies! Kill the liar and loot his stores!”
De Crespigny held one hand up for silence and because they were used to giving him a hearing they gave him a last one now.
“Now for your own sakes, don’t be fools! You can kill me; that’s easy. You can loot the Governorate, although you’ll find that tough work and not worth while. Then you can start for Jerusalem; and the Sikhs will meet you on the way! I’ve done my best for you. If you’ll go back to your homes now there shall be no reprisals for this night’s work. Go home, and act like sensible men!”
Someone threw a rock at him, but missed and it broke a lower window. They laughed and he held up a hand for silence again. It was then that I heard a row like the grumble of far-off thunder and looking to the right saw a string of swiftly moving lights—very strong lights, one behind the other, heading this way from Jerusalem. That was Sikhs in lorries; it couldn’t be anything else. They were coming like a fourth-alarm turn-out to a fire.
A minute later, while de Crespigny was trying to make himself heard above the growing tumult, the men on the crowd’s edge heard too, and looked and yelled. Ten minutes later ten great lorries came to a halt in line in an utterly empty street in front of the Governorate, disgorging two machine guns and more hairy Sikhs than you would have believed could be possibly crowded into that space.
The Sikhs were angry. They had been skirmishing for a day and a night without sleep. They wanted nothing on earth so much as a crowd to glut their temper on and stood about outside, grumbling their disappointment. But one enormous man with a beard like the man’s on the chutney-bottle in the grocer’s window thrust his way into the Governorate, calling aloud for Jimgrim.
“Ah!” he exclaimed at sight of him and came to attention. “Not dead, then, sahib! And the man I was to reckon with—that Ali Baba person—where is he?”
Grim introduced them and the eyes of Sikh and Arab met for thirty full seconds.
Then Narayan Singh the Sikh grinned hugely and thrust his bayonet forward. Ali Baba answered the threat by touching his knife and pointed to his sixteen sons.
“The more the better!” said Narayan Singh, perfectly ready to accept odds of seventeen to one.
“Inshallah!”
“We will see, whenever the time comes!”
“Inshallah!” repeated Ali Baba sweetly.
“Lovin’ couple, ain’t they!” put in Cohen. “Say; don’t you fellows ever eat supper in this joint? I’m dyin’ o’ thirst! What time is it?”
“Ah!” Grim laughed. “That reminds me; here’s your watch back. I allow you’ve won the bet. Where’s mine?”
“Gimme mine first.”
Grim obeyed and Cohen pocketed the thing.
“Like to kid yourself, don’t you! Think I’ll part with yours? Nothin’ doing! I’ll keep this blame thing for a souvenir—souvenir o’ the first time I was made a stark starin’ sucker out of and wasn’t sorry! But say; let’s have supper now and drink to them seventeen thieves!”
THE LION OF PETRA
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,