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 handgrips 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 so long as I was playing his game, 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 so 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, 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 line 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 ysailmak! Tammu fi hiraset Allah!”
CHAPTER X
“Wallahi!” 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 any one in Abu Lissan was to know it.
But there was this to consider: The more afraid our fires had made the Avenger and his men, the greater the danger to us in approaching. Men in a panic fire wildly at the slightest sound.
Nor could we afford the time to creep up cautiously to the ruined walls and announce ourselves as white-flag bearers from some safe hiding place among the shadows. Grim had made no secret of the fact that we were taking a horribly long chance.
But I suppose our time hadn’t come yet. Fortune favored us. Ibrahim ben Ah was, of course, a nominal fatalist by religion, and an opportunist by conviction and habit. I’m both or neither, I don’t know which; except that, as I’ve said, “I’ve observed” that fortune favors the right side as a rule. Narayan Singh is a soldier, which is not a profession but a creed, whoever maintains the contrary; his viewpoint was peculiar to the sub-denomination that he follows:
“Many a man has stumbled on good fortune in the dark simply because he dared go forward. It is only they who wait for chances to whom chances never come.”
Three points of view being superior to one apparently, we rode together into a perfect trap that proved to be our salvation.
The Avenger, scared though he was, had retained a modicum of common sense. We discovered afterward that he had tried to rally a skirmishing force that should unmask whatever might lurk behind those fires, but his men had threatened to mutiny at the first suggestion of it.
So he had had to content himself with minor precautions, and had managed to persuade a few score men that for the sake of their own skins it would be wise to go out on picket duty in the shadow of some sand-hills half a mile beyond the walls.
They were so appalled by our illuminations that they huddled all together in one dark spot. And they kept so quiet for fear of calling attention to themselves that we never even suspected their presence, or we could very easily have given them a wide berth.
As it was, they saw us, counted us, and held their fire, because bullets in the dark have a way of killing camel instead of rider. Camels taken alive are profitable loot; dead ones are only carrion. Dead men more often than not leave blood-feuds to be fought or settled with their relations whereas living prisoners may be held to ransom—besides which, you can cut their throats at any time.
So we were swooped on suddenly in the utter darkness of a gap between two mounds, dragged from our camels, and would have been disarmed if Ibrahim ben Ah hadn’t found his tongue and the voice of authority. Age has its recompenses, even in the dark. They respected his age where they might have gagged and bound Narayan Singh and me; and once he had a hearing experience made him convincing. He called them sons of sixty dogs, of course. You begin most victorious arguments with that in Arabic. Then he cursed their mothers, wives, daughters and female relatives in general for several generations either way, before beginning on their fathers, brothers, uncles,