The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

What does this mean? Ali? Ali Higg? You here? I don’t understand!”

      “You’ll be dead before you understand if you don’t call those men off,” Grim answered; and his pistol demonstrated that he meant it, for her men were closing in on us.

      So she knelt up on her camel and cried out that Ali Higg was there, bidding them keep their distance.

      “But what does this mean, Ali? And you speak English? Since when? Oh, I must be mad! You are not Ali Higg! No! I see now you are not, but . . .”

      She turned on Ayisha and spoke in Arabic: “Ayisha, what does this mean? Answer me!”

      But Ayisha said nothing. She chose to get back between the curtains of the shibriyah, and I saw Narayan Singh on the far side whispering to her.

      “For,” as he told me afterward, “the time to persuade a woman you are her friend is when she is afraid or distracted by doubt. At all other times she is like a leopard; but then she is like a lost sheep!”

      The silence was at an end now. Every one was shouting; the real Ali Higg’s men wanting to know what had happened, and Ali Baba’s answering them with threats if they dared disobey and come closer. The effect was exactly as if the figures on a motion-picture screen could be heard calling back and forth.

      The two men whom we had captured with the woman Jael were silent, staring hard at Grim as if they saw a vision; and Yussuf, the prisoner we had made at the oasis, tried to talk to them, but they would not listen to him; the drama was too absorbing. Jael herself, inclined to be panicky at first, was recovering self-possession by rapid stages, and grew silent.

      She hardly looked like a woman until you came quite close to her, for she was dressed like a man, in the regular Bedouin cloak and head-gear, with a bandolier full of cartridges. But her hair had come unbound, and one long reddish lock of it was over her shoulder.

      She had a good-looking, strong face, badly freckled, and was probably about forty years old, although that much was hard guessing in the moonlight; for the rest, she looked like the incarnation of activity—standing still, but only by suppression.

      “Now Jael Higg,” said Grim, “we’ll have no squeamishness about sex. I’m in a tight place, and you’ll obey orders or take the consequences. We’re going to Petra, the lot of us.”

      “You! Are coming with me? To Petra?”

      “Yes. And we’ve escort enough. Who commands those men?”

      “I!”

      “Yes, yes. But who’s at the head of them now?”

      “Ibrahim ben Ah.”

      “Call out for Ibrahim ben Ah to come here to speak with Ali Higg, and watch that he comes alone,” Grim ordered, and two or three of Ali Baba’s men went off to obey. “Now, Jael, you do the talking. Understand me, though; this pistol has a way of going off quite suddenly when the trigger is pressed. Answer: What village were you intending to raid?”

      “None.”

      “No use lying. Ali Higg’s spy brought word to him that the British are engaged elsewhere. Raid follows promptly, of course. Now, out with it! I don’t need you at Petra; Ayisha will serve my purpose there. You’ve ten seconds before I pull the trigger. Where was this raid headed for?”

      “El-Maan.” “Why?”

      “That place has become too independent. The tribes meet there and plan raids on their own account.”

      “Uh-huh. That sounds fairly credible. Now, observe—I pass my pistol to this Indian.”

      He handed it to me.

      “He will shoot you dead if you make one false move. You will tell Ibrahim ben Ah to take all his men at once to that next oasis on the way to El-Maan, and to wait there for yourself and Ali Higg, to wait as long as three days if necessary. Say you will join them there and lead the raid. You understand me?”

      “Yes.”

      “You understand that you will die immediately if you disobey?”

      “Yes.”

      “He will ask what the shooting meant just now. You will answer that there was a mistake owing to the darkness, and that Ali Higg is in a great rage, and he had better make himself scarce. If he asks others questions, curse him and tell him to be off.

      “And one last warning, Jael Higg! Obey me exactly, and you shall see your husband in Petra. Disobey by as much as a word or a sign and you’re dead. Do we understand each other?”

      “You really mean it? You will go to Petra?”

      “Yes.”

      “I have seen fools, and men in love, and gamblers, but you are the greatest madman of them all,” she answered. “Very well, I will speak to him as you say.”

      Grim mounted his camel and rode to the top of a ridge of sand about twenty yards away, where he halted and sat motionless. If he really looked so much like Ali Higg, as seemed to be the case, no one at that distance could have doubted his identity. I hauled off two or three paces, so as not to betray the fact that I was to be Jael’s executioner in a certain contingency, and the long sleeve of my cloak concealed the pistol.

      As I am setting down the facts exactly as they happened I may as well record here that I laughed. She thought I laughed at her in cold-blooded delight at the prospect of murder, and I think that tightened her resolution not to give me the least excuse.

      But I was not feeling in the least cold-blooded. I was laughing at myself, who might be forced to shoot a woman after all.

      Perhaps Grim gave the job to me because he knew I would not shoot her in any case. I don’t know. Nor do I myself know now whether I would have shot her; sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. My guess is that I would have failed to do it, and that Narayan Singh, who was standing by and heard every word that passed, would have wiped my eye, as the saying is.

      Then Ibrahim ben Ah came striding into our midst like an old-time shepherd with a modern rifle in place of crook, looking neither to the right nor the left of him, but fixing his eyes on the man he thought was Ali Higg on the camel beyond us. He seemed surprised when Jael Higg stopped him, and told him to take all his men at once to that oasis, where he was to wait, if necessary, three days.

“I was told to speak with the Lion himself,” he objected. “Ya sit Jael,40 there is wrath for those who disobey him!”

      “Go, taste his wrath then!” she retorted. “There was shooting because of a mistake in the darkness. Good camels were killed. He is more enraged than at the loss of twenty men. He would have it the blame is yours—”

      “Mashallah! Mine!”

      “But I persuaded him. He cools his wrath in the moonlight, communing with Allah. Better go, Ibrahim, before his mood changes again.”

      “But how came he to be here ahead of us? We left him in Petra. How—”

      “How old beards love to wag! Fool! Go ask him then! I call these men to witness I have given the order that he told me to give to you. I wash my hands!”

      She began to make the gesture of washing hands, but thought better of it, for I might have mistaken that for a signal. Old Ibrahim ben Ah looked straight into her eyes, read resolution there, and bowed like a courtier to a queen. Then he turned on his heel, strode back to his camel, mounted, and returned to his men without another word to any one. Yet I dare bet that he had counted us, and knew we were all strangers, and dare say his thoughts would fill a good long chapter of a book.

      Grim continued to sit his camel motionless until the raiders under Ibrahim ben Ah had formed into four long lines and ridden away westward, towing enough baggage-animals behind them for a week or two’s supplies.

      “One