The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

the poison is our business,” said the Sikh. “We make terms. If the person to be poisoned is an enemy of ours, well and good; you shall have it and we shall be gainers. But Allah forbid that we should hasten the death of a friend! Is it for Jael Higg?”

      “No, for I see that to poison her would be to incur the enmity of Jimgrim. Already he takes counsel with her; did he and she not lay their heads together in your presence after morning prayers?”

      “For whom, then? For Jimgrim?”

      “God forbid! Shall I woo a dead man? Nay! You say you will give me the poison if I tell? You swear it? Then it is for the Lion of Petra. Thus I shall win the love of Jimgrim. And Jael, being without a man, will run away to Egypt, where her money is.”

“Bismillah!” swore the Sikh. “I see no reason why I should not get an angry husband out of the way so simply! But remember, Ayisha, you must slay me in turn if you hope to have Jimgrim for husband. By my beard and the Prophet’s feet43 it is I who will have you to wife, if I have to burn kingdoms first!”

      “Give me the poison first, and we shall see,” she laughed.

      “Very well; leave us for a while, Ayisha. I will persuade this master of mine, who has a vein of caution, since he lacks the zeal of love. I will bring you the stuff when he and I have talked it over.”

      “Strong, strong stuff,” she insisted. “Stuff that would eat iron. Ali Higg’s belly is tough.”

      “It shall come out through his flesh like flame,” the Sikh promised.

      As soon as she had gone, and he had watched her out of earshot, he turned to me with a gruff laugh.

      “Now, sahib, make her up a potion of some harmless powder for me to carry to her tent while you go and tell our Jimgrim what has passed. Give her physic that will purge the Lion of Petra without doing worse than make his belly burn. Stay; give croton in a bottle; that is best.”

      CHAPTER XI

      “That We Make a Profit from this Venture!”

      Late that afternoon, before they loaded up the camels, there was another conference between Grim, Jael Higg, Narayan Singh, our prisoner Yussuf, and myself. The ancient hills of Edom were not far away, and we were near enough to Petra to feel nervous. Jael made a pretty good pretense of meeting Grim half-way, and I think she had made up her mind to let him dig his own pit and tumble into it.

      Yussuf was aware by that time, if not of Grim’s identity, at any rate of the fact that he was an officer in the British pay, and was rather obviously considering which would likely pay him best—to side secretly with Ali Higg or openly with Grim, or both.

      Having fought over all that country under Lawrence, and knowing consequently every yard of it, I suppose Grim felt neither thrilled nor mystified; but in case any scientist reads this and wants to know how I felt, “fed up and far from home” about describes it. But there was worse to come!

      Grim turned to me at last and smiled in that darned genial way he has when he means to call on your uttermost patience or endurance.

      “You see, the difficulty is,” he said, “to get to Ali Higg without his getting us first. He has probably got between forty and fifty men in Petra with him, so we daren’t invade the place. Yet we’ve got to hurry, because old Ibrahim ben Ah with that army may get suspicious and send back a messenger on his own account. Now, do you feel willing to beard the Lion in his den?”

      “Alone?” I asked.

      I never felt less willing to do anything, and dare say my face betrayed it.

      “No. Narayan Singh will go too, and, of course, Ayisha.”

      Ayisha seemed about as safe an ambassador to send as an electric spark to a barrel of powder. I glanced at Narayan Singh and felt ashamed, for his eyes glowed unmistakably. He was enthusiastic.

      Well, it seems I draw a color-line after all. I can’t fight like a Sikh, or be as good a man in lots of ways; but I’m not going to be outdone by one in daring, while the Sikh is looking.

      “All right,” I said, “I’ll do anything you say.”

      But I did not have the perfect voice-control I would have liked, and Jael Higg grinned. That naturally settled it.

      “Narayan Singh needn’t come if he’d rather stay with you,” I added, and the Sikh raised his eyebrows.

      “Do you dare to make love to Ayisha, sahib?” he grinned.

      I began to see the general drift of the plan of campaign, and wondered. Having seen more than a little of the Near East, and knowing how the peace of the whole world depends on preserving that unmelted hotpot of nations from anarchy, I was not impressed by the stability of things in general!

      Grim had come out on his hair-raising venture because no army was available to deal with Ali Higg, and he would not have ventured unless powers-that-pretend-to-be were sure that Ali Higg was deadly dangerous. Did the peace of the world, then, depend on the success or otherwise of a Sikh’s mock love-making. It did look like it.

      Narayan Singh got to his feet with a laugh and a yawn, and went to dance attendance on Ayisha, while Grim reinstructed Yussuf regarding the ease with which the British could impound his Jaffa property; but though I listened to all that, and heard Yussuf’s vows of fidelity—heard him promise to reverse his former report and spread rumors in Ali’s camp of a British army getting ready to advance—the prospect to me looked gloomier and gloomier.

      “You can only die once,” Grim laughed after a quick glance at my face, “and we may save a hundred thousand people from the sword.”

      But I suppose I wasn’t cut out to be a willing martyr. It was a case of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and though I did go forward on that mad escapade it was fear that drove me—fear of the Sikh’s and Grim’s contempt, and of my own self-loathing afterward.

      Grim and Narayan Singh are made of the real hero stuff. I wonder how many others there are like me, who face the music simply because one or two others have got guts enough to lead us up to it.

      We didn’t move far that night, for there was no need, and Grim was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the heat they had sucked up through the day.

      The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the ravine. Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us. Even the great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and suffered one of his worst defeats there. The Turks made the same mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed Bedouins and women.

      Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there, making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and grumble to one another—safe enough until daylight, unless they should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the women and Ayisha’s four men up to the caves with only Narayan Singh to watch them, for there was no way of escape, except by that twelve-inch goat-track.

      Then, because Ali Baba’s sons and grandsons were nervous about the “old man their father,” and because the one thing that more than all other circumstances combined could ruin our slim chance would be panic, Grim squatted on the sand in the gorge with the men all around him and began to tell stories.

      Right there in the very jaws of death, within a mile of the lair of Ali Higg, in possession of two of the tyrant’s wives, with an army at our rear that might at that minute be following old Ali Baba into the gorge to cut off our one possible retreat,