The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

named Ibrahim ben Ah, were resting their camels miles away in an oasis. The remaining forty and odd were camped in another direction.

      Jael, Ali Higg’s wife, after being made prisoner, had grudgingly agreed to help Grim tame her lord and master; and what with drenching him thoroughly, lancing his boils and catching him at an all-around disadvantage, we had forced him to give a hostage for good behavior in the shape of a deposit of fifty thousand pounds lying in his wife’s name in the Bank of Egypt.

      So far, good; but there were complications. In the first place, that document was not worth a plugged piastre until safely under lock and key in Jerusalem; for Ali Higg would surely steal it back if he could. The money had been paid into the bank in gold, mainly half-sovereigns that were earned by Arab troops in the war against the Turks. The man who could squeeze all that money out of fighting Bedouins was unlikely to lose his grip on it, even for the three-year term of the agreement, if force or chicanery should provide him an alternative. If those troops of his should suddenly return, for instance, not only the agreement but our lives would be at stake.

      The easiest course would have been to scoot out of Petra and head for Palestine, avoiding that oasis where the “army” waited. But Grim had made a promise, which prevented that. In return for Ali Higg’s pledge and in the general interest of peace he had undertaken to deal with a sheikh at Abu Lissan, farther south, who with eight hundred men proposed to come and “eat up” the terrible Ali and his scant ten score.

      While on our way southward there would be nothing to prevent Ali Higg from swooping on us treacherously from behind; but in dealing with people who might perhaps break faith there is nothing nearly so important as observing your own promises.

      Nor was that all. Our opportunity to visit Petra, give the slip to Ali Higg’s men, capture his head wife and corner the gentleman himself had come through Ayisha, his second wife, whom Grim had found making purchases in Hebron and who welcomed our escort on her way home across the desert. On the way she had fallen in love with Grim after the desperately swift fashion of the country. Thinking to poison Ali Higg, she had given him croton oil, which we provided. It served our purpose famously, but rather naturally maddened the fierce polygamist, who divorced her on the spot. So we had Ayisha on our hands, for we couldn’t decently leave her to take the con­sequences.

      When I was a boy at school I once borrowed from another boy a dime manual entitled “What To Do with a Dead Policeman.” But that problem—solved, I remember, clumsily—was a very simple one compared to what we had to face.

      Ayisha was a beautiful young woman, wholly bereft of convention in the Western sense, and totally resolved to win Grim for her own or know the reason why. Our rank and file, excepting Narayan Singh and myself, were all profound polygamists from El-Kalil, thieves by profession and conviction, and inclined to treat Ayisha’s love affair as a prodigious joke; which, of course, it was, but for the infernal danger.

      In fact, the whole situation was a joke, if you could only bring yourself to look at it in that way. What else could you call the intention of twenty men (not one an Englishman) cut off from supplies and support, to interfere between the warring tribes of North Arabia and breed peace in the process where none had ever been since history was written?

      As I sat with my back against the wall of Ali Higg’s cave overlooking the gorge of the City of Ghosts (as they call Petra) I tried to figure on our chances, but could meld nothing. Not that we weren’t a pretty resourceful crew of a sort, and fit to fight, perhaps, three times our number; but the odds seemed overwhelming in that land where, as they say, “in the desert all men are enemies.”

      There wasn’t one of us who could not mount his camel on the run, with a rifle in one hand, and our camels were the finest beasts that ever swung leg out of Syria. There was nothing about desert work that you could teach Grim or any of our seventeen Arabs. Narayan Singh was a Sikh in a thousand—a bold soldier of the old school, who should have been born a hundred years ago. As for myself, although comparatively new to Arabs and Arabia, I have prospected and hunted big game for a living up and down the length of Africa; and if diplomacy is not my long suit, I can endure; and physical strength has advantages.

      But I laughed to myself as I sat there and looked at Grim, wondering at the freak of fortune that had thrown us together. True, I have chosen to spend my life looking for adventure where it grows; but a man likes to pile up a few dollars against old age and I have generally reckoned up the prospects in advance.

      There was no money to be made in Grim’s company. It didn’t matter, as it happened, for I have not had more than my share of disappointment and need never starve again as long as the U. S. keeps a Government in being. But middle-aged dogs don’t learn new tricks too easily, and I have known less surprising things than to find myself risking a sun-burned neck behind a whole-souled altruist without the remotest possibility of making a profit.

      But you couldn’t resist Grim. The man is like a lodestone, if you have the iron of adventure in you. I could take two of him, one in each hand, and shake them as a dog does rats; for though he is tall he is lightly framed, whereas the muscle stands on me in lumps. But when it comes to a call for those qualities that have always seemed to me man’s finest, he can leave me standing still.

      Mind you, I yield to no man in determination to live so according to the rules, as I understand them, that I can afford to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to Hell if I see fit. But that is one thing—comfortable in its way, and good for friendship. Genius is another. Grim has genius, besides a flair for leaving this old battered world a wee mite better than he found it.

      I never heard him preach. Intimate friend of mine though he now is, I have hardly ever heard him discuss his principles. But I did hear him tell Jael Higg, by way of convincing her that her only possible course was to help him tame her ambitious lord if she hoped to escape imprisonment and deportation, that his one asset is understanding of Arabs and Arabia; that he is Hell bent, as he put it, on doing his bit in the world; and that his notion of a good big bit is to help Arabia to independence by preventing brigandage and civil war.

      He clings to his American citizenship as some men stick to religion. The British made him a major on those terms because they needed him, and he accepted because it seemed the best way to carry on what he had in view. He is punctiliously loyal to the crowd whose uniform he wears occasionally, yet I never knew a man more outspoken to his paymasters whenever he disagrees with them, nor any one who took more liberties with orders.

      His one annoying quality is that of keeping his thoughts to himself, hardly ever discussing a plan until it is perfect in his own mind and then telling you, perhaps, not more than half of it; after which he springs the rest on you as a surprise. But if you want to be friends with any man on earth you’ll find there’s something or other to put up with.

      We all have our hobbies, even those who imagine they have none and boast of it. Having traveled widely I have had to make mine portable, and the two things that have increasingly obsessed me are the ancient history of whatever land I happen to be in, and the study of men’s faces.

      I had time to study two now—Grim’s and Ali Higg’s, for they were sitting face to face in the middle of the cave, Grim stooping from the shoulders as he squatted Arab fashion in exactly the same way that the robber chieftain did.

      You would never have guessed that Grim wasn’t an Arab, born in that part of Arabia. Unless in the secret, you would never have believed the two were not blood-brothers—possibly even twins. Seen in the comparative gloom of the cave they resembled a man facing his reflection.

      Except for the bandages on Ali Higg’s neck they were dressed alike, and the only difference noticeable at the first glance was the color of their eyes: Ali Higg’s were brown and blood-shot; Grim’s were keen and baffling—somewhere in the region of blue-gray. I have looked straight into them and not been able to tell their color.

      Now the puzzling thing was this: That whereas every line of Grim’s face made for strength, independence, honesty and all those other qualities that you recognize in a man at the first glance and like immediately, almost identical features made a rogue of Ali Higg. I believe you could have taken a pair of calipers and measured them without finding