The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

just around the corner of the wall, where he could listen.

      “Do you realize,” Grim asked at last, “that if I proposed to take sides against you I would simply take and kick you over this cliff now?”

      “Allah! That is not how friends talk.”

      “Yet I haven’t even disarmed you. Instead, my hakim here has lanced your boils and—”

      “Aye! Leaving me too sore and weak to take the field against any one! I would bastinado such a hakim if he were mine.”

      He looked meaningly at me, but drew small satisfaction from it, for I laughed. I dare say my hand was a fraction heavy with the presentation razor that turned that trick. I can skin a dead lion rather neatly, but no college of surgeons ever gave me its parchment benediction.

      “I don’t wish you to take the field,” said Grim.

      “Il hamdul illah! [Thank God!] What then?”

      “I want your men.”

      At that the Lion of Petra swore a blue streak sixty seconds long of brimstone Arab blasphemy. There is no such language as Arabic to swear in. Not even the Missouri mule has kicked back at such scurrilous expletives. Ali Baba thrust his old wrinkled face around the corner and grinned.

      “So that is the idea! So that is the foreign scheme! What son of sixty dogs imagines he can lead my men?”

      “They might find themselves pretty soon without a leader otherwise,” suggested Grim.

      Ali Higg ceased smoking. Rage and tobacco and helplessness didn’t seem to make a palatable mixture. To judge by his wandering eyes, one second he seemed to be making up his mind to dash past us in a bolt for liberty, the next he contemplated suicide in a duel to the death with Grim.

      His left hand groped for his rifle behind him, but could not quite reach it without betraying what he intended. Narayan Singh rattled the butt of his own rifle on the cave floor, and I laid mine pretty ostentatiously across my knees. There was no need for Grim to feel disturbed, and he obviously didn’t.

      In fact, I think Grim was having a good time. I’m no fisherman myself, lacking that kind of patience and getting more enjoyment from the sports that call for strenuous exertion, but I’ve often seen on the face of some fellow angling for a big one pretty much the expression that Grim wore then. His lips were set in a firm smile, and his eyes shone.

      “You will ask me for my wives presently,” said Ali Higg with biting sarcasm.

      “No, not all of them,” Grim answered. “Only one.”

      “By the beard of the Prophet and my feet, what next! I have divorced Ayisha—you may have the baggage. Much good may she do you!”

      “I witnessed the divorce,” Grim answered, “so I did not count her as your honor’s wife.”

      “What then?”

      Now the Lion’s anger began to weaken into fear as he guessed the drift of Grim’s intention. You can’t help feeling sorry for a tyrant in a corner as one phase after another of his helplessness dawns on him.

      Grim eased the torture at once. A man like Ali Higg suffers more from beaten pride than we non-tyrants do from toothache.

      “Never fear,” he said; “I will not take Jael from you. I will either bring or send her back to you safely afterward, but she must come.”

      Ali Higg looked incredulous, enraged, suspicious, treacherous in turn, but made no answer. Another answered for him. There was an inner cave all hung with fine Bokhara embroideries, opening into that in which we sat. Jael herself stepped from the interior gloom, stood still for a minute facing us all, and laughed.

      “Enough, Ali; I will go with him!”

      When we had first met her she was dressed in man’s clothes; but now, all jeweled with turquoise and amber, she wore the Bedouin woman’s regalia, and it suited her style of beauty. The paleness of her freckled face was relieved by the veil that partly framed it, and although she must have been deathly tired after the recent adventure she looked younger and not so hard-drawn. Jael was a perfect name for her—so perfect that you wondered whether it was really hers and not adopted; you could easily imagine her driving a tent-peg through the temples of a sleeping foe.

      “Peace, woman!” growled Ali Higg.

      “Peace, Ali? How can there be peace unless we let this Jimgrim have his way? Refuse him, and we must deal with Saoud the Avenger. Agree with him, and he may show us a way. If he fails, we shall be no worse off. I go with him.”

      “Peace, woman, I say! Be silent!”

      “Very well. I will go in silence. It may be thus that we shall contrive peace. But I surely go with him!”

      “Thou shalt not!”

      “Ali, I say I go with him!”

      CHAPTER II

      “Once before she called herself his wife, on half the provocation.”

      There is a certain type of captious critic who annoys me horribly. He is usually a person who, by dint of vinegary unbelief in those solid underlying qualities of human character that decide most issues, has destroyed all his own power to make good the grand assertion in that favorite song of Grim’s and mine—

      I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul!

      Such a man will tell you that Grim hadn’t done much yet. He will say—for I have heard him in a dozen places; on occasion he would be a merely jealous official superior of Grim’s, but now and then, too, an after-dinner glutton by the fireside—that my friend’s fortuitous resemblance to Ali Higg had got us safely into Petra, and the rest was sheer luck. The same man would doubtless consider it a piece of luck that the sun got up at dawn this morning and that the U.S. hasn’t recently defaulted on its bonds. All right; but why not use the luck?

      Grim had used his, and improved on it. Narayan Singh has certain qualities of romantic manhood that have made a soldier of him, along with an ineradicable fault that has preserved him from promotion and obscurity. It was Grim who put Narayan Singh to work. Grim picked him out of the routine business in Jerusalem.

      I have independent means enough to labor free of charge if I see fit, and a pretty wide experience of emergencies that has made me in a sort of way reliable without dulling my appetite for adventure in the world’s by-ways. It was Grim, not any Government, who studied me from every angle when I called on him in Jerusalem out of curiosity, put me to the test in a dozen ways without caring whether I suspected it or not, and bent my liking for adventure to his own ends. He did it with my permission, but not on my advice. And there wasn’t another man in the Near East who could have made those seventeen thieves of ours risk their necks behind him without hope of loot.

      You may say it was gall that let him make such dangerous use of other people, and I’ll agree with you. Don’t you admire a man with gall, provided it’s not his own profit or some mere commercial end he’s serving? I take it Drake had gall, and John Paul Jones, and Theodore Roosevelt as well as others whose memory more men cherish than the haters of the great prefer to think. I’m not one of those who choose to discredit any man who does things.

      And it was luck and gall in combination, if you like, that now gave him the use of an “army” of a hundred and forty men, with a woman to captain them whose brains had been the making of Ali Higg. I won’t say much for her military judgment, because we had captured her too easily for her to boast on that score; but she had the gift of bending Arabs to her will, and you know how it goes in politics—if you own the man who can swing the votes, the election is yours. The same principle applies in other walks of life.

      I have heard a missionary criticaster say that because Ali Higg’s army was mounted on stolen camels and fed on looted grain, as well as armed for the most part with rifles filched from the Allies, therefore Grim should have scorned to make use of it. But a quarter of a century ago I left off arguing with men like that. In the midst of