The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

      Narayan Singh returned and sat down beside her. He looked amorous, the ability to do that being part of his equipment as a soldier. His great black beard was a little bit unkempt and his turban slightly awry, but liquid brown eyes and a flashing smile made up for all that.

      “Father of bristles, what do you want?” she demanded; for he sat so close that she had to pay attention to him.

      “Sweetheart,” he answered, “you know I have loved you since the moment we first met.”

      “As a hog loves truffles,” she retorted.

      I thought that was a pretty poor beginning, but Narayan Singh is one of those soldiers who are only spurred to greater daring by defeat in the first few skirmishes.

      “Nay, but as the bright sun loves a flower,” he boomed. “Consider destiny, and wonder at it. Here was I born half a world away, hurled into wars and plucked forth with only a wound or two, sent on the wings of fortune into foreign lands and preserved by endless miracles from death and marriage, simply that I might meet thee, O lady with the eyes of a gazelle!”

      Experts I have talked with say that all women should be carried by direct assault. I don’t profess to know. But could you make love to a woman that way, with nearly twenty people looking on?

      Our Arabs had started a game with dice, since the prospect of death had lost immediate interest; but they left off to watch and listen. Realizing that he had an attentive audience, Narayan Singh began to show his real paces.

      He did not propose, though, to admit he was a Sikh in that land of Moslem fanatics. Our men all knew his true religion and nationality, but that was no reason why Ayisha should.

      “We Pathans,” he boasted, “understand the royal road of love! Our hearts burn within us and our spirits blaze when we at last meet the women of our destiny. And oh, what fortune for the woman who is loved by one of us! For we are men—strong, fiery-blooded men, whose arms are a comfort for our women and a terror to our foes. Hah! Lady Ayisha, smile and bless Allah, who has brought a Pathan of the Orakzai to lay his fortune at your feet!”

      “Pig!” she answered.

      Possibly she had overheard him say just now that his fortune amounted to nine piasters; that would be, say, forty-five cents at the old rate of exchange.

      “Nay, lady, call me lover! Never was such burning love as mine! You doubt it? For a smile of yours I would pull the King of England off his throne and take the jewels of his crown to make a necklace for you.

      “Behold: We march today against this braggart at Abu Lissan who calls himself the Avenger. A bold one, is he? A captain of eight hundred men? What do you covet of his? His ears? His nose? His head wife for a servant? Say the word and see! Test my love, beloved! Put it to the proof!”

      His avowal was saved from entire absurdity by the fact that he had made the same sort of advances to her most of the way from Hebron; so she had a right to consider that he meant it, even if the proposal did not charm. She who had deliberately laid her net for Grim, in a land where all except the properly negotiated marriages are affairs of sudden fancy and violent abduction, could hardly doubt his earnestness. And, as I have said, all she was watching for was opportunity.

      “You would not lift a hand for me,” she answered. “Everybody knows the Pathan.”

      “Not lift a hand for thee, beloved! Hah! I would murder kings!”

      “Nor would you tell me one secret.”

      “Try me! I would break open a king’s letter, if thy tender eyes as much as glanced at it!”

      “You would tell me anything?”

      “Anything! By Allah and the devil’s bones, I would tell you anything! We Pathans are no half-lovers!”

      “Very well. Then tell me what to do to please Jimgrim,” she answered.

      He contrived to look thoroughly indignant. It was a good piece of acting. Jealousy blazed from his eyes.

      “Do you want me to slay Jimgrim?” he demanded.

      But she could act too. She smiled swiftly, as if his passionate avowal had not been quite without effect.

      “Unless I please Jimgrim,” she answered, “he might send me away; and then how could I listen to your boastings?”

      “Ah!” he answered. “All lovely women have the wisdom of a snake! That is true. That is good reasoning. He might dismiss you. Ah! Well, listen then, beloved. Ali Higg has four-and-forty men, who will presently return to this place. It would please Jimgrim to know for a certainty that they will remain here, and not follow to attack us from the rear.

      “Therefore go thou, beloved, and say to the wives of those men in the camp below there that our Jimgrim has promised two of them apiece to us, his men. Say that our going is but a ruse; that we shall return when the four-and-forty have left Petra and carry off our pick of the women.

      “You may as well add that the only way to prevent that will be for them to keep their husbands close at hand. Thus you will satisfy Jimgrim.”

      She turned that over in her mind for half a minute and then got up without answering him. She did not even glance at any of us, but walked straight away along the narrow ledge, and started down the ancient stone stairway toward the women’s camp.

      As soon as she was out of earshot Narayan Singh looked over toward me and showed his white teeth in a perfectly prodigious smile.

      “That is the way in which such things are done, bahadur!” he remarked.

      CHAPTER III

      “We’re all set now.”

      Those four-and-forty men of Ali Higg’s who had been raiding the Beni Aroun village were a much too dangerous factor for Grim to take unnecessary chances with. Ali Higg, Jael and Ayisha were accounted for; we knew nearly every detail of their movements since we entered Petra. But there were other women, whom we had hardly more than seen, and some whom we had not seen; to say nothing of the handful of men described by Narayan Singh as the “weak and wounded,” whose number we did not know exactly, and one of whom might have left in secret to bring the four-and-forty in.

      It was likely we could fight the four-and-forty and escape without more than a fair proportion of casualties. But with only twenty men all told we couldn’t afford to lose one; and there were the Bedouin women in the camp to be reckoned with. They are pretty fierce, those women. Lawrence held Petra with a scratch regiment of them in one of his most famous battles, and thoroughly routed Turkish regulars, who are not troops to be despised. And now that Ayisha was spreading among them the report of our intention to carry off the youngest and best-looking there was more than a chance that they night send a messenger on their own account to summon their husbands in a hurry.

      That trick of Narayan Singh’s was one of those boomerang contrivances, in other words, that have to be snappily handled. If we were out of the way before the husbands returned, well and good; they were extremely likely to insist on staying in Petra to defend their women; but if they should return before we were out of the way, they would almost certainly attack us as the best means of preventing what we were supposed to contemplate.

      So although we all needed sleep, and although Ali Higg importuned Grim to spend that night in Petra—doubtless for private reasons not unconnected with those four-and-forty men, although he made a great to-do about hospitality—Grim wasted no more time. And there was another reason. The women were not wholly without true ground for anxiety.

      Our Arabs were professionals from El-Kalil, the home of the proudest trained thieves in the world. Thieving, to them, made the combined appeal of sport and guild craftsmanship; and there seems to be no such exhilarating sport as stealing women, that being the one game in the world that knows no national boundaries. Now that Ali Baba was away, whose word was absolute law to his sons and grandsons, the sixteen were not going to be any too easy to control—not with a bait like that Bedouin camp under their acquisitive noses.

      When