He repeated the instructions to the policeman in Arabic and vanished. While we watched him run down-hill the old woman came up panting, to abuse me in voluble Russian about her crumpled cotton underclothes; but Russian is one of several things I don’t know, so we didn’t grow intimate. The policeman bundled all her laundry up and threw it off the roof, which seemed to me hardly tactful in the circumstances; so I gave her a coin and she blessed me and we let it go at that.
Thereafter I could hardly watch Grim and the swiftly retreating eighteen for wondering at the view. You could see clear across the whole of Palestine —the Moab Hills beyond the Dead Sea to the eastward, and over to the west the blue of the Mediterranean and thirty miles of white surf pounding on golden sand. A little, little country, that had managed to make more impression on the world than many a big one!
Grim followed as far as the road we had come by in the night without troubling to conceal himself. After that, though, he took to hiding behind rocks and running forward in spurts when he dared. But all that trouble turned out to be unnecessary, for before long we saw all eighteen men disappear behind a scrawny olive-tree in such extraordinary fashion that a cave at that spot was the only possible explanation. It was two thirds of the way up the opposite hill, about a mile, or something less, from where we watched.
So the policeman shooed me off the roof as if I were a goat out of bounds —grumbled at me for taking so much time on the ladder and at the old dame downstairs for not having breakfast ready for us—and panted behind me down the hill with a running comment on the weight of his rifle and the absurdity of racing when a sensible man might walk. He was a perfectly good policeman, raised in the don’t-do-it school, and faithful as an old work-horse, with a horse’s sense of what is due him on the grades.
We found Grim waiting for us behind a big rock, and when the Arab had recovered breath enough to swear with we got orders to engage.
“Can you see the back of a man’s head just beyond the olive- tree? No, not that; that’s a hawk feeding; look ten feet to the left. There. See him move? Mahommed ben Hamza keeping lookout. Never occurred to the fool to look this way, or he’d have seen you two experts maneuvering! Now there’s just a chance they’ll prove ugly. One of us may go West this trip. Spread, and come on them from three sides; then if they cut up rough there’ll be at least one of us to break back with the news. I’ll snoop up this side and approach first. You two get over the brow of the hill and watch what happens to me. Re-enforce me as required or when I beckon.”
So we made a short circuit and ran and lay a hundred yards apart on top of the hill. The policeman raised his rifle and as soon as Grim caught sight of it he left cover and walked straight forward, singing a shepherd song. But quite as clearly as Grim’s voice I could hear the drumming of an airplane flying low from the direction of Ludd; and the man outside the cave was watching that intently, so that he neither saw nor heard Grim until he was close up.
The plane circled twice over Hebron and departed. Grim went closer and spoke. I couldn’t hear what he said, but Mahommed at the cave-mouth jumped and then put his hands up. Grim ordered him down into the cave and beckoned to us. I did not know until then that Grim had as much as a pistol with him.
The cave was the usual thing. All that country is full of caves and every one of them has been a sepulcher until another generation or any army came and robbed it. There was a low, hewn entrance that you had to stoop to get by, and a short dark passage with a sharp turn, beyond which you could imagine anything you liked. You could enter at your peril; a man couldn’t possibly defend himself in the gut where the passage turned.
“They know now who’s here,” said Grim. “I’m going to take a chance. They’ve had time to make their minds up. You’d better stay outside.”
But I had not had that run on an empty stomach just to cool my heels outside a cave and told him so.
“All right,” he laughed. “Suit yourself. We’ll leave Mustapha.”
But the policeman wouldn’t hear of it either and got point-blank mutinous. He asked what sort of figure he would cut going back to the Governorate to report that we had had our throats cut while he looked on. He said he did not mind getting killed, since that was likely to happen just now at any time, and demanded to go in first. So Grim let him fix his bayonet and follow me, with strict orders not to start anything unless we were attacked first.
And after all that fuss there was not any opposition, although there well might have been. Twenty feet beyond the turn the passage opened into an egg- shaped cave, where all eighteen men sat solemnly around a lighted candle. The eighteenth—he of the tarboosh wrapped in calico—looked like a lunatic. They had taken his long knife away—old Ali Baba had it laid across his knees—and two of the sons—the giant and the fellow with the long arms—were sitting one on either side of him, leaning inwards, with the obvious purpose of seizing him if he tried to move.
I have never seen a more ferocious-looking devil. He had a lean, mean face with scars on it and loose lips like an animal’s that seemed to have been given him for the purpose of hurling incentive language at a crowd; they made a sort of trumpet when he thrust them out. He had a cataract in one eye, but the other made up for it by being preternaturally bright and black and cunning; and his ears were set far back like an angry dog’s.
“Peace! Peace!” urged Ali Baba, as Grim and Mustapha and I stood upright with our backs to the entrance. Grim had put his pistol out of sight, but the policeman stood on guard like a terrier watching rats.
“Peace! Peace!” all sixteen sons repeated after the patriarch.
“Fools! Idiots!” yelled the eighteenth man and tried to spring to his feet, but the men on either side restrained him. I think even a gorilla would have been helpless in those titanic arms that pressed him downward like a cork into a bottle until he seemed a full foot shorter than he actually was and gasped under the strain.
“What will you, Jimgrim?” asked Ali Baba.
Grim nodded in the direction of the eighteenth man.
“I’ve come for him.”
But the gentleman did not propose to be fetched, and he had a way of his own of making the objection obvious. He couldn’t move, for the giant on one side and the monstrous-armed fellow on the other continued to lean their weight on him; but he could speak and yell blasphemy and threaten; and he surely did, filling the cave with a clamor like a dog-fight.
The blasphemy was his great mistake, for they were simply a pious gang of thieves, despite their own sacrilege, and his coarsely mouthed Egyptian liberties with sacred words hurt their feelings. They might have taken his part with more determination but for that.
“You fools! Kill them! Kill all three of them!” he yelled and followed it with frightful imprecations—foul, filthy epithets all mixed up with the names of angels and Allah so that Ali Baba protested and his sixteen sons clucked after him in chorus like a lot of scandalized hens.
“What else have you got in the cave besides that beauty?” Grim inquired.
“Nothing, Jimgrim. This is but a meeting-place,” said Ali Baba.
“Um-m-m! Nothing under that stone you’re sitting on?”
“Nothing, Jimgrim. I am old. The floor of the cave is cold. My sons give me the place of honor.”
“Suppose you let me look.”
Ali Baba hesitated and collected eyes like a hostess breaking up a dinner- party. It was perfectly obvious that at a word from their chief the whole gang would resist, but Grim stepped into the midst of the circle very coolly with his back to the most dangerous men and waited smiling. I knew what he had in mind. At the first symptom of attack he was going to put his foot on the candle. I got ready to bolt into the throat of the cave ahead of him where, with one rifle and one pistol he and I could keep the lot of them at bay while the policeman could run for help. He told me afterwards that he would have sent me running and kept the policeman by him; so the imaginary glory of a scrap that never happened is not mine after all.
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