“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 afterwards, 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 captain of my soul, I am the master of my fate!”
Such a man will tell you that Grim hadn’t done much yet. We 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 in 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, and 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 unwesternized knavery Grim always uses the least unmoral weapon he can find, and makes the most of it.
We followed him out of the cave now to the narrow path that wound along the face of the cliff to a point where it met a flight of ancient stone steps something like a mile long. (The ancients who carved Petra out of sandstone evidently didn’t mind a toilsome climb to church, for there was a place of sacrifice at the top of the hill.) We sat down beside Ali Baba in a row with his men, overlooking the Roman amphitheatre, whose tiers and tiers of stone seats glittered in the sun.
The valley two hundred feet beneath us, inside the amphitheatre and all about it, was black with goat-hair Bedouin tents, in which the wives and daughters of Ali Higg’s army were busy with their morning work, of doing nothing, leisurely. There were eagles soaring above us, whose shadows raced on the dazzling rock below, and innumerable kites were circling on about a level with our eyes. You could sometimes catch the bronze sheen on their backs, and watch the play of their wing-tips as they swerved. Along a ledge on the opposite cliff sat a row of vultures in fair imitation of us.
The colors of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado are about the same as those of Petra—the raw, real color out of which the paint for the universe was mixed with a hard light from a polished turquoise sky to judge it all by, provided your brain will work in front of any such kaleidoscope. But we weren’t there for the view.
“We’ll give Jael Higg a chance to talk her old man round,” said Grim in English; and Ali Baba caught the gist of it. (He knew enough English in the old days to rob tourists when the Turks weren’t looking, and enough Turkish to cheat the police over the commission afterwards.)
“Whatever talking a woman does—and especially that woman —is the woof of trouble, Jimgrim!” he said warningly.
But I saw other trouble coming, and laughed aloud, for which I cursed myself a moment afterwards. A laugh is pretty easily misunderstood in that land.
The cliff bulged outward on our left beyond the opening of Ali Higg’s cave, and around the bend there was another cave that we hadn’t investigated; but judging by the chatter of female voices it was the headquarters of Ali Higg’s harem. He evidently overrode the rule about providing a separate establishment for each additional wife.
Around that corner now Ayisha came—Ayisha the divorced —with all her belongings done up in a huge blue bundle, and the whole lot balanced on her head. The wives of a polygamist are not, I believe, noted for lying down together like the leopard and the kid of prophecy, and a chorus of mocking laughter followed