Balancing that enormous bundle (full of the loot of villages, no doubt) with the grace that is born in the Bedouin women, she made as if to pass us, and I think she would have done if Grim hadn’t spoken, for she was proud.
“Ya sit Ayisha,* what have I done that you should treat me scornfully?” he asked.
(* O Lady Ayisha.)
“Have a care!” groaned Ali Baba. Having raised sixteen sons and grandsons he posed as an authority on women. She turned to face Grim, her body quivering like a fine Damascus blade as she balanced the load. He smiled up at her, and she seemed to waver between liking for him and disgust at me. Then with the sudden swiftness of a female panther making up her mind she answered his smile with melting eyes and flashing teeth, and opened the war with me by dumping the bundle into my lap. It would have damaged a smaller man, for it weighed more than a hundred-weight and there were brass bowls in it, and knives and things like that, but I caught it on knees and shins and, although I didn’t plan to, kicked it forward so that it rolled over the edge of the path and fell two hundred feet on to the ruined roof of an ancient tomb below.
You know how a panther lays his ears back? She expressed anger just as effectually, even if you couldn’t exactly say how she did it. It wasn’t any use apologizing. I sat rubbing my shins, with both eyes watching for the dagger I felt sure would come my way in a second. But she passed the buck to Grim.
“Kill that fool for me!” she commanded him; and he laughed at me whimsically sideways.
“But I need the man,” he said. “He is the hakim. He has the chest of medicines. Who else shall physic us?”
“Bah!” she exclaimed. “I would bastinado such a fool! He is the son of sixty dogs who gave me baby’s pap instead of poison for the Lion in there! Thanks to that fool I am divorced instead of a widow! Throw him down after my baggage!”
“We can recover most of it, and what has been broken shall be replaced,” Grim answered. “What are your plans, O Lady Ayisha?”
“I go to find my people.”
“Where are they?”
“Only Allah knows.”
You see, the desert hasn’t changed much. Hagar did the same thing once, going out alone into the waste of sand and rock, in search of a tiny wandering tribe whose tents are here today and gone tomorrow; and thousands since have done the same thing, without enough acquaintance with the angels to get water whenever they need it.
“Be seated,” said Grim, and she took him at his word, thrusting herself down between him and me, giving me the point of her elbow. I shifted along close to Ali Baba so as to allow her a full six feet of clearance, still bearing that possible dagger in mind.
“And now,” growled Ali Baba in my ear, “the bint* believes she has him! He has bidden her sit beside him before witnesses, and has promised her a new outfit! Once before she called herself his wife on half the provocation; and now who shall deny her?”
(* Bint. Daughter, girl; in this case a disrespectful word.)
“He will,” I retorted. “Jimgrim is no Arab. We don’t do things that way in the West.”
“This is the East,” he answered, “and she will do things her way! Inshallah,* Jimgrim may prove clever enough to foil her, but I doubt it.”
(* If God wills.)
But more than cleverness was going to enter into Grim’s dealings with that young woman. He was smiling, and a hint of worry underlay the smile. Nobody but a born fool would think of applying Western standards to judge her conduct by, and though she had meant to poison Ali Higg there wasn’t a doubt she had had lots of provocation. It was true we hadn’t invited her to poison him, but she had made the attempt on Grim’s account none the less and we had taken full advantage of it. If Grim had been disposed to leave her at a loose end I wouldn’t have agreed to that, and even the wild Lothario Narayan Singh, I think, would have objected. But Grim would be the last man to leave her unprovided for; I have seen him spend his scant spare hours befriending murderers whom he has landed in the gaol.
“We go south to deal with Saoud, who calls himself the Avenger,” Grim said to her. “Will you come with us?”
“I go where my lord wishes,” she answered, in the sort of voice that Ruth may have used to Boaz in the Bible story. Ruth came from that desert country, too.
She must have known Grim was an American, but I really think she meant what she said. Out in the sunlight there he was a lot better looking than Ali Higg, because his face wasn’t seamed by vice and anger; and she had grown so used to being owned by a man who resembled Grim superficially that it wouldn’t be much of a task to transfer her affections. Grim, for one thing, had no other wife, and did not bastinado people.
“Until you find your people or another husband you must regard me as a father,” Grim said kindly.
“But why should I look for another husband?” she asked.
That highly interesting question wasn’t answered just then. Jael Higg came out, looked at the two of them, and laughed in that mean, metallic way that women use to one another. But I think that she, too, suspected that there might be a dagger to reckon with, for she made no direct comment.
“I am ready,” she said in English. “My husband has agreed to my going with you. I shall bring a woman to keep me in countenance, but”—(she glanced brazenly down the line of our men and raised her voice, finishing the speech in Arabic)—“I don’t suppose there will be a man among you rash enough to try any liberties!” I guess she was right, too, for her thin lips weren’t of the yielding kind.
Some spirit of devilment took hold of me then, and forgetting my role of Indian hakim I horned in with a suggestion.
“Won’t Ayisha serve the purpose, Lady Jael?”
Well, that woman was used to handling men by brow-beating and overbearing them. I suppose she had tongue-lashed into subjection some of the toughest characters between the Dead Sea and the Persian Gulf, and you get out of the habit of mincing words when that sort of job occurs frequently. You get fluent-acrid-fiery; or at least that had happened to her. And she turned loose the full flood of her vocabulary on to me, speaking past Ayisha as if that young woman never existed, but making it perfectly obvious that we might divide the epithets between us. I dare say some of it was meant for Grim, too. The fact was that the situation had got on her nerves and all her pent-up rage had to find some sort of outlet. I had simply provided her an outlet; and Grim his opportunity.
He waited until she had finished, and then got to his feet and yawned.
“Let’s have a clear understanding on two points to begin with, Lady Jael,” he said in English. “I’ll answer for my men. And two women on this expedition are enough.”
The effect was as if he had struck her. She flinched away from him, and he followed up before she could recover and give tongue.
“I’ll give all the orders. Everybody else obeys.”
She bit her lip and turned her back on him. And then I realized that Ali Higg had been quietly watching us from inside the cave. She wasn’t used to being rebuked in front of him. He came out and stood in the entrance, smiling ironically. I don’t think he knew any English, but he appreciated that that termagant head-wife of his had met a man who wasn’t in the least afraid of her, and who knew how to manage her; and he looked almost good-tempered as he watched that happen which he had never been able to achieve.
“Call