“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 were pretty fierce, those women. Lawrence held Petra with a scratch regiment of them in one of his 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 might 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 reason 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 Grim announced himself ready to start there were only eight of them in sight. The rest had vanished, and there was only one direction they could have taken—down that mile-long flight of stone steps. Thereafter there were two ways: to the left toward “Pharaoh’s Treasury,” where our camels waited; to the right in the direction of the women’s tents. It was a safe bet which way they had gone.
Most people think that generalship consists solely in the art of winning or losing battles, but there couldn’t be a greater mistake. If that were really so, then chess-players would conquer the world, and all our arm-chair theorists would be enthroned as an aristocracy.
It is soldiers who win battles. The good general is the man who can get them to the spot without leaving more than a third of them behind in clink and another third in hospital. The hardest test of a man’s manhood lies in leadership. Can he or can’t he make the lame dog and the rascal so respect him that they’ll disregard their own immediate comfort and profit and give their best behind him in the cause he favors.
Of course, no two men are quite alike in their method, and there aren’t any definite rules, or we’d all learn them and all want to lead. Ali Higg’s method, for instance, was crucifixion or the bastinado for disobedience: Jael’s was something like it, with scarifying language for milder cases. She looked at our diminished line, and glanced at Grim, and smiled ironically.
“Let’s go,” said Grim.
So off we marched along the overhanging ledge, Grim leading, Jael next, then Narayan Singh, then I, followed by our remnant bringing up the rear, chorusing abuse of Ali Higg for a mean host who had given them no presents. The Lion of Petra stood in the cave-mouth watching us with an expression such as you can see in New York any day on the face of an obvious criminal who has been acquitted on a technicality—near-incredulity, relief, cunning, and contempt for authority that can’t convict him.
It seemed to me merely a question of how many hours it would take that tough Lion of Petra to recover from the lancing of his boils before he would set out to avenge himself on our rear. Men of his ambitious mold think more, as a rule, of personal vengeance than of high strategy; they are made short- sighted by the very qualities that have brought a semblance of success. Without Jael to counsel him he wasn’t likely to betray much wisdom, and we had her in control; but she and Ali Higg had done a lot of whispering together in the cave, and although I’m no kind of judge of women, not having had much opportunity to learn the home-keeping sciences, I was ready to bet that minute that a plan was in the wind for cooking our goose thoroughly.
And so, as it transpired, there was; but not even Grim, who can see farther than most men through the fog of any Eastern entanglement, had the remotest suspicion of what its form was going to take.
If it had been my business I would have turned to the right at the foot of that ancient stairway. Having handled lawless natives by the score in various parts of Africa, my method would have been to go into that women’s camp and rout my rascals out of it with a heavy fist for those I could overtake and a long whip for the rest of them. Grim turned straight to the left and never said a word, merely nodding recognition of Ayisha as she came along and joined us.
When we passed the mass of ruins on to which I had dropped Ayisha’s bundle of belongings he sent two