They made no secret of the fact that they preferred a woman. Possibly even Jael’s discipline was less fierce than Ibrahim ben Ah’s or Ali Higg’s.
“Good! We will follow his wife!” they shouted.
“He had more than one wife,” I countered then. “What does it matter to you which wife he sends?”
They said it made no difference. I think they rather hoped a junior wife would come, whose hand would fall less heavily than Jael’s on offenders. They were just as feckless in the hour of uncertainty as any other crowd of men —the usual human mixture of emotions, fierce and sheeplike alternately—accustomed to be led, and consequently afraid of nothing so much as to be left to their own resources.
Can you think of one crowd of rebels since history was written that in a climax wasn’t eager for a change of captains? They were still full of confidence in Ali Higg, because he had always held himself as much as possible aloof from them. He was a sort of mystery, who led them once in a while in person on some whirlwind foray, and who imposed his drastic punishments more often than not by deputy. So Ibrahim ben Ah, the deputy, was a weariness to the flesh, while Ali Higg remained a hero in their imaginations.
I dare say that in that minute I could have led a mutiny against Ibrahim ben Ah. It would only have called for a little mouthing of religious platitudes—quotations from the Koran—any of the pabulum with which all agitators fool the crowd into believing it has justice on its side (for you can’t do much, even with a crowd of pirates, unless you make them think the issue is a moral one.)
But, setting aside the fact that mutinous troops are useless to anybody, and Grim, as far as I understood the situation, wanted a force in being to maneuver against the Avenger, there is something in my make-up that rebels against that sort of thing. It strikes me as playing off-side, and I don’t enjoy to win my point, earn money, or resolve a difficulty that way.
To trick an opponent is one thing. To take him by surprise, catch him napping, cause him to deceive himself, and, if he is a man of violence, feed him his own medicine, is all in the game, as I see it. But to defeat even a bandit by deliberately stirring mutiny among his men seems to me to put you in the class with Trotzky and Lenin; it’s no white man’s business.
So I didn’t say one word further about Ibrahim ben Ah. For all I cared, and if they chose to submit to it, he might lead them to the devil once that hand was played; that was their affair, and his. Old Ibrahim got much the worst of the transaction; but I’d enjoy to meet him tomorrow and talk the matter over. That’s one of the reasons why Grim and I got on so well together in spite of his uncommunicativeness; I have never known him play cards under the table. He plays good poker. He can bluff like a Down-East Yankee, drawing nothing to a pair of Jacks and winning by the glitter in his eye. But he plays a white man’s game; and I’ve never known him spiteful.
However, there I was on a pile of flour-bags in the baking sun, wondering what to say next. As I have explained, the bivouac rested in the curve near one end of a boulder-strewn hill. You couldn’t see around the corner, but in front and to the left was empty desert, smirched here and there with sand-clouds driven by the scorching wind. The only men on watch that I could see were half a dozen posted on the lower end of the spur that cut off the right-hand view, although there may have been one or two others hidden among the boulders on the top of the hill behind me.
For lack of any better entertainment I was about to tell them of the plunder there might be in Abu Lissan, that being a subject that would have amused them without committing me in any way, when I detected symptoms of excitement among the watchers on the spur of the hill to my right. That could only possibly mean that somebody was coming. The crowd was facing me. I waved my rifle in the direction of the lookout, and they all faced about to see. That gave me time to think, and I thought first of Narayan Singh.
If anyone except Grim were coming, the Sikh and I were as good as dead men; for visitors would certainly be taken straight to Ibrahim ben Ah’s tent, and you could trust that old opportunist to turn the tables on us promptly at the first chance. We would have to shoot in self-defence, and it would be all over in a minute.
So it wasn’t the least use speculating on that contingency. The only possible chance of safety lay in the arrival of Grim, and in his being mistaken for Ali Higg. I must bet on that; and being so constituted that I habitually use the last shot as determinedly as the first one, I went the limit.
“Aho!” I roared. “The Lion of Petra comes! To your camels! I go to tell Ibrahim ben Ah!”
At the first suggestion of anything doing the Bedouin thinks of his camel in any case. Each man rushed away to where his beast lay hobbled. (They tie a rope around his folded fore-leg after the camel has been made to kneel, and that prevents his getting up until the rope is loosed again.) I jumped off the pile of bags and strode, as slowly as I could contrive in the state of excitement I was in, toward Ibrahim ben Ah’s tent, where Narayan Singh still sat motionless with his back toward me.
The lookout on the spur began shouting before I was half-way to the tent. I couldn’t hear the words, but the men nearest to them did, and passed the news along. Instantly the bivouac was in an uproar, and camels began rising to their feet in twos and threes and dozens as the hobbles were untied.
“Akbar Ali Higg!” they roared in greeting. So Grim was coming!
But as I reached the tent old Ibrahim ben Ah seemed to me to be wearing a rather too confident smile for a man in his predicament. I think he counted on a dozen or more men running to the tent with news, in which case we should be overwhelmed. He probably argued that, in view of Ali Higg’s arrival, we would hesitate to shoot first. “Between promise and fulfilment a man may marry off his ugly daughter” is a proverb with which every Arab in extremity consoles himself; and I knew as well as he did that between the moment of Grim’s turning the corner of the hill and his reaching the tent a hundred things might happen. If we should be killed in the interval, whether we were the Lion’s friends or not, and whether or not he set high value on us, as dead men we should never be able to explain the incident or deny any made-up yarn of Ibrahim’s.
So I enlightened him on one point, to begin with. I stood in the tent opening, with my pistol leveled straight at him.
“What is written is written,” I said, “and none knoweth any outcome before it cometh to pass. But I know this pistol is a good one, and is loaded. If it is written that blood shall flow now, of us three you die first, friend Ibrahim ben Ah!”
He decided to sit still, luckily for him. But it was an uncomfortable minute. There is nothing pleasant about holding a pistol at an old man’s head, or in the possible necessity to shoot him, for that matter.
But luckily for us Grim was at the top of his form that morning. He had taken his time about following us across the desert, reserving all his speed for the last lap, when speed and nothing else could count. There wasn’t a chance in a million of his being able to keep up the pretense of being Ali Higg if he lingered among the men, or once came within eye-shot of Ibrahim. He had to pull off one swift, convincing bluff, or else we were all in the discard together.
I got behind Ibrahim ben Ah, so as to see what was going on without losing the upper hand of him. I touched the back of his head with the muzzle of my pistol, and watched as if Babe Ruth were making a home run.
Suddenly Grim swooped around the corner at full gallop, followed by Ali Baba and his sixteen rascals with Ayisha in their midst, and I nodded to Narayan Singh to get to his feet, as the bandits shook their rifles in the air and thundered out their greeting:
“Akbar Ali Higg!”
CHAPTER VIII
“Have you heard of Jimgrim?”