Another point in his favour was the real Ali Higg’s notorious aloofness. It was in keeping with the part that he should halt a hundred yards beyond the limit of the bivouac and wait in solitary grandeur while his men came on to do his bidding.
Nor was it anything remarkable that those accompanying him should be strangers to Ibrahim’s command, for unless such a robber chief as Ali Higg can keep on adding fresh parties of marauders to his string he is pretty surely doomed to collapse.
Evidently Grim had left no detail of his plan unexplained this time, and he had the advantage of Ali Baba’s familiarity with the lay of things. Our seventeen rascals with Ayisha in their midst came on at top speed, straight for the tent, where it might be expected that Narayan Singh and I would be, since we were nowhere else in evidence.
Midway, Ayisha whirled aside to confront and harangue the lined up camel- men; and she showed the same sort of form that she did at El-Maan railway station when we first saw her in action. Under the very eyes of Ali Higg himself they could hardly do other than hear her respectfully; but you don’t have to be savage to get all worked up when a pretty young woman with a rifle in her hand screams warlike exhortations at you from a blooded camel. She thrilled me; and I had something else to think about.
It didn’t look good to me to leave old Ibrahim ben Ah to stew in his resentment, and perhaps to spoil Ayisha’s game at a critical moment. Having no notion what the game might be, still it was hardly a stroke of genius to suppose that she would play it easier without that handicap.
On the other hand, it looked no better to submit him to indignity before his men. If they once got the notion in their heads that Ibrahim ben Ah was in disgrace, they would be all the more likely to try to take advantage of Ayisha, because, as the Turks are so fond of saying, “a fish begins stinking from the head.” The suggestion that a commander can be deposed in the field spreads insubordination in the rank and file.
I had made up my mind what to do, whether Grim should approve, or not, before Ali Baba and his sixteen reached the tent and halted in a cloud of dust. Our two camels were kneeling twenty feet away; and Ibrahim ben Ah’s magnificent beast, all hung with worsted ornaments and blue beads, was standing at a picket close by.
“It is time for you two to come!” called Ali Baba with a note of almost desperate excitement in his raven voice.
“Nay, three of us!” I shouted back. “Send two men in here swiftly. Let a third bring the commander’s camel.” There was one thing about those thieves of ours; they were used to team work, and in any kind of crisis they were as swift as lightning. Nobody stopped to argue. I tapped the muzzle of my pistol on Ibrahim’s shoulder.
“Now,” said I, “alive or dead, you’re coming with us to Ali Higg yonder! If you want to save your face before your men, act dignified! We’re either a guard of honors or a prisoner’s escort, whichever you prefer. You may keep your weapons for the present, but I’ll take them all away from you in front of your men and make you walk to Ali Higg if you try to start any kind of trouble! Get up!”
He didn’t try anything. The old man liked his dignity too well. He rose to his feet without a word. Mujrim and Mahommed closed in on either side of him, and led him to his camel. The gang reformed platoon. Our old fox Ali Baba brought his camel alongside Ibrahim’s, and led off, followed by Narayan Singh and me with our pistols ready but not too openly displayed. Behind us rode the sixteen, eight abreast. Not even Xerxes, King of Persia, ever rode from his tent with greater apparent honors, and I gravely doubt whether even Ayisha, all eyes though she was for everything and all alert for information, suspected until we were gone that Ibrahim ben Ah had been made prisoner.
We rode out of the bivouac at a walk, as any general with his staff might go to attend a conference. And when we came within a hundred yards of Grim he wheeled and rode away ahead of us, answering the roars of the Bedouins with a curt wave of the hand. A minute later he swung at a gallop around the corner of the hill, and we were hard put to it to overtake him.
But he wouldn’t let me draw abreast to compare notes yet. Grim is one of those fellows who, if he had the part of Othello to act, would blacken his skin all over. We were still visible to the lookout on the spur, and perhaps to others on the hilltop. He signed to me to keep my distance, for it seemed that Ali Higg had a reputation for preferring to ride all by himself in advance of his men.
So I had to bide my time until we reached that same deep wady in which Narayan Singh and I had talked with Ali Baba, and I didn’t spend it envying Ayisha, with the job on her hands of maneuvering a hundred and forty cutthroats in accordance with some secret plan; though I dare say she asked nothing better, if only because she was usurping Jael’s prerogative.
Our baggage beasts were kneeling in a fine hiding-place between boulders, not far from where we had come on Ali Baba, and there Grim halted at last for a talk, and we all gathered around him in the shadow of an overhanging rock. Ibrahim ben Ah opened on him without preliminary, and with no more courtesy than the Prophet Elijah, for instance, used to show toward sinful Israelitish kings.
“Who are you, who pose as the Lion of Petra?” he demanded angrily.
“Does it matter?” Grim answered smiling.
“Malaish!” he retorted. “No, no matter. A dog comes to a dog’s end! Death and a dung-hill—khallas!”*
(* Finish)
“Isn’t it a little soon to talk of dogs and dung-hills?” Grim answered pleasantly. “One friend is better than a hundred enemies.”
At that there came into Ibrahim ben Ah’s eyes a look of calculating, cold cupidity. When men of the desert kidnap important people, they kill them or hold them to ransom; that is the accepted procedure. They certainly don’t offer to make friends with them unless their own position is too desperate for ordinary measures. And desperate folk must accept exacting terms. The very bristles of the old man’s beard seemed to move as his temper changed, and he eyed Grim with a rising insolence.
“What does such a man as you imagine he can offer me?” he demanded.
Grim laughed good-temperedly.
“Perhaps only a choice of evils. But a choice is something. I might send you back to Petra for Jael to laugh at.”
The savage old commander’s mood changed rapidly once more.
“By Allah,” he snarled, “I will make no bargains with a tent-sneak-thief! Do your worst, son of a dog!”
“You’re going to have no chance to make a bargain,” Grim answered. “There’s an offer going to be made to you. You may accept it and smile, or reject it and take the consequences. None of us is going to be inconvenienced in either case.”
Ibrahim ben Ah became bewildered. He sat down cross-legged on the sand, with a gesture implying that the future lay in Allah’s lap. If he had been deprived of his weapons and jewels, perhaps he might have thought he understood; but there gleamed the diamonds on his fingers; there were his rifles-pistols-knives; and instead of scowling, talking about ransom, or threatening torture his captor smiled at him good-humoredly and talked conundrums.
“Inshallah, we shall see,” he said simply.
So Grim sat down, too, and folded his arms, with his back to the sunlight, in position to read the old man’s face. You can glean more information from a man’s passing expressions than from anything he says, in most instances, provided you own the proper eyes for the business.
“Have you heard of Jimgrim?” Grim asked him; and Ibrahim’s eyes opened wider by a fraction of an inch.
“I have ears. Surely I have heard of him. An infidel, who went to Mecca in defiance of the Moslem law. An unbelieving dog, who should be shown no quarter.”
“I am Jimgrim,” Grim assured him pleasantly.
“I knew