However, Grim was fortunately in no mood for side-issues of that sort.
“We must get the better of a bigger force than Ali Higg’s, and boasting beforehand isn’t going to help much. Let us start now, and sing songs about it afterwards.”
He suited action to the word by walking to his camel; but he did not mount until Ibrahim ben Ah had mounted—an act of courtesy that, I think, went a long way to confirm the old pirate’s newly pledged friendship. What was more, he gave Ibrahim the place of honors by his side, and we had ridden up out of the ravine and traveled several miles in a more or less southerly direction before I had any chance to talk with him privately. At last, though, Ibrahim ben Ah fell back with the perfectly obvious intent of satisfying curiosity by drawing into conversation whoever might feel disposed that way; and I seized the opportunity to range alongside Grim.
“You’re the devil,” said I, and he laughed.
“How so?”
“I’ve had how many adventures with you? Quite a number. All the while I’ve supposed you were a sort of volunteer policeman, satisfied to keep the peace and let history shape itself.”
“So I am.”
“Not you! I’ve found you out. What beats me is why you never told me you’re gunning for Feisul all this time. I know Feisul,” I said, “and I like him. He assays pounds to the ton of pure gold. Why in thunder couldn’t you tell me that all this lonely, dangerous business is in Feisul’s behalf? I’d have been twice as keen.”
The hot wind was excuse enough for not answering at once. There came a sudden blast of it that whirled the dust into our faces, obliging a man to tuck his chin down into the face-cloth and lean forward. But he was silent for several minutes after the squall had passed. For he is a strange fellow; I think it strains him somewhere inside to be obliged to make confession of his deepest thoughts.
He is the exact opposite, in fact, of a propagandist. I think he feels that the airing of desire and parading of convictions is indecent. He smiles at other men’s and makes a secret of his own. To some extent, too, he treasures ultimate purpose as if its very secrecy were half its strength, permitting only momentary glimpses of it under the stress of circumstance.
“You wouldn’t have been half as keen,” he said at last. “Tell me why you have come as far as this with me.”
I chewed the cud on that before I answered. Few men can explain their real motives at a moment’s notice.
“Because I consider you a white man who can show me sport,” I answered after a minute.
“Have you changed your mind?” he answered.
“No.”
“But if I had told you in the first place that I’m bent on putting Humpty- Dumpty back on a wall that he hasn’t been knocked from yet, you’d have put me down as a visionary and, even supposing you’d still come for the sport of the thing, you’d have hung back all the time, and argued; and sooner or later you’d have discovered that your own affairs are more important to you than my dreams.”
“But I’ve told you I like Feisul,” I said.
“All right. Has your discovery that I’m working for him changed your judgement in any way?”
“Of course not. I’m glad to know that you think as highly of him as I do.”
“Well then, what’s the trouble?”
“I’m not troubled. I’m interested. You’re the first man I ever met who had a cause and wouldn’t talk about it. Most men get on soap-boxes, or into pulpits, or sit at a desk, and yell.”
“Let ‘em!” he answered. “Any man may waste his time who feels like it. I don’t like noise, and don’t believe it gets you anywhere. Each man’s opinions are his own affair; goats, sheep, rats, camels, fish have opinions, too, I dare say. I have mine, but I don’t inflict ‘em on other folk. Who was it said we’re faced by circumstances, not by theories?”
“Very well,” I answered, “here’s a circumstance. If you had told me to begin with that you are out for Feisul, I would have jumped at the opportunity to help.”
“Seems to me you’ve helped quite a bit as things are,” he answered smiling. “But anyhow, I hate that kind of thing—despise it! No man has any right to cajole me into risking my life, or risking anything else for that matter, in his cause. I’ve no right to play such a dirty trick on you, or anyone. You wanted adventure. You asked for it. Have I proved a niggard host?”
“Ha-ha!”
“Besides, I’m out for Feisul with reservations. It’s not my job to foist him on to the Arabs. That’s up to them. I saw them root for him during the War, and after the Armistice. I’ve watched every underhanded, dirty, lowdown trick in the process of getting rid of Feisul from outside; and if I loathe anything on God’s green earth it’s control of other people by so-called interests. I’m more against the foreign politicians than for Feisul. If Feisul can come back, and the Arabs still want him, I’ll do my bit to make things easy for him and them, that’s all. I won’t preach for him. I won’t argue. I won’t betray the uniform I sometimes wear, or the Administration that pays my salary. But when I come across people here and there, who happen to think the same way I do, and want to see Feisul back, I’ll work with them like a beaver, and that’s all.”
It seemed about enough for me. I made up my mind there and then to let private affairs in America go hang, and to see Grim through on his rather original, perhaps Quixotic, quite unselfish, and possibly unprofitable quest.
CHAPTER IX
“Should I stoop to a pig-Pathan, with a prince waiting for me?”
There are two outstanding peculiarities of that ancient land of Edom, wherein we were adventuring; for that matter, they apply to all Arabia, most of Palestine and Syria, and to the desert places in between that are any man’s land or nobody’s according to the seasons, and disease, and the ebb or flow of politics.
One is that warfare is governed and restricted absolutely by the water- holes. An army can only move from one hole to another, as in a game of checkers. Consequently a man like Allenby, who was daring enough to import American iron pipe and pump his water-supply along behind the army, was able to upset all calculations. (The Turks swore first and last that it wasn’t fair, and the German General Staff agreed with them.) Failing an efficient force of modern engineers, whoever makes war in the desert moves by water-holes.
The other outstanding feature is a mental peculiarity of the inhabitants. They are first-class fighting men in most ways, but utterly unreliable when reporting numbers. Not even the Bulgarian General Staff, when counting prisoners of war, was half as wild in its estimate as any Bedouin invariably is when speaking of his own force or the enemy’s.
Tribes that can put seventy rifles in the field boast glibly of seven hundred. Opposed to a hundred men, they will describe them as a thousand, and after a victory will sing about ten thousand (which perhaps accounts for some of the swollen returns in Old Testament history).
We knew the strength of Ali Higg’s force, now led by Ayisha, pretty accurately. A hundred and forty was about the right figure. But Saoud the Avenger probably believed them to be seven or eight hundred at least; and he may have supposed them more numerous that that.
It followed that, although the Avenger’s force was reported to number eight hundred rifles and a thousand camels, that estimate might safely be cut in half by any conservative strategist. Probabilities are dangerous things to play with, but it was no worse than