The Avenger was evidently a foresighted conqueror. Having seized Abu Lissan and decided to make it the pushing-off place for a more ambitious campaign, he had sent firewood parties up into the hills to lay in a good store of the stuff. For firewood in any quantity is about the hardest thing to come by when campaigning in that sterile land, and doubtless the Allies had taught him in the War the benefit of getting stores piled up ahead.
Whether he had intended to transport the stuff to Abu Lissan, or to relay it by camel-loads behind his advancing army, was none of our affair. There the wood was, mostly bound together in negotiable bundles, and it was worth to Grim in that minute incalculably more than all the loot that might have been picked up by following the retreat of the Avenger’s men.
He measured the stuff with his eye and began to hum tunes to himself. He lit a cigarette, and whistled. He threw the cigarette away, seized hold of me, and danced a two-step all in among the piles of wood. Finally, he stripped himself and took a bath in the small rock-basin over which the spring bubbled musically.
When Ibrahim ben Ah requested an explanation, he sang him a little song in English about a “merry man moping mum, who asked no sup, and who craved no crumb, and all for the love of a la-a-a-dy.” Then he climbed to the top of the hill behind, to sit and watch for Ayisha; not that any of us doubted she was coming, but that Grim wanted to form his own judgement as to whether or not the movement of her column could be seen from Abu Lissan.
Narayan Singh and I rode back then to the sugar-loaf hill to bring along the baggage-camels, for all our eatables were stowed in the loads, and if exercise, excitement and amusement do a thing to you at all, they make you hungry. I hate a diet of uncooked dates for more than two meals in succession; they’re handy and all that; they’ll keep you alive, and still be palatable after they’ve been sat on in the hot sun; yet I’ve noticed that the Arabs, though they boast of them, agree with me in eating in preference almost anything else that comes along. And we had canned stuff in the camel-loads—cheese and honest coffee and good wheat bread. Have you tried wheat bread in cans? It keeps “new” for months, and there’s nothing like it to campaign on.
Narayan Singh was in one of his moralizing moods. He often gets that way when something he admires takes place under his eyes, and there is time to turn the various aspects of it over in his mind.
“There is no such thing as a color-line, sahib,” he exclaimed suddenly, at the end of a quarter of a mile. “Nevertheless, we dark men draw it more determinedly than you white men do. But that is craziness. There are two sorts of men; no others. Men who naturally can. Men who can’t. Jimgrim can; and there you have him. I have fought under generals who can’t; and believe me, that is a costly business for the rank and file. There are some men to whom you could give kingdoms, and they would lose them in a week. There are others whom you could strip as naked as a little frog— as Jimgrim was in the pool just now—and if you turn them into the desert naked, they will carve a fortune or change the country’s face. Our Jimgrim hasn’t fired a shot, and I wager he will fire none. He hadn’t told his plan, and I wager he never made one! He can; and he knows he can. He goes forth, and fortune goes with him. Can you tell me the why of that?”
“Natural talent, I suppose. Training, environment, a liking for the task. I’m not good at conundrums.”
“Neither am I, sahib. But I know this. There is a line that is not a color line. Jimgrim is above the line, and we are below it. If you and I knew how to vault above that line, we might be green in the face with yellow whiskers, and nevertheless the world would change under our hands! By my beard and the Prophet of this people’s feet, that Jimgrim of ours could be a king, if he was minded—yet he would laugh at the idea, although I have heard it said that all you Americans regard yourselves as kings. He could be a millionaire, if he was minded, yet I think he would regard the suggestion as a joke, although I am told that every other American looks on millions as his heritage. Jimgrim is a man of infinite capacity, who had nothing but a babu’s salary! He enjoys everything, and wants nothing! He studies all manner of men, and is amused, but covets no man’s shoes! Can you explain him?”
“Seems to me you’ve done it pretty well,” I said. “Let’s hurry. Come on. I’m hungry.”
We had brought the baggage beasts to the oasis, watered them, and started to prepare a meal before Ayisha came. She left her excited command behind the sugar-loaf hill and came galloping to confer with Grim. Excitement was too mild a word for her condition; she was in her element, and as full of fiery zeal as Joan of Arc, although I dare say the glorious Joan had more compunction and less savagery. She looked lovely in her Bedouin costume, with eyes blazing and an Amazon smile on her lips; and she was too contented to resume her quarrel with me—actually tossing me a smile of recognition as she passed.
I did not hear what she said to Grim; they talked alone together by the pool; but what he said sobered her. She ate with us in silence, and the rest of us had to hustle to get our share, for her appetite wasn’t what the old- fashioned finishing schools would reckon lady-like. She could wolf bread and cheese like a stone crusher swallowing rock.
At last, with a mouth full of food, she sprang on her camel again and departed, just as the sun seemed to rest for an instant on the rim of the western horizon, as if it were a living ball of fire hesitating to make the plunge into the unknown. It was pitch-dark already by the time she reached her men.
Then began about the hardest work I ever lent a hand in. Grim and the rest of us—even old Ali Baba and Ibrahim ben Ah with his silken skirts tucked up about his waist—Ayisha and her men, and the camels all toiled harder than galley slaves to get that wood distributed.
We laid it in great heaps at intervals along the hilltop at the back of the oasis. We carried tons of it to the sugarloaf hill, and stacked it at even distances apart in long lines extending from each side of the hill, with a liberal supply on top (and the men who toted the loads up that hill had to be threatened each time they returned). We sent several tons on camel-back to the place where Ayisha had left her outpost. And we finished the job by midnight.
Lord! and weren’t we tired then. I dare wager that not one man of all those Bedouins, nor even any of our seventeen beaver-active thieves, had ever worked half as hard; no, not if you added all the work they had ever done, and set the total against that one performance. Grim and Ayisha did the whip-work; Grim smiling, and seeming to be everywhere at once; Ayisha cursing, coaxing, laughing, laying on the stick—and they stood it from her, Heaven knows why! They didn’t know of her divorce, and that meant something; they may have reckoned they must square accounts with Ali Higg if they struck back at her, and none of them got a close enough view of Grim in the dark to realize that he wasn’t the Lion of Petra. But there was more than that. She radiated and screamed courage; the spirit was infectious.
When the job was done, we spread and lit the bonfires. And if the Avenger, watching from his roof in Abu Lissan, hadn’t believed that there was an army camped against him then, he would have had less imagination than a piece of protoplasm in the radiolarian ooze. Some of the men were told off to keep moving in the firelight; and, seeing the general theory of the thing now readily enough, they danced and sang. It was pretty easy to imagine the Avenger’s feelings; adding to the anxiety of having to face what he supposed was a force of at least a thousand men, there was the natural disgust at seeing all that good store of wood go up in flame. And, of course, the more they danced around the fires, the more depressed he must have felt.
So far, good. A confident team is half the game; and a dejected opponent is a good proportion of the other half. But we had to be quick; for as surely as dawn should come the Avenger wouldn’t have to exercise his talents much in order to discover the deception. Grim called a midnight council under the stars, consisting of himself, Ayisha, Ibrahim ben Ah, Ali Baba, Narayan