“By Allah!” growled an angry voice behind him. “There shall be a high price exacted for that ram’s pleasantry! By morning you shall wish Um Kulsum (an utterly unrighteous harridan of Arab legend) had never brought you forth.”
CHAPTER VIII
“Allah makes all things easy!”
Jim had not the least idea where they were taking him. His trained sense of direction was checkmated by a simple precaution that they took outside the cave, pushing him from one to the other and spinning him in a sort of savage blindman’s buff. To end that ignominy he lay down at last, whereat they kicked and dragged him up again and hurried on their way.
It was all he could do to breathe through the combination of gag and gunny-bag. That effort and the pain in his wrist kept his normally keen intuition in abeyance; but he did experience the sensation of passing between high walls, and suspected accordingly that their course lay south, along the wady through which he had reached the tomb. He could not tell whether the iblis was with them or not. The very few words that passed were in a low whisper. But by the jingle of metal on metal he knew that some of his captors were carrying looted rifles; and once they stopped to gather up something heavy and several of them carried along afterward in turns between them. Whatever that load might be, they drove away jackals from it before stopping to pick it up.
Supposing that his surmise was correct that they were hurrying down the wady, then he was sure that they turned nearly due west at the end of it; but after that the windings of the course were altogether too mazy to remember. He had begun by counting his steps from the point where they left off hazing him, but realized the uselessness of that after the eighth or ninth turn.
Strangely enough, in spite of the gag and the pain in his wrist he was fairly cheerful. If they had proposed to kill him, he argued, they would have done it in the tomb; and it was his natural New England-born conviction that no set of circumstances are irretrievable until so proven. He even saw humor in the situation, now that he was sure that Catesby and Narayan Singh would not rush headlong into ambush.
He could not smile or even chuckle under the smothering gag; but mirth does not really need expression, as the red man knew, who regarded laughter as womanly weakness. The imaginary picture of Suliman’s rage on finding the cave empty—of Catesby’s better bread chagrin—and of Narayan Singh’s grim, muttered vengefulness gave him the full feeling of laughter without its compromising form.
Even in that predicament he did not think with any approval of the prospect of swift death for the iblis. He wanted facts first; after those let come what might.
Jim has altogether peculiar qualities that some consider cold-blooded; it never gave him the slightest twinge of satisfaction to see a criminal land in jail at the end of a long battle between wits, nor yet to see a murderer hung. What interested him at the moment—and so deeply that he would rather die than fail to unearth the lowest root of it—was the scheme behind the criminal. He had a sort of sporting admiration for the man himself, provided only he was game, much as a real hunter has a friendly feeling for the animal that does its fighting utmost.
Nevertheless it amused him to imagine the iblis fool enough to wait there in the tomb and be discovered by Narayan Singh. Narayan Singh knew no such nice distinctions; his was the direct, unwavering desire to get his man, with death as the only logical and satisfying finish to a criminal career.
The iblis would likely learn quite a lot about physical pain if he should fall into the Sikh’s hands and refuse to give information; with his own wrist aching like a tooth that thought did not exactly make Jim worry.
Unless you kill outright a man who can amuse himself in that way, thinking of other things in spite of his predicament while captors hurry him helpless toward an unimaginable fate, you never can have the best of him. For he is not mesmerized by circumstance. Fear gets no chance to do its paralyzing work. Though the fact seems exactly the reverse, the odds are really in his favor.
Jim’s captors were obsessed by the knowledge that they had a prisoner who must be disposed of in some way; and the longer they put him off the less simple and convenient the solution was going to seem. Jim, on the other hand, was thinking of anything except that prospect, so that when the next development was staged he faced it quite unconvinced of desperation.
Most captors imagine they had imprisoned a man’s wits when they have tied his hands, and many prisoners believe it too; but the wise man when he is bound thinks of “Shakespeare and the musical glasses” until his moment comes. Jim began to consider the probably past history of that cavernous tomb he had left, while they hustled him through the darkness and worried one another with horse whisperings.
* * * * *
They crossed the railway at last, for he tripped twice on the metals, which meant that they had turned from the west or thereabouts to very nearly due east. Ten minutes’ hurry after that brought them to some sort of stone building, where they let him lean against the wall while one of the party wrestled with a rusty lock and key.
He tried to work his hands loose by rubbing the thong against the stonework, but made small progress because of the pain in his wrist, and only succeeded in working off his scarab ring.
The door swung open at last on creaking hinges. Two men took him by the shoulders and thrust him forward. He tripped on a stone still, and they jeered as he landed face downward on a rough stone floor. A second later the door slammed shut behind him and he heard the scream of the complaining key.
He lay still and listened for several minutes to discover whether he was alone or not. Hearing nothing, he scrambled to his feet and, backing until he reached the wall, began to feel his way along it, hunting some projection against which he might chafe the leather thong. The room he was in was circular, which set him thinking.
Part way around the circuit he felt some steps, and a rusty iron rod supporting the handrail. There were better tools that that for cutting rawhide, but the rawhide was eating into his wrists, and necessity sharpens patience.
First against the edge of a stone step, then against the rusty iron, then against the step again, he chafed and sawed, injuring his own skin almost as often as the leather, and without any means of measuring progress. During a pause while he strained at the thong to test it he heard a sound that seemed familiar.
In a flash his thought went back to the entrance of the tomb and the dry, peculiar noise that had induced him to enter. It sounded like the same cough or belch or whatever it was. Yet he could hear no breathing.
He changed the order of proceedings then and knelt, working his face up and down against the step to get the gag off, and succeeded after several minutes in forcing it down over his chin, where it hung loose. But it was not so simple to get the bag off his head. He managed that finally by bending his head downward and shaking it until the blood surged up behind his eyes and the universe seemed like a sea of fire with purple stars in it.
It was a minute after he had got rid of the sack before he could see at all, although the circular room in which he found himself was not absolutely dark. Faint moonlight filtered through a small iron-barred window set twelve feet above the floor, and dimly illuminated the bare walls.
He stared about him for another minute before his eyes recovered sufficiently to make out a shadowy shape beneath the window. Little by little, as he grew accustomed to the dim light, he made out the outline of a man, who sat so still as to seem dead, although it was an uncommon posture for a dead man, squatting Moslem-fashion, elbow on knee. He was about to approach to investigate when the man moved, and then he recognized the iblis.
The movement was in character. He had been sitting shrouded in a brown cloak, but threw it back now from his shoulders and sat naked, eyeing Jim with scornful curiosity, much as he might have watched the antics of a beetle on a pin. Jim set his back against