Adventure Tales #5. Vincent 1886-1974 Starrett

the grass is green and sappy and the water pure. A fine chance, in your own country, for a man’s hard, decent work—even a man of your years—and there we shall live, the four of us, and thrive—God willing!”

      “You,” stammered Omar the Black “you said—the four of us?”

      “Ayesha and your brother—and you and I. Can you not add two and two?”

      Now this—to live once more at home—had been the very thing which, deep in his soul, he had dreamed of and longed for, ever since he had come to the steppe. But it would not do for a man to give in too quickly to his wife.

      “Nothing of the sort!” he re­plied. “We shall ride back to Gulabad and—”

      “Listen!” she interrupted.

      “Yes?”

      She stepped up close to him.

      “Would you want,” she de­manded, lowering her voice, “your child to be born in an alien land?”

      He gave a start.

      “My—my child?”

      “Mine too.” She smiled. “Our child, before the end of many months. Oh yes—my hair is gray. But,”—blush­ing a little—“I am not as old as all that.”

      Then he took her tenderly into his arms. “By the Prophet the Adored!” he cried triumphantly. “Let it be a man-child, a little son, to you and me! A strong little son! The strongest in all High Tartary—”

      “Except,” cut in Omar the Red, “for the son whom Ayesha shall bear to me.”

      “Liar!”

      “Liar yourself!”

      “Drunkard!”

      “Unclean pimple!”

      Almost, they came to blows.

      * * * *

      AND the end of the tale?

      The end of the tale is not yet.

      But, up there in the ancient castle in High Tartary, live two white-haired men. White-haired, too, their wives. And the latter exchanging winks when, occasionally, their husbands com­ment naggingly, querulously, about the morals of Islam’s younger generation, including their grandsons.…