by Talbot Mundy
“Better shoot soon,” grinned the iblis, probably mistaking Jim’s deliberation for superstitious funk.
Jim lowered the pistol. He decided to summon his two friends by other means.
“Suliman,” he said, “come here a minute.”
But Suliman had had enough of it and had vanished, creeping like a ghost among the shadows. A moment later he heard the boy scramble out of the passage into the entrance and take to his heels.
“The child is wiser than the man,” the iblis grinned maliciously.
Jim went to the entrance and leaned with his back against the opening, cutting off the one way of retreat and hoping that the iblis might not force the issue by attacking him. For he was fully resolved not to shoot if that could be avoided by any means; and strong though he knew himself to be he suspected that the iblis had twice his strength.
More depended on Suliman in the next few minutes than he cared to dwell on, and he went through the alternating cold chills and hot sweat that always attacked him when success or failure depended for the moment on someone else. It was Jim’s besetting weakness that he could not rest easily unless the key to a given crisis were in his own hand, and he suffered more in such minutes than a victim on the rack.
There were so many possibilities. Suliman might even be killed by a leopard. A hyena might overcome natural cowardice sufficiently to attack a boy of that size. Or he might lose his way.
Catesby and Narayan Singh might have grown impatient and have tried to follow, in which case Suliman might fail to find them. Perhaps they were already scouting in the wrong direction. Or lurking thieves might make away with the boy. If the camp-thieves should return and catch him alone with the iblis he would be in a fine predicament.
And all the while the iblis sat quite still, blinking beside the candle in what, if not amusement, was a most astounding bluff at it. Insolently naked, impudently confident, he seemed aware of hidden resources of which Jim knew nothing.
He was certainly an unusual malefactor. Nine criminals out of ten caught in a corner and held at pistol-point would have at least pretended to consider that partnership proposal, if only with a view to subsequent treachery. In fact, all that redeemed the proposal itself from treachery was certainty that the iblis would never dream of playing fair. Jim might have gained an insight into the inner workings of the scheme while the other sought to gain time, that was all.
“When your friends come they will be as impotent as you are,” said the iblis after a few minutes.
His tone of voice was that of an agent of the Inquisition discussing the next item on the program for a victim’s benefit.
It was tempting to answer threat with threat, but that is a poor game. Threats are always launched either to unmask the other’s batteries or else to undermine self-command and blind an opponent to his wisest course. There is not exception to that rule, even though threateners don’t always analyze it and the threatened seldom do.
Feeling like a bear that has treed his man, Jim waited in expectant silence, little guessing, in spite of all his hard-won understanding of Eastern human nature, what a consummate player of surprise hands he had to deal with.
“Allah makes all things easy. I can deal three or four of you as easily as one,” remarked the iblis after a long silence.
Jim did not answer.
“I can deal with twenty-five as easily as one.”
“Why not deal with one first, while you have the chance?” laughed Jim.
For answer to that the iblis pressed out the candle with his thumb and threw the cave into instant, utter blackness. He did not make a sound, but by the time Jim could get the flashlight from his pocket and press the button there was no sign of him anywhere. He had vanished as completely as the darkness did under the electric glare.
Jim gripped his pistol and flashed the light all over the cave, turning the rays into the other recesses one by one. As far as he could see from where he stood they all seemed empty, but he did not dare leave his place by the entrance to look more carefully because that would have given the iblis a chance to bolt. If there was a passage leading through one of the recesses into another cave he could afford to wait and look for that after the arrival of Catesby and Narayan Singh, because however many their ramifications, those ancient tombs of Palestine never have more than one small opening to the world outside.
He kept the light turned steadily on the floor in front of him to guard against surprise, and presently he knew why the iblis had chosen just that moment for disappearance. Jim’s own ears are exceptionally sharp, but the other’s must have been sharper. He could hear approaching footsteps now. Catesby and Narayan Singh were coming.
He did not look around to greet them. From somewhere in the coal-black shadow of one of the recesses the iblis began barking like a jackal. Most fanatics use some form or other of animal noise to goad themselves into action. He kept his eyes alert in front of him and, since he did not choose to betray his nationality to the iblis yet, called aloud to his friends in Arabic.
“Ta’ala, islab; ma fi darar! (Come on, you fellows; there’s nothing the matter!)”
The iblis barked again, and footsteps in the winding tunnel behind him doubled their speed. He set his back more squarely against the opening, for if the iblis proposed to make a rush for if the iblis proposed to make a rush for liberty now was his last chance; or his active muscle might count on surprise and speed to upset men groping through a narrow passage with the light behind them.
The iblis changed his bark into a yell. Jim stiffened himself for action. Less than a second later a hand reached forward from behind him and seized his throat in a grip there was no breaking. He tried to fire backward over his shoulder, but another hand seized his wrist and nearly broke it, wrenching the pistol free.
Then two men jumped on him, and when the steely fingers on his throat had squeezed him half-unconscious they bound both wrists behind him with a leather thong and threw him face downward on the floor. There he lay still, making no effort yet to look about him, concentrating all his faculties on regaining breath and recovering from the physical pain. He was stunned, hurt and ashamed of himself for being taken by surprise; and as soon as he could breathe without agony he battled down and beat the unmanning suggestions of self-accusation that have put many more stout men out of business than ever surprise or defeat did.
“Shall we cut his throat?” inquired a gruff-voice casually.
There was no immediate answer. Jim lay with the gooseflesh rising and receding on his back in tidal waves, while an Arab whom he could not see stood across him with a foot on either side, ready at a nod to do the butcher work.
Someone lighted the candle-end. Another someone blew it out. There began to be whispering over in a corner. Other men came in through the tunnel and threw heavy objects on the floor, one or two of which rattled with the sound of rifle swivels.
It seemed that there was quite an argument going on, although Jim could not distinguish the voice of the iblis. They hissed over in the corner like a lot of snakes, once and again a low growl breaking out by way of emphasis. The man who stood athwart Jim’s ribs grew restless and struck a long knife on the palm of his hand.
“Oh, let’s cut his throat and be done with it,” he grumbled, stooping to fumble for Jim’s forehead and bend his head back for the sacrifice.
To have started to struggle at that moment would have meant death certain; the Arab would have taken the decision on himself. But it was nervous work to lie still with throat bent convex, taut and ready.
One other thought monopolized Jim’s brain at that minute. Knife or no knife, he was ready to let out a yell of warning if he could catch sound of his friends’ footsteps in time. If he died for it the next second, he must save them from advancing into the trap, and he listened desperately.
He thought it was all up when the whole gang began to cross the floor toward him. Then he put up the best fight possible, which wasn’t much in the circumstances. Just before the fir
st man reached him he rose to his knees with a jerk and tossed the would-be executioner over his head.
The man who had annexed his flashlight discovered how to turn it on, but held it sidewise, and nine men stood revealed, all eyes turned on the new toy. Jim charged the nearest of them head forward and butted him in the belly, sending him sprawling. But the rest fell on him, tripped him up, beat him and pulled a bag over his head.
They bound a cloth tightly over his mouth outside the bag, and a moment later he was being hustled out of the cave, pricked on from behind by the knife- point of the wrathful one who had been butted.
“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 o
utline 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 the steps and resumed his labor at the thong, pressing hard and rubbing with as little noise as possible.
“I can deal with you with your hands free,” said the iblis after a minute or two.
“Try it,” Jim suggested, and threw caution to the winds.
Pretending to chafe more violently at the thong, measure the distance with his eyes meanwhile, he went for the iblis with a sudden run and jump, intending to land feet foremost on him. But without any obvious muscular effort, the iblis shifted his position just as suddenly half a yard to the right, and Jim’s feet hit the wall.
He made a prodigious effort to recover balance and jump again, but fell on his back, and having lost his Arab headdress when he shook the bag free, contact with the stone floor nearly stunned him. So he lay still, and the iblis leaned down to peer into his face, with that unchanging, curiously scornful smile that was half-sneer, half-amusement.
“I can deal with three — or thirty — or three hundred of you.”
Jim did not answer. With his hands free, half-stunned or not, he would have taken his chance in a free-for-all fight, though the iblis was as strong as two of him; but to tempt providence in his present position would have been sheer lunacy. He was constitutionally unable to believe himself down and out as long as consciousness remained, so he lay and wondered whence his opportunity would come and what form it would take.
The iblis provided it. He was evidently of an economical turn of mind, for he produced from a pocket in the discarded cloak the self-same stub of candle that had served his purpose in the tomb, and lit it. Jim set his teeth, thinking at first that torture was to be the next item on the program; for in the fingers of an expert a lighted candle can do as much mischief as a red-hot iron. But the iblis only looked about for a place to set the light on, and leaned over finally to drip wax on the floor and stick it there out of reach.