by Talbot Mundy
“What did Hendrick do about it?” I asked; for Grim showed symptoms of drying up at the source.
“Nothing. Hendrick died that night. The cattle he didn’t understand broke loose and he was horned in the dark. But I guess Ross had the wind up. His defaulter sheet was none too rosy, and a man of his caliber doesn’t enjoy the prospect of military prison — especially for an accumulation of alleged offences that are not considered crimes in civil life. Ross disappeared.”
“Deserted?”
Grim raised his eyebrows noncommittally. “You couldn’t prove it by me. The whole caravan disappeared, and Ross with it. That sort of thing happened rather frequently, because we hadn’t officers to spare, and now and then the Arabs used to call it a short war, when left to themselves, and light out for home with any plunder they could lay their hands on. Whether they took Jeremy Ross with them, or killed him before they bolted, didn’t transpire.”
Bear in mind, Grim wasn’t deliberately trying to keep information from me. I’m quite sure of that. I suspect that most of these secret keepers, who get the name for iron self-control, really withhold information just as naturally as they breathe. The self-control in Grim’s case is added on to a prenatal peculiarity. Mujrim and two of his brothers started off after the camels and that was a job that would take them fully half-an-hour. There was plenty of time to coax admissions out of Grim, so I settled down cross-legged straight in front of him and pulled out cigarets.
“Now, see here, Grim,” said I, “I knew Jeremy Ross and I know you. You didn’t help him out of that scrape for nothing, and he didn’t disappear for nothing. No fellow of your disposition could know Jeremy for three weeks and not appreciate him. What did you and he cook up together?”
“Nothing.”
“He didn’t die and you know it! What became of him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean you’ve no official knowledge!”
“Well?”
“Who’s this Jmil Ras we’re going to see?”
“We’re going to see.”
“Jmil Ras — Jeremy Ross — I’ve heard names more dissimilar!Are they one and the same man?”
“Wait and see,” he answered, smiling at me blandly.
“You’ve no call to be reserved with me,” I said. “Even if you did connive at Jeremy’s desertion, and admitted it to me, I wouldn’t give you away. Surely you know that?”
He nodded. “I didn’t. I’ve no proof that he deserted, and I don’t believe he did. I don’t know a thing about him for certain.”
“What do you know about Jmil Ras?”
“No more, and no less than I know about Jeremy Ross.”
“Then what do you suspect?”
“That’s different.”
“Spill it!”
“About a dozen incidents since the armistice was signed have led me to suspect that Jeremy Ross wasn’t killed. I hardly believed at the time that he could have been — at all events, not by the men he went away with that afternoon. He was clowning, ventriloquizing, and doing stunts for them before they started; and you’ve no notion how the Arabs idolize a fellow who can do that kind of thing. He had a natural gift for learning Arabic, and a talent for amusing folk that was even greater than his flair for resenting Jack-in-officiousness; and underneath all that he had keen common sense. There was nothing the matter with Jeremy Ross except boisterous spirits and a little too much independence.”
“And you’re pretty sure in your own mind — aren’t you? — that Jmil Ras and Jeremy Ross are the same.”
“I won’t say that. It’s just possible; and I’ve known of equally strange circumstances. It might be the worst that could have happened, if it’s true.”
“How so?”
“This message from the Avenger doesn’t look good. If Jeremy Ross can really burn his own smoke, as you called it just now; and if Jmil Ras is really he, we may be able to pull a fat chestnut out of the fire for Feisul. But if Jmil Ras is a Jeremy Ross who got bored and lost patience, then all these supplies we’re taking him will only add fuel to the fire. I wouldn’t help Jeremy Ross or any other white man exploit Arabia against the Arabs. I’m for the Arabs in their own country, and dead set against all foreign interference. However, it may all turn out to be a mare’s nest. We’ll know soon.”
There were other matters to learn first, though, and one was how fast the post can ride when Arabia deigns to admit she is in a hurry. Why is it that the men who drive like Jehu son of Nimshi are the most lethargic at all other times? Your consistently energetic man hardly ever drives furiously.
There came a rider like a black insect in a dust-cloud, pushing a racing camel as if life depended on the number of yards covered before dark. We could see the incessant stick long before we could make out whether we were to be spoken with or avoided; in fact, the rider was in such a hurry that we were possibly unseen in the shadow of that great acre of rock until we were so close that a rifle shot could have compelled an interview.
It was no man, but a woman, dressed in the somber black cotton from head to foot that usually hides the Bedouin lady’s charms; and the moment she was near enough to recognize us she gave a wild, shrill cry of welcome that put at rest all doubt of her intention and of her identity.
She cried out again when Grim got to his feet, and rode at him like a warrior brandishing her rifle.
But none raised a rifle to prevent her. We all knew Ayisha, the divorced wife of Ali Higg the self-styled Lion of Petra, whom Grim had managed to remarry to Saoud the Avenger. I told about that in the last tale. She was the last person in the world who would want to injure Grim. Besides, she was laughing.
And Lord! Wasn’t she good to look at, as she halted her spent beast within a yard of him, saluting with her hand up to her forehead like a man. Most of those desert women grow old early, and are hags at twenty-eight. She was possibly twenty, or twenty-one, and though she must have been nearly as tired as the camel, she looked seventeen and shone with youth through the mask of desert dust.
“Il awafi! [Hail] O, Jimgrim, it is good to see you!” she exclaimed, laughing down at him before leaping from the camel to stand facing him as frankly as a woman from the West. She had learned a lot from her short association with us at the time Grim checkmated Ali Higg, being one of those rare Eastern women who learn quickly because they are not too conservatively settled in the ancient ways.
“Welcome, Ayisha! What brings you?” Grim answered smiling.
“An ill-wind brings me! Thanks to the Lord of Mercies who sent you to befriend me, Jimgrim, I have a man for husband. But Allah jests savagely now and then.”
“Are the other wives too jealous of you?” Grim asked; for there wasn’t any other likely reason why a rather newly married woman should be riding away from home alone in all that hurry.
“No,” she answered. “Not too jealous. Not more than enough to amuse me. But unless you come swiftly I am like to lose my man!”
The camels were collected in a bunch and were roaring out their usual objections to being saddled and put to work; but instead of swearing back at them and putting on the harness all our gang had come clustering around Grim and Ayisha. But Narayan Singh came thrusting himself among them, elbowing right and left.
“Are ye cattle or men?” he thundered. “Is there no room to spread in all this desert? Is there no work to do? Ye cluster like the flies around a bad smell, yet ye have enough smell of your own to shame a camel, every one of you!”
That was hardly a gentle hint, but they seemed disinclined to take it. Moreover, they weren’t a good gang to insult too freely — not if you hoped to preserve peace. I was as keen as anyone to hear what Ayisha had to say, but it was likely that if I waited they would all stay too, and Narayan Singh might feel the point of a long knife for his trouble. So I led the way toward the camels and lent a hand with the heaviest loads — a task that even Mujrim, their strongest, was pleased enough to have me perform.
So I got no other informat
ion just then than the guess-work of the gang tossed off between grunts, as they saddled the protesting camels, with all the assurance with which old-timers pretend they know when they don’t, the wide world over. Mujrim pretended to know most, of course, since he had paid a secret visit to Jmil Ras; and the whole-cloth completeness of his misinformation may explain why Grim hadn’t bothered as much as to question him about the man whose goods we were delivering.
“Jmil Ras is a handsome Sheik, whose wives are growing old. He has seen Ayisha, and she him. Her husband the Avenger is jealous, for he is a proud Sheik, to whom it is no pleasure to consider sharing his fourth wife with a rival; so he set a strong guard to close the road between Ayisha and Jmil Ras. But he who would keep a she-fox in the ground should stop the hole at both ends! He watches that way, and she has bolted this. She heard that our Jimgrim is coming, and ran to meet him! Can not he who married her to the Avenger marry her again to Jmil Ras? That is the long and short of it. Look — see how she pleads with him there where they stand together.”
Ali Baba, for very pride in his great black-bearded oldest-born, confirmed every word of that story. He was in position to, of course, not having visited Jmil Ras, nor having anything to go on but imagination. Supposing Jmil Ras really to be Jeremy, I could have invented that sort of story all too easily myself, and was only too prone to believe it; for a man doesn’t need to have Jeremy’s fondness for company before he can get into trouble with women, in a land where that kind of thing is deadly dangerous. I could very easily imagine Jeremy indulging in an affair with Ayisha, just out of devilment and for the sake of running counter to convention. Before we had got the camels loaded there were raw jokes going the round, and the whole gang was set for a romance in high life, with daggers, poison, torture, and a couple of blood-feuds all thrown in — enjoying the prospect almost as much as if it were something that had actually happened, for Mahommed, the gang poet, to make songs about. For they prefer to glorify with song the past that all men know, rather than the future that lies in Allah’s lap.
And though Narayan Singh affected to attach no weight to their prognostications, his own were hardly reassuring. He and I sat on the rump of a loaded camel, smoking and watching Grim, waiting for him to give the order to march.
“Hitherto we had a problem that was simple,” he growled. “What it was I know not, but it was simple, for it had to do with men. Now there is a woman in it, and nothing that they touch is simple any longer. Moreover, we know the woman. What is worse, she knows us. Those women remember things that a man forgets; and if one of us in the past once showed a weakness, she will use that as a target for her brains at every opportunity.”
“She is grateful to Jimgrim,” I answered. “It isn’t likely she would try to injure us.”
“No woman knows what is injury to a man,” he retorted. “Whatever looks good to her, she believes must be good for her victims. I knew a woman once who truly thought that death must be good for me because she wished to see me dead; she was a very religious woman and a great advocate of reform among us Sikhs, but I observed that the changes she proposed were all designed for her advantage. She wished to see me dead because of things I knew that she did not wish known. So I made love to her, and she drank the poison she prepared for me. I shall make strong love to Ayisha; it is safest.”
He had made what he calls “strong love” to her right up to the day when Grim contrived to marry her to the Avenger, but hadn’t accomplished much beyond providing her and all the rest of us with amusement by the way. I dare say I grinned reminiscently.
“You have my permission to laugh at me,” he said, “for you are one of those who laugh without contempt and jest without malice. Nevertheless, it is better to be like Jimgrim and not laugh when a man speaks out of his heart’s knowledge. Ayisha will make show of scorning my advances, but I shall make all the more show of overwhelming passion. To her that will seem like a weakness. And as in war we look for the enemy’s weak point, so she, being a woman, will look for this party’s weakest member and will suppose that I am the one. Thus, whatever her purpose may be, she will try to use me. I shall seem to walk into her trap, with the result that Jimgrim will receive what the army calls intelligence.”
Well, it looked to me rather like a bear-trap set to catch a fly, but there never was sense in sneering at an honest fellow’s notions. I changed the subject slightly.
“What do you suppose is the reason why the Avenger has sent for Jimgrim?”
“As well try to guess what is behind the moon! But I know this, sahib, and you know it too, for you were present. It was agreed between Jimgrim and the Avenger that because the Avenger yielded to Jimgrim’s terms of settlement in the Ali Higg dispute, when he might easily have broken faith and made great trouble, therefore the Avenger should have the right to send for Jimgrim to help him out of any difficulty.
“And the Avenger said — you heard him say it — that if there should be no excuse for summoning Jimgrim he would take care to create one. Well, sahib, if you give a child a pistol he will fire it off. These Arabs are children, and the most like children are the chiefs, for they have men’s lives to play with, which are the most enticing toys. Give an Arab chief the right to send for such a man as Jimgrim whenever he gets into trouble, and he will make trouble. The nature of the trouble? Who knows? Who cares? Trouble is the name of it. It is all one. You will find that our Jimgrim has his work cut out.”
The sun was nearly down by then, and the gang cook — one of Ali Baba’s grandsons — spilled hot rice, coconut oil, and rubbery chicken into a great tin pan, around which we squatted on our hunkers for the evening meal, Narayan Singh foregoing all the rules of caste — as the Sikh is supposed to do in any case, but almost never does, except at the spur of necessity. We dipped our right hands into the mess and ate in the usual hurry, because whoever doesn’t eat fast gets a lot less than his share.
But Grim ate alone. And Ayisha ate alone; for not even her disrespect for convention entitled her to share a meal with menfolk. It was really a remarkable concession that she wasn’t kept waiting until after we had finished; and it wouldn’t have been made, only that Grim was determined on an early start.
Most of us were stanch Moslems, and those who were not were pretending to be, but the law requiring prayer at sunset, which is all-important, was forgotten, whereas there was quite a little comment on the circumstance that the bint, as they called Ayisha, was allowed to give herself such airs. In fact, we acted pretty much like Christians, take us on the whole.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to Grim until we had left the camping-place a mile behind and were heading nearly southeast over wilderness that Moses and his horde made famous centuries ago. Then I whacked my camel to a gallop and drew beside him in the lead.
“Well; what’s the news?” I asked him, for it was a dead sure bet that he wouldn’t tell me unless I did ask.
“Jmil Ras came from Yemen at the south end of Arabia about two years ago. He has a ragtag following, said to be very fierce and rather well-disciplined; and he has established himself in a deserted village on the side of a hill about twenty miles from Abu Kem, where he defies all comers.
“They say he has rebuilt the village and fortified it strongly, and the malcontents are flocking from all over the place to join him. The Avenger, who claims to rule that district, demanded tribute, which was scornfully refused. The Avenger threatened to exterminate him, and Jmil Ras retorted by ambushing about a hundred of the Avenger’s men, taking their camels and weapons, stripping them, and sending them back stark naked with a verbal message to the general effect that two can play at the extermination game. So the Avenger has sent for me.”
“But why Ayisha?”
“The man who brought the message to Jerusalem seems to have disappeared. Nothing’s been heard of him. Most likely he was murdered for his camel and rifle. The Avenger had relays of men in wait at different points to intercept him and pass the word along. They’ve seen us and reported
us by signal; so Ayisha was sent to meet us half way on the supposition that possibly the first messenger never reached Jerusalem. It seems she told the Avenger she has influence with me; and his other wives encouraged him to send her off alone so as to have a good basis for starting an intrigue against her.”
“Yemen?” I said. “That’s a thousand miles away. That hardly sounds like Jeremy.”
“No,” he admitted, “it hardly does. But then there’s this — they say Jmil Ras is a magician, who can change bullets into gold and make the dead saints talk in their tombs. Does that sound to you like an Arab, or an impudently humorous Australian?”
CHAPTER VII. “A member of a strangely free and independent, brave and disrespectful sect.”
I GOT no more out of Grim. He did not propose to hamper his free range of thought with guesswork based on half the facts, and said so. I believe that on such occasions he forces his thoughts into channels that lead anywhere at all except into the maze that lies ahead of him — thinks about the stars, or cabbages and kings, or Shakespeare.
Maybe I’m wrong about that; but I know that when we halted about midnight for a half-hour rest and I drew abreast of him again, he pulled out a pocket edition of Mark Twain — A Yankee at King Arthur’s Court I think it was — and leaned against his camel’s rump to read it in the moonlight.
Perhaps it was only a hint to me that he didn’t want to talk, but I think not. He seemed really absorbed in the book, wrinkling his forehead over the fine print and chuckling occasionally, very quietly, as if the humor were a secret between the author and himself. Our Arabs were hugely impressed. Ali Baba beckoned me away, and I joined him, thinking he had some request to make to Grim by proxy. When the old fox had any particularly outrageous demand in mind he usually tried to make me the go-between, partly because Grim seldom refused me anything if he could help it, but also in order to lay the blame of a possible refusal on to my head and retain the good opinion of his sons, who regarded him as an arch-strategist, who could always get what he wanted. However, for a wonder, he had no request to pass along on that occasion.