Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Me and Byng, sir?”

  “Yes, you and Byng! Did you hear me tell you to take him away?”

  “Very good, sir; thank you!”

  Curley Crothers saluted without the vestige of a smile, and hurried off before the dog could show too early signs of recovering health and strength or the commander could change his mind.

  “Come on, Scamp,” he whispered. “That was nothing but a temporary disaccommodation to your tummy, doglums; we’ll soon have you to rights again.”

  He dived into the fo’castle with the dog behind him, and there were those who noticed that the terrier’s whip-like tail no longer hugged his stomach, but was waving to the world at large.

  And thirty minutes later, as the Puncher’s launch put off with Curley and Joe Byng comfortably seated in the stern, it was obvious to any one who cared to look that Scamp was the happiest and healthiest terrier in Asia.

  “Now, I wonder what they did to him,” mused the Puncher’s commander, watching from beneath his awning. “Those two men live up to the name they brought aboard! I believe they’d find means and a good excuse for walking to windward of a First Sea Lord!”

  III.

  Now an Arab would as soon allow a dog to lick his face as he would think of eating pork in public with his women folk; so the bearded, hook-nosed believers in the Prophet who looked down from the rock wall that lines one side of Adra knew what to think of Curley and his friend Joe Byng long before either of them realized that they were being watched.

  Arrayed from head to ankles in spotless white, their black boots looking blacker by comparison, they proceeded in the general direction of the distant village, with the order and decorum of sea lords descending on a dockyard for inspection purposes. The trackless sand proved hot and sharp; the dog proved in poor condition from the voyage and the morning’s incidental martyrdom, and Byng was generous-hearted. He picked up the dog and carried him; and Scamp displayed his gratitude in customary canine way.

  The comments of the watching Arabs would not fit into any story in the world, and it is quite as well that Crothers and Joe Byng did not hear them and could not have translated them, for in the other case trouble would have started even sooner than it did. As it was, they tumbled and maneuvered over unresisting sand through almost tangible stench to where a gap in the ragged wall did duty as a gate. As they came nearer, a banner with the star and crescent was displayed from the wall-top, but no other sign was given that their coming was observed.

  It was not until they had debouched (as Crothers termed it) to their half-right front and had taken to a narrow one-man track that ran below the wall that any over attention was paid them. Suddenly a hook-nosed Asiatic gentleman emerged through the once-was gateway — a picture of a Bible shepherd but for the long-barreled gun he carried instead of crook — a brown shadow against brown masonry. He challenged them in Arabic, and Curley Crothers answered him in Queen Victoria’s English that all was well.

  “Everything in the garden’s lovely!” he asserted, in a deep-sea sing-song. “How’s yourself?”

  The man repeated whatever he had said before, this time with a gesture of impatience.

  “Friend!” roared Byng and Curley both together. And the bull terrier took the joint yell for a war cry, or a bunting call, or possibly the herald’s overture that summons bull pups to Valhalla. He was bred right and British Navy trained and his was not to reason why. He waited for no second invitation, but lit out from Byng’s arms like a streak — a whip-tail, snow-white streak — for where the Arab’s hard lean legs shone shiny-brown below his fluttering brown raiment.

  “Come back, there!” yelled both keepers in excited unison, but they called too late.

  Each grabbed for the chain too late. Their heads and shoulders cannoned and they fell together on the hot, dirty sand while Scamp and the Arab made each other’s intimate acquaintance in a whirl of ripping cloth and legs and teeth and blasphemy.

  That in itself was bad enough, and good enough excuse if such were wanted for war between the Shadow of God Upon Earth and England’s distant Queen; but there was worse to follow.

  One does not laugh, between certain parallels, unless the ultimate degree of insult is intended. And Curley Crothers and Joe Byng did laugh. They held their ribs and laughed until their muscles ached and their strong men’s strength oozed out of them.

  They were laughing when they grabbed the dog at last and pulled him off. They laughed as they set the Arab on his feet and gave him back his gun; and they laughed at him with Christian and mannerly good grace when he spat at them in awful frenzy until the spittle matted in his beard. And, being gentlemen after a fashion quite their own, they smilingly apologized.

  Arabia lies in the middle of the zone where laughter is not wisdom. And a smile lies midway in the measure of a laugh. A laugh might be unintentional. A smile must be deliberate. And the Arab’s spittle was run dry. Creed, custom, law of tooth for tooth and the thought of half a hundred co-religionists all watching him from crannies in the wall combined to make him shoot, since further means of showing malice were denied him; and he raised the long butt to his shoulder with meaning that was unmistakable.

  And so, with sorrow that the East should be so lacking in good fellowship, but with the ready instinct of men who have been trained for war, they closed with him from two directions, swiftly, bull-dog-wise, and took his gun away. And how could even an able seaman help the dog’s taking a share in the game again?

  So far, nobody had done anything intended to be wrong — least of all the dog. The Arab was defending institutions; Crothers and Joe Byng were bent on holiday, and full of kind regards for anything that lived; and the dog was living dogfully up to well-bred-terrier tradition. It was as if two harmless chemicals had met and blended into nitroglycerin.

  Deprived of his gun, the Arab drew a knife; and no British sailor lives who does not understand the quick-loosed answer to the glint of steel. Fist and boot both landed on the Arab quicker than his own thought served the knife, and the weight of quick concussions jarred him into all but coma. This time Byng caught the dog in time and held him back, leaving Curley Crothers to finish matters by making the long knife prize of war. Once more he helped the Arab on his feet, smiling hugely and gentling the iron sinews with huge paws that could have wrenched them all apart if need be.

  “Take my advice, cully, and weigh quick!” he counseled, looking the Arab over and making sure the unfortunate had not been too much hurt. “Run for shelter where you can cool your bearings! Run off to the mosque and pray, to make up for all that cussing. Go and be good! And next time you meets us, be friendly — see?”

  The Arab was too apoplectically angry to comply, but Crothers took him by both shoulders and shoved him; and finding himself shot forward out of reach, seeing safety ahead and its possible corollary of awful vengeance, he suddenly achieved discretion and scampered through the gap in the wall.

  “‘E’s gone to fetch his pals. Look out, mate!” warned Joe Byng.

  “Not ‘im!” vowed Crothers. “‘E’s ‘ad enough, that’s all! We’ve seen the last of ‘im!”

  And the most amazing thing of all was that Crothers believed just what he said — Curley Crothers, to whom Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports were as an open book, and to whom the Arab customs and religion and reprehensible tendencies were currently supposed to be first-reader knowledge. It was he who had proved there were no harems — he who coined the Navy adage, “Search an Arab first, and sit on him, before you come to terms!”

  Yet here he was, advising Byng to disregard a looted Arab’s spittle! There is no accounting, ever, for the ways of shore-leave sailor-men.

  “Come on, Joe,” he said. “Lead ‘the dawg — he can walk now — and let’s see what Adra looks like.”

  IV.

  All might have been well, and both seamen might have reached the Puncher again with dignity and grace, had they not entered Adra, past the only jail in that part of Arabia. And an Arab jail being rarer
and one percent more evil than any other evil thing there is, the two of them quite naturally paused to make its closest possible acquaintance.

  “Look out for vermin!” cautioned Curley, standing on tiptoe to peer in through the close-spaced iron bars.

  They forgot the dog. The jail, for the moment, challenged all their waking senses, the olfactory by no means least.

  “Can you see anything?” asked Byng.

  Before Crothers could answer him, a snarl, then a yap, then a quick, determined growl gave warning of the terrier’s interest in something else than fleas.

  He had been scratching himself peacefully a moment earlier; now, like a bower anchor taking charge, he ripped the chain through Byng’s hand and was off — chin, back and tail in one straight, striving line — in full chase of a pariah.

  The yellow cur yapped its agony of fear; the nearest hundred and odd mangy monsters of the gutter took up the chorus; within five seconds of the start there was the Puncher’s mascot racing after one abominable scavenger, and after him in just as hot pursuit there raced the whole street-cleaning force of Adra — tongues out, eyes blazing, and their mean thin barks all working overtime.

  “Good-by, Scamp!” groaned Byng, estimating rapidly.

  “Not yet it ain’t!” said Crothers, grabbing Byng’s arm and nearly tearing out the muscles.

  It was a crude way of rousing Byng’s latent speed, both of thought and movement, but it worked. Before Joe could swear, even, Crothers was off like the wind, with Joe after him, using the string of oaths he had meant for Crothers on the sand that gave under him and made him stumble at every other stride.

  Adra turned out, as a colony of prairie dogs might from planless burrows; only these had more venom in their bite than prairie dogs and came from structural instead of natural, from flea-bepeppered instead of grass-grown dirt. Man, woman and child — the grown men armed, the women veiled in dirt-brown, some of them, and some (mostly the better-looking) unveiled and unashamed, the little children mostly naked and colored with all the human hues there are — raced, yelling, through a swarm of flies in hot pursuit. Never since Shem’s great-grandson gat the Arab race was there a procession like it.

  Behind its mud-and-Masonry decrepit wall that guards only the seaward side, Adra straggles quite a distance desertward; and there are winding streets enough to hide an army in, provided that the army did not mind the fleas. Scamp, view-halloaing his utmost, led that most amazing hunt a quite considerable circuit before other men and dogs, arriving from a dozen different directions, set a limit to his unobstructed movement.

  He knew what he was after, but they did not; they had come to see. For a moment they seemed to think that Scamp was the object of the chase, and a dozen guns of a dozen different kinds and dates were aimed at him.

  And then, as consciousness dawns on a man recovering from chloroform, there swept over their lethargic Eastern brains the simultaneous idea that Curley Crothers and Joe Byng were the real quarry; and — again like men recovering from chloroform — they did not quite know what to do. Should they slay, there was the Puncher to be reckoned with; and the Puncher’s port quick-firers could be seen commanding Adra by any man who cared to climb the wall.

  Besides, an Arab’s hospitality is proverbial. He very seldom kills a visitor on sight.

  On the other hand a man, and particularly a British sailor, who runs has reason, as a rule. Therefore these two men were evidently guilty. Therefore they must not escape. In five seconds the affair had changed from a spectacular amusement, with Adra’s population in the role of super-heated audience, to a hunt of Crothers and Joe Byng.

  Within ten seconds each of the sailors lay with his face pressed hard into the sand and at least a dozen Arabs sitting on him. Scamp — utterly forgotten now by all except the sailors — still behind the one stray pariah and ahead of all the rest but beginning to appreciate the fact that he was hunted, and beginning to feel spent — raced on, took three sharp turns in close succession, and was gathered all unwilling in the arms of an enormous black man who snatched him from the very teeth of the following pack and dispersed them, howling, by means of well-directed kicks.

  “Ah seed you yesterday, Ah did,” said his deliverer in English; and, recalling principle, the terrier bit at him — only to find himself muzzled by a horny, huge fist that caressed even while it rendered impotent.

  “Ah’m fond of little dogs! Ah’m English!”

  Scamp understood nothing of the conversation, but with canine instinct realized that he was safe; and after that he was satisfied to lie and pant. With five red inches of tongue hanging out, and no sign whatever of his white-uniformed guardians to trouble him, a black man’s arms were as good as any other place; he did not waste half a thought on Byng and Crothers.

  But Byng, three turnings back, spat filthy sand out of his mouth the moment an Arab deemed it safe to leave off sitting on his head, looked wildly around for Crothers, and bellowed —

  “Where’s the pup?”

  Crothers, spitting out sand, too, twenty yards behind where the swifter Byng had fallen, called back:

  “Dunno. Whistle him!”

  Byng tried to whistle, and the Arabs mistook the effort for a signal. In an instant both men were face-downward again, struggling for breath and clawing at the dirt. Then worse befell. The gentleman whose brown anatomy had suffered from the seamen’s feet and fists just previous to their invasion of the town limped up with his eye teeth showing and his flapping cotton raiment still unmended where the dog had torn it. Any other wrath, however awful, could be nothing but the shadow of his state of mind; and since he knew the more vindictive portions of the Koran all by heart, and was quoting as he came, there was little need of words to illustrate further his attitude.

  He seemed to be a person of authority. An Arab town or village is a democracy in which each free man has his say; not even a sheik can overrule the vote of a majority, and this man was no sheik. But rage and self-assertion will generally exercise a certain weight in tribal councils, and the crowd in this case was too doubtful of the facts to have any settled notions of its own.

  “To the jail with them!” the new arrival almost shrieked, and about a dozen in the crowd took up the cry —

  “To jail with them!”

  “Infidels! Worshipers of dogs! Wine-drinkers! Eaters of pig flesh! Dogs and the sons of dogs — what mothers gave them birth? Are your hands, True-believers, fit bonds for them? To the jail! To the jail that Abdul Hamid caused his men to build for such as these!”

  He stooped and looked deliberately to make sure that Crothers could not break away, then came closer and spat on him, saving half his spittle with impartial forethought for the struggling Byng, who looked up in time to see what was in store for him. Being spat on is even less exhilarating than it sounds or looks, and Byng waxed speechless after passing through a many-worded stage of blasphemy.

  Crothers, the larger of the two and by six brawny inches more phlegmatic, bode his time in silence, so that neither of them spoke a word while they were hustled and cuffed along the street between the unbaked brick hovels. It was not until the reinforced iron door of Adra’s one stone building slammed on them that either of them said a word.

  Then —

  “I’m not a mean man,” protested Crothers.

  “No?” said Byng, monosyllabic for a start.

  “No,” repeated Crothers, “I am not, Joe Byng. But — and I says it solemn; I says it with one ‘and above my ‘ed, and I’d take my affidavy on it in a court o’ law, if it’s the last word I ever does say an’ it’s my dying oath — so ‘elp me Solomon and all ‘is glory; I’m a Dutchman if I wouldn’t like to ‘ave a come-back at that Arab.”

  Byng lay full length on his stomach, and buried his face in his arms. He was still too full of wrath for words.

  “I’d kick his mother, if I couldn’t land on him,” mused Crothers. And then he busied himself about conning his new bearings. It was a four-walled jail — one-doored,
one-windowed, iron-barred — ill-smelling, verminous, too hot for words and too suggestive of the opposite of home, sweet home to call forth humor, even from a seaman.

  “They’ll come an’ rescue us,” moaned Byng. “They’ll quarantine the pair of us for being lousy, and they’ll turn the perishing salt-water hose on us. We’re due for the brig for Gawd knows ‘ow long; our reppitation’s gone; we’ve been spat on by a — by a Arab, and we ‘aven’t hit ‘im back; an’ we’ve lost the pup. We’ve gone an’ lost the pup! Gawd! There ain’t no more good in nothin’!”

  Which shows no more than that Joe Byng in his sorrow overlooked a circumstance or two. For instance, there were rings in the floor that Crothers eyed with keen curiosity. They were anchored in the solid blocks of stone.

  “It’s better than it might be, mate!” he argued optimistically. “They might ‘ave gone and chained us up to those!”

  V.

  Arabia has some peculiarities, not all of them discreditable, which she does not share with any other country. There is, for instance, the kind custom that dictates the setting free of slaves when they have rendered seven years’ good service.

  That rule (and it is rather rule than law) tends to eliminate all class and color prejudice. Provided that a man will bow to Mecca three times daily and refrain from pork and wine, he may wear whatever skin God gave him and yet mingle with the best. He may even marry whom he will and can afford; and he may be whatever his ability, ambition, and audacity dictate.

  And Hassan Ah had never been a slave, so he had even less to overcome than might have been the case. He stalked Adra socially uncondemned where once he had caught fish, groomed camels, and done other irritating jobs. His old fish-catching days had given him an intimate acquaintance with the reef, and his small-boat seamanship, born of hard pulling in the trough of beam-on-seas, was well suited to the local type of craft.

  So nobody questioned his right to the title of harbor pilot. And if certain perquisites went with an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected. Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor of it, in Arabia?