The American filled an empty tin with water and set it, with an opened tin of meat, near Al Wazir’s hand. An instant later he dodged, as the mad hermit hurled the tins at him with all his power. Shaking his head in despair, Gordon went into the storeroom and broke his own fast. He had little heart to eat, with the ruin of that once-splendid personality before him, but the urgings of hunger would not be denied.
It was while thus employed that a sudden noise outside brought him to his feet, galvanized by the imminence of danger.
V
It was the rattling fall of the stone Gordon had placed in the path that had alarmed him. Someone was climbing up the winding trail! Snatching up his rifle he glided out on the ledge. One of his enemies had come at last.
Down at the pool a weary, dusty camel was drinking. On the path, a few feet below the ledge there stood a tall, wiry man in dust-stained boots and breeches, his torn shirt revealing his brown, muscular chest.
“Gordon!” this man ejaculated, staring amazedly into the black muzzle of the American’s rifle. “How the devil did you get here?” His hands were empty, resting on outcroppings of rock, just as he had halted in the act of climbing. His rifle was slung to his back, pistol and scimitar in their scabbards at his belt.
“Put up your hands, Hawkston,” ordered Gordon, and the Englishman obeyed.
“What are you doing here?” he repeated. “I left you in el-Azem—”
“Salim lived long enough to tell me what he saw in the hut by Mekmet’s Pool. I came by a road you know nothing about. Where are the other jackals?”
Hawkston shook the sweat beads from his sunburned forehead. He was above medium height, brown, hard as sole leather, with a dark hawklike face and a high-bridged predatory nose, arching over a thin, black mustache. A lawless adventurer, his scintillant gray eyes reflected a ruthless and reckless nature, and as a fighting man he was as notorious as was Gordon — more notorious in Arabia, for Afghanistan had been the stage for most of El Borak’s exploits.
“My men? Dead by now, I fancy. The Ruweila are on the warpath. Shalan ibn Mansour caught us at Sulaymen’s Well, with fifty men. We made a barricade of our saddles among the palms and stood them off all day. Van Brock and three of our camel drivers were killed during the fighting, and Krakovitch was wounded. That night I took a camel and cleared out. I knew it was no use hanging on.”
“You swine,” said Gordon, without passion. He did not call Hawkston a coward. He knew that not cowardice, but a cynical determination to save his skin at all hazards had driven the English man to desert his wounded and beleaguered companions.
“There wasn’t any use for us all to be killed,” retorted Hawkston. “I believed one man could sneak away in the dark and I did. They rushed the camp just as I got clear. I heard them killing the others. Ortelli howled like a lost soul when they cut his throat — I knew they’d run me down long before I could reach the coast, so I headed for the caves — northwest across the open desert, leaving the road and Khosru’s Well off to the south. It was a long, dry ride, and I made it more by luck than anything else. And now can I put my hands down?”
“You might as well,” replied Gordon, the rifle at his shoulder never wavering. “In a few seconds it won’t matter much to you where your hands are.”
Hawkston’s expression did not change. He lowered his hands, but kept them away from his belt.
“You mean to kill me?” he asked calmly.
“You murdered my friend Salim. You came here to torture and rob Al Wazir. You’d kill me if you got the chance. I’d be a fool to let you live.”
“Are you going to shoot me in cold blood?”
“No. Climb up on the ledge. I’ll give you any kind of an even break you want.”
Hawkston complied, and a few seconds later stood facing the American. An observer would have been struck by a certain similarity between the two men. There was no facial resemblance, but both were burned dark by the sun; both were built with the hard economy of rawhide and spring steel; and both wore the keen, hawklike aspect which is the common brand of men who live by their wits and courage out on the raw edges of the world.
Hawkston stood with his empty hands at his sides while Gordon faced him with rifle held hip-low, but covering his midriff.
“Rifles, pistols or swords?” asked the American. “They say you can handle a blade.”
“Second to none in Arabia,” answered Hawkston confidently. “But I’m not going to fight you, Gordon.”
“You will!” A red flame began to smolder in the black eyes. “I know you, Hawkston. You’ve got a slick tongue, and you’re treacherous as a snake. We’ll settle this thing here and now. Choose your weapons — or by Heaven, I’ll shoot you down in your tracks!”
Hawkston shook his head calmly.
“You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood, Gordon. I’m not going to fight you — yet. Listen, man, we’ll have plenty of fighting on our hands before long! Where’s Al Wazir?”
“That’s none of your business,” growled Gordon.
“Well, no matter. You know why I’m here. And I know you came here to stop me if you could. But just now you and I are in the same boat. Shalan ibn Mansour’s on my trail. I slipped through his fingers, as I said, but he picked up my tracks and was after me within a matter of hours. His camels were faster and fresher than mine, and he’s been slowly overhauling me. When I topped the tallest of those ridges to the south there, I saw his dust. He’ll be here within the next hour! He hates you as much as he does me. You need my help, and I need yours. With Al Wazir to help us, we can hold these caves indefinitely.”
Gordon frowned. Hawkston’s tale sounded plausible, and would explain why Shalan ibn Mansour had not come hot on the American’s trail, and why the Englishman had not arrived at the caves sooner. But Hawkston was such a snake-tongued liar it was dangerous to trust him. The merciless creed of the desert said shoot him down without any more parley, and take his camel. Rested, it would carry Gordon and Al Wazir out of the desert. But Hawkston had gauged Gordon’s character correctly when he said the American could not shoot a man in cold blood.
“Don’t move,” Gordon warned him, and holding the cocked rifle like a pistol in one hand, he disarmed Hawkston and ran a hand over him to see that he had no concealed weapons. If his scruples prevented him shooting his enemy, he was determined not to give that enemy a chance to get the drop on him. For he knew Hawkston had no such scruples.
“How do I know you’re not lying?” he demanded.
“Would I have come here alone, on a wornout camel if I weren’t telling the truth?” countered Hawkston. “We’d better hide that camel, if we can. If we should beat them off, we’ll need it to get to the coast. Damn it, Gordon, your suspicion and hesitation will get our throats cut yet! Where’s Al Wazir?”
“Turn and look into that cave,” replied Gordon grimly.
Hawkston, his face suddenly sharp with suspicion, obeyed. As his eyes rested on the figure crouched against the column at the back of the cavern, his breath sucked in sharply.
“Al Wazir! What’s the matter with him?”
“Too much loneliness, I reckon,” growled Gordon. “He’s stark mad. He couldn’t tell you where to find the Blood of the Gods if you tortured him all day.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter much just now,” muttered Hawkston callously. “Can’t think of treasure when life itself is at stake. Gordon, you’d better believe me! We should be preparing for a siege, not standing here chinning. If Shalan ibn Mansour — look!” He started violently, his long arm stabbing toward the south.
Gordon did not turn at the exclamation. He stepped back instead, out of the Englishman’s reach, and still covering the man, shifted his position so he could watch both Hawkston and the point of the compass indicated. Southeastward the country was undulating, broken by barren ridges. Over the farthest ridge a string of white dots was pouring, and a faint dust haze billowed up in the air. Men on camels! A regular horde of them.
“Th
e Ruweila!” exclaimed Hawkston. “They’ll be here within the hour!”
“They may be men of yours,” answered Gordon, too wary to accept anything not fully proved. Hawkston was as tricky as a fox; and to make a mistake on the desert meant death. “We’ll hide that camel, though, just on the chance you’re telling the truth. Go ahead of me down the trail.”
Paying no attention to the Englishman’s profanity, Gordon herded him down the path to the pool. Hawkston took the camel’s rope and went ahead leading it, under Gordon’s guidance. A few hundred yards north of the pool there was a narrow canyon winding deep into a break of the hills, and a short distance up this ravine Gordon showed Hawkston a narrow cleft in the wall, concealed behind a jutting boulder. Through this the camel was squeezed into a natural pocket, open at the top, roughly round in shape and about forty feet across.
“I don’t know whether the Arabs know about this place or not,” said Gordon. “But we’ll have to take the chance that they won’t find the beast.”
Hawkston was nervous.
“Let’s get back to the caves! They’re coming like the wind. If they catch us in the open they’ll shoot us like rabbits!”
He started back at a run and Gordon was close on his heels. But Hawkston’s nervousness was justified. The white men had not quite reached the foot of the trail that led up to the caves when a low thunder of hoofs rose on their ears, and over the nearest ridge came a wild white-clad figure on a camel, waving a rifle. At the sight of them he yelled stridently and flogged his beast into a more furious gallop, threw his rifle to his shoulder. Behind him man after man topped the ridge — Bedouins on hejin — white racing camels.
“Up the cliff, man!” yelled Hawkston, pale under his bronze. Gordon was already racing up the path, and behind him Hawkston panted and cursed, urging greater haste, where more speed was impossible. Bullets began to spatter against the cliff, and the foremost rider howled in bloodthirsty glee as he bore down swiftly upon them. He was many yards ahead of his companions, and he was a remarkable marksman for an Arab. Firing from the rocking, swaying saddle, he was clipping his targets close.
Hawkston yelped as he was stung by a flying sliver of rock, flaked off by a smashing slug.
“Damn you, Gordon!” he panted. “This is your fault — your bloody stubbornness — he’ll pick us off like rabbits in—”
The oncoming rider was not more than three hundred yards from the foot of the cliff, and the rim of the ledge was ten feet above the climbers.
Gordon wheeled suddenly, threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired all in one motion, so quickly he did not even seem to take aim. But the Arab went out of his saddle like a man hit by lightning. Without pausing to note the result of his shot, Gordon raced on up the path, and an instant later he swarmed over the ledge, with Hawkston at his heels.
“Damndest shot I ever saw!” gasped the Englishman.
“There’re your guns,” grunted Gordon, throwing himself flat on the ledge. “Here they come!”
Hawkston snatched his weapons from the rock where Gordon had left them and followed the American’s example.
The Arabs had not paused. They greeted the fall of their reckless leader with yells of hate, but they flogged their mounts and came on in a headlong rush. They meant to spring off at the foot of the trail and charge up it on foot. There were at least fifty of them.
The two men lying prone on the ledge above did not lose their heads. Veterans, both of them, of a thousand wild battles, they waited coolly until the first of the riders was within good range. Then they began firing, without haste and without error. At each shot a man tumbled headlong from his saddle or slumped forward on his mount’s bobbing neck.
Not even Bedouins could charge into such a blast of destruction. The rush wavered, split, turned on itself — and in an instant the white-clad riders were turning their backs on the caves and flogging in the other direction as madly as they had come. Five of them would never charge again, and as they fled Hawkston drilled one of the rear men neatly between the shoulders.
They fell back beyond the first low, stone-littered ridge, and Hawkston shook his rifle at them and cursed them with virile eloquence.
“Desert scum! Try it again, you bounders!”
Gordon wasted no breath on words. Hawkston had told the truth, and Gordon knew he was in no danger of treachery from that source, for the present. Hawkston would not attack him as long as they were confronted by a common enemy — but he knew that the instant that peril was removed, the Englishman might shoot him in the back, if he could.
Their position was bad, but it might well have been worse. The Bedouins were all seasoned desert fighters, cruel as wolves. Their chief had a blood feud with both white men, and would not fail to grasp the chance that had thrown them into his reach. But the defenders had the advantage of shelter, an inexhaustible water supply and food enough to last for months. Their only weakness was the limited amount of ammunition.
Without consulting one another, they took their stations on the ledge, Hawkston to the north of the trail head, Gordon about an equal distance to the south of it. There was no need for a conference; each man knew the other knew his business. They lay prone, gathering broken rocks in heaps before them to add to the protection offered by the ledge rim.
Spurts of flame began to crown the ridge; bullets whined and splattered against the rock. Men crept from each end of the ridge into the clusters of boulders that littered the plain.
The men on the ledge held their fire, unmoved by the slugs that whistled near at hand. Their minds worked so similarly in a situation like this that they understood each other without the necessity of conversation. There was no chance of them wasting two cartridges on the same man. An imaginary line, running from the foot of the trail to the ridge, divided their territories. When a turbaned head was poked from a rock north of that line, it was Hawkston’s rifle that knocked the man dead and sprawling over the boulder. And when a Bedouin darted from behind a spur of rock south of that line in a weaving, dodging run for cover nearer the cliff, Hawkston held his fire. Gordon’s rifle cracked and the runner took the earth in a rolling tumble that ended in a brief thrashing of limbs.
A voice rose from the ridge, edged with fury.
“That’s Shalan, damn him!” snarled Hawkston. “Can you make out what he says?”
“He’s telling his men to keep out of sight,” answered Gordon. “He tells them to be patient — they’ve got plenty of time.”
“And that’s the truth, too,” grunted Hawkston. “They’ve got time, food, water — they’ll be sneaking to the pool after dark to fill their water skins. I wish one of us could get a clean shot at Shalan. But he’s too foxy to give us a chance at him. I saw him when they were charging us, standing back on the ridge, too far away to risk a bullet on him.”
“If we could drop him the rest of them wouldn’t hang around here a minute,” commented Gordon. “They’re afraid of the man-eating djinn they think haunts these hills.”
“Well, if they could get a good look at Al Wazir now, they’d swear it was the djinn in person,” said Hawkston. “How many cartridges have you?”
“Both guns are full; about a dozen extra rifle cartridges.”
Hawkston swore. “I haven’t many more than that, myself. We’d better toss a coin to see which one of us sneaks out tonight, while the other keeps up a fusillade to distract their attention. The one who stays gets both rifles and all the ammunition.”
“We will like hell,” growled Gordon. “If we can’t all go, Al Wazir with us, nobody goes!”
“You’re crazy to think of a lunatic at a time like this!”
“Maybe. But if you try to sneak off I’ll drill you in the back as you run.”
Hawkston snarled wordlessly and fell silent. Both men lay motionless as red Indians, watching the ridge and the rocks that shimmered in the heat waves. The firing had ceased, but they had glimpses of white garments from time to time among the gullies and stones, as the besiegers
crept about among the boulders.
Some distance to the south Gordon saw a group creeping along a shallow gully that ran to the foot of the cliff. He did not waste lead on them. When they reached the cliff at that point they would be no better off. They were too far away for effective shooting, and the cliff could be climbed only at the point where the trail wound upward. Gordon fell to studying the hill that was serving the white men as their fortress.
Some thirty caves formed the lower tier, extending across the curtain of rock that formed the face of the cliff. As he knew, each cave was connected by a narrow passage to the adjoining chamber. There were three tiers above this one, all the tiers connected by ladders of handholds niched in the rock, mounting from the lower caves through holes in the stone ceiling to the ones above. The Eagle’s Nest, in which Al Wazir was tied, safe from flying lead, was approximately in the middle of the lower tier, and the path hewn in the rock came upon the ledge directly before its opening. Hawkston was lying in front of the third cave to the north of it, and Gordon lay before the third cave to the south.
The Arabs lay in a wide semicircle, extending from the rocks at one end of the low ridge, along its crest, and into the rocks at the other end. Only those lying among the rocks were close enough to do any damage, save by accident. And, looking up at the ledge from below, they could see only the gleaming muzzles of the white men’s rifles, or catch fleeting glimpses of their heads occasionally. They seemed to be weary of wasting lead on such difficult targets. Not a shot had been fired for some time.
Gordon found himself wondering if a man on the crest of the cliff above the caves could, looking down, see him and Hawkston lying on the ledge. He studied the wall above him; it was almost sheer, but other, narrower ledges ran along each tier of caves, obstructing the view from above, as it did from the lower ledge. Remembering the craggy sides of the hill, Gordon did not believe these plains dwellers would be able to scale it at any point.
Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four) Page 303