The Adventure MEGAPACK ®. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон

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СКАЧАТЬ But it put Zangi in a position to use his personal talents to gain an ascendancy—an ascendancy Mitkhal feared would relegate him to a minor position.

      “Speak, El Borak,” ordered Mitkhal. “But speak swiftly. It may be,” he added, “Allah’s will that the moments of your life are few.”

      “Death marches from the west,” said Gordon abruptly. “Last night a hundred Turkish deserters butchered the people of El Awad.”

      “Wallah!” swore a tribesman. “El Awad was friendly to the Turks!”

      “A lie!” cried Zangi Khan. “Or if true, the dogs of deserters slew the people to curry favor with Feisal.”

      “When did men come to Feisal with the blood of children on their hands?” retorted Gordon. “They have foresworn Islam and worship the White Wolf. They carried off the young women and the old women, the men and the children they slew like dogs.”

      A murmur of anger rose from the Arabs. The Bedouins had a rigid code of warfare, and they did not kill women or children. It was the unwritten law of the desert, old when Abraham came up out of Chaldea.

      But Zangi Khan cried out in angry derision, blind to the resentful looks cast at him. He did not understand that particular phase of the Bedouins’ code, for his people had no such inhibition. Kurds in war killed women as well as men.

      “What are the women of El Awad to us?” he sneered.

      “Your heart I know already,” answered Gordon with icy contempt. “It is to the Rualla that I speak.”

      “A trick!” howled the Kurd. “A lie to trick us!”

      “It is no lie!” Olga stepped forward boldly. “Zangi Khan, you know that I am an agent of the German government. Osman Pasha, leader of these renegades, burned El Awad last night, as El Borak has said. Osman murdered Ahmed ibn Shalaan, my guide, among others. He is as much our enemy as he is an enemy of the British.”

      She looked to Mitkhal for help, but the shaykh stood apart, like an actor watching a play in which he had not yet received his cue.

      “What if it is the truth?” Zangi Khan snarled, muddled by his hate and fear of El Borak’s cunning. “What is El Awad to us?”

      Gordon caught him up instantly.

      “This Kurd asks what is the destruction of a friendly village! Doubtless, naught to him! But what does it mean to you, who have left your herds and families unguarded? If you let this pack of mad dogs range the land, how can you be sure of the safety of your wives and children?”

      “What would you have, El Borak?” demanded a gray-bearded raider.

      “Trap these Turks and destroy them. I’ll show you how.”

      It was then that Zangi Khan lost his head completely.

      “Heed him not!” he screamed. “Within the hour we must ride northward! The Turks will give us ten thousand British pounds for his head!”

      Avarice burned briefly in the men’s eyes, to be dimmed by the reflection that the reward, offered for El Borak’s head, would be claimed by the shaykh and Zangi. They made no move and Mitkhal stood aside with an air of watching a contest that did not concern himself.

      “Take his head!” screamed Zangi, sensing hostility at last, and thrown into a panic by it.

      His demoralization was completed by Gordon’s taunting laugh.

      “You seem to be the only one who wants my head, Zangi! Perhaps you can take it!”

      Zangi howled incoherently, his eyes glaring red, then threw up his rifle, hip-high. Just as the muzzle came up, Gordon’s automatic crashed thunderously. He had drawn so swiftly not a man there had followed his motion. Zangi Khan reeled back under the impact of hot lead, toppled sideways and lay still.

      In an instant, a hundred cocked rifles covered Gordon. Confused by varying emotions, the men hesitated for the fleeting instant it took Mitkhal to shout:

      “Hold! Do not shoot!”

      He strode forward with the air of a man ready to take the center of the stage at last, but he could not disguise the gleam of satisfaction in his shrewd eyes.

      “No man here is kin to Zangi Khan,” he said offhandedly. There is no cause for blood feud. He had eaten the salt, but he attacked our prisoner, whom he thought unarmed.”

      He held out his hand for the pistol, but Gordon did not surrender it.

      “I’m not your prisoner,” said he. “I could kill you before your men could lift a finger. But I didn’t come here to fight you. I came asking aid to avenge the children and women of my enemies. I risk my life for your families. Are you dogs, to do less?”

      The question hung in the air unanswered, but he had struck the right chord in their barbaric bosoms, that were always ready to respond to some wild deed of reckless chivalry. Their eyes glowed and they looked at their shaykh expectantly.

      Mitkhal was a shrewd politician. The butchery at El Awad meant much less to him than it meant to his younger warriors. He had associated with so-called civilized men long enough to lose much of his primitive integrity. But he always followed the side of public opinion, and was shrewd enough to lead a movement he could not check. Yet, he was not to be stampeded into a hazardous adventure.

      “These Turks may be too strong for us,” he objected.

      “I’ll show you how to destroy them with little risk,” answered Gordon. “But there must be covenants between us, Mitkhal.”

      “These Turks must be destroyed,” said Mitkhal, and he spoke sincerely there, at least. “But there are too many blood feuds between us, El Borak, for us to let you get out of our hands.”

      Gordon laughed.

      “You can’t whip the Turks without my help, and you know it. Ask your young men what they desire!”

      “Let El Borak lead us!” shouted a young warrior instantly. A murmur of approval paid tribute to Gordon’s widespread reputation as a strategist.

      “Very well!” Mitkhal took the tide. “Let there be truce between us—with conditions! Lead us against the Turks. If you win, you and the woman shall go free. If we lose, we take your head!”

      Gordon nodded, and the warriors yelled in glee. It was just the sort of a bargain that appealed to their minds, and Gordon knew it was the best he could make.

      “Bring bread and salt!” ordered Mitkhal, and a giant black slave moved to do his bidding. “Until the battle is lost or won there is truce between us, and no Rualla shall harm you, unless you spill Rualla blood.”

      Then he thought of something else and his brow darkened as he thundered:

      “Where is the man who watched from the ridge?”

      A terrified youth was pushed forward. He was a member of a small tribe tributary to the more important Rualla.

      “Oh, shaykh,” he faltered, “I was hungry and СКАЧАТЬ