The Adventure MEGAPACK ®. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон

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СКАЧАТЬ presence of the wild men on the slopes. Olga began to feel her nerves quiver. Doubts and forebodings gnawed maddeningly at her.

      “We took position too soon! The men will lose patience. Osman can’t get here before midnight. It took us all night to reach the Well.”

      “Bedouins never lose patience when they smell loot,” he answered. “I believe Osman will get here before sundown. We made poor time on a tiring camel for the last few hours of that ride. I believe Osman broke camp before dawn and pushed hard.”

      Another thought came to torture her.

      “Suppose he doesn’t come at all? Suppose he has changed his plans and gone somewhere else? The Rualla will believe you lied to them!”

      “Look!”

      The sun hung low in the west, a fiery, dazzling ball. She blinked, shading her eyes.

      Then the head of a marching column grew out of the dancing heat waves: lines of horsemen, grey with dust, files of heavily laden baggage camels, with the captive women riding them. The standard hung loose in the breathless air; but once, when a vagrant gust of wind, hot as the breath of perdition, lifted the folds, the white wolf’s head was displayed.

      Crushing proof of idolatry and heresy! In their agitation, the Rualla almost betrayed themselves. Even Mitkhal turned pale.

      “Allah! Sacrilege! Forgotten of God. Hell shall be thy portion!”

      “Easy!” hissed Gordon, feeling the semi-hysteria that ran down the lurking lines. “Wait for my signal. They may halt to water their camels at the Well.”

      Osman must have driven his people like a fiend all day. The women drooped on the loaded camels; the dust-caked faces of the soldiers were drawn. The horses reeled with weariness. But it was soon evident that they did not intend halting at the Well with their goal, the Walls of Sulaiman, so near. The head of the column was even with the sangar when Gordon fired. He was aiming at Osman, but the range was long, the sun glare on the rocks dazzling. The man behind Osman fell, and at the signal the slopes came alive with spurting flame.

      The column staggered. Horses and men went down and stunned soldiers gave back a ragged fire that did no harm. They did not even see their assailants save as bits of white cloth bobbing among the boulders.

      Perhaps discipline had grown lax during the grind of that merciless march. Perhaps panic seized the tired Turks. At any rate, the column broke and men fled toward the sangar without waiting for orders. They would have abandoned the baggage camels had not Osman ridden among them. Cursing and striking with the flat of his saber, he made them drive the beasts in with them.

      “I hoped they’d leave the camels and women outside,” grunted Gordon. “Maybe they’ll drive them out when they find there’s no water.”

      The Turks took their positions in good order, dismounting and ranging along the wall. Some dragged the Arab women off the camels and drove them into the hut. Others improvised a pen for the animals with stakes and ropes between the back of the hut and the wall. Saddles were piled in the gate to complete the barricade.

      The Arabs yelled taunts as they poured in a hail of lead, and a few leaped up and danced derisively, waving their rifles. But they stopped that when a Turk drilled one of them cleanly through the head. When the demonstrations ceased, the besiegers offered scanty targets to shoot at.

      However, the Turks fired back frugally and with no indication of panic, now that they were under cover and fighting the sort of a fight they understood. They were well protected by the wall from the men directly in front of them, but those facing north could be seen by the men on the south ridge, and vice versa. But the distance was too great for consistently effective shooting at these marks by the Arabs.

      “We don’t seem to be doing much damage,” remarked Olga presently.

      “Thirst will win for us,” Gordon answered. “All we’ve got to do is to keep them bottled up. They probably have enough water in their canteens to last through the rest of the day. Certainly no longer. Look, they’re going to the well now.”

      The well stood in the middle of the enclosure, in a comparatively exposed area, as seen from above. Olga saw men approaching it with canteens in their hands, and the Arabs, with sardonic enjoyment, refrained from firing at them. They reached the well, and then the girl saw the change that came over them. It ran through their band like an electric shock. The men along the walls reacted by firing wildly. A furious yelling rose, edged with hysteria, and men began to run madly about the enclosure. Some toppled, hit by shots dropping from the ridges.

      “What are they doing?” Olga started to her knees, and was instantly jerked down again by Gordon. The Turks were running into the hut. If she had been watching Gordon she would have sensed the meaning of it, for his dark face grew suddenly grim.

      “They’re dragging the women out!” she exclaimed. “I see Osman waving his saber. What? Oh, God! They’re butchering the women!”

      Above the crackle of shots rose terrible shrieks and the sickening chack of savagely driven blows. Olga turned sick and hid her face. Osman had realized the trap into which he had been driven, and his reaction was that of a mad dog. Recognizing defeat in the blocked well, facing the ruin of his crazy ambitions by thirst and Bedouin bullets, he was taking this vengeance on the whole Arab race.

      On all sides the Arabs rose howling, driven to frenzy by the sight of that slaughter. That these women were of another tribe made no difference. A stern chivalry was the foundation of their society, just as it was among the frontiersmen of early America. There was no sentimentalism about it. It was real and vital as life itself.

      The Rualla went berserk when they saw women of their race falling under the swords of the Turks. A wild yell shattered the brazen sky, and recklessly breaking cover, the Arabs pelted down the slopes, howling like fiends. Gordon could not check them, nor could Mitkhal. Their shouts fell on deaf ears. The walls vomited smoke and flame as withering volleys raked the oncoming hordes. Dozens fell, but enough were left to reach the wall and sweep over it in a wave that neither lead nor steel could halt.

      And Gordon was among them. When he saw he could not stop the storm he joined it. Mitkhal was not far behind him, cursing his men as he ran. The shaykh had no stomach for this kind of fighting, but his leadership was at stake. No man who hung back in this charge would ever be able to command the Rualla again.

      Gordon was among the first to reach the wall, leaping over the writhing bodies of half a dozen Arabs. He had not blazed away wildly as he ran like the Bedouins, to reach the wall with an empty gun. He held his fire until the flame spurts from the barrier were almost burning his face, and then emptied his rifle in a point-blank fusillade that left a bloody gap where there had been a line of fierce dark faces an instant before. Before the gap could be closed he had swarmed over and in, and the Rualla poured after him.

      As his feet hit the ground a rush of men knocked him against the wall and a blade, thrusting for his life, broke against the rocks. He drove his shortened butt into a snarling face, splintering teeth and bones, and the next instant a surge of his own men over the wall cleared a space about him. He threw away his broken rifle and drew his pistol.

      The Turks had been forced back from the wall in a dozen places now, and men were fighting all over the sangar. No quarter was asked—none given. The pitiful headless bodies sprawled before the bloodstained hut had turned the Bedouins into hot-eyed demons. The guns were empty now, all but Gordon’s automatic. The yells had died down to grunts, punctuated by death-howls. Above these sounds rose СКАЧАТЬ