Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  During the day we heard of the chicken, as Will called her, somewhere on ahead, and we spent that night at a kahveh, which is a place with all a khan’s inconveniences, but no dignity whatever. There they knew nothing of her at all. The guests, and there were thirty besides ourselves, lay all around the big room on wooden platforms, and talked of nothing but robbers along the road in both directions. Every man in the place questioned each of us individually to find out why we had not been looted on our way of all we owned, and each man ended in a state of hostile incredulity because we vowed we had met no robbers at all. They shrugged their shoulders when we asked for news of Miss Gloria Vanderman.

  There was no fear of Ibrahim and his friends decamping in the night, for the Zeitoonli kept too careful watch, waiting on them almost as thoughtfully as they fetched and carried for us, but never forgetting to qualify the service with a smile or a word to the Turks to imply that it was done out of pity for brutish helplessness.

  These Zeitoonli of ours were more obviously every hour men of a different disposition to the meek Armenians of the places where the Turkish heel had pressed. But for our armed presence and the respect accorded to the Anglo-Saxon they would have had the whole mixed company down on them a dozen times that night.

  “I’m wondering whether the Armenians within reach of the Turks are not going to suffer for the sins of mountaineers!” said Fred, as we warmed ourselves at the great open fire at one end of the room.

  “Rot!” Will retorted. “Sooner or later men begin to dare assert their love of freedom, and you can’t blame ’em if they show it foolishly. Some folk throw tea into harbors — some stick a king’s head on a pole — some take it out for the present in fresh-kid stuff. These Zeitoonli are men of spirit, or I’ll eat my hat!”

  But if we ourselves had not been men of spirit, obviously capable of strenuous self-defense, our Zeitoonli would have found themselves in an awkward fix that night.

  We supped off yoghourt — the Turkish concoction of milk — cow’s, goat’s, mare’s, ewe’s or buffalo’s (and the buffalo’s is best) — that is about the only food of the country on which the Anglo-Saxon thrives. Whatever else is fit to eat the Turks themselves ruin by their way of cooking it. And we left before dawn in the teeth of the owner of the kahveh’s warning.

  “Dangerous robbers all along the road!” he advised, shaking his head until the fez grew insecure, while Fred counted out the coins to pay our bill. “Armenians are without compunction — bad folk! Ay, you have weapons, but so have they, and they have the advantage of surprise! May Allah the compassionate be witness, I have warned you!”

  “There will be more than warnings to be witnessed!”, growled Rustum Khan as he rode away. “Those others, who sharpened weapons all night long, and spoke of robbers, have been waiting three days at that kahveh till the murdering begins!”

  That morning, on Rustum Khan’s advice, we made our Turkish muleteers ride in front of us. The Zeitoon men marched next, swinging along with the hillman stride that eats up distance as the ticked-off seconds eat the day. And we rode last, admiring the mountain range on our left, but watchful of other matters, and in position to cut off retreat.

  “The last time a Turk ran away from me he took my Gladstone bag with him!” said Fred. “No, only Armenians are dishonest. It was obedience to his prophet, who bade him take advantage of the giaour — quite a different thing! Ibrahim’s sitting on my kit, and I’m watching him. You fellows suit yourselves!”

  We passed a number of men on foot that morning all coming our way, but no Armenians among them. However, we exchanged no wayside gossip, because our Zeitoonli in front availed themselves of privilege and shouted to every stranger to pass at a good distance.

  That is a perfectly fair precaution in a land where every one goes armed, and any one may be a bandit. But it leads to aloofness. Passers-by made circuits of a half-mile to avoid us, and when we spurred our mules to get word with them they mistook that for proof of our profession and bolted. We chased three men for twenty minutes for the fun of it, only desisting when one of them took cover behind a bush and fired a pistol at us with his eyes shut.

  “Think of the lies he’ll tell in the kahveh to-night about beating off a dozen robbers single-handed!” Will laughed.

  “Let’s chase the next batch, too, and give the kahveh gang an ear-full!”

  “I rather think not,” said Monty. “They’ll say we’re Armenian criminals.

  Let’s not be the spark.”

  He was right, so we behaved ourselves, and within an hour we had trouble enough of another sort. We began to meet dogs as big as Newfoundlands, that attacked our unmounted Zeitoonli, refusing to be driven off with sticks and stones, and only retreating a little way when we rode down on them.

  “Shoot the brutes!” Will suggested cheerfully, and I made ready to act on it.

  “For the lord’s sake, don’t!” warned Monty, riding at a huge black mongrel that was tearing strips from the smock of one of our men. The owner of the dog, seeing its victim was Armenian, rather encouraged it than otherwise, leaning on a long pole and grinning in an unfenced field near by.

  “The consul warned me they think more of a dog’s life hereabouts than a man’s. In half an hour there’d be a mob on our trail. Take the Zeitoonli up behind us.”

  Rustum Khan was bitter about what he called our squeamishness. But we each took up a man on his horse’s rump, and the dogs decided the fun was no longer worth the effort, especially as we had riding whips. But skirmishing with the dogs and picking up the Armenians took time, so that our muleteers were all alone half a mile ahead of us, and had disappeared where the road dipped between two hillocks, when they met with the scare they looked for.

  They came thundering back up the road, flogging and flopping on top of the loads like the wooden monkeys-on-a-stick the fakers used to sell for a penny on the curb in Fleet Street, glancing behind them at every second bound like men who had seen a thousand ghosts.

  We brought them to a halt by force, but take them on the whole, now that they were in contact with us, they did not look so much frightened as convinced. They had made up their minds that it was not written that they should go any farther, and that was all about it.

  “Ermenie!” said Ibrahim. And when we laughed at that he stroked his beard and vowed there were hundreds of Armenians ambushed by the roadside half a mile ahead. The others corrected him, declaring the enemy were thousands strong.

  Finally Monty rode forward with me to investigate. We passed between the hillocks, and descended for another hundred yards along a gradually sloping track, when our mules became aware of company. We could see nobody, but their long ears twitched, and they began to make preparations preliminary to braying recognition of their kin.

  Suddenly Monty detected movement among the myrtle bushes about fifty yards from the road, and my mule confirmed his judgment by braying like Satan at a side-show. The noise was answered instantly by a chorus of neighs and brays from an unseen menagerie, whereat the owners of the animals disclosed themselves — six men, all smiling, and unarmed as far as we could tell — the very same six gipsies who had pitched their tent in the midst of the khan yard at Tarsus.

  Then in a clearing at a little distance we saw women taking down a long low black tent, and between us and them a considerable herd of horses, mostly without halters but headed into a bunch by gipsy children. Somebody on a gray stallion came loping down toward us, leaping low bushes, riding erect with pluperfect hands and seat.

  “I’ve seen that stallion before!” said I.

  “And the girl on his back is looking for somebody who owns her heart!” smiled Monty. “Hullo! Are you the lucky man?”’

  She reined the stallion in, and took a good, long look at us, shading her eyes with her hand but showing dazzling white teeth between coral lips. Suddenly the smile departed, and a look of sullen disappointment settled on her face, as she wheeled the stallion with a swing of her lithe body from the hips, and loped aw
ay. Never, apparently, did two men make less impression on a maiden’s heart. The six gipsies stood staring at us foolishly, until one of them at last held his hand up palm outward. We accepted that as a peace signal.

  “Are you waiting here for us?” Monty asked in English, and the oldest of the six — a swarthy little man with rather bow legs — thought he had been asked his name.

  “Gregor Jhaere,” he answered.

  For some vague reason Monty tried him next in Arabic and then in Hindustanee, but without result. At last he tried halting Turkish, and the gipsy replied at once in German. As Monty used to get two-pence or three-pence a day extra when he was in the British army, for knowing something of that tongue, we stood at once on common ground.

  “Kagig told us to wait here and bring you to him,” said Gregor Jhaere.

  “Where is Kagig?” Monty asked, and the man smiled blankly — much more effectively than if he had shrugged his shoulders.

  “We obey Kagig at times,” he said, as if that admission settled the matter. Then there was interruption. Rustum Khan came spurring down the road with his pistol holsters unbuttoned and his saber clattering like a sutler’s pots and pans, to see whether we needed help. He had no sooner reined in beside us than I caught sight of Will, drawn between curiosity and fear lest the muleteers might bolt, standing in his stirrups to peer at us from the top of the track between the hillocks. Somebody else caught sight of him too.

  There came a shrill about from over where the women were packing up, and everybody turned to look, Gregor Jhaere included. As hard as the gray stallion could take her in a bee line toward Will the daughter of the dawn with flashing teeth and blazing eyes was riding ventre a terre.

  “Maga!” Gregor shouted at her, and then some unintelligible gibberish. But she took no more notice of him than if he had been a crow on a branch. In a minute she was beside Will, talking to him, and from over the top of the rise we could hear Fred shouting sarcastic remonstrance.

  “She is bad!” Gregor announced in English. It seemed to be all the

  English he knew.

  “Are you her father?” Monty asked, and Gregor answered in very slipshod German:

  “She is the daughter of the devil. She shall be soundly thrashed!

  The chalana!* And he a Gorgio!”* *

  —— —— —— —— * Chalana — She jockey (a compliment). * * Gorgio — Gentile (an insult). —— —— —— ——

  Suddenly Fred began to shout for help then, and we rode back, the gipsies following and Rustum Khan remaining on guard between them and their camp with his upbrushed black beard bristling defiance of Asia Minor. Our Turkish muleteers had decided to make a final bolt for it, and were using their whips on the Zeitoonli, who clung gamely to the reins. As soon as we got near enough to lend a hand the Turks resigned themselves with a kind of opportune fatalism. The Zeitoonli promptly turned the tables on them by laying hold of a leg of each and tipping them off into the mud. Ibrahim showed his teeth, and reached for a hidden weapon as he lay, but seemed to think better of it. It looked very much as if those four Zeitoonli knew in advance exactly what the interruption in our journey meant.

  Will was out of the running entirely, or else the rest of us were, depending on which way one regarded it. He had eyes for nobody and nothing but the girl, nor she for any one but him, and nobody could rightfully blame either of them. Yankee though he is, Will sat his mule in the western cowboy style, and he was wearing a cowboy hat that set his youth off to perfection. She looked fit to flirt with the lord of the underworld, answering his questions in a way that would have made any fellow eager to ask more. Strangely enough, Gregor Jhaere, presumably father of the girl appeared to have lost his anger at her doings and turned his back.

  Fred, smiling mischief, started toward them to horn in, as Will would have described it, but at that moment about a dozen of the gipsy women came padding uproad, fostered watchfully by Rustum Khan, who seemed convinced that murder was intended somehow, somewhere. They brought along horses with them — very good horses — and Fred prefers a horse trade to triangular flirtation on any day of any week.

  The gipsies promptly fell to and off-saddled our loads under Gregor Jhaere’s eye, transferring them to the meaner-looking among the beasts the women had brought, taking great care to drop nothing in the mud. And at a word from Gregor two of the oldest hags came to lift us from our saddles one by one, and hold us suspended in mid-air while the saddles were transferred to better mounts. But there is an indignity in being held out of the mud by women that goes fiercely against the white man’s grain, and I kicked until they set me back in the saddle.

  Monty solved the problem by riding to higher, clean ground near the roadside, where we could stand on firm grass.

  Seeing us dismounted, the gipsies underwent a subtle mental change peculiar to all barbarous people. To the gipsy and the cossack, and all people mainly dependent on the horse, to be mounted is to signify participation in affairs. To be dismounted means to stand aside and “let George do it.”

  Gregor Jhaere became a different man. He grew noisy and in response to his yelped commands they swooped in unprovoked attack on our unhappy muleteers. Before we could interfere they had thrown each Turk face downward, our Zeitoonli helping, and were searching them with swift intruding fingers for knives, pistols, money.

  The Turk leaves his money behind when starting on a journey at some other man’s expense; but they did draw forth a most astonishing assortment of weapons. They were experts in disarmament. Maga Jhaere lost interest in Will for a moment, and pricked her stallion to a place where she could judge the assortment better. Without any hesitation she ordered one of the old women to pass up to her a mother-o’-pearl ornamented Smith & Wesson, which she promptly hid in her bosom. Judging by the sounds he made, that pistol was the apple of Ibrahim’s old eye, but he had seen the last of it. When we interfered, and he could get to her stirrup to demand it back, Maga spat in his face; which was all about it, except that Monty made generous allowance for the thing when paying the reckoning presently. As our servants, those Turks were, of course, entitled to our protection, and besides that weapon we had to pay for five knives that were gone beyond hope of recovery.

  Monty paid our Turks off (for it was evident that even had they been willing they would not have been allowed to proceed with us another mile). Then, as Ibrahim mounted and marshaled his party in front of him, he forgot manners as well as the liberal payment.

  “Mashallah!” (God be praised!) he shouted, with the slobber of excitement

  on his lips and beard. “Now I go to make Armenians pay for this!

  Let the shapkali,* too, avoid me! Ya Ali, ya Mahoma, Alahu!” (Oh,

  Ali, oh, Mahomet, God is God!)

  —— —— —— — * Shapkali — hatted man-foreigner. —— —— —— —

  “Let’s hope they haven’t a spark of honesty!” said Monty cryptically, watching them canter away.

  “Why on earth — ?”

  “Let’s hope they ride back to the consul and swear they haven’t received one piaster of their pay. That would let him know we’re clear away!”

  “Optimist!” jeered Will. “That consul’s a Britisher. He’d take their lie literally, and deduce we’re no good!”

  For the moment the girl on the gray stallion had ridden away from Will and was giving regal orders to the mob of women and shrill children, who obeyed her as if well used to it. Gregor Jhaere and his men stood staring at us, Gregor shaking his head as if our letting the Turks go free had been a bad stroke of policy.

  “Aren’t you afraid to travel with all that mob of women and cattle?” asked Monty. “We’ve heard of robbers on the road.”

  “We are the robbers, effendi!” said Gregor with an air of modesty. The others smirked, but he seemed disinclined to over-insist on the gulf between us.

  “Hear him!” growled Rustum Khan. “A thief, who boasts of thieving in the presence of sahibs! So is corruption, stinking in the sun!�
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  He added something in another language that the gipsies understood, for Gregor started as if stung and swore at him, and Maga Jhaere left her women-folk to ride alongside and glare into his eyes. They were enemies, those two, from that hour forward. He, once Hindu, now Moslem, had no admiration whatever to begin with for unveiled women. And, since the gipsy claims to come from India and may therefore be justly judged by Indian standards, and has no caste, but is beneath the very lees of caste, he loathed all gipsies with the prejudice peculiar to men who have deserted caste in theory and in self-protection claim themselves above it. It was a case of height despising deep in either instance, she as sure of her superiority as he of his.

  There might have been immediate trouble if Monty had not taken his new, restless, fresh horse by the mane and swung into the saddle.

  “Forward, Rustum Khan!” he ordered. “Ride ahead and let those keen eyes of yours keep us out of traps!”

  The Rajput obeyed, but as he passed Will he checked his mare a moment, and waiting until Will’s blue eyes met his he raised a warning finger.

  “Kubadar, sahib!”

  Then he rode on, like a man who has done his duty.

  “What the devil does he mean?” demanded Will.

  “Kubadar means, ‘Take care’!” said Monty. “Come on, what are we waiting for?”

  That was the beginning, too, of Will’s feud with the Rajput, neither so remorseless nor so sudden as the woman’s, because he had a different code to guide him and also had to convince himself that a quarrel with a man of color was compatible with Yankee dignity. We could have wished them all three either friends, or else a thousand miles apart two hundred times before the journey ended.

  As we rode forward with even our Zeitoonli mounted now on strong mules, Maga Jhaere sat her stallion beside Will with an air of owning him. She was likely a safer friend than enemy, and we did nothing to interfere. Monty pressed forward. Fred and I fell to the rear.