by Talbot Mundy
“Jimgrim! Oh, J-i-m-g-r-i-m! Oh, J-i-m-g-r-i-m! It is I — Narayan Singh! Come this way, J-i-m-g-r-i-m!”
Grim took to his heels and the others after him, running along the two-foot parapet because the roof was hot and smoking through — leaping the right-angle corner to avoid a flame that licked like a long tongue — making for the middle of the rear end, where the smoke blew back, away from them, and they saw a man like the spirit of the black night shouting through a brass phonograph horn thirty feet away from a roof across the narrow street.
“Jimgrim! Oh, J-i-m-g-r-i-m!”
“Here we all are! What now, Narayan Singh!”
“Sahib , there is a ladder below you! Reach for it!”
Too low! Too late! The ladder lay dimly visible along a ledge ten feet below. They saw it as the roof gave in and a gust of flame scorched upward like the breath of a titanic cannon, illuminating acres. All the secret tubes for conveying drinks and information in the “Star of India” were carrying draft now. The core of the inferno was white-hot. King’s and Ali’s clothes began to burn; the others were singeing. Narayan Singh’s voice through the brass horn bellowed everlastingly, emphasizing one idea, over and over:
“For the love of God, sahib , reach that ladder!”
The ladder was out of reach.
“I don’t cook good!” laughed Jeremy, amused with life even in the face of that death. “I’d sooner die raw! Anybody strong enough to hold my feet? Not you, Jeff — you take his — it calls for two of us. Hurry, some one!”
Jeremy leaned on his stomach over the parapet. King seized the long Arab girdle, knotted that around his own shoulders so that the two of them were lashed together in one risk, and laid bold of Jeremy’s heels.
“Over you go, Australia! You belong down-under!”
Jeremy laughed and scrambled over. Ramsden laid hold of King’s ankles, setting his own knees against the parapet; and to the tune of crackling flame and crashing masonry the living rope went down — not slowly, for there wasn’t time — so fast that to the straining eyes in the street it almost looked as if they fell, and a scream of delighted dread arose to greet them.
Jeremy reached the ladder, grabbed it, and it came away, adding its weight and awkwardness to the strain on Ramsden.
“Haul away!” yelled Jeremy — not laughing now.
The turn-table motion of the ladder in mid-air was swinging him and King.
Jeff Ramsden’s loins and back and arms cracked as he strained to the load. The others, obeying Grim, held him by the waist and thighs to lend him leverage, Grim holding his feet, in the post of greatest danger at the rear, where the flame roared closer every second.
“Quick, sahib ! Quick!” came the voice of the Sikh through the brass horn.
Ramsden strove like Samson in Philistia, the muscles of his broad back lumped up as his knees sought leverage against the parapet and King’s heels rose in air. (His legs would have broken if Jeff hadn’t lifted him high before hauling him in.) Grim, unable to endure the heat behind, put an arm around Jeff’s waist and threw his own weight back at the instant when Jeff put forth his full reserve — that unknown quantity that a man keeps for emergency. The ladder and the living rope came upward. And the parapet gave way!
It was Grim’s arm around Jeff’s waist that saved them all, for Jeff hung over by the thighs; the Afghans’ hold was mainly of Jeff’s garments, and they tore. The broken stone hit King and Jeremy, but glanced off, harming no one until it crushed some upturned faces in the crowd. And Jeff’s task was easier after all without the stone to lean on. He did not have to lift so high. He could pull more. King, Jeremy and ladder came in, hand over hand.
“Quick! Quick! Oh quickly, sahibs !” came the Sikh’s voice through the horn.
But the heat provided impulse. There was only one way to get that ladder across from roof to roof. They had to up-end it and let it fall, trusting the gods of accident, who are capricious folk, to keep the thing from breaking — they clinging to the butt to prevent its bouncing over. And it fell straight with four spare rungs at either end. But it cracked with the weight of its fall, and by the light of the belching flame behind them they could see the wide split in the left-hand side-piece. Someone said that Jeff should cross first, because his weight was greatest and the frail bridge would endure the strain better first than last.
Jeff did not argue, but lay on the ladder and crawled out to where the break was, mid-way. Across the midway rung he laid his belly — then set his toes on the last rung he could reach behind him — passed his arms through the ladder — and seized with his hands the rung next-but-one in front. Then he tightened himself and the ladder stiffened.
“Come on! Hurry!” he shouted.
They had to come two at a time, for the last of the roof was going and they stood on a shriveling small peninsular beleaguered by a tide of flame. The Afghans came afoot, for they were used to precipices and the knife-edge trails that skirt Himalayan peaks, treading along Ramsden’s back as surely as they trod the rungs. But King and Grim crawled, King last. And it was when Grim’s hand was almost on the farther coping, and King’s weight was added to Jeff’s midway, that the ladder broke.
Narayan Singh had turbans and loin-cloths twisted through the rungs at his end long ago, and had a purchase around a piece of masonry. So only the rear end of the ladder fell to the street. King clung to Jeff’s waist while the other half swung downward against the opposing wall, and the thrilled mob screamed again. Jeff, King and ladder weighed hardly less than five hundred pounds between them. They went like a battering ram down the segment of an arc, spinning as the turbans up above, that held them, twisted.
It was the spin that saved them — that and the madness of Narayan Singh, who snatched at the ladder and tried to break its fall with one hand! Both circumstances added to the fact that the ladder broke unevenly, caused it to swing leftward. It crashed into the wall, but broke again above Jeff’s hands, and catapulted both men through the glass of a warehouse window, where Narayan Singh discovered them presently laughing among bales of merchandise. They shouldn’t have laughed. There were more than a hundred human beings roasted in the building they had left. Maybe they laughed at the unsportsmanship of Providence.
Narayan Singh was deadly serious, though unexpectedly.
“I watched the Portuguese! Sahibs . I thought these seven sons are not the princes of perfection they are said to be! They made a plan in that whispering gallery that you just left! But I kept my own counsel. I followed the Portuguese. I know where he went. The Portuguese has talked. The Nine Unknown are aware of danger! You are spied on. They knew you would come to this place. Someone in their pay set fire to the hotel, and said you did it! Their agents now are telling the mob to tear you in pieces! They say you are secret agents of the Raj, who set fire to the place because a few conspirators have met there once or twice! Sahibs , if you are caught there will be short argument! They saw you from the street. Listen! They come now! What shall we do?”
“Do? Track the Portuguese!” said King. “How’s that, Jeff?”
“Sure!” said Ramsden, something like a big dog in his readiness to follow men he liked anywhere, at any time, without the slightest argument.
CHAPTER IV. “Here’s your Portuguese!”
THEY escaped by way of the roof by means of the oldest trick in Asia, which is the home of all the artifices known to man. All thieves know it, and some honest men. You join in the pursuit. You call to the human wolves to hurry. You have seen the fugitive. You wave them on, answering questions with a gesture, saving breath to follow too, glaring with indignant eyes, impatient of delay, but overtaken — passed. So, falling to the rear, you face about at last and, while the wolves yelp; on a hot trail in the wrong direction, you walk quietly in the right one — yours — the opposite — away.
They found a stair down to the street through the house of a seller of burlap, who was edified to learn that they were authorized inspectors. He obeyed their recommendation
to shut his roof-door tight. They took some samples of his goods to prove, as they said, by laboratory tests that the fire risk in his house was nothing serious, which made him feel immensely friendly. And out in the street they became customers of the burlap- merchant, hurrying home after a belated bargain — bearing samples — an excuse that let them through the fireline formed of regiments just arrived, whose business seemed to be to drive every one the way he did not want to go.
So presently, behind the drawn-up regiments, they threaded a thinning crowd toward the north, leaving the tumult and the honking motor-horns behind. The streets grew dimly lighted and mysterious, to Jeremy’s enormous joy. His passion is pursuit of everything unconventional. They strode down echoing alleys where no European ever goes, unless there is a murder or a riot too high-tensioned for the regular police. They stopped and ate awful food in a place where sunlight never penetrated, drinking alongside surly ruffians, who sat on their knives in order to keep conscious of them all the time.
The way they took led by taverns out of which the stink of most abominable liquor oozed — raw, reeking ullage with the King of England’s portrait on a label on the bottle — where women screamed obscenities and yelled in mockery of their own jokes — places where the Portuguese had led his night-life, and had not been loved. Time and again Narayan Singh, with a sheepskin coat hung loosely on his shoulder as a shield, peered into a den — sometimes opium, sometimes drink was the reek that greeted him — to inquire whether the Portuguese had headed back that way by any chance. Invariably he was cursed, and certain gods were thanked, by way of answer. One could gather that da Gama was not liked even relatively in the places he frequented.
Narayan Singh, full of his office of guide, and proud of his accomplishment in having found and blazed da Gama’s trail, visited every haunt the Portuguese frequented, talking between-whiles.
“It was here they sat, sahib — he and the man who gave orders to the others who carried the books. And the Portuguese told all about our meeting in the office, I listening, pretending to be drunk — so drunk along the floor they all but trod on me! Da Gama desired to play you on a hook, saying he needed money from you. Therefore the other said — nay, sahib , I never saw him before, and don’t know who he is, but he wore yellow — the other said the Nine will give da Gama money, if he will go to a place he knows of, where he will discover it left in a bag for him. The Portuguese asked how should he believe that? And the other answered that neither the Nine nor any agents of the Nine tell lies for any reason; moreover, the other added that all you sahibs and your servants — by whom he meant Ali and his sons and me — will be roasted to death within an hour or two. So I rolled out of this kana * into the gutter, which is cleaner, and as soon as I had watched da Gama to another place I ran to warn you. Let us only hope he has not escaped us between then and now.”
“Can’t!” laughed Jeremy. “He’s no more than a shilling up a conjurer’s sleeve! Process of elimination gives the answer.”
So they harked along da Gama’s trail into a rather better quarter of the city, where the ladies of undoubtful reputation ply the oldest trade without severely straining any caste laws. Priests live fatly thereabouts. Whoever entertains a Sikh, for instance, or Mohammedan, or Hindu of a lower caste than hers, may regain purity for payment — which is very shocking to the civilized, who only buy seats in the senate, or perhaps a title, or who “use their pull with the press” to hush up things the public shouldn’t know.
There, in a rather wider street, in a house that had gilded shutters, they sat cross-legged on embroidered cushions vis-à-vis to a lady sometimes known as Gauri, which is a heavenly name. She was pretty besides inquisitive, and the turquois stud in the curve of one side of her nose contributed a piquancy that offset petulance. Her vials of vituperation were about full, and she outpoured almost at the mention of da Gama’s name.
Know him? Know that slime of adders stuffed into a yellow skin? She wished she did not! But who were the gentlemen, first, who wished to know about him? Men whom he had robbed? Amazing! What a mystery, that such a pashu * as that Portuguese could win the confidence of anyone and steal as much as one rupee! Yet he had robbed her — truly! Her! A lady of no little experience — He had robbed her of a thousand rupees as lately as yesterday. He had laughed at her to-day! The beast had spent her fortune! Practically all her savings, except for a jewel or two.
And he had robbed others! Although it served the others right! Vowing fidelity to her — the brute — he had intrigued elsewhere, as she had only just discovered, coaxing other women’s savings from them. What did he use the money for? To bribe the priests’ servants to bring him old books out of temples — smelly old books full of magic and ancient history! He said that if he can get the right book he can find so much money in one place that all the rest of the wealth in the world wouldn’t be a candle to it! She was to have a tenth of all that. She supposed he made the other women equally tempting offers.
As a rajah on his throne might feel toward a dead dog on a dung-heap; so she felt toward da Gama! She wished the Lords of Death no evil, but she hoped they might have the Portuguese, nevertheless! He had come that afternoon and laughed at her! She had asked him for a little of her money back, and he had mocked her to her face! He had boasted flatly that she would never see one anna of her money back, and had then gone, mocking her even from the street!
Whereat Jeremy, adept at following the disappearing shilling, hinted to King in a whisper. So King made a suggestion, and the priestess of delight blew cigarette smoke through her nose in two straight, illustrative snorts.
She — hide that pashu in her house — now — after all that had happened? There was a day when she had hidden him — a day born in the womb of bitterness, begotten of regret! How vastly wiser she would have been to leave him to the knives of the men he had robbed! He was always a thief. She knew that now, although then she had thought he was persecuted.
King made another suggestion, launching innuendo deftly on the ways of jest as he accepted sherbet from the Gauri’s maid. She looked as if she wished the drink were poisoned, and retorted without any button on her rapier:
“Thug! You would like to search my house to steal the Portuguese’s leavings! There is nothing! He took all! And it would cost me three hundred rupees to the priest to repurify the place if I let such as you go through it!”
Now a fool would have taken her statement at face value, believing or disbelieving as the case might be, and learning nothing. A clever fool would have paid three hundred for the privilege to search, learning that the Portuguese was not there, but otherwise no wiser after it. Wisdom, yoked up with experience, paid attention to the price she quoted and, not liking to be cheated, doubled the price and made a game of it. For, although all cheat him who buys, and some cheat the gambler, the odds against the gambler are so raised already by the gods that some folk let it go at that.
“Three hundred for the priest? I’ll bet six hundred you don’t know where the Portuguese is now!” said King.
Her eyes snapped.
“Tell for less than a thousand?” she retorted scornfully. “I am not a spy!”
“But I am a gambler,” King answered. “I offered to bet. I will bet you five hundred you don’t know where da Gama is this minute.”
“You said six hundred!”
“Now I bet five. In a minute I reduce my stake to four. Next minute three—”
“I have no money to bet with,” she answered. “Da Gama has it all!”
“Yet, if you were betting on a certainty you wouldn’t lose, so you could afford to stake your jewelry,” King answered. “I will bet five hundred rupees against that necklace of pearls that you can’t tell me where the Portuguese is!”
“Who would hold the stakes?” she asked hesitating.
That was a poser, but Ali of Sikunderam was ready for it. He drew forth his silver-hilted knife and made the blade ring on the floor.
“You hold them!” he said, looking ha
rd at her — upwind, the way he was used to viewing the peaks of Sikunderam. “If my friend wins, I come to claim the stakes. I am old in the ways of women, and I come with this in my right hand! Only if you win you keep the stakes.”
She judged his eyes, and understood, and nodded. King laid on the carpet five one-hundred rupee notes. She laid her necklace opposite. Ali of Sikunderam raked all the lot together with the point of his weapon and then pushed them toward her. She put on the necklace and folded the notes.
“I could send my maid,” she said. “The place is indescribable.”
But the maid of any such mistress as Gauri is more untrustworthy than treachery itself. Having nothing to lose, and the world before her, her eccentric trickery is guaranteed.
“I deal with principals. I bet with you,” said King.
“I cannot go there! I am afraid to go there! It is too far!” exclaimed Gauri. “It was my maid, not I who followed him. She knows the way. I—”
Ali of Sikunderam ran a thumb-nail down the keen edge of his knife, and Gauri shuddered, but it was Narayan Singh who voiced the right solution. He leaned over and touched the nearest of Ali’s sons, who was day-dreaming over the maid’s delightfulness — perhaps imagining her likeness in the Moslem paradise.
“Two horses!” he commanded. “Instantly!”
The youngster came to with a start and glanced at his sire, who nodded. King produced money. Gauri claimed it.
“Let the owner of the horses send his bill to me!” she insisted, and nearly enough to have bought two horses disappeared into a silken mystery between her breasts.
