King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (ink ebook reader .TXT) 📕

swore that the first man came from slaying an unbeliever in the teeth of written law. They said he ran from the law. So, as the custom is, I let all three enter!”

“Good!” said the crowd. “Good!” They might have been five thousand judges, judging in equity, so grave they were. Yet they licked their lips.

“But later, word came to me saying they are liars. So--again as the custom is--I ordered them bound and held!”

“Slay them! Slay them!” the crowd yelped, gleeful as a wolf-pack on a scent and abandoning solemnity as suddenly as it had been assumed. “Slay them!”

They were like the wind, whipping in and out among Khinjan's rocks, savage and then still for a minute, savage and then still.

“Nay, there is a custom yet!” the mullah howled, holding up both arms. And there was silence again like the lull before a hurricane, with only the great black river talking to itself.

“Who speaks for them? Does any speak for them?”

“Speak for them?” said the roof.

There was silence. Then there was a murmur of astonishment. Over opposite to where King sat the mullah stood up, who the Pathan had said was “Bull-with-a-beard”--Muhammad Anim.

“The men are mine!” he growled. His voice was like a bear's at bay; it was low, but it carried strangely. And as he spoke he swung his great head between his shoulders, like a bear that means to charge. “The proof they brought has been stolen! They had good proof! I speak for them! The men are mine!”

The Pathan nudged King in the ribs with an elbow like a club and tickled his ear with hot breath.

“Bull-with-a-beard speaks truth!” he grinned. “'Truth and a lie together! Good may it do him and them! They die, they three Baluchis!”

“Proof!” howled the mullah who had no hair eyelashes.

“Proof--oof--oof!” said the stalactites.

“Proof! Show us proof!” yelled the crowd.

“Words at the gate--proof in the cavern!” howled the lashless one.

The Pathan next King leaned over to whisper to him again, but stiffened in the act. There was a great gasp the same instant, as the whole crowd caught its breath all together. The mullah in the middle froze into immobility. Bull-with-a-beard stood mumbling, swaying his great head from side to side, no longer suggestive of a bear about to charge, but of one who hesitates.

The crowd was staring at the end of the bridge. King stared, too, and caught his own breath. For Yasmini stood there, smiling on them all as the new moon smiles down on the Khyber! She had come among them like a spirit, all unheralded.

So much more beautiful than the one likeness King had seen of her that for a second he doubted who she was--more lovely than he had imagined her even in his dreams--she stood there, human and warm and real, who had begun to seem a myth, clad in gauzy transparent stuff that made no secret of sylph-like shapeliness and looking nearly light enough to blow away. Her feet--and they were the most marvelously molded things he had ever seen--were naked and played restlessly on the naked stone. Not one part of her was still for a fraction of a second; yet the whole effect was of insolently lazy ease.

Her eyes blazed brighter than the little jewels stitched to her gossamer dress, and when a man once looked at them he did not find it easy to look away again. Even mullah Muhammad Anim seemed transfixed, like a great foolish animal.

But King was staring very hard indeed at something else--mentally cursing the plain glass spectacles he wore, that had begun to film over and dim his vision. There were two bracelets on her arm, both barbaric things of solid gold. The smaller of the two was on her wrist and the larger on her upper arm, but they were so alike, except for size, and so exactly like the one Rewa Gunga had given him in her name and that had been stolen from him in the night, that he ran the risk of removing the glasses a moment to stare with unimpeded eyes. Even then the distance was too great. He could not quite see.

But her eyes began to search the crowd in his direction, and then he knew two things absolutely. He was sitting where she had ordered Ismail to place him; for she picked him out almost instantly, and laughed as if somebody had struck a silver bell. And one of those bracelets was the one that he had worn; for she flaunted it at him, moving her arm so that the light should make the gold glitter.

Then, perhaps because the crowd had begun to whisper, and she wanted all attention, she raised both arms to toss back the golden hair that came cascading nearly to her knees. And as if the crowd knew that symptom well, it drew its breath in sharply and grew very still.

“Muhammad Anim!” she said, and she might have been wooing him. “That was a devil's trick!”

It was rather an astounding statement, coming from lovely lips in such a setting. It was rather suggestive of a driver's whiplash, flicked through the air for a beginning. Muhammad Anim continued glaring and did not answer her, so in her own good time, when she had tossed her golden hair back once or twice again, she developed her meaning.

“We who are free of Khinjan Caves do not send men out to bring recruits. We know better than to bid our men tell lies for others at the gate. Nor, seeking proof for our new recruit, do we send men to hunt a head for him--not even those of us who have a lashkar that we call our own, mullah Muhammad Anim. Each of us earns his own way in!”

The mullah Muhammad Anim began to stroke his beard, but he made no answer.

“And--mullah Muhammad Anim, thou wandering man of God--when that lashkar has foolishly been sent and has failed, is it written in the Kalamullah saying we should pretend there was a head, and that the head was stolen? A lie is a lie, Muhammad Anim! Wandering perhaps is good, if in search of the way. Is it good to lose the way, and to lie, thou true follower of the Prophet?”

She smiled, tossing her hair back. Her eyes challenged, her lips mocked him and her chin scorned. The crowd breathed hard and watched. The mullah muttered something in his beard, and sat down, and the crowd began to roar applause at her. But she checked it with a regal gesture, and a glance of contempt at the mullah that was alone worth a journey across the “Hills” to see.

“Guards!” she said quietly. And the crowd's sigh then was like the night wind in a forest.

“Away with those three of Muhammad Anim's men!”

Twelve of the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with delicious anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried, for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth. Yasmini,