CHAPTER XIV.
Towards nightfall they descended the mountain, and were nearing the home tent.
"Listen!" said the old man, putting his hand upon the shoulder of his comrade. "That is the very soul of our religion—a song in the heart that sends a song to the lips, as the fountain comes bubbling from the full veins in the earth."
A sweet, strong voice rang up through the ravine, to the top of which they had come. Ben Yusef's eyes filled with tears. "So like her mother's voice," he said.
It was Ruth who was singing:
"Jehovah's my Shepherd; I'll not want.
In pastures green he makes me lie,
By restful waters leadeth."
Before the girl stalked a great dog, large enough to tear a wolf. He pricked up his ears, stopped, threw back his head, then with a bound broke through the bushes and climbed the shaly bank to where his master and Hiram were standing. Ruth followed as nimbly as a goat.
"You will be so glad," said she to Hiram, "for somebody who knows you has found you. He described you exactly in face, and said you spoke the tongue of Tyre. He would not have me come to meet you, and when I started followed close behind, until Anax got between us. The dog sat right down before him, and showed his great teeth if the man moved a step."
Ben Yusef glanced quickly at Hiram, asking with his eyes a score of questions without the need of a word.
"Yes," replied Hiram, "I must fly at once. Only shield me by your discretion, as you have by your hospitality."
"You shall not fly from the tent of Ben Yusef," said the old man, with protesting vehemence. "My life will shield you, and, if the danger be great, in an hour Elnathan can summon a score of our neighbors. We have learned, in these troublous times, to combine for mutual protection. One bugle-call over these hills, and, as the stars come out one by one, but before you can count them all are there, so man after man, with ready weapon, will move out from the darkness and surround my tent. And woe to the intruder who cannot give our shibboleth."
"I cannot accept the protection of such brave men, nor yours, since it would surely be revenged by fiends who work in the dark, and who are relentless in their hatred. Let me fly while I may endanger only myself!" said Hiram, gratefully grasping Ben Yusef's hand.
"Wait at least until the night blackens. Secrete yourself anywhere. Elnathan will find you. You will know of his approach by the hoot of the owl he has learned to imitate. You may need his knowledge of by-paths. But, above all, in the land of Israel trust in Israel's God. He has said, 'Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by noonday.' 'He that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.' Farewell until brighter days!"
Night fell too rapidly for Hiram to get far away. Nor was there need, for the base of the mountain had been torn by earthquake and freshet into a hundred hiding-places. The chief danger was from wild beasts rather than from men. He chose a deep cleft which he observed to have a double opening, from either of which he could depart if the other were menaced. He had not waited long before the hoot of an owl sounded.
"Amazingly natural!" thought Hiram. He had once prided himself upon his powers of mimicry, and now he would essay a trial of skill with Elnathan.
"Too-whoo! too-whoo!" he echoed back.
"Too-whoo!" rang out from a crag quite distant. A moment later it came again, but this time from another direction. Then from another.
"The peasant is more deeply learned in bird-speech than I," mused the listener. "He throws his voice from cliff to crag, from ravine to tree-top."
Hiram ventured another call. Scarcely had the sound escaped his lips when the air hummed; a pair of dusky wings whirred close to his head, and a black object settled on the edge of the rock above him.
"I did it well," he congratulated himself, "to have brought the bird to me as a mate. Welcome to my nest, Sir Owl, for I think you are a restless soul like myself."
The bird flew away. But other companionship came. A rattling of stones down the ravine told of some one's approach. Hiram's success with the former hoot emboldened him to challenge Elnathan again.
"Too-whoo!" rang and re-echoed.
"But what a shriek!" said a voice not far distant. "I have heard that the owls in these mountains are the ghosts of dead Jews let out of Sheol for a night airing."
"I can believe it, and that they are all damned ghosts, too, if that owl's voice shows his feeling," rejoined another.
The stones rattled again.
"The curse of Baal-Hermon on the traitor's head for leading us on such a road as this," said one who had evidently stumbled and fallen among the rocks.
"Call on some other god, for the mountain god must have spent all his curses in making such a land as this. Try Beelzebub, the god of flies, for it would take a gnat to find the king in these narrow paths, branching everywhere. But I don't believe he went this way. The girl gave him warning. He has gone back, or taken the road to Hazor, and will make for Kadesh and Baal-Gad, and across the spur of Hermon to the highway for Damascus. We will do better to follow that. The addle-headed lout at the tent said that was the way most open, and he must have told the king the same, for he hadn't wit enough to invent two ideas."
"But we cannot find that path; at least not until the moon rises. Let us wait here."
The two men sat down close to one of the openings of Hiram's retreat.
"The sacrifice should never have been at the image of Moloch. Melkarth is Lord of Tyre, and, had it been at the temple, Melkarth would never have allowed him to escape."
"If he did escape!" said the other.
"You doubt it, then?" replied his comrade.
"Yes, for it cannot be proved, and the people all believe that Baal took him."
"The people be cursed! But the priests do not believe it. Baal does wonders, but, so far as I have seen, he never does wonders that the priests cannot understand. And Egbalus himself shook his head when we asked him, and looked very wisely as he pointed to that tilting stone."
"True!" replied the other; "but Egbalus bade me explore that underground passage. I did so until I came nearly under the god, when the way was utterly blocked. No human being could have gone farther without being changed into a ghost."
"If he changed to a ghost, he will change back again; and I think some of our knives will find him to be as veritable flesh as ever butcher cut in the shambles. But, hist! Somebody comes."
"Too-whoo!"
"By the horns of Astarte! The owls are as big as horses here, judging from the way the sticks snap under their feet. An owl-headed man, I think. Back into the crevice!"
One of the pursuers came close to Hiram. In an instant a knife sank from the man's throat to his heart. A sharp cry was its only signal.
"What is it, comrade?" asked the other, feeling his way in to offer assistance.
Hiram, having by daylight observed the turn of the crevice, slipped out of the other opening, and, giving signal, joined Elnathan. A moment's consultation was sufficient for their plan. Each entered an opposite opening of the crevice. As the living priest confronted Hiram, Elnathan's strong fingers were upon his throat. The man struggled impotently, as a sheep might have done in the hug of a bear. They drew him into the open.
"Harm him not," cried Hiram. "He has never harmed thee. His life is mine. Know, thou villainous priest, if it will be any comfort to thee, that thou diest by the hand of thy king. And take my challenge to Moloch himself, if there be any such being in the world of the damned."
The sentence was not completed before the knife had done its double work.
Hiram in a moment recognized his own unwisdom in his hasty speech, and, turning to Elnathan, said:
"I cannot take back the words you have heard. They tell more than I should have told. But, as you saved my life once at the volcano, you can preserve it only by forgetting what you have heard. Pledge me this, as you trust your God for grace."
"Nay," said Elnathan, "I think I shall best serve you by remembering it. I could have guessed as much from what I overheard these two now dead priests say, if I had not guessed it before. The ravine beyond the tent is famous for its resounding walls. The crawl of a lizard can be heard a hundred cubits. These wretches took their supper at one end of the gorge. I was beyond the bend. They might as well have whispered into the end of a shepherd's horn. Your appearance as you lay on the cot under the terebinth, your mutterings in fevered sleep, and what these rascals said to each other, I put together into a story of the miraculous escape of King Hiram of Tyre from being burned alive to Moloch. Now, my good friend, we have no king in Israel. I swear to you, King Hiram, all the loyalty a Jew can offer to any Gentile—the loyalty of man to man. Your secret is mine, and my service is yours. So help me, God of Israel!"
Hiram was unable to respond at once to this. When he did, it was to grasp both the big hands in his own, and say: "But one other man like this lives."
"Ay, my father," said Elnathan.
"And one more," added the king.
He would have kissed the hands of Elnathan, but the noble fellow withdrew them.
The moon appeared at this instant, the leaves and limbs of the trees marking themselves in sharp and moving outlines against her huge red disk, as she shone through the mists that hung over the low-lying lands by the Sea of Galilee.
In the excitement and previous darkness, Hiram had not noticed that Elnathan was strangely transfigured. He was dressed as a Persian soldier. He wore a stiff leather hat, whose round top projected forward; a leather tunic, close-fitting, with long sleeves; leather trousers, which disappeared at the ankles within high-topped shoes. At his belt hung a short sword, or rather a huge dagger. He carried also a spear, the light shaft of which served as a support in walking.
"I have brought you these," said the Jew. "Years ago, when Nehemiah came from Susa to Jerusalem, one of the soldiers whom King Artaxerxes had sent with him sickened on the way and died at my father's tent. These were his trappings. He begged that he might be buried in the winding-sheet, according to the custom of the Jews, whose faith he had embraced. Your herdsman's shirt is not a prudent disguise, especially since some of your pursuers have already tracked you in it. Besides, your very figure belies it. Sword-play and sceptre-holding give a different grace from that of clubbing swine; and it would take full twelve moons to grow a head of hair shaggy enough to make even a sheep look at you without suspicion. Our good King David might as well have played the shepherd with his crown on."
As he talked Elnathan divested himself, one by one, of his martial garments, and made Hiram put them on.
"And now, have I not performed a princely part myself?" said he, laughing. "For it was our Prince Jonathan who, when he had found out that David was really born to be a king, 'stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.'"
Elnathan then described carefully the paths leading eastward; the deep, winding wadies that debouched into the Sea of Galilee; the rock of Akhbara, rising five hundred cubits, like an enormous castle, cut by nature into a hundred hiding-places; the towns on the shore of the little sea. He gave the names of men of kin to the house of Ben Yusef, or known to be trusty, to whom Hiram might appeal in case of extremity. To Hiram's repeated pledges to reward him as a king should, when better days came, the Jew replied:
"The Lord is our reward in all things."
"Tell me," asked Hiram, "does your God teach you to do such things as you and your father's house have done to me, a stranger? for it was not to a king, but to a stricken wayfarer, you did it from the first."
"Yes, it is the command of our God, who taught it by the holy men he has raised up to lead our people. Our patriarch Job said: 'The stranger did not lie in the street: but I opened the door unto the traveller.'"
"But," interposed Hiram, "if the stranger were not merely a stranger; rather one, like myself, of a hostile race, as you Jehovites must regard the Baalites of the coast?"
"In heart you are not of Baal. Our God knows his own; and he has given to some of his people a wondrous power of detecting all true souls. My father, Ben Yusef, through much communing with the Lord, seems to be possessed of such spiritual sight. As you lay under the terebinth, before you came to your senses, my father cautioned us, saying: 'The favor of the Lord is upon this stranger. What we do unto him will be as if done unto our God.' Besides, did not the Lord give your life into my keeping when he bade me look the moment you fell into the crater? Did he not give me daring to go down into its very fires, and strength to carry you out? I have looked into that pit of brimstone since, and surely man alone could not have rescued you. And did not our God, at my prayer, give back your breath, that the hot air had burned out of you? Your life is mine, and must I not guard it as I would my own life? If harm should come to you through my neglect, I would not dare to pray to our God again as long as I live."
"Strange people!" said Hiram, half musing within himself. "In the tent of a shepherd I have learned more than all the world could teach me. I know nothing of gods, but I can pray one prayer to the God of Israel. It is, that he will bless the house of Ben Yusef forever."
"Amen! And the throne of Tyre!" said Elnathan, as the two heartily embraced, and stood gazing a moment into each other's moonlit faces.
Hiram started on his way. He had gone but a few paces, when the Jew recalled him.
"I may serve you further. Let me go with you, or let me follow you, that I may watch for you against dangers."
"It must not be."
"Then give me some sign by which, if evil comes upon you, I may know that you have need of me."
Hiram paused a moment before he replied:
"Then let the sign be the mark of a circle. Farewell!"
He quickly disappeared through the shadows of the night.