The Winding Stair

by A. E. W. Mason

But though he listened with both his ears and though he walked his horse as slowly as he could, he heard nothing. He saw his sergeant suddenly look at his belt. It was coming, then, without a doubt. The next moment the sergeant was at his side and looking up into his face.

“My commandant, you have left your revolver behind in that house.”

Gerard de Montignac took all the time that he could. He stared at the sergeant and made him repeat his statement as though he had been lost in thought and had never heard it at all. Then he looked down at the holster and fingered it as if he were trying to recollect where in the world he had taken the revolver out.

“Why, that’s true,” he said, at last. He wheeled his horse around and rode back very dispiritedly with his chin sunk upon his breast. “It is to be Meknes after all, then, and all the public shame,” the sergeant heard him mutter; and then a pistol cracked sharp and clear, and Gerard raised his face. It was lit with a great relief.

They were only ten paces from the house. Gerard dismounted and gave the reins to the sergeant.

“Wait for me here! Keep the door clear!” he ordered. He had left the door of the house open when he rode away. It was open still. Gerard ran up the stairs and burst into the room. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air, and the Moorish woman with the orange scarf and the white robe and the deep gold waistband was standing with her hands pressed over her face.

But there was no sign of Si Tayeb Reha anywhere. They had tried to trick him, then! They imagined that he would accept the evidence of the pistol-shot and continue on his way! They took him for no better than a child, it seemed. No, that would not do!

“Where is he?” he asked, angrily, of the girl, and now he, too, spoke in Arabic.

She pointed a trembling hand towards the window; and Gerard saw that the rail of the balustrade of the balcony was broken and that the revolver lay upon the boards. Gerard stepped out from the window and looked down.

The balcony had been built out from the sheer wall; it was a rough thing of boards, supported upon iron stanchions, and jutting out above the deep chasm at the edge of the town. Gerard could see between the boards deep down a precipice of rocks to a tiny white thread of stream and clumps of bushes. He drew close to the broken rail and leaned cautiously over. Caught upon some outcropping rocks, a little way below the wall, hung the body of Si Tayeb Reha. He was lying face downwards, his arms outspread. The story of what had happened was written there for him to read.