Chapter VIII
Sheik to Sheik
Chapter VIII
In the short interval at our camp I had given Ab-Domen explicit orders as to just what to do. Twenty of the best tribesmen and all the available horses came with me. The men were mostly Moplahs with a few Kadas. They had long roamed the desert and having had much experience with tourists, were as rapacious and blood-thirsty a lot as one could wish. In addition I had Swank and Whinney, trusted and true, with the exact amount of intelligence necessary to handle the turbulent natives and no more.
Ab-Domen stayed with the caravan. His instructions were to retrace his steps with the outfit which was, of course, slow moving. He was to make one day’s journey after which he was to pitch camp and be prepared to welcome us back or dig in and resist to the death should Allah so will. My parting with the ponderous dragoman had been unusually affecting and it was with a stern, set countenance that I headed my impetuous band.
For some time we rode in silence. The vault of heaven was still black at the zenith but at its eastern edge glowed a widening band of silver that flickered and ran fitfully about the horizon as the flame runs around the wick of an oil stove. I never light my four-cylinder blue-flame without thinking of that momentous hour. Back of us the star, El Whizbang, sank to its usual matinal extinction, a faithful and exemplary planet, having performed its good deed for the night. We soon reached the crouching form of the Circassian woman with whom I left supplies, a loaf of bread, a goatskin of camels-milk and several of the latest magazines and whose location I marked for Ab-Domen’s guidance with a small red flag mounted on a spear. Thus we left her, looking like the eighteenth green of a desert golf course.
In the growing light the trained eyes of my Moplahs easily followed the vague tracks of my previous ride. No wind had risen to disturb the shifting sands and though invisible to me their practised vision easily picked up the trail. They were much puzzled when we reached the site of my struggle with the sorrel where the deep hoof marks and trampled sand were plain to all. “You fell?” asked Ouidja, a cadaverous Kada. I laughed at the idea and shortly narrated the incident to their great delight, and ejaculations of “Bishmillah!” “Biskra!” and “Wahully!”
Day now streamed lucidly over the undulating plain but though the tension of the previous hours was somewhat relaxed by action the increasing light brought to me an increase of anxiety. By now Azad’s camp would be astir. At this very moment the attack might be beginning if—alas! it had not already ended. This despairful thought prompted an attempt on my part to shorten the distance between us.
Between our present position and the original site of Azad’s camp lay an hour’s hard riding. From that point he had gone north while my course had been east. We had been describing two sides of a right angle. Obviously the intelligent thing to do was to close the triangle and take the shortest possible route along its hypotenuse. “Halt!” I ordered.
THE RESCUE
“Superb! you are like a swift-running tide-race foaming over a hidden reef.”