“Thou art one against a thousand,” she whispered; “wait till thou art one against one.”
He dipped his nose in the camel-stew, for some one poked a head in at the door—every sense in him was alert, every instinct alive.
“To-night,” said Mahommed Ibrahim, in the hoarse gutturals of the Bishareen, “it is ordered that Fielding Bey shall die—and by my hand, mine own, by the mercy of God! And after Fielding Bey the clean-faced ape that cast the evil eye upon me yesterday, and bade me die. ‘An old man had three sons,’ said he, the infidel dog, ‘one was a thief, another a rogue, and the third a soldier—and the soldier died first.’ ‘A camel of Bagdad,’ he called me. Into the belly of a dead camel shall he go, be sewn up like a cat’s liver in a pudding, and cast into the Nile before God gives tomorrow a sun.”
Dicky pushed away the camel-stew. “It is time to go,” he said.
The ghdzeeyeh rose with a laugh, caught Dicky by the hand, sprang out among the Arabs, and leapt over the head of the village barber, calling them all “useless, sodden greybeards, with no more blood than a Nile shad, poorer than monkeys, beggars of Beni Hassan!” Taking from her pocket a handful of quarter-piastres, she turned on her heels and tossed them among the Arabs with a contemptuous laugh. Then she and Dicky disappeared into the night.
II
When Dicky left her house, clothed in his own garments once more, but the stains of henna still on his face and hands and ankles, he pressed into the ghazeeyeh’s hand ten gold-pieces. She let them fall to the ground.
“Love is love, effendi,” she said. “Money do they give me for what is no love. She who gives freely for love takes naught in return but love, by the will of God!” And she laid a hand upon his arm.
“There is work to do!” said Dicky; and his hand dropped to where his pistol lay—but not to threaten her. He was thinking of others.
“To-morrow,” she said; “to-morrow for that, effendi,” and her beautiful eyes hung upon his.