"Dang it," came a mutter, "I didn't 'ave the 'eart to tell 'er, bless 'er sweet face! 'E's done for, 'e is, and 'ere I be, tied up wi' the missus and the two on 'em while that danged pasty-faced scoundrel's been and got clean off. But wait, me friend! Them as stabs in the dark shall perish in the dark, as the Good Book says; but when I gets me 'ands on 'im—Lud! So you've been and woke up, Mr. 'Ammer?"
The American, wondering what sort of nightmare he was passing through, had raised his hand and felt a thick bandage around his head, and the movement had startled Solomon from his soliloquy.
Despite the bandage and his bewilderment, Hammer felt very well, and announced that fact as he tried to sit up. Solomon's hand repressed him.
"Down wi' you, if you please, sir! It's still a-workin' in you, but to-morrow morning you'll be fit to—Lud help us all! If 'e don't last——"
"If who doesn't last?" queried Hammer, lying back among his pillows. "Who is it that's done for?"
"You've 'ad a sleeping potion, Mr. 'Ammer," came Solomon's reply, a curious note in the man's voice. "It's been and give you bad dreams, sir, so just drink this, and in the morning——"
Obediently, Hammer swallowed a few drops from the spoon that Solomon held to his mouth, and still wondering what the conversation had been all about, slipped off into slumber before he could speak his thoughts.
He woke to find it broad daylight. He was lying on a mosquito-curtained cot beside an open window, and gained a glimpse of green trees and white-boiled cotton-fields before he turned his head to inspect his quarters. For a space the wonder of the thing gripped him, keeping him from recalling what had last taken place.
He had gone to sleep in an open launch off the Sabaki River, and he had wakened in a room that might have housed a prince. Save for his cot and a small stand of plain ebony beside it that held medicines, there was no furniture in the room but rugs—rugs on walls and floor, and ceiling, even. Though knowing nothing of such things, the American sensed the fact that they were such rugs as he had never seen before.
Opposite him was a royal Ispahan prayer-rug of solid fawn and blue silk, with unbroken lines of Arabic worked in solid gold thread, and the cypress, the tree of life, rising over all in white.