He laughed as he spoke, on the spur of his primitive reasoning, and stroked the soft silk which wrapped his rightful mate.
“Mistress!”
At a certain tone in his voice with which she was unacquainted she turned her head and looked over her shoulder and up at him sideways, so that her yellow eyes gleamed through half-closed lids, just as gleamed the eyes of the wellnigh adolescent lion cub watching them from a corner of the luxurious room.
“Mistress, it were well if I broke the neck of the white woman within the hour, and fastening her dead body upon some horse, sent them floundering into the sands of death. Then will I spread a tale of the white woman’s betrayal of thy hospitality, and how she stole thy horse and attempted to escape, so——”
He laughed as she turned upon him in anger, then bent and looked down into her beautiful, furious eyes with a look she did not understand, but which caused her to draw back a pace.
“Behold, are thy words as bright as a rusty sword and thy reasoning as sharp as the blunt edge,” she cried. “The white woman has found favour in the eyes of thy brethren, thou fool! Thinkest thou that when they hear of her death that their lamentations will not reach to the mountaintops, yea, and to the ears of the white man, so that he turns upon me in rage? Behold, are the wits of the deaf boy who waits upon the white man like two-edged daggers compared to thine, O Al-Asad of the camel head!”
Al-Asad of the camel head made no sign of the storm caused within him by the nearness of the woman and her contemptuous words. He stood quite still, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils, the silk of her garment in his hands.
“Thou makest a pond of a raindrop, woman,” he answered. “What are my brethren but children, pleased to-day at a smile, angered to-morrow at a word? Make great promise of feasting and fighting, and their love belongs to the giver of food and promoter of battle; laugh at them, mock them, make sport of their words and their raiment and their countenance, and they kill without a word.”
Zarah put her little hands against his chest and pushed him away, and looked at him sideways as she crossed to the couch, and looked at him again when he did not follow, and beckoned him with a backward movement of the head, which showed him the beauty of her throat as he leant against the lintel and looked at her, and laughed at the simplicity of the plan that was formulating in his mind.
Dying of thirst, he stretched for the cup even if there was but a drop of water left; starving, he swept the very floor for a crust; destitute, he demanded the smallest coin as price for the way he had found for removing the obstacle from the Arabian girl’s path. When she beckoned he crossed to her and sat down, but not upon the floor at her feet. He sat beside her, close to her, and looked at her so that she shrank away.