When the sun rose he was still thinking about the sort of residence a successful young executive might set up in Barkut if that land were as uninhabited as the bald-headed man had suggested in the shishkebab restaurant. But about him there was no sign of any sort of civilization. The bakhil glided smoothly over waves that were neither high nor negligible. The sea was of an improbable but fascinating color. The sky was lapis lazuli, and the bakhil was sheer archaic clumsiness. The heavy, bending boom which carried her mainsail seemed about to crack with the burden of patched canvas and wind which strained it. The crew was as unsavory a gang of cutthroats as ever a director sought in vain for a motion picture. There was not a man who did not carry a knife in plain view, and few who had not been liberally scarred by the knives of others. The captain’s face looked very like a rough sketch for a crossword puzzle blank.
None spoke a word to Tony. All glowered when he met their eyes. The bakhil sailed on a course Tony could not determine, toward a destination he could not guess—except that it surely was not Barkut—and there was apparently no soul on board but himself who spoke English or had any feeling but that of murderous antipathy toward him.
He flipped the golden ten-dirhim piece and felt exceeding peace fill all his being. Crew members saw the glint of gold in the sunshine. If Tony moved from the rail and one of them could get behind him, the result would be final. If he dozed, he would wake in another world, but not very likely Barkut. His life hung upon the fact that he had a revolver, and that it might cost lives to kill him. He waited contentedly all through the baking-hot day for nightfall, quite well aware that with the darkness plans would take effect to abate the nuisance of his living presence.
Came the sunset. Glorious reds and golds. The surface of the sea looked like molten aureate metal. The whiskered villains of the bakhil ’s crew prostrated themselves in pious prayer unto Allah, and then began low-toned discussions over the most practical way of inserting some six or seven inches of steel into Tony’s liver.
He beamed. He was alive. This was life and zest and adventure such as he had never known or dreamed of before. His conscience was despairingly silent. Tony would not have changed places with anyone on earth.
* * *
The sun sank below the horizon. Darkness seemed to flow over the world from the horizon on every hand. Obscurity blotted out the edge of the world, and shadows appeared and grew opaque upon the bakhil ’s deck, and Suhail, the great star, shone brightly in a dimming sky. Then it was night.
Men gathered forward. And Tony tossed overboard his twentieth cigarette of the day, and heard it hiss briefly as it touched the water. He moved briskly, silently.
The helmsman closed his eyes and sank to the deck. Darkness hid his sorrow. He had been the victim of a scientific gun-whipping learned by Tony in a neighborhood movie palace on Amsterdam Avenue, while watching Randolph Scott in the role of a frontier marshal. Tony re-pocketed the revolver, hauled the trailing small boat close under the bakhil ’s stern; then he pushed the great tiller hard over. The lubberly bakhil came heavily up into the wind and hung there. Its lateen sail flapped crazily. The ship careened, the massive boom swung over and increased its heel, and then the bakhil seemed simply to shiver irresolutely, dead in the water, all way gone.
Tony slipped over the stern into the small boat. He took to the oars as a displeased outcry arose on deck. He pulled off into the darkness. He had no idea where he might be, save that he was roughly twenty hours slow sail from Suakim. He might be anywhere along the African eastern coast, or along either of two shores of Arabia. The essential thing was to get away from the bakhil where his murder was at the moment being loudly promised.