“This is a coin of Barkut,” he told the man who was itching to rob him. “It is my desire to go to Barkut. Arrange it.”
He went back to the fly-infested hotel, where he paid nine prices for his lodging. He spent some time flipping the coin. He had changed a good deal inside as well as out, once he’d learned how to grow really stern with his conscience. The coin turned up some heads and some tails. If it actually had a homing instinct, it gave him essential information. If everything had been a matter of chance up to now, and the series of coincidences between fact and the heads-and-tails decisions of the coin were about to end, it simply led him to preparations for an over-elaborate suicide.
Within the hour, his interpreter came back to the hotel with voluble assurances that he had engaged a bakhil to carry Tony to Barkut. It was taking on the last of its cargo now. It would put out into the harbor at sunset, and Tony must board it secretly during the night because of harbor regulations.
Tony packed. He was reasonably well outfitted, now. He dressed for his journey in the absolute ultimate of the inappropriate. He wore a soft felt hat, brightly polished brown shoes, and a camel’s-hair topcoat with a belt in the back. He slipped a revolver in his pocket.
Night fell. Tony dined, as well as the resources of Suakim would permit, and felt expansive and contented and anticipative. Two hours after dark, his interpreter returned with news that the bakhil was out in the harbor and awaited his coming. Tony went down to the water front of Suakim—a not too cautious move in itself, alone and at night. He climbed down a ladder into a small boat and placidly let himself be rowed out into the darkness. The night was black, save that stars glowed enormously against a sky like velvet. The sleepy, murmurous sounds of the city were very romantic indeed. There was the lapping of waves, and somewhere a wraith of string music where revelers made merry, and somewhere a dog barked indignantly in the darkness. That was all, except the sound of the oars.
Presently a dark form loomed ahead. The bakhil was an ungainly shape some seventy or eighty feet long, with the stubby thick mast and colossal boom on her lateen rig. Tony’s interpreter hailed. A guttural voice replied. The small boat came alongside the bakhil and the interpreter steadied it for Tony to step on board. He climbed to the deck. The bakhil stank glamorously of fish and pearl oysters and goat hides and kerosene and tar and bilge water and humanity. Its deck was an impenetrable maze of shadows in the starlight. Tony drew a deep breath of complete satisfaction. He moved aside to be out of the way.
Then there was an infuriated howl, plus the sound of oars being worked at most enthusiastic speed. Tony’s interpreter and guide had obsequiously held the small boat to allow him to board the bakhil. The unwashed cutthroats of its crew had prepared to receive Tony’s baggage. Instead, they saw and heard the shore boat being rowed away at the topmost speed of which the interpreter was capable.
The bakhil’s crew howled with rage, which was not righteous indignation at the witnessing of a theft, but the much greater rage of being cheated of the privilege of stealing Tony’s possessions for themselves. Men raved up and down the deck, uttering deep-throated maledictions at the top of their voices. Then, forward, the loudest voice shouted down the others. A small boat from the bakhil splashed overside. It went cursing after the racing oar strokes of the boat with Tony’s baggage in it.
Tony stepped delicately to the stern and ensconced himself against the rail. He got a cigarette lighter and lighted a cigarette and smoked it happily, still holding the lighter in his hand. This event had been implied in the series of heads and tails the golden coin of Barkut had turned up when he spun it for decisions on how he should prepare for the trip by sea. All this uproar was consoling confirmation of the homing tendency of the ten-dirhim piece. He smoked beatifically, while out on the dark harbor water one small boat manned by cutthroats went raging after another small boat manned by a sneak thief, and the crew of the bakhil listened between cursings to the sounds on the water.
Far off, there was a howl of fury. Still farther, a triumphant yell of derision. The small boat of the bakhil came back in a thick fog of sulphurous language, Tony’s late interpreter evidently having made the shore and gotten away with his loot.