"Depending on the woman," answered Rustum Khan. "Old—unpleasing—" He made an upward gesture with his thumb, and a noise between his teeth suggestive of a severed wind-pipe. "If she were good-looking—I have heard say they pay high prices in the interior, say at Kaisarieh or Mosul. Once in a harem, who would ever know? The road ahead is worse than dangerous. Whoever wishes to save his life would do best to turn back now and try to ride through to Tarsus."
"Try it, then, if you're afraid!" sneered Will, and for a moment
I thought the Rajput would draw steel.
"I know what this lord sahib and I will do," he said, darkening three or four shades under his black beard. "It was for men bewitched by gipsy-women that I feared!"
Will was standing. Nothing but Monty's voice prevented blows. He rapped out a string of sudden rhetoric in the Rajput's own guttural tongue, and Rustum Khan drew back four paces.
"Send him back, Colonel sahib!" he urged. "Send that one back!
He and Umm Kulsum will be the death of us!"
Fred went off into a peal of laughter that did nothing to calm the
Rajput's ruffled temper.
"Who was Umm Kulsum?" I asked him, divining the cause.
"The most immoral hag in Asian legend! The aggregated essence of all female evil personified in one procuress!"
"Say, I'll have to teach that gink—"
Monty got up and stood between them, but it was a new alarm that prevented blows. A fist-blow in the Rajput's face would have meant a blood-feud that nothing less than a man's life could settle, and Monty looked worried. There came a new thundering on the door that brought everybody to his feet as if murder were the least of the charges against us. Only Kagig appeared at ease and unconcerned.