"Now, the men are on strike. That's understood. Well what are you and they going to do about it? When the draft for the monthly pay roll comes to the bank, at Jerusalem as usual, I shall refuse to indorse it. I give you my oath on that, too. I am not going to distribute the company's cash among a bunch of strikers. Without my signature, the bank won't cash the draft. You know that. Well, how are you going to live, all of you, on nothing a month? When the present stock of provisions gives out I'm not going to order them renewed. And the provision people in Jerusalem won't honour any one's order for them but mine. This is the only concern in Syria to-day that pays within forty per cent, of the wages you chaps are getting. With no pay and no food you're due to find your strike rather costly. For when the mine shuts down I'm going back to America. There'll be nothing to keep me here. I'll be ruined, in any case. You people will find yourself without money or provisions. And if you go elsewhere for work it will be at a pay that is only a little more than half what you are getting now. Your lookout isn't cheery, my striking friend!"
He made as though to go into his tent. After a brief pause of horror,
Najib pattered hurriedly and beseechingly in his wake.
"Howadji!" pleaded the Syrian shakily. "Howadji! You would not, in the untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that? Not me, at anyhow? Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old! You would not forsook me, to starve myself! Aie! Ohé!"
"Shut up that ungodly racket!" snapped Kirby, entering his tent and lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib's wide-flung jaws. "Shut up! You'll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to howling! It's bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the rest of the mess."
"But, howadji!" pleaded Najib.
"Tamán!" growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic word for the ending of all interviews.
"But I shall be beruinated, howadji!" tearfully insisted Najib.
Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make ready for bed. If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.
This was Kirby's sole hope. And he knew it. Unless the fellaheen could be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should break the mine as well as the mine's manager. Kirby knew of no way to persuade the men. The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean nothing to them. All their brains could master at one time, without the aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double pay and half labour.
A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby. In one hour his golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed. At best he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments to the point of sabotage.