Puslapio vaizdai
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dering if his Government would remember it came from the mouth of some indigent him after the newspapers had ceased to who reads and prays daily in Arab houses shout his wrongs. I knew enough of Turks for a monthly rupee. to know they would not offer him for ransom if they had a good season, and were busy selling coffee and carpets. That is what maddens one most with an Oriental: he holds so many good cards that he never plays.

When I had been in Sanaa a week I arranged with Seyyid that if I were suspected I should go away at once, managing the shipping of our coffee from Hodeidah, while he bought in the Hinterland. I pretended to him that I was followed, and, indeed, I felt myself suspected; for I argued that, had I been counted a true Arab, I should have heard something of the town's white prisoner. But, whatever else I did or left undone, I was careful to sing loudly, night and morning, at my window, in a voice as ugly as any Indian's.

A blue night hung over the town; the sky was quite as blue as by day, but darker. A round moon had fastened itself above the great mosque, as if the Gospel light shone above it. I had looked fifty times at the little court, and had grown half disbelieving of his durance in it; but as I looked this evening, without special thought of him, I saw a movement by the house wall among the crotons, still showing red in the limpid moonlight. The night was as still as a dead man's heart.

My eyes were fastened on the court now, and I saw someone limp from the shadow, a shackle dragging at his heel. He looked up at the moon for a long moment, and then, stooping, slipped his foot from the chain. It was Macenvoy; I recognized his figure as he bent to the ground. I cleared my throat and began the evening's singing-in Gaelic. This is what I sang: "O Captain Macenvoy, mighty in the hills of the North, lonely in Sanaa, the son of the old horse-jobber of Lochfrinth is come to deliver you. How you will ever get over that wall only the God who made us knows at present, but later on, I believe, He will put some plan in your head or mine (and no irreverence meant) for the fame of His glory."

Then a strange thing happened. The voice of a holy man, nasal, strident, seemed to answer me from the street. It was an inexpressibly weak voice, and sounded as if

"Alhamdalillah hi," the voice cried; “I can escape by way of the wall, climbing up by means of my shackle, which has a hook in the end. I hear a voice in darkness singing of my home. Where can I find its owner?"

"At the camel-jobber's over the way," I sang in excited antiphon; "come now, while house and street are empty."

"Now or never," came the voice of the holy man, and presently I saw the shadowy figure in the court throw his shackle at the wall. No physical pain has ever gripped me tighter than the agony of the moment when his shackle fell without a hold. I saw he was too weak to try again at once, but presently he threw the heavy thing, and the sharpened hook at its end caught with a strange sound. I watched him pull himself up, feeling here and there with his feet for a jut of stone to hold him, and as I watched I prayed. He stood a moment in foolhardy fatigue, a mark on the wall's top black against the blue night, and crudely apparent in the marvellous moonlight. Remembering his chain, he dislodged it and flung it into the street, where he dropped himself a moment later, nerveless and huddled as a bunch of rags.

I dared not go out to him lest I spoil all. Mine was not the strength that could watch and be still; I prayed my child prayers over again, my eyes closed tightly, and when they opened unwillingly I saw that he had stirred.

I began to sing again, in a voice as weak as his own: "The room on the housetop holds your welcome, son of the everlasting hills."

And the voice of the holy man responded in English: "Why didn't you say so before, you blighter; I've been waiting instructions.”

Again I waited, and presently heard him scratching at the door. Opening it, we gripped hands without speech. His face was like a dead man's, but his smile was as near his pale lips as when he was a boy. His filthy white duck clothes were still military in effect, a long beard and hair waved about his brown collar. He had on one ridingboot only, and I guessed they had shackled him about the other, so that when the boot

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was off, Archie might be off as he pleased, dark. I dared not rouse him with loud as well. knocks, lest others be roused as well, but as

"That would be just an Oriental, all I wondered what I could do, the captain over," I said, thinking aloud. whistled the Skye boat song.

"We'd best be getting out of this, whereever it is," he said pleadingly. "Where is it, anyway? I've often wondered."

I told him, and he merely said, "I thought it was deuced cold here.”

The first phrase had barely left his throat when a shutter opened on well-oiled hinges, and a sobbing, silly old voice sounded above us. "Oh, mon, mon dear!" it said in broad Scotch, and looking up, we saw Sandy He rushed to my ewer and basin and in all his nocturnal beauty, including a washed himself as if he could not stop. cap-stretched forth from the window, And then I got a great sack, and made him with eyes straining through the dark. It see if he could pack himself away in it. I was not long before he opened the door and had to stop to write a note to Seyyid tell- thrust the emblem of home, over the dooring him to go examine the upland coffee, sill, into Macenvoy's hands. We stood betwelve miles away, in the early morning. low him in the narrow street, and the capBy that time I hoped to be a day's journey tain reached up for the sign of his home and toward Hodeidah. the token of his deliverance with a look on his face that was a fitting climax to his wild adventures. We dressed him in Arab clothes and started away for Cowasjee Dinshaw's steamer, running to Aden at daybreak. He was cramped and sore from travelling in a sack, but we knew he breathed more freely as the moments passed.

I chose the Bussorah beast which Sandy had "lifted," and I made the captain sit in the sack I strapped to her. I drove her noisily forth from Sanaa's gate, and trembled with excitement as we climbed the hills of egress from the town.

We met no one for ten miles, and after that the six days of our journey were passed in perilous meetings and narrow escapes. I never slept without dreaming that the Bussorah's owner had sprung up on the road and claimed her, and I never woke without realization of the dangers of the day. Sometimes the captain told me of starvation and shackles.

We slipped into Hodeidah by night. I gave the captain a cloth to tie round his face, as if his teeth ached, and we let the Bussorah beast find her own master. Stealing through the town as silently as nightfall, we came to Sandy's house, where all was

Before we took the steamer we had a late supper, or early breakfast, and Sandy set the table with home's emblem in the midst. He opened a tin of haggis, the last he had, and a bottle of "smooth" whiskey from his birthplace. As he opened his carpet-bag for the remains of our feast, he took from it a novel of Mr. Barrie's. "Thank God for leisure and a quiet mind to enjoy my favorite author," he exclaimed devoutly, go-ing out into the dawn sonorous with the eighteenth psalm. Our light hearts said "amen" in the cool of the morning.

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