A Son of the Sahara Part 45

Over the high walls of her garden came the hum of a crowded city. From her screened gallery she saw camel trains loom out of the haze of distance to El-Ammeh, with a wrangle of sweet bells; camels that came from some vast unknown.

And there was another sound that Pansy heard; a sound that hailed from somewhere within the Palace; that always came about bedtime, and always set her shivering; the sound of a girl screaming.

Each morning with her early tea there was a basket of rare flowers, flowers she did not trouble to tell Alice to move now; she put them down to some palace custom, nothing that had any bearing on the Sultan.

She never thought of Le Breton's words:

"Still only a few flowers, Pansy?"

And each evening she sat in the dim, scented room and waited for those m.u.f.fled screams. She knew where they came from now; from somewhere behind one of the locked doors leading into her room.

Limp and listless, she dragged through the hot, monotonous days, brooding on her own fate and her father's, envying the ragged black crows that flew, free, like bits of burnt paper, high in the scorching sky.

Pansy had been about a fortnight in El-Ammeh, when something happened.

One morning, as she stood by the sunken pond, feeding the greedy carp with rolls she was too miserable to eat, Alice came to her round-eyed and startled-looking.

"Oh, Miss Pansy, dey hab come for you," she gasped

"Who?" Pansy asked quickly.

"De Sultan's soldiers."

"Are they going to take me to him?" she asked, feeling the interview she desired and dreaded was now at hand.

"Dey take you to de slave market. To be sold. Oh, oh!" the girl wailed.

Alice's hysterical sobs followed Pansy down the dim pa.s.sage some minutes later, when, with strained face and tortured eyes, she went with a guard of eight Arab soldiers to meet the fate the Sultan Casim Ammeh had promised for her more than sixteen years before.

CHAPTER XI

Sir George Barclay and most of his staff had a knowledge of Eastern prisons from the outside. They knew them to be abodes of misery; dark, insanitary dens, alive with vermin, squalid and filthy, filled with a gaunt, ragged crowd who, all day long, held piteous hands through iron bars, begging for food from the pa.s.sers-by, the only food they were given.

The Governor's staff did not look forward to a sojourn in El-Ammeh. As for Sir George himself, he had other matters than his own personal comfort to dwell on.

His thoughts were always with Pansy, and always in his heart was the prayer that she would succ.u.mb to the effects of Cameron's bullet, and not have to meet the fate his enemy had in store for her.

After the one interview the Sultan had ignored Barclay. But during the long journey, Sir George often saw his enemy, and if he thought of anything outside of his daughter's fate, it was to wonder why Casim Ammeh looked so different from the wild hordes he ruled. Exactly like a man of the well-bred, darker, Latin type, certainly not the son of the savage marauder whom he, Barclay, had had to condemn to death.

On reaching El-Ammeh, the Europeans found the quarters awaiting them very different from what experience had led them to expect.

They were ushered into a large courtyard dotted with trees and surrounded by high walls. Into it a dozen little cells opened. Within the enclosure they were free to wander as they pleased; a glance around the place showed them why. The walls were twenty feet high, and as smooth as gla.s.s, and there were always a dozen Arabs stationed by the gate, watching all they did. At night they were each locked in separate cells.

It was impossible to bribe the guards, as Cameron and his fellow officers discovered before a week had pa.s.sed.

For the imprisoned Englishmen the time pa.s.sed slowly. Often they speculated on their own ultimate fate. Whether death would be their portion, or whether they would be left there to stew for years, after the manner of more than one European who had had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of some desert chief.

They all knew the reason of their capture--merely because they happened to be on the Governor's staff. He had told them the story of Casim Ammeh, and the promised revenge. They never thought of blaming Barclay. What the present Sultan of El-Ammeh called "murder" was the sort of thing any one of them might be called upon to do.

A day came when it seemed to Barclay that the fate that wild youth had promised him long years ago was at hand.

One morning an escort came for him.

In their company he was led out of prison, to his execution, he expected. His staff thought so too; for they took a brief, unemotional farewell of him. They expected the same fate themselves at any moment.

However, Barclay was not led to his death. The escort took him through a twist of narrow streets, into a house and up a flight of dark stairs.

He was left alone in an upper room, with a heavily barred window, through which came a hum of wild voices, with an occasional loud, guttural, excited call.

He crossed to the window, and stood there, riveted.

There was a big square beneath, seething with dark-faced, white-robed men, all gazing in one direction--in the direction of a raised platform where a girl stood. A slim, white girl.

It would have been much easier for Sir George to have faced death than the sight before him.

Pansy was on the platform. His daughter! Standing there in full view of the wild crowd. Being sold as a slave in the market of this desert city. To become the property of one of those savages.

Barclay's hand went across his anguished face, to try and shut out the horrible sight.

It could not be true! It must be some hideous nightmare.

Yet there she was, with white face and strained eyes, meeting her fate bravely, as his daughter would. Pansy, as he had often seen her, in a simple white muslin dress, and a wide white, drooping hat with a long, blue, floating veil. Garbed as she had gone about his camp during his fatal tour.

Even as Sir George looked, Pansy's tortured eyes met his, and she tried to smile.

The sight broke him utterly, bringing a groan to his lips.

At the sound a voice said in French, with a note of savage triumph:

"Now perhaps _you_ understand what _I_ suffered when you shot my father?"

Standing behind him was a big man in a khaki riding-suit, a European, he looked. For the moment Barclay did not know him for his enemy, the Sultan Casim Ammeh.

When he recognised him he did for Pansy what he would never have done for himself--he begged for mercy.

"For G.o.d's sake, for the sake of the civilisation you know, don't condemn my child to such a fate!" he entreated in a voice hoa.r.s.e with agony.

"You showed my father no mercy. Why should I show you any now?" the Sultan asked coldly.

"At least have pity on the girl. Do what you like with me, but spare my daughter."

"Did you show me any pity when I begged for my father's life? 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap.' Isn't that what you Christians say? There is your harvest. A pleasing sight for me, when I think of my father."

The Sultan's gaze went to the window, but there was more tenderness than anything else in his eyes as they rested on the slim girl who faced the crowd with such white courage.

Now one figure stood out from the surge, that of a big, lean man in turban and loin-cloth, with long matted hair and beard, the latter foam-flecked. He stood at the foot of the platform, and his eyes never left the girl as he bid up and up against the other compet.i.tors; cursing everyone who bid against him, yet always going higher.

"Look at that wild man from the desert," the Sultan said. "I know him.