The Haunting of Low Fennel Part 27

She placed her lips to the phial, and drank.

It seemed that fire ran through every vein in her body. Then came chill.

It grew, creeping from her hands and her feet inward and upward to her heart.

"Good-bye ... dear...." she whispered, and sobbed once, dryly.

The ropes held her rigidly upright.

VI

"_Wa-llah!_ she is dead, and we have slain her!"

El-Suleym's Bedouins stood before the pillar in the temple, and fear was in their eyes. They unbound the girl, beautiful yet in her marble pallor, and lowered her rigid body to the ground. They looked one at another, and many a glance was turned toward the Nile.

Then the leader of the party extended a brown hand, pointing to the tethered horses. They pa.s.sed from the temple, muttering. No one among them dared to brave the wrath of the terrible sheikh. As they came out into the paling moonlight, the camp seemed to have melted magically; for ere dawn they began their long march to the lonely oasis in the Arabian Desert which was the secret base of the Masr-Bishareen's depredatory operations.

Stealthily circling the camp, which buzzed with subdued activity--even the dogs seemed to be silent when the sheikh slept--they came to the horses. Solitary, a square silhouette against the paling blue, stood the sheikh's tent, on top of the mound, which alone was still untouched.

The first horseman had actually leapt into the saddle, and the others, with furtive glances at the ominous hillock, were about to do likewise, when a low wail, weird, eerie, rose above the m.u.f.fled stirring of the camp.

"_Allah el-'Azeen!_" groaned one of the party--"what is that?"

Again the wail sounded--and again. Other woman voices took it up. It electrified the whole camp. Escape, undetected, was no longer possible.

Men, women, and children were abandoning their tasks and standing, petrified with the awe of it, and looking towards the sheikh's tent.

As they looked, as the frightened fugitives hesitated, looking also, from the tent issued forth a melancholy procession. It was composed of the women of El-Suleym's household. They beat their bared b.r.e.a.s.t.s and cast dust upon their heads.

For within his own sacred apartment lay the sheikh in his blood--a headless corpse.

And now those who had trembled before him were hot to avenge him. Riders plunged out in directions as diverse as the spokes of a wheel. Four of them rode madly through the temple where they had left the body of their captive, leaping the debris, and circling about the towering pillars, as only Arab hors.e.m.e.n can. Out into the sands they swept; and before them, from out of a hollow, rose an apparition that brought all four up short, their steeds upreared upon their haunches.

It was the figure of a white-bearded man, white-robed and wearing the green turban, mounted upon a camel which, to the eyes of the four, looked in its spotless whiteness a creature of another world. Before the eagle-eyed stranger lay the still form of Eileen Graham, and as the camel rose to its feet, its rider turned, swung something high above him, and hurled it back at the panic-stricken pursuers. Right amongst their horses' feet it rolled, and up at them in the moonlight from out a ma.s.s of blood-clotted beard, stared the gla.s.sy eyes of El-Suleym!

The sun was high in the heavens when the grey-faced and haggard-eyed searchers came straggling back to Mena House. Two of them, who had come upon Graham ten miles to the east, brought him in. He was quite pa.s.sive, and offered no protest, spoke no word, but stared straight in front of him with a set smile that was dreadful to see.

No news had come from the company of soldiers; no news had come from anywhere. It was ghastly, inconceivable; people looked at one another and asked if it could really be possible that one of their number had been s.n.a.t.c.hed out from their midst in such fashion.

Officials, military and civil, literally in crowds, besieged the hotel.

Amid that scene of confusion no one missed Mohammed; but when all the rest had given up in despair, he, a solitary, patient figure, stood out upon a distant mound watching the desert road to the east. He alone saw the return of the white camel with its double burden, from a distance of a hundred yards or more; for he dared approach no closer, but stood with bowed head p.r.o.nouncing the _fathah_ over and over again. He saw it kneel, saw its rider descend and lift a girl from its back. He saw him force something between her lips, saw him turn and make a deep obeisance toward Mecca. At that he, too, knelt and did likewise. When he arose, camel and rider were gone.

He raced across the sands as Eileen Graham opened her eyes, and supported her as she struggled to her feet, pale and trembling.

"I don't understand it at all," said Graham.

Eileen smiled up at him from the long cane chair. She was not yet recovered from her dreadful experience. "Perhaps," she said softly, "you will not laugh in future at my Irish stories of the 'good people'!"

Graham shook his head and turned to Mohammed.

"What does it all mean, Mohammed?" he said. "Thank G.o.d it means that I have got her back, but how was it done? She returned wearing the turquoise necklace, which I last saw in your hand."

Mohammed looked aside.

"I took it to him, Effendi. It was the token by which he knew her need."

"The pedlar?"

"The pedlar, Effendi."

"You knew where to find him, then?"

"I knew where to find him, but I feared to tell you; feared that you might ridicule him."

He ceased. He was become oddly reticent. Graham shrugged his shoulders, helplessly.

"I only hope the authorities will succeed in capturing the Bishareen brigands," he said grimly.

"The authorities will never capture them," replied the dragoman with conviction. "For five years they have lived by plunder, and laughed at the Government. But before another moon is risen"--he was warming to his usual eloquence now--"no Masr-Bishareen will remain in the land, they will be exterminated--purged from the desert!"

"Indeed," said Graham; "by whom?"

"By the Rawallah, Effendi."

"Are they a Bedouin tribe?"

"The greatest of them all."

"Then why should they undertake the duty?"

"Because it is the will of the one who saved her for you, Effendi! I am blessed that I have set eyes upon him, spoken with him. Paradise is a.s.sured to me because my hand returned to him his turban when it lay in the dust!"

Graham stared, looking from his wife, who lay back smiling dreamily, to Mohammed, whose dark eyes burnt with a strange fervour--the fervour of one mysteriously converted to an almost fanatic faith.

"Are you speaking of our old friend, the pedlar?"

"I am almost afraid to speak of him, Effendi, for he is the chosen of heaven, a cleanser of uncleanliness; the scourge of G.o.d, who holds His flail in his hand--the broom of the desert!"

Graham, who had been pacing up and down the room, paused in front of Mohammed.

"Who is he, then?" he asked quietly. "I owe him a debt I can never hope to repay, so I should at least like to know his real name."

"I almost fear to speak it, Effendi." Mohammed's voice sank to a whisper, and he raised the turquoise hanging by the thin chain about Eileen's throat, and reverently touched it with his lips. "He is the _welee_--Ben Azreem, Sheikh of the Ibn-Rawallah!"