The Lighted Match Part 33

Her insatiable appet.i.te for beauty had brought Cara on deck early. The early sh.o.r.e-wind tossed unruly brown curls into her eyes and across the delicate pink of her cheeks.

When the yachtsman joined her, she read in his eyes that he had been long awake and was deeply troubled. In the shadow of the after-cabin she stopped him with a light touch on his arm.

"Now tell me," she demanded, "what is the matter?"

His voice was quiet. "There is nothing in my thoughts that you cannot read--so--" He lifted the eyes in question, half-despairing despite the smile he had schooled into them. "Why rehea.r.s.e it all again?"

Her face clouded.

He turned his gaze on the single dome and four minarets of the Mosque of Suleyman.

"Besides," he added at length, speaking in a steady monotone, "I couldn't tell it without saying things that are forbidden."

When she spoke the dominant note in her voice was weariness.

"My life," she said, "is a miserable serial of calling on you and sending you away. Back there"--she waved her hand to the vague west--"it is summer--wonderful American summer! The woods are thick and green....

The big rocks by the creek are splotched yellow with the sun, and green with the moss.... I wonder who rides Spartan now, when the hounds are out!" She broke off suddenly, with a sobbing catch in her throat, then she shook her head sadly. "You see, you must go!" she added. "You will take my heart with you--but that is better than this."

She turned and led the way forward and for the length of the deck he walked at her side in silence.

As they halted he demanded, very low; "And you--?"

Her answering smile was pallid as she quoted, "'More than a little lonely'--" then, reverting to her old name for him, she laughed with counterfeited gayety--"as, Sir Gray Eyes, people must be--who try to be good."

CHAPTER XXVI

IN A CURIO SHOP IN STAMBOUL.

The _muezzin_ had called the devout to their prayer-rugs for the third time that day, when the girl and the two men turned from the Stamboul end of Galata Bridge into the tawdry confusion of buildings which cl.u.s.ter about the Mosque Yeni-Djami. They were bound for the bazaars.

Along the twisting ways stretched the booths of native merchants stocked with the thousand fascinating trifles that the City of the Sultan markets to the journeying world. Everywhere the crowd surged and jostled.

On the side street where the shops are a trifle larger than their neighbors, one Mohammed Abbas keeps his curio bazaar. In such flowery Orientalism of appeal did he couch his plea for an inspection of his wares, that Cara was persuaded and turned into the shop. Cut off by pressure of the crowd, Pagratide, who was following, some paces back, caught a glimpse of her figure in the door and fought his way to her side, but Benton, having stopped to price a bracelet of antique silver set with turquoises, lost sight of them. The girl had become interested in a quaint, curved dagger thickly studded with semi-precious stones.

Mohammed Abbas urged her to see the rarer and choicer articles which he kept in an upper room. As they tailed, a half-dozen natives, swarthy and villainous of face, drifted into the shop to be promptly ordered out by the proprietor, who used for that purpose a vocabulary of scope and vividness. The ruffians retreated after a brief conversation in guttural Arabic, but not by the street door through which they had come. Instead, they left by a low-arched exit to the rear, concealed from view by the angle of the screening stairway. Abbas led his customers to an upper room which they found dark except where he lighted it as he went with hanging lamps. Its s.p.a.ce was generous, broken here and there by piles of ebony furniture, inlaid with pearl; pieces of Saracenic armor, Damascened bucklers, and all the gear too large for the narrow confines below.

Half an hour's searching through the chaos of wares failed to reveal the choice daggers which Mohammed wished them to see, and with many apologies for added annoyance he begged _Monsieur_ and _Madame_ to mount yet another flight, and visit yet another store-room. At the head of these stairs they encountered absolute darkness and the shopman, with his ever-ready apologies, paused again to light lamps.

As Pagratide's pupils accustomed themselves to the murk he realized that this last room was bare except for tapestries hung flat against the wall, and that at its farther side narrow slits of light showed along the sills of two doors. Turning, he noted the darker shadow of some recess in the wall, immediately to his left.

Suddenly Mohammed Abbas closed the door upon the stairs, and sharply clapped his hands. In all lands where Allah is worshiped, clapping of the hands is a signal of summons. Thrusting his hand into the pocket where he had stored an automatic pistol, Karyl found it empty, and remembered that on the stairway the merchant had apologized for jostling him. Then simultaneously the two opposite doors opened and framed against their light a momentary picture of crowding Arabs.

Outside, Benton had been searching. First he had felt only annoyance for a chance separation, but when ten minutes of futile wandering had lengthened to fifteen, annoyance gave way to fear, and fear to panic. A dozen tragic stories of mysterious disappearances in Stamboul crowded like nightmares upon his memory. At last, standing bewildered in the street, he caught sight of a familiar figure; a figure that filled him with astonishment and delight.

Colonel Von Ritz had left Cairo to return to Puntal. Now here he was in a crooked Stamboul street, appearing without warning, but with his almost uncanny faculty for being at the right spot when needed. He shouldered his way to the side of the officer.

Though the two men had parted several weeks before, the Galavian greeted the other only with a formal bow, and an abrupt question. "Where are they?"

"I have lost them," replied Benton. He rapidly sketched the events of the last half-hour, and confessed his own apprehensions.

With evidence of neither anxiety nor interest, Von Ritz listened, and replied with a second question. "Have you seen Martin?"

Benton gave a palpable start. "Martin!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Is Martin in Constantinople?"

For reply Von Ritz permitted himself the rare indulgence of a smile.

"Martin is here," he said briefly.

"And you--?"

As he spoke the figure of Martin himself emerged from a shop a few paces ahead, and without a backward glance cut diagonally across the narrow street to disappear into the doorway of the curio shop which is kept by Mohammed Abbas.

When, after being cut off and delayed for some minutes by a pa.s.sing donkey train, Von Ritz and Benton entered the place, they found it empty except for a native salesman, but as the Galavian paused to make a trivial purchase his listening ear caught a sound above. Without hesitation, he wheeled and mounted the stairs with Benton close at his heels. Behind him the shop-clerk stood irresolute--taken aback, with a vague consciousness that he should have devised a way to stop this gigantic Infidel. a.s.suredly the master would be angry. Orders had been explicitly given to allow no one to climb those steps to-day without permission.

While Cara and Karyl had been on the second floor, a heavy _Osmanli_, wearing the Sultan's uniform, had stood in the center of the room above, looking about with keen, pig-like eyes, as he gave rapid commands to a half dozen Arabs of villainous visage.

"You, Sayed Ayoub," he ordered, "take your pig of a self and others like unto you into that doorway by the stairs. Remain until you hear men enter from these two doors, facing the Infidel dogs. Then come upon them from behind. The man is to be bound, and when evening comes--but that is later! Still, if he resists too much--" The speaker shrugged his heavy shoulders and made a certain gesture.

"And the woman? What of her?" The question came from a gigantic Bedouin whose evil countenance was made the more sinister by one closed and empty eye-socket.

Abdul Said _Bey_ nodded. "She is to be tenderly handled," he enjoined.

"She, also, must disappear, but that shall be my care. My harem is as silent as the Bosphorus."

There were steps on the stairs, and instantaneously the room emptied itself and became silently dark.

When Karyl heard the hand-clapping of the decoy shopman, and saw the responding ruffians in the opposite doors, he swiftly thrust the girl into the spot of blacker shadow at his back, and seized the wrist of Mohammed Abbas with a force and suddenness that wrung from him a piteous wail.

Keeping the Turk before him, he backed toward the shadowed recess, with the one idea of shielding Cara. But the darker spot was the door behind which Sayed Ayoub lay in ambuscade, and as Karyl reached it, it swung open, showing them against a background as bright as though they were painted on yellow canvas.

With his free arm he swept Cara into the doorway, wheeling quickly in front of her, and sent Mohammed Abbas lurching forward into the faces of the a.s.sailants led by Sayed Ayoub. Instantly, however, his arms were pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down stifled and garroted into insensibility.

Seeing the man overwhelmed and dragged through the door, Cara stood rigidly upright, white in the intensity of voiceless outrage, until the gigantic brute with one sightless eye and a greasy _tarboosh_ reached out his grimy hand and seized her. Then she sickened at the profaning shock of his touch, and fell unconscious.

A few moments later the "English Jackal" stood nonchalantly looking down at the bound figure of the former King lying on the floor, shoulders propped against the wall, head wrapped in a richly embroidered shawl from Persia. Lamps had been kindled. The head wrappings had already been somewhat loosened and Karyl was stirring with the indication of returning consciousness.

"Oh, d.a.m.n it!" remarked Martin in disgust. "He doesn't need to be both trussed up and gagged, you know. He's quite safe. Take off the head cloths."

He stuffed tobacco into his blunt bull-dog pipe as he supervised the undoing of the smothering fabric and complacently looked at his prisoner.

Freed from the bandage, and drinking in again reviving breaths, Karyl awoke to the sense of his surroundings. His eyes at once swept the place for Cara, but he saw only the closed door of the room where she was detained.

Martin looked down and as their eyes met he casually nodded.