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Roy Glashan's Library
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Adventure, September 1914, with "Foul of the Czar"
WESTER was blowing savage seas against the coast of Palestine, and the steamers, trading up and down beam-on to it made heavy weather. Half of the time the Themistokles whirled her one propeller in the air; most of the other time it chug-chug-chugged in surface spume. Progress was slow, and comfort a minus quantity; safety had not been charged for.
So there were only three passengers who did not suffer on the ship's account. One of them—the Princess Karageorgovich—was too interested; Andry MacDougal was too hard-bitten; and the third—Dick Anthony—would scarcely have suffered just at that time on a red-hot grid. He would have chuckled, probably, if he had guessed that the course was pricked out in a bee-line for the shoals of death; and as it was, he behaved as a gentleman might be expected to in hell.
As a fugitive from justice—a Scottish gentleman of decent birth and nice distinctions—life held no very luring bait for him, and death, with a spice of accident, looked, smelled, and tasted good. For choice he would have picked a finish of the "Charge of Balaklava" type, but since that solace was denied him, the "Loss of the Birkenhead" held sympathetic memories and imitable joys. Drowning all-standing while the women got away would have been the decent end of a proud man, and the prospect of it did not seem so hopelessly improbable as the bow lurched off and on again in sticky, stinging spray, and the priming cylinders wheezed and grew weaker.
Thought of the possibility put new comfort into him. He began to look up and look about him. And since the after, first-class, part of the ship was very small, he could not help but see the woman—who, of course, would get away to safety while he drowned chin-high on a sinking deck!
So far as observation went just then, there was only one woman; her maid was seasick, and invisible. The Princess Olga Karageorgovich was not of the type that surrenders to the weather; nor did her complexion need shelter. No older than Dick Anthony in years, she was serenely, sweetly, radiantly beautiful, and as serenely conscious of it; the shawl, the pillow, and the other odds and ends were trimmings, not necessities. The angle of her daintily-shod foot was not haphazard. And, since the wind would tousle her brown hair, she saw to it without fuss that her curves and motions harmonized.
Dick's eye—sadder just now than it had ever been—fired and grew savage as he watched her, imagining himself unwatched. He could not see the little mirror hidden in the deep folds of the shawl. His chin, which had been sulking much too low, rose higher and looked braver. The sorrow that was his, squeezed out by the knowledge that his eye was on his enemy, began to be succeeded by another feeling more appropriate to an Anthony of Arran.
He had not the least notion how royal he looked—how much like what a man should look in armor.
IT was Andry, and for the second time in history, who drew a cord unwittingly and loosed the dogs of war. Bowing to the fact that Scottish lungs—two hundred nine-and-forty pounds, nine ounces, stripped to the buff—six feet five of bone and brawn—will not fit comfortably into a two-berth cabin six by four, and Dago-clean, Andry dug his bagpipes from a box beneath the bunk and struggled forward. They were his one possession that yet linked him personally with a world he had given up for Dick's sake, and as he went he sheltered them carefully beneath his jacket.
He sought inspiration, that he might inspire his master, and he sat a while in thought. Before long, as thoughts will come to a man quite different from what he seeks, the recollection came of how a Jew in Glasgow had gotten the better of him once in a bargain over a suit of reach-me-downs. And here, on the starboard bow, was Palestine!
His red ire kindled at the notion; and from where the duller gray of wind-snapped boiler-suits flouted a dark, wet sky—a-squat on a catted anchor, and oblivious of everything but what he was and did—Andry made Highland music. He treated the Jews ashore to a musical summary of what he thought of them, and he prayed that they might have ears and sense enough to retranslate the noise, and spunk enough to be resentful. Bagpipes were invented, and are made and played, by men with leather lungs and most deliberate minds; so, if the Jews could but have heard him, they might have guessed at the dishonor that was theirs.
Somebody else did hear. A few stray notes blew back along the deck to where the Princess Olga nestled in a steamer-chair. The thunder of the sea, the scream of gulls, the sobbing-sucking-wheezing-pounding of the engine-room, the shriek of wind through the standing rigging, were all in harmony; but the chanter's defiant notes, piercing occasionally through the medley, made inharmony and set her teeth on edge. She writhed each time the bagpipe music reached her.
And it is possible to be an outlaw and bear malice, yet remain a gentleman. It is more than possible to hail from Arran, and have powers of observation. One can be Scots, and have pity on the weaker sex. With his tawny hair blown into jungle by the wet, salt wind, Dick Anthony leaned forward and asked a question. Wind snatched the words, but not its meaning.
"I can't hear," she smiled. And as plain as writing on a wall she meant "Come closer."
So Dick drew nearer, wondering why Fate made him share a fifty-foot-long deck with his female enemy. Were the Powers sleeping? It wasn't decent, or so it seemed to him.
"Do the pipes get on your nerves?" he asked.
"On s'y habitue."
The shrug was inimitable, and her smile was of the kind that alters dynasties. Napoleon dallied at Warsaw once for something of the kind; and nothing more betrays Dick's difference from certain other men of destiny than his behavior then. He owed her every single item in his sickening total of misfortune, and her interference with him had been gratuitous and impudent; for her own ends she had turned his honor into shame. But he did not choose that she must grow used to bagpipe music, or go without her meed of mere civility.
He was a human man, and he looked her for an ungrudged minute in the eye, giving her all the admiration she could claim—and that was a prodigious quantity; from such a man as Dick it was inestimable; it made her delirious. Then he turned on his heel and left her. She read the strong, free manliness in his movement as a signaler reads semaphores; he intended to adjust her minor comforts, since she would suffer otherwise, and then forget her, her doings, and even his contempt for her! It was fine; but it was dangerous. Her lip-line hardened as he went.
Even as he struggled forward, leaning into the wind with dirty scupper-slush aslide between his feet and his arms outspread to grasp things, he looked different from other men—more dignified and less self-conscious. She left her seat and clung to a rail to watch him, knowing well that he would have laughed at her had he known it.
"Give them here, Andry!" he ordered; and the giant gave up his pipes with an expression of obedient resentment. From the safe seclusion of the bridge the Captain sighed his gratitude that Dick, and not he, had been called on to interfere.
"There's a lady aft who doesn't like pipe music. I'll put these in the bag with mine."
"A leddy?"
"The Princess."
"Man—Mr. Dicky, sir—I hae ma doots she's no' a Princess at a'—just a wumman, an' verra dangerous! Have a care, Mr. Dicky! A mon ye may dr-rive a dir-rk into, or heave into the sea, or cr-rush; but if ye cr-rush a wumman—leasti-ways her kind—'tis to y'r ain undoin'! I've had expedience, an' ye may learn from mine. There was a lassie once in Glasgie—a wee bit lassie, not so big as yon—"
But Dick was in no mood for reminiscences. He struggled aft again and left Andry gazing out to sea like some great freckled figurehead, with red hairs outstanding on its arms like the spines on a gooseberry. Andry had forgotten Jews now; he was measuring Scots judgment with a rule and line on his master and the Princess and the past. By evening he had a sermon pickled by, with references to Robbie Burns and Holy Writ all sandwiched in the proper places. He was ready and willing to improve the first occasion.
Dick packed away the bagpipes and avoided the Princess all afternoon; it was easy enough, for though the deck was small the sea was too rough for promenading; he sat on one side and she on the other of the little after-deckhouse. He avoided her again at dinner-time by going without food, depending on Andry, who did not believe in missing meals, to watch points for him without further definite instructions. Andry sat in the farthest corner of the small saloon, keeping both eyes on her and eating awfully the while, and he was still eating when she went up on deck again: it did not occur to him to hurry first up the narrow companion and warn Dick of her coming.
FATE helped out the next move certainly, for only Fate could have made any one screw a hideous full-length mirror at the head of the companion. The Princess ran into Dick at a moment when there was no room to step aside. And she knew better this time than to try to win by smiling.
"Thank you very much for stopping the music," she said simply; and she waited where she was, because just then the deck was too unsteady.
"Not at all," said Dick uncomfortably.
The ship gave a terrific lurch. A lesser artist would have let herself be lurched into him. She clung to a hand-rail with both hands, and he was forced in common manliness to offer her an arm. Nor could he escape the ordinary civility of helping her to her chair, and he tucked the rugs around her, wondering that her eyes should blaze so in the dark, and all unconscious of the blazing of his own.
"Thank you, Mr. Anthony," she said quietly. And as he started to leave her she repeated, "Mr. Anthony!"
He had to stoop to listen, for the engines were arguing with a rising sea.
"Are we enemies?" she asked. She spoke calmly, without coquetry, as if she sought information.
"Yes," he said simply, and she laughed straight up at him deliciously, delighted.
Andry chose that moment to pass by, his huge legs braced against the ship's movement, and a hand to his mouth; it was not possible to hear him cough, but the attitude was eloquent. Dick made up his mind then that Andry was a man-servant and not a dry-nurse; he decided that instant not to walk away, and the Princess Olga Karageorgovich read both decision and its reason.
"Then, my enemy, this is my flag of truce!"
She produced a white handkerchief—priceless, lace-edged, ridiculously tiny. Dick pulled out his immense one, laughing too; and his laugh, as usual, calmed his own temper as well as other people's: it was ugly, unmusical, full of unfathomable strength and strong good-nature.
"Now that both flags are flying, will you please sit here beside me and discuss matters? Or, would your man perhaps not like it?"
Dick went in search of a camp-stool. He set it in a corner close to her, where he could watch her face.
"Won't you sit more forward, where I can see you, too?"
"No," he said quietly; and she laughed again, like a little girl who has found something altogether new to play with.
Without knowing it, she was in luck's way as regarded opening negotiations. She would have laughed at his ideals, for her own were personal, supposing that she had any. Most of all she would have laughed at his respect for the Anthony motto, "Agree with thine adversary quickly." Yet, if she had known it, it was his belief in the family motto as something to live up to that had made the conversation possible.
Translated by Dick, it was identical with Nelson's flag-spelled battle-signal, "Engage the enemy more closely!" From his peculiar standpoint, the one way to agree was forward, and the one spot face to face. He conceded only that it was always good to listen patiently, and make quite sure his case was just; but even at that, one's enemy was the one to listen to, and that again was a close-quarter business. So he sat and listened, in strong, non-committal silence.
"Do you admit my right to be compassionate?" she asked him. Had he admitted it or denied it she would have scored at the first assault, but he said nothing. She had to begin again.
"I am sorry for you, Mr. Anthony. You and your man between you killed nearly a dozen men in Alexandria. You are an outlaw. How will you escape?"
But Dick was there to listen, and he could do that better than most men. He did not speak.
"I suppose you are afraid to tell me?"
Her eyes laughed expectantly as she stared into the blackness overside and waited for an answer. But Dick was drawing quiet amusement as he read her face, and it was she who had to resume the burden of assault. He answered nothing.
She looked at him once sidewise, and then summoned all her skill and personality, all her acumen, to a new attempt. Her every line and feature showed to best advantage silhouetted in the night, and every motion as she turned to meet his eyes was calculated to bewitch.
He could see that her eyes were violet, and languorous (when she chose to have them so). And she saw that her first note of his as lion's eyes was altogether wrong: there was nothing of the cat-like in them; they had too much courage, too little savagery, and too much intelligence. They looked so straight into hers that she was at a loss for words, until she remembered that unless she spoke first he would not speak at all.
"It was my fault," she said then. "I should have asked you first. But who, in a world full of wild improbabilities, would dream of a man like you, a confessed malcontent, poor, proud, and at a loose end, refusing the offer of a kingdom! Only a Don Quixote could behave so unexpectedly—confess it! Admit you were unreasonable, Mr. Anthony!"
He admitted nothing. "I was free of the world when I first saw you," he answered. "And I never invited you to interfere."
SHE switched her angle of attack with a suddenness that would have bewildered many men, and was intended to bewilder Dick. She aimed to reach personal ground, where she would have most strength and skill, and he least.
"So. You blame me for your own outlawry. But, how much less did you do to me, Mr. Anthony? I too am an outlaw, and of whose making?"
"Your own," said Dick.
"Did you give me time or chance to change my plans? Did you consider me? I—I chose you to be a king; that surely was a compliment. All Egypt waited for nothing but the order to rise and—"
"And overthrow by treachery the Government of a King, in one of whose regiments I am an officer," he intercepted.
He stated facts. She was there to juggle with them, not play into his hand.
"You blame me," she insisted, "but you gave me neither time nor chance to make different arrangements. Instead of refusing soberly and treating my disclosures to you as confidences "
"They were uninvited."
"—You fought. You broke up everything. You fled, and you left me no course but flight!"
"I knew nothing about your plans, and I cared less," said Dick. "I care nothing now. If you want to know what I think of you, I'll remind you that I heard you order that riffraff gang of conspirators to murder me."
"Do you suppose I would have let them kill you?"
"Yes."
"Do you really suppose I would have let them?"
The look she wasted on him had ruined more than one pawn in the international game, but Dick was a king-piece; she did not have in her the metal that could strike an answering spark from him.
"I'm sure," he answered quietly.
So again she changed her angle of attack. It was part of her credo that men whose price was high could nevertheless be bought, or blackmailed, or coaxed, or trapped, or shamed. She wanted Dick. He was conscious of an almost physical change of guard to meet her altered tactics.
"Then, believe it, Mr. Anthony! Perhaps you are right. Perhaps, in the heat of that minute and that misery, I would have had you killed. Disappointment like that breeds passion. But that was then, Mr. Anthony, and this is here and now. May I not repent? Listen! I am a Russian. My paymaster is Russia, I am answerable to Russia only, and I was working then for Russia. Russia's plan is to advance—advance—advance!"
"Behind the skirts of—er—ladies?"
She checked, and bit her lip, then took her talents by the head and tried again.
"Imagine yourself in my position, Mr. Anthony. Try. I offered you a kingdom, you remember—a kingdom and Russia's backing."
Dick made no answer, but she was aware that every sense he had was on the exquisite qui vive. It was like attacking a trained swordsman in the dark, with only a dagger for a weapon.
"For some quixotic reason that I don't profess to understand—perhaps patriotism, so-called, or jingoism; who knows?—you refused the offer at less than a moment's notice, and offered instant fight. You seized me most ungallantly, ripped my veil, betrayed my identity to men from whom it was a secret, upset the plans of three years that had cost millions, balked Russia's plans in Persia, which depend solely now on England's army being too occupied to interfere; and made Egypt and all British territory too hot for me and for yourself—all in one mad minute! And you complain because I called on them to kill you in the heat of that mad minute!"
"I did not hear myself complain," said Dick.
"You forget that you made your escape in my carriage, leaving me 'in the soup,' as your idiom is! It was only by the most extraordinary luck that I contrived to reach my hotel in time and catch this steamer with my maid and luggage. Now I, too, am an outlaw! I, too, am a fugitive from what you choose to call justice! Are you imagining yourself in my position, Mr. Anthony? Are you trying to?"
"No."
"In my position—when you reached Russia —as I shall reach Russia — you would—no longer—be a fugitive—from justice!"
"No?" said Dick; and she heard him catch his breath. She suspected shrewdly that she had touched a train that would lead to a magazine.
"You are a fugitive." She sat bolt upright, and told off the points with a cautioning forefinger. "You dare not set foot on British territory, and the wireless waves are surely out against you everywhere. You are in danger wherever you disembark. You are lost. You are done for. You are damned, Mr. Anthony!"
He did not answer her. When his antagonist appeared to hold the stronger hand he nearly always waited. She misunderstood his silence.
"I myself heard you describe yourself as a rebel to a high official in the club at Cairo. It meant little then, perhaps, but it will be remembered against you now! By this time a flashlight photo of you, standing with sword aloft in the midst of known criminals, is in the hands of the police. You slew men in a brawl. You ran. You stand convicted by circumstantial evidence—you, an officer in the British army, as I have heard you claim. What do you propose to do? Where will you go?"
"That is my business, and not yours," said Dick.
"No? Not mine? You forget. Consider my position and my business a moment. I am a woman, Mr. Anthony. I trapped a man, or was instrumental in trapping him. I saw him—oh, Mr. Anthony!—I saw him fight his way out of the trap where any other living man I ever met would have quailed, would have been overwhelmed! For the first time in all my life, Mr. Anthony, I saw a really brave man, a truly brave man—a man whose courage I could honor. I lost sight of him, believing I had ruined him. And I travel with him on the same ship by the merest accident!"
Dick listened, but said nothing.
"Mr. Anthony! In my position, were I you, would you not try to save that man? Remember, when I reach Russia I will no longer be a fugitive. Russia protects me, and whom else I name! Were you in my shoes—had you brought about my ruin— would not you help me?"
The wind howled, and the little steamer writhed and creaked. From the wheezy engine-room there came the sob of overloaded valves and the racket of strained, machinery. Sea, sky, and ship had songs to sing, but Dick said nothing.
"In my shoes, would you not ask forgiveness, and try to make amends?"
Not a word said Dick. The blackness behind him throbbed, as if Night herself were spell-bound, but he sat on his camp-stool still, unmoved.
"I am offering you, Mr. Anthony, the protection of the Russian Government—the hospitality of Russia. I have power to offer it."
"And I decline with thanks."
A sigh seemed to pour out from the deep, dead black behind him; but that might have been the overloaded engines.
"Listen, imbecile! It means exactly this: From the moment you set foot in Russia you are free! I will name you to the lieutenant-governor of a province, and he will accord you his protection. There are no conditions, no terms. Will you not accept?"
"No, thanks," said Dick; and he arose to offer her his arm.
She knew enough to know when she had failed; and she was far too wise to make failure irretrievable with further argument. She took his arm, and let him lead her to the head of the companion.
"My offer stands," she smiled over her shoulder as she left him.
"So does my refusal," answered Dick; and he strode out on to the dark deck again, to be met instantly by Andry—a big, black ghost emerging out of blackness, and peering in his face.
"If I catch you listening again, my man," said Dick, "I'll kick you overboard; d'you hear? You sigh like a boiler bursting! Mind your own business; d'you understand?"
"Aye. I mind. But, Mr. Dicky, sir—ye're daft—ye're fey—deementit; man, yon's an opportunity! Her plan's a gude ane, an'—an' the lassie's head o'er heels in love wi' ye—a fule cud see it! Man—Mr. Dicky—ye shud ha' clappit baith ar-r-rms 'roond her an'—"
"Good-night, Andry!"
"But, Mr. Dicky "
"Andry!"
"Sir?"
"Help yourself, if you want her help or Russia's. For me, I'll see her and Russia damned in hell before I'll ask or accept a favor!"
"Listen to him! Weel! Aweel, Mr. Dicky, I'm y'r man!"
"So I understand. Good-night, Andry."
"Gude-nicht, sir."
THE sea died down, but the night was comfortless, for the Levant can be rawer-wet than seas with milder names. Dick went below at midnight, to brace himself in a swaying berth and fight with a hatred of the world that he knew was unworthy of him. He was feeling mean and hopeless for the first time in his life. But it takes time to grow used to outlawry, when a man is bred and self-trained Dicky's way.
He knew he would recover, for only cowards at heart and mean men, who are down and under by the logic of their own misdeeds, doubt eventual outcomes. He, who had drawn an Andry to him through a raging sea by merely being Dick, was not built to be gloomy overlong.
Too indifferent at first to undress, he lay with his clothes on, watching cockroaches hunt on the cabin floor, and listening to Andry advertising sleep, five cabins down the starboard corridor. Humor returned soon, and Dick laughed at the protests of a Levantine; first one by one in seven languages, and then in all seven together blasphemously mixed, he was trying to make the enormous man in the berth above him cease snoring.
But the berth was five inches too short by any reckoning, and Andry's six-feet-five were packed in like a panorama, face upward; he could not have helped snoring, even had he understood the flow of words. Vaguely he dreamed that the man below was saying Asiatic prayers; but he had said his own long-worded, Calvinistic ones aloud before he got in bed, so no heathen incantations could disturb him. His "auld Scots mither" had brought him up in the belief that prayer could blast unrighteousness, so he even dreamed pityingly, for he had a charitable heart concealed within that grim exterior.
Night was awful with the Levantine's yells, before the actual crash came and the night split open at the birth of ruin. He and Andry leaped from their bunks the same instant, and Andry landed last, on top. Thinking of Dick, and of how to reach Dick soon enough and be of use, he remained on top while he reached for his boots and jacket. With dour mistrust of foreigners, he had slept in his shirt and breeks, and needed only boots to be a "real mon."
One instant the underpowered, creaking ship had slugged amid beam-on seas. Then the bridge babeled suddenly through megaphones. Somebody yelled "C-H-R-I-S-T!" with fear-rasped lungs, and the engine-room bell rang mad, mistaken messages. The engines tried to go astern. The decks were a sudden battleground, a-drum with hurrying feet, and the siren hooted until the vision arose of a monster with terror-widened eyes staring into chaos.
And then the shock came—a thousand-ton-weight blow, with no answering ring at all, but a shudder, and the sickening, yielding feel and sound of steel plates bending inward. Then the lights went out.
The ship bucked, and sat down. The rolling altered to a writhing movement, with a jerk at either end and a slowly growing list to port. Andry left his cabin like a whirlwind, but with his boots on, and with a fistful of the Levantine in either hand.
He hove the protesting merchant up the companion steps, and paid no attention to the other's yells for more guidance, but felt his way back, cabin-door by door, to where Dick thundered on the panels. The strain of the shock and list had jammed the door tight. In a moment Andry's feet were against the nearest bulkhead, and he grunted as his shoulders took the strain. The door creaked once, and then went in, frame and all, as if a typhoon struck it; the door and Dick collapsed in the cabin corner.
"Ar-r-re ye dressed?" demanded Andry. "Ar-r-re y'r boots on?"
"Yes. Get off me! Man, you weigh a ton!"
"Is the bag packed? Aye; I have it an' the claymore, here; I have 'em baith!"
"Get off me, man!"
"Ar-r-re ye hur-r-rt, Mr. Dicky?"
"Come on!" answered Dick; and all that Andry saw then was a black shadow, which he raced after in the blackness, trying to catch up. Dick went for the companion as he had charged around the scrum in the old days, the best three-quarter-back in Britain; he reached the deck as if shot out of the bowels of the night by springs, and he had the situation conned before Andry had overtaken him. And Andry was no sluggard, for his size and weight.
The steam of two stricken ships rip-roared to heaven, as they lurched bow-on, locked in a death-grip, already by the head. There was a glow above the funnels, and a lantern flickered here and there; but darkness hid most of it. Screams told the story—fear-frenzied yells of men, stentorian orders roared at a fallen dam, and the dead, dread weight of flowing, thousand-minded terror, out of all control, blind, tangible. They had struck a pilgrim ship, bound Mecca-ward.
Already over the stove-in bow Turks, Kurds, Albanians, and every sort and breed of fanatic that makes that pilgrimage swarmed in a savage rush for boats. The Greek Captain and an English mate opened fire with their revolvers, aiming at the whites of human eyes. A Greek bo'sun charged forward gamely with a capstan-bar, and by the light of a revolver-flash Dick saw him fall backward, with a thrown knife in his throat.
Four of the little liner's boats were overside already, crowded full. Frantic men from both ships, packed in already much too tight to be of use, were trying to shove off, but the waves drove them back again against the side and more men dropped into them in fifties. Dick saw one boat go to pieces and another swamp in the thirty seconds while he watched. Then he began to search the decks for something, and Andry followed close, not quite sure what the something was.
SUDDENLY Dick turned and gripped Andry, as his way was when there was time to be emphatic. Andry stooped, for roaring steam, revolver-shots, hoarse shouts, the thundering tide of feet, yells to two Gods in a dozen languages, and the pounding overside blended in pandemonium; a man could scarcely hear himself.
"The women!" yelled Dick. "They're below yet!"
"Aye. They'll droon."
"Leave the bag. Come on!"
But Andry pulled a wry face, and stayed to hide the bag and sword where he could find them. The next thing he saw was matches being struck at the foot of the companion, sheltered in the hollow of a hand against the air that rushed upward. Two seconds later he cannoned into Dick, taking ten stairs at a time and missing his footing at the bottom.
"Did I hur-r-rt ye?"
"No."
"Man, ye must hurry! Ye'll be trappit in the dark! Can ye no' hear the water gugglin' up?"
But Dick was gone again, swift-footed down the listing passageway. He had heard screams, in Russian, then in French, muffled by an intervening door.
"Au secours! A moi! A nous! Ouvrez! Venez! Ouvrez! La porte est—"
He and Andry charged into the swaying blackness through a living tide of rats. They trod on dozens of them. Some sprang on them, to be flung off with an oath and crushed. A match that Dick struck was reflected instantly in a river of glittering eyes. In the second while they paused to get foot-purchase rats swarmed over them, and Andry crushed one squealing thing to death between his shoulder and the woodwork. Then wood creaked and splintered, and a door burst inward.
At once some one pressed the button of an electric torch, and its all but exhausted rays shone golden on Dick's hair.
"I knew you would come for me," smiled the Princess.
"We'll have to hurry up," said Dick.
The light of her torch shone past him into Andry's carved, grim face, and the maid recognized him as the thin rays paled and died. There was reassurance in his huge, deep-breathing presence, whatever she might think of his attractiveness; her fear began to go and her below-stairs officiousness to come.
"Ugh!" she exclaimed. "Le monstre! Take thiss portmanteau! Thiss one, imbécile! Yess, that one! Pick it up!" Then she screamed—long, shrilly, with the ghastly note of a coward facing death. The Princess screamed an echo to her.
Rats had come in by dozens through the burst-in door. Dick struck his last match but one, as the maid collapsed in helpless hysteria; its light showed the Princess fighting royally with the fear that passes understanding, rigid, deathly white, but brave enough to be ashamed of having screamed. Then the ship shuddered its whole length long, and settled forward two feet, as the crushed bows parted company.
"Have ye another match?" asked Andry.
So Dick struck his last one, for the torch had given out.
"Which trunk said she? Yon big ane? Ay, for she's a wumman, an' they're a' alike! Ready, sir! Lead on!"
The match went out. The blackness throbbed with human questioning and deep-breathed decision. Dick had to feel for the Princess, and at the first touch she sank into his arms.
"Ah, Richard Oh, mon roi!" she murmured. "I am safe—I know that I am safe!"
So Dick gathered her up and ran for it, stumbling over rats, and Andry followed him, like a battery at the flog, with a woman under one arm and a trunk in the other that weighed impudence knew how much. He laid both on the deck beside Dick just as somebody on the bridge lit a bunch of oily waste; a smoky flame danced over howling hell and showed the glint of knives, where maniacs from the other ship fought for the last left lifeboat. He rushed off at once, then, for the sword and bag, and brought them back triumphantly.
Then the mate spied them, in the light of his weird torch.
"There's a small boat aft," he shouted. "Take it."
"Come with us!" bellowed Dick, remembering, as he spoke, a dingey of a thing that hung in davits abaft the after wheel.
"We've another one up here," roared the mate. "Hurry, man! She's about going by the head!"
Standing was difficult already, and the slope of the deck was growing greater. Dick rushed astern, and Andry followed. In a minute, being sailors both of them, they had the little boat swung clear and Andry hove the luggage in. Their one chance was to get away before the mob knew that they had a chance and charged to take it from them; they worked as only brave men dare when a ship is sinking—fast, but with infinite attention to small detail. Within a minute the maid lay in the bottom of the dingey. And then the worst happened:
"Mr. Dicky, quick, sir! They've seen us! They're comin' hot-foot!"
In the split, skinned, demi-semi-fraction of the nick of time Dick grabbed a capstan-bar from its rack by the after wheel, and an instant later it struck skull-meat with a ton-weight smack. A knife, meant for Dick, went slivering through the night. Andry hove the Princess off her feet and swung her in beside her maid, and as he dropped her he snatched an oar. There followed then—night-hidden, guess-lunging, hell-ghastly, quicker than the Mersey shambles—a fight that beggared their rush for the moonlight, back in Alexandria.
One instant they were back-to-the-rail, close pressed on a tilted deck grown slippery with blood. The next, with a cheer, and a "Scotland forever" yell from Andry, they had driven the mad swarm downhill. Dick's awful wooden bar beating like the flail of Judgment Day and Andry's oar split by the weight of blows. But back they came again—uphill, railward; for the swarm was being fed. A boat was a boat, and fear was fear that night.
More than a dozen times, ten feet each time, they drove the mob backward, blanched and wilting; but again and again darkness and the sheer dead weight of savagery won. They could not hold their gain, and Dick was running blood, although Andry did not know it. Suddenly, just as they had charged, Dick yelled to Andry to jump in and lower away the boat.
"Na, na! I'll no leave ye!"
"Get in and lower away!" commanded Dick, charging again like a bear at bay, to cover the retreat.
"I'll no leave ye!" And Andry's oar beat like a forester's green branch, when the low fires crackle.
So Dick spared a swing with that dreadful flail of his, and struck for the sake of discipline.
"Get in and lower away!" he ordered, as the big man staggered back.
"Ou-aye!"
ANDRY blubbered, then, while he obeyed. Scots custom, courage, inclination, bade him die beside his master or over his master's body. Saving two female enemies, while Dick died fighting, made no appeal to him. But with arms outspread he paid away both falls, and the boat took water fairly underneath the stern.
"Pull clear!" roared Dick; and Andry heard the awful thrashing of the capstan-bar—too close to the rail, too desperately quick to be reassuring. But he obeyed again. His fisherman's lore made nothing of the dying waves, although the little dingey danced like a cork on them; he was on his element, and he had eyes to spare; he watched the stern he was leaving, miserably, while he pulled away from it.
When he stopped at last to lean on his oars and listen, the Princess bent forward, laying a hand on his enormous one.
"Leave us here, and swim back to him!" she urged.
"Jezebel!" he hissed. "I hae ma orders!"
So, since she was Olga Karageorgovich, she gathered that he could not swim and wished to save his face. Her agile brain was searching, searching for another plan, when a splash came that put new, sudden heart in Andry. The two stout oars bent into semicircles, as his great back-muscles cracked and the dingey spun. The little boat leaped on the wave-tops as the flying fishes scoot from the dolphins. Under the overhanging stern he stopped and plunged his arms in; in an instant Dick's dripping head was hauled clear of the gunwale; in an instant more he lay on the bottom of the boat, bruised and bleeding, but alive. Then Andry took to his oars again like a man possessed, grinning, his lungs heaving, and the distance between them and the downward-sucking hell lengthened by streaks.
He stopped when he saw a distant shadow lift—that was a steamer's stern. He leaned on his oars then, and heard the deadened thunderclap of bursting boilers. After that there were no lights—not even lanterns—and no sounds. He paddled back, to find the mate and Captain if he might, but by morning he had found no trace of any other boat; the ships had sucked down everything.
"Aye!" he said, as dawn broke. "Bathe awa'!" The Princess was bathing Dick's head with a handkerchief dipped overside, and a movement had decided Andry that the end was at least not yet. "Mak' the maist o' y'r opportunity! Tak' the utmost care o' him, for if he dees I'll upset the boat an' droon us a'! But, dinna hope he'll kiss ye when he wakes—na, na! He said he'd see ye, an' Roosia too, in hell afore he'd tak' one favor; aye, an' he's a mannie o' his word, is Mr. Dicky! Bathe awa'!"
"Cannibale!" hissed the maid. "Monstre!" Her seasickness and hysteria, both, had left her as the waves died down. The Princess did not answer; she was following the line of Andry's eyes that peered at something in the lifting, early light.
"I'm wonderin' what they gie a mon to eat on yon steamer?" he said unexcitedly; then his eyes sought Dick again. He had seen Dick's eyes open—look around once—and close.
"Is he takkin' time to think?" he wondered. "Or—na, na, but aye! 'Twill be that! Aye, that'll be the answer! The puir laddie got an awfu' sair crack o' the skull—ou-aye!"
He was glum—silent—ruminant for an hour, while a dirty steamer overtook them. He watched Dick's face until the Nizhni-Novgorod—bound for the Dardanelles and Black Sea ports—lost way beside them, and lowered a Jacob's-ladder down her grimy side.
Somebody called out in Russian from the bridge, and the Princess answered; she seemed a Princess again at sight of her native ensign and sound of her native tongue. Disarrayed and tired, she stood up in the little boat and told them who she was, authority and pleasure radiating from her. But Andry, dour as an old hound, gripped an oar tighter. He was suspicious of foreign languages, and of dirty sailors on dirtier ships, who leaned over bulwarks without speaking.
They seemed to own no companion-ladder. After a lot of talk with the Princess they took the cover off a hatch and rigged it in slings.
"Lay Mr. Anthony on that!" the Princess ordered, as they lowered it overside from an outswung derrick. She seemed to think obedience would be infectious.
"Leddies first!" said Andry; and his lips closed tight.
"I will sit on it beside him."
"Wull ye!" He was standing with enormous legs astride to balance things, and one great hairy arm was laid on the swaying sling. "Wad ye think me fule enough to trust him—my Mr. Dicky—on a plank wi' ye, or on a deck wi' ye—an' me doon here wi' anither wumman on ma han's? Up awa' wi' baith o' ye!"
He made an all-comprising, all-contemptuous gesture with his arm, and the Princess recognized inflexibility. The anger in her eye glowed fair, full warning of reprisals, but Andry grinned at her, and grinned again as he lifted the shuddering maid. The vixen kicked him for his pains; so he kissed her, laughing aloud at her screams of indignation. What cared he? The worst, he argued, that the Princess could do to them would be to steam away and leave them; and were there no other ships? He was hungry, and beginning to be very thirsty, but he was not in the least afraid.
He was down on his knees by Dick before the sling was half way up the steamer's side.
"Ar-r-re ye awake, Mr. Dicky? Can ye hear?"
Dick smiled, and opened both his eyes.
"Then, 'tis what I feared! Listen—listen, laddie! Listen, sir! 'Twas a' verra fine to lay y'r head i' her lap, an' let her cuddle ye—I'd ha' done it masel', wi' half the opportunity—ou-aye, 'twas mebbe scrumptious, an' I dinna doot that ye enjoyed y'rsel'. But y'r puir head's been sair bangit, Mr. Dicky, an' y'r mem'ry's gane. Y're forgettin'. She's no' a frien' at a'—she's a verra weekid wumman, an' oor enemy! She's a bad ane. She's verra dangerous. Ye canna mak' love to her an' run awa', for she'll hang on like a bad smell to a piece o' meat. Mannie, she's i' love wi' ye—a fule cud see it—an' the de'il's ane wife 'ud be a better sweetheart for ye! Wull ye no listen?"
"Andry, you're an ass!" Dick was pale, and looked weak from bleeding, but his smile was like the sunshine.
"Ou-aye, I mind Balaam had an ass!"
"She had a great chance to grow intimate," laughed Dick; "but how much talking did we do? I heard you speak rudely, my man, but you don't know any better. I haven't even quarreled with her—yet!"
He sat up, and Andry sat down, to chew the cud of wonderment. Both of them watched critically then, as a boat was lowered from the Russian steamer's stern. It was a dingey, much like theirs, and two men could have managed it easily; but it held four. One sat in the bow with a boat-hook, and another in the stem, while two men rowed. They came alongside in silence, and Andry made haste to help them with the luggage; then he helped Dick to his feet, and was too busy for the moment being "verra careful" to notice what else might be going on. One of the Russians took Dick and helped him to the stern; then the Russian boat was full; there was no room for Andry, and he laid hold of the Russians' gunwale, that they might tow him along. It was simpler to be towed than to row himself.
HE yelled with rage when a Russian struck his wrist with an oar-end. He reached for an oar to strike back. It was then he discovered that the oars were gone, and realized that the Princess kept short reckonings. She had not forgotten that he called her "Jezebel!" She was out of sight, but not for one fragment of a second did Andry doubt her authorship.
But she had built a little too much on the supposition that the big man could not swim. He gave Dick no time to make a plan for him or shout him orders, but plunged with a bellow like a bull seal taking water. He knew well enough what an oar could do, so he let the dingey go its way. He had seen what the Russians and the Princess had forgotten, and Dick laughed as he watched him swim for-the Jacob's-ladder, with the sword between his teeth.
Too late, the Princess looked over-side to gloat at him. Too late she screamed an order. A mate and two seamen hauled at the ladder, but they hauled up Andry. They let go suddenly, but the ladder fell alone; Andry's toes and iron fingers had found purchase half way up the side. The giant sprang between them before they could think of seizing things to hit him with, and it was only the sight of Dick being helped out of the dingey on to the steamer's poop that prevented him from making bloody use of the claymore. He would have used it on the Princess first! But Dick was safe.
"Well done, my man!" smiled the Princess Olga Karageorgovich, stepping toward him. That smile had melted Andry once, in the hall of a hotel in Egypt. Now he glowered at her.
"Were you afraid they would not row back for you?" she laughed.
"An' there was naethin' left o' Jezebel excep' her han's an' feet!" he snarled, shaking his head, though not in answer to her question. She did not quite appreciate the nicety of his remark, for she had not his Calvinistic intimacy with the Bible; but she realized that her attempt to cover up had failed. Instantly her brain sought out new subtleties.
She had counted on a Dick who was unconscious and an Andry who could not swim—on a Dick who could be lied to about Andry, and perhaps—a little later—taught to love. But even as she and Andry faced each other, with an oath of deathless enmity on Andry's lips, Dick walked unsupported off the poop. He looked weak; he was bandaged here and there with fragments of her linen; but he could still walk like a king and look like one; and though the whole of her she-tiger's heart went out to him that instant, she recalled that diplomacy, and nothing less, could win the game she played. She made no advances—yet.
The steamer's shaft was turning. Andry's eyes were on the little boat that had saved their lives, and that floated now alone—deserted.
"Wull they leave yon dingey?" he grumbled. " 'Tis a sinfu' waste!"
Dick's eye followed his; and then the Princess touched Dick on the shoulder.
"Look!"
Her word was cut short by a rifle-crack. Flame spurted from the bridge-end, and a tiny puff of smoke. A smack! retorted from the sea, and it seemed as if the dingey shuddered. Everybody on the ship was watching—the man who held the rifle with pride, and the rest with rapt attention. Slowly, then faster, the little dingey filled. A wave flopped in above the gunwale. Then she lurched as her mother ship had done, and went whence ships do not return to carry tales.
"Good-by evidence!" the Princess laughed. "There goes the only link between—US—and Alexandria. Monsieur le proscrit—monsieur le bandit—permit me to congratulate you!"
In a word she made Dick her accomplice—placed him under obligation, and offered him the one way out.
Hatless, he saluted her—but ironically as the devil. Then he took one step backward, turned, and walked away. Andry turned on a scornful heel without troubling to salute, and followed up the deck.
She ignored Andry—was not conscious of him. But as her violet eyes watched Dick they lit strangely, and her lips seemed not so kissable, perhaps, as sometimes was the case.
"Eh bien, Monsieur Anthony of Arran!" she nodded after him. "Monsieur le bandit—Monsieur le superbe—qui vivra verra!"
Then she climbed to the bridge and talked more than a little with the Captain.
ENGLAND is not the only land, by many a baker's dozen, that produces gentlemen adventurers. There are restless men, of means and breeding, who hail, say, from East of Suez, from the South of Cape Horn, or from North of the Himalayas, who crave to take a hand in the game of happenings, and have the necessary pluck. Just such a man was Usbeg Ali Khan, the Afghan.
If his features were the least bit Jewish, and his skin light olive, he was none the less strikingly handsome on that account. His black beard set off the uniform, without which no Afghan gentleman would think his life worth while; and he had a different uniform, in a different color-scheme, for each conceivable occasion.
No man could look at him and doubt his claim to bravery; no woman could see him once and doubt his gallantry; and he was ready to prove either instantly. But he was courteous always, carrying politeness to the verge of ostentation, after the manner of his countrymen.
Beyond doubt he could be cruel, for he came of a race that is weaned amid cruel mountains; his lip, the curl of his nostril, and the corner of his eye betrayed as much. But he was a man whom seven other men had cared to follow to the end—wherever that might prove to be—from Afghanistan, through Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, to Egypt. Such followers are good; but he whom they follow must be better.
Like many another Afghan, his capital was invested in the neighborhood of eight per cent, with Bombay and Calcutta merchants. Nobody but he knew the total amount of interest he drew; but he drew on certain banks whenever he saw fit, and he could afford to clothe and horse his seven men as became a man of fortune, even if he paid them next to no wages.
One by one he had drawn blank the countries that he journeyed through. Persia had given promise, but nothing more; he had wearied of his search for a real patriot, with a real cause worth fighting for. Had he found such a man, Persia could have owned Usbeg Ali Khan from that minute, sword, following, and bank-account, for he would have dearly loved to ride a tilt at Russia. But Persia held nothing that he could find except lies and purchasable selfishness, so in the end he bought new horses for his men and journeyed on.
It was news of a Pan-Islam movement taking root in Egypt that brought him to Alexandria and Cairo. There cautious overtures on his part had been met by almost frantic offers; and, true to his type—with more than a grain of wisdom running through his recklessness, and with a fund of shrewd suspicion underlying all—he waited before deciding, no more committed than he needed be in order to keep in touch.
He found himself one of many thousand men, all sitting on the fence—all waiting for a leader. Alone of them, he touched none of Russia's money; not that he was scrupulous in such matters, but he chose not to commit himself to that extent. For a while, when the first excitement seized him, he had thought of offering himself as leader; but second and third thoughts prevailed, and he settled down to be encouraging and awfully polite, but to wait and watch guardedly. He could well afford to wait, and Cairo was not without attractions.
He amazed the British officers by his proficiency at polo, but forgot to tell them that he had played against their best in India, at Mount Abu and elsewhere. Once, for new amusement's sake, he engaged the British winner of the All-Egypt Cup for Swordsmanship, and beat him to his knees. On a subsequent occasion he got into trouble in a native village, by practising at pigeons with a pair of automatic pistols. His shooting was exquisitely nice, but the fellaheen have prejudices, and defended them with chunks of rock. He was lucky to escape from that mess without killing anybody, and even as things were it was only his connection with the "Movement" that saved him. The "Movement" owned a native judge, most of the newspapers, and the police of that district.
On the whole he enjoyed Egypt. But he grew weary of its peace, and he was ready for a move on Morocco, where they told him a rebellion was simmering beneath French rule. He had sold his horses and was inquiring about passage, when the word went around that "She" had a leader ready. So he hurried by train to Alexandria.
Observant, as his countrymen all are, he admired Dick Anthony and Dick's giant attendant in the street. He even swaggered more himself, for having set eyes on such quiet dignity. Some time ago he had decided in his own mind that the Princess must be "She" who paid, and issued orders; but he did not connect her and Dick Anthony, and Andry, and the past and future and himself, until that night of nights when Dick and Andry burst into the crowded room like Resolution loosed, and he and a hundred more conspirators knew that instant that they had the man, if only he would lead and they dared follow.
When Dick swung the quivering blade above his head in proof of ownership, it had been Usbeg Ali Khan who shouted, "Zindabad Anthony Shah!" He had led the answering shout, "Long live King Anthony!" Last to leave the room at "Her" bidding, he had stood nearest to the door. He had seen Dick rip "Her" veil down and disclose the Princess Olga Karageorgovich. At her instant cry of "Kill him!'" he had blocked the door a moment, for it suited him to see how this wonder of a man might quit himself, with half a chance. He had watched the fight spell-bound, while Andry backed Dick up with a broken chair, and Dick hewed—smashed—burst a road to the outer night and freedom. Almost—so nearly that he wondered what had held him—he had taken Dick and Andry's part.
Above all, though, he had heard the story of the sword, that a king named Alexander had presented to an Anthony. There is only one Alexander to the Afghans, or ever will be—but one magnificent Iskander, Nor was there ever such a sword, that he had seen, with such a beryl in the hilt. True, this Iskander was said to be of Scotland, wherever that might be; but did not the Great Iskander conquer all the earth? Scotland must be on the earth. The tale alone had been enough to fire his veins and his imagination; but the tale, and the sword, and the man, and the fight he made, considered all together—Allah! The mind of Usbeg Ali Khan was made up for better or for worse that night.
WITHIN five minutes he had sent his seven men hurrying through byways, with orders to scout fast, and bring word later. Within an hour they had tracked Dick down, and had brought him the name of the steamer, even, on which Dick waited for the dawn. Within five minutes of receiving that information, Usbeg Ali Khan was the only one of all that hesitating swarm who knew exactly what to do.
Some stayed and argued until the police arrested them. Some scattered wildly. Some lay low. Usbeg Ali hurried straight to the highest official he could find and laid bare the whole story as he knew it, naming names and stating facts. He knew his Englishmen. He treated the whole thing as a colossal joke, roaring with laughter as he recalled fresh details. He had sworn no vows; he owed no fealty to anybody; he broke no confidences, then. And he produced credentials; he laid bare his private record. He made the biggest man in Egypt listen to him, and believe him word for word.
And where rebellions, like epidemics, are inclined to blaze up between night and morning, Governments show speed first and deliberation afterward. A council met, two hours before dawn, and two of the men wore overcoats above pajamas. They considered, with amazing speed and detail, a host of things that ordinary men might overlook; and, being English, they had to be very serious or laugh. Usbeg Ali Khan had set the keynote for them.
Russia, they recalled, and England were supposed to be at peace. Moreover, Parliament was sitting, and the labor members would ask inconvenient questions. The Princess could not be arrested without scandal, but she would be sure to escape without scandal, if allowed to. Dick Anthony was known to be on board a ship. A battalion of Highlanders was due at dawn, and the battalion to be relieved had not marched out yet; therefore there were troops enough to handle any situation. No harm had been done, beyond the killing of a few known criminals in an obvious drunken brawl. Action might mean outbreaks everywhere. Inaction would mean that for months to come thousands of timid conspirators would tremble in their shoes, expecting hourly vengeance.
So they decided to do what the plotters had accomplished—exactly nothing. Only, men were sent to scare the Princess into flight, and other men to see that Dick Anthony did not return ashore. From Usbeg Ali Khan they were content to exact a promise of silence until he had left Egypt, and that, once having left, he would never, never, never come back again.
He swore—on the Koran and the Kaiber knife—exactly what they required of him, without hesitation, without a murmur, and in absolute good faith—but with a bright, quick twinkle in his eye.
Then he rushed in a hired cab to the different steamship-offices. The Themistokles, he soon discovered, was bound for Black Sea ports, with various calls between. He was able to find out, too, that Dick Anthony had booked for Trebizond on the Southern Black Sea shore, and his dark eyes glittered as he thought of the caravan route that winds away over the mountains at the back of Trebizond and penetrates the really interesting, lawless parts of Asia. He smelled adventure. He detected plan in his hero's wanderings!
There was another steamer bound for Trebizond, without any intervening stop, that would leave in two days' time and get there one day later than the Themistokles. He booked by it, for himself and seven men.
So, all unaware of the fate of the Themistokles,he disembarked one afternoon into a bumboat expecting to find Dick ashore there ahead of him. There are consulates at Trebizond, and banks, and agencies. He was able to cash drafts there, and ask questions of men who were well informed. So he learned the news—that the little Themistokles was what Lloyds call a "total loss." Dick Anthony and the Princess Olga Karageorgovich were named as having been among the passengers, and missing.
So, being an Afghan and a gentleman, he prayed to Allah for an hour, and then consoled himself with the reflection that he, at least, was alive, and free to seek adventure wherever Allah had seen fit to plant it. There was a caravan expecting to start over the mountains within a week, and as a fighting man with a fighting following he was something more than welcome.
He had about made up his mind to start with it, when a Russian steamer dropped anchor in the infamous bad roadstead, and rolled in the heavy Black Sea swell. There came bagpipe-music from her deck, and that occurred to him as strange; he knew bagpipe-music, for he had often heard the Highlanders and the Gurkhas; he even knew the real thing from the imitation, and his sensations were mixed as he recognized the lilt and swing of British battle-tunes.
Then a bumboat caught his eye. She was going off, to bring away an overdue consignment of tin-plate from the Nizhni-Novgorod. He made a quick bargain, and took a trip by her, gazing through field-glasses at the Russian steamer's decks, and commenting on what he saw through them with deep, strange-sounding Himalayan oaths that made the boatmen stare and grin.
"God only knows," he growled, "and time will disclose His plans. May I be there!"
THE Princess Olga Karageorgovich appraised Dick at his real value. It was her business to read men and use them, and she had seen Destiny shine out of his extraordinary eyes. She had felt the disturbing thrill that genius excites in genius. She knew.
It was for herself she wanted him. She-tiger, that could hate, and wait, and spring from ambush, she could love as cruelly. The means to her end were any that came handy, just as Russia's are; and as surely as she knew herself for the velvet glove of Russia's unseen hand, she knew too that Russia was as cruel as herself.
A Princess of Russia who elects to be "political" has restless intrigue to build on and remorseless pressure for a spur. She must justify her choice, or else the land of the Czar engulfs her, and she is not. There are marriages, and end-of-the-world estates in Russia that are drearier than death in a forgotten graveyard, and the Czar's word is final; he gives in marriage when, and to whom, he will.
So she was married to no insufferable Muscovite; but she knew that if she were ever to have Dick for her own it was for Russia she must use him—with Russia's aid that she must win him—in Russia, by Russia's leave, in the Czar's good time that she must mature her plan. For the present she must steer Dick Anthony to Russia—and that seemed easy, seeing he had booked for Trebizond. He was now on the way to Trebizond; she took care that a mate should tell him as much in broken English, and she gathered—observing closely over the bridge rail—that the information delighted him, and put him off his guard. Savagery is akin to love in certain natures. Dick was sitting on a coil of rope, with his head between his hands—sore from a dozen knife-cuts, dizzy with headache. Some people would not have needed to love him, but could have pitied him out of hand. Andry stood beside him, swearing to himself and watching preparations being made for the Princess Olga's comfort.
He saw the Captain's cabin made over for her use. He saw the first mate's cabin swept and washed and given to her maid. Double awnings were rigged in the starboard corner of the bridge, and a canvas weather-guard was lashed around it. He saw a deck-chair furbished up, and saw the Princess take her seat on it, almost out of sight in her screened-off place of vantage. And all the while dry blood was caking black on Dick's rough bandages.
But not even Andry, who had formed his opinion of the Princess, and like an honest Scotsman held it, divined her full intention. Not even he, who could believe no good of her henceforth for evermore, amen, could have persuaded himself that she meant to take advantage of Dick's pitiful condition, due to his gallant fight for her, and try to subjugate him by sheer cruelty, since he would not yield otherwise.
Each effort he had made for her at Dick's behest had hurt like an iron yoke, but the iron would have gone into his soul had he realized the full extent of what he did. Saving that great trunkful of clothes was the king-pin of her luck, and nearly the final touch to the ruin of his and Dick's. He and Dick were dripping; what clothes they wore were crumpled and awry; Dick wore bloody bandages; they looked like tramps, and were likely to look worse within a day or two, for there was little in the bag besides bagpipes and some underclothes. She had a maid, and a cabin, and a mirror, and a trunk that had been packed with discrimination.
The Captain and his crew might have questioned mere flotsam disarrayed, and they were at no pains to disguise their indifference for Dick and Andry. They might have adopted a tentatively hostile attitude toward the Princess even, after the first flush of her authority had worn away. But she stepped out of the cabin a Highness, dressed for the part, with lace and jewelry, Parisian lingerie, and a hat that was a dream of flowers. Century-trained serfdom bowed its head.
She made Dick no more overtures of friendship, nor did she pretend any friendship for him. The details of what she told the Captain never transpired, but she had the field to herself, and a wonderful imagination in addition to a sound, true basis for romance; she said enough to bring the Tartar out through the Russian's porous hide, and throughout the ensuing game the Captain took full responsibility without even realizing that he was being made a tool. The details of the indignity he heaped on Dick were his invention; the motive-power behind them was the Princess Olga.
She was on the bridge, half-hidden in her corner, when Dick essayed to brace himself and climb the bridge companion.
"Can I have quarters for myself and my man, captain?" he asked, with his foot yet on the last step up but one. "I'm under the weather a bit, and I'd like to lie down."
He tried his mother-tongue first, as a Scotsman nearly always will; and the Captain answered him in English.
"Get forrard!" he swore; and Dick—never hasty with conclusions—chose to believe that they had both misunderstood.
"Get forrard! Get—off—my—bridge!"
The voice and the words were ripe with all the insolence servility knows how to use. The effort to be roughly autocratic in an alien tongue added a touch of clumsy coarseness to the words that rounded the situation out and made it exquisitely loathly. Dick glanced at the Princess. She had heard every word of it, and she was smiling—looking straight in front of her. As plainly as the writing on a wall, her smile said once again: "Come nearer. Appeal to me!"
Dick's hand went into his pocket. "You can name your own price," he said; and one would have thought he was speaking to an equal, for his voice and attitude were almost casual. But there was some one on that ship, now, more powerful than the name of money.
"Son of a —! You hear me say, 'Get forrard'?" That seemed to exhaust his English; he broke into French, and the second person singular he used was the polish on a jewel of speech whose facets scintillated.
He had said the unspeakable. He had offered gratuitous, blackguardly insolence, in the presence of a woman. His due, his place, then, was on his back with his front teeth crowding in his gullet. But Dick looked over to the stern at the Russian ensign—back straight at the Princess, and laughed. It was a catching laugh, without a note of music in it, but ringing none the less so true that one could almost fit words to it. The Princess knew that he knew it was war between them—knew instantly that he knew she wanted him in irons. She frowned to hide a smile, and he read through the frown. The Captain read the frown and misunderstood, or else overrated it.
THE rifle that had sunk the dingey stood in a corner of the wheel-house, loaded. In a second he had snatched it, and he held it very close to Dick, thrusting the stock out and his own chin at the same time, and patting the rifle till the sling-swivels jangled.
"See here! You see this?"
"Yes," said Dick; and he seized the rifle—twisted it with a sudden wrench that was irresistible—and spun it overboard. He looked the Captain straight in the eye a minute, apparently unmoved himself; the man was speechless. From him he looked at the Princess—as he might have looked, for instance, at a sea-gull, uncritically and dispassionately—then turned and went. As he descended the companion he did not even deign to guard his back; he seemed to know there was not enough manhood on the bridge to dare strike him from behind!
"Bring the bag, Andry!" he said quietly. "They've offered us the fo'castle. We'll take it."
He could hear up above behind him a little, beautiful, silvery laugh on an ascending scale; but if the Princess could have seen the smile in his eyes—if she had had virtue enough to let her read the freedom camped between his shoulder-blades—she might have spared herself the disappointment that was all any one could get from trying to conquer him. His was such strength of character that he did not even care to conquer her. He was a free man—unchainable—free of the earth and sea; not that he knew it at the moment, for he imagined there were warrants out for him. The Princess thought him already in the meshes of her net. It was Andry—the Scots barbarian—"le monstre"—"le cannibale"—who knew the truth about Dick, deep in his loyal heart, and who followed him up-deck to the fo'castle with as good will as if they had been assigned to first-class quarters on a liner. What suited Dick was good enough for him at all stages of the game. If Dick bled, he bled. He would rather be eaten than see Dick hungry. If Dick smiled, Andry could be satisfied in hell.
Andry pulled the fo'castle door open, and a rancid mixed stench of onions, garlic, and unclean men crept out to greet them. The first whiff drew a hurricane of Scots profanity from Andry, for he could swear like a border trooper when he was not saying prayers; but Dick's spirits rose at once; they always did when there was need.
There was no division down the center, as there usually is in steamship fo'castles; firemen and sailors shared a dim, disgusting den together. A dozen men sat up to glower as Dick strode in, and here and there a half-furtive laugh betrayed the mental atmosphere to be about as friendly as the material one. Andry gave back glower for glower, and a cluck of Scots contempt for each snigger that he heard, but Dick walked straight on, up the middle, noticing nobody, but studying strategy.
There was a trap-door over the fore-peak, and a big ring in the floor to lift it by. Beyond the trap-door, crosswise of the ship and above a locker, there were two bunks, both occupied.
"We'll take those two bunks," said Dick; and Andry said, "Aye, sir!"
Dick stood aside, and looked around at his hosts, bunk by bunk. Andry laid the bag down, and passed him the canvas-covered sword; Dick held it just underneath the hilt, gathering in the slack of the canvas, so that it looked like what it was—a weapon. The Russians in the two bunks seemed to be asleep.
"Get oot, or I'll pull ye oot!" said Andry, suddenly enough and loudly enough to wake the dead; and the rapidity with which the man in the lower bunk produced a knife was proof enough that he had been awake and watching. Surely he did not understand what Andry said. Andry made a quick feint at him, and the man slashed at his wrist.
Then Andry pounced like a sparrow-hawk descending on a hedge-row. There was a swoop, two yells—and the knife went clattering against the bulwark at the farther end; after it, in quick succession—thud! thud! thud!—went a Russian, then another one, a chest, blankets, belongings; things that an Anglo-Saxon sailor would call ditty-boxes, onions, tobacco—everything, in fact, that the Russian sailors owned.
"Keep the matches!" ordered Dick, as Andry came to the end of foraging.
"Aye; an' the soap!"
Dick's hand went in his pocket, and he tossed a silver coin into the middle of the medley, as payment for the loot; and though he did not expect instant friendliness, the speed of what followed took him by surprise. The ring of the falling coin had hardly died away before men leaped to the floor and rushed him. Intuition, more than reason, told him that robbery had been hinted at by the afterguard; the Princess had desired him to be robbed; she wanted him helpless. Reason, as well as intuition, warned the would-be thieves that they had better pause half way and think.
"Back to your bunks!" commanded Dick; and, though his words were foreign to them, the note in his voice was the same as the note of the shimmering sword-blade that licked out of its canvas bag and seemed to point straight—exactly—for the nose-bone between each separate pair of eyes!
"Back to your bunks!" he ordered again, once; and one by one the men lost heart until there were only four left facing him; then all those four lost heart together.
Dick laughed aloud. His wits were as quick as hers, and he told himself that if the Princess wanted him so much within her power, she surely would not have him killed just yet a while; the danger of death by her orders had passed with the rage of her disillusionment in Alexandria, until it should come again eventually with the understanding that he would not yield to her—ever—on any terms.
Hunger was his chief problem now; his own stomach had begun to gnaw, and he could imagine how Andry's huge appetite was clamoring. But even at that he did not relish the thought of eating in that filthy fo'castle, in an atmosphere some of which he would be forced to swallow first; nor did he mean to fight for food out of the "mess-kid" when it came, with the crew all around him like a ravening wolf-pack. He meant to eat, and sleep, and bathe himself somewhere where a human man might be at ease, and his eyes lit as he saw step one of his strategic moves develop to fruition.
One of the men who had been thrown out of his bunk crawled to the door, slipped out, and ran aft with his complaint to the Captain already stuttering from his lips.
"Lift that trap-door, Andry," he ordered.
Andry'S back-muscles bent into a bow of steel. He grunted, and his muscles cracked, but the trap-door lifted; the watch below lay still and gasped as four men's work was done by one. Slowly the giant lifted the trapdoor clear and set it on its end, disclosing darkness and a deep-sea smell.
"Take those," said Dick; and Andry's huge fist shut on a box of matches.
"Open the bag. Take out the pipes—yes, yours and mine, both. Give me mine. Now swing yourself down there and hunt for anything inflammable. They keep their spare waste in the fore-peak as a rule—you ought to find some down there. Search in the dark—don't strike a match until I tell you."
Obediently as a child, and trusting as a child—for he had seen the light in Dick's eyes, and he understood it—Andry swung his weight on to his hands and turned a circle. A moment he hung still by his eight fingers. Then he dropped, and his voice called, "It's no' a great drop, Mr. Dicky, sir."
"Is there a ladder there?" asked Dick.
"Aye. I've ma han' on it."
"Set it up, and then come get your pipes."
Soon Andry appeared head and shoulders through the opening, and gathered in his bagpipes as a mother takes a child. Dick saw the second evicted Russian make his escape through the fo'castle door.
"Hurry up and look for something that'll burn. What's all that smell down there?"
Ships coming from Jamaica, say, are as sure to carry a cask of rum somewhere on board as a stray dog is to carry fleas. Other ships, registering from the different Black Sea ports, are just as likely to have crude petroleum. They carry it much as a man may carry trinkets in his clothes, because of the association and without exactly knowing why. It was not in the least wonderful that the first thing Andry ran his nose into in the gloom of the fore-peak was a barrel of petroleum. He sniffed at it, smelled again, tasted the drippings with a tentative forefinger, and announced his discovery with glee.
"Anything else?" called Dick.
"Waste, sir—half a bale o' it—opened up."
"Can you get the plug out of the barrel?"
There was silence for a minute, while Andry sought for the plug, and found it.
"Aye, it's oot. It's runnin' oot."
"Let it run. Dip a pound or two of waste in it."
"Aye."
"Can you make a torch out of that?"
Andry hunted swiftly, his great arms outstretched in the darkness, and his fingers analyzing everything he touched.
"Aye," he called presently, "I've found some wire."
"Good. Let the petroleum run. Come up here, and stand on the ladder with your torch."
Once more Andry's head appeared above the level of the deck. He was grinning hugely this time, for the Scots are not slow-witted; he knew exactly at whose mercy the whole ship, crew and cargo were, for there was no more than a wooden bulkhead between him and the hold.
"Have you the matches safe?"
"Aye, in ma pooch."
"Tune up, then!"
Together—one on the deck, and the other's head appearing just above the deck—they filled the leather bags of their instruments with wind, while the Russians watched and wondered, Dick's head ached as if it would split, but he laid the strange sword down at his feet and gave his whole attention to the effort. Together, like the battle-hum of a hundred million hornets, their drones began, and the startled Russian sailors sat upright in astonishment.
"'Scots Wha Hae'!" said Dick abruptly; and their chanters—both together—lifted to the tune.
Scotland weeps to that tune—weeps and swears—goes wild to it. Of all that Robbie Burns wrote, and of all the Highland melodies, there is none that kindles fire so readily in strong men's hearts or that has sent more kilted regiments a-thunder up the hill to glory. It breathes defiance, deviltry, and disregard; it flings the gauntlet into England's teeth, and the rest of the world's with England's. Over and over again, a hundred times, it has wakened a drowsy battle-line. Along with the "Wearin' o' the Green" and another treasonable tune or two, it has spurred and whipped and called and led the junior partners of the Union until a height was scaled, or a ditch was filled with dead—and another victory passed to the count of England on the books.
The fo'castle of the grimy Nizhni-Novgorod seemed to reverberate and swell. The bunks were emptied one by one, as the battle-music stirred in the lees of Muskovy, and even the Russian seamen laughed, swung their hips to it, and shuffled with their big flat feet. Louder and louder skirled the pipes, fiercer, more defiant, till the whole ship was awake like a hive of bees, and the decks clattered as men raced over them to see.
THE door was pulled open suddenly, and the Captain looked in over the heads of six men; he was standing on a bucket at the rear of them. At a sign from Dick the music ceased with a suddenness that seemed to puncture ear-drums.
"Come in, Captain," smiled Dick; "nobody's going to hurt you!"
The Captain seemed to hesitate. It was perfectly evident to Dick that he was holding a revolver and did not want it seen.
"Light your torch, Andryl" he directed.
Andry struck a match. The torch flared up smokily. There was an instant rush for the door by all hands, and the Captain was borne backward along the deck by the stampede. He fought against it, though; he seemed to be finding courage somewhere, and he made a fine show of authority as he swaggered back, straight in through the door.
"Take a seat, Captain!" suggested Dick.
"What in hell is this?" he flustered, once more exhausting nearly all his command of English in one explosive sentence.
"A torch," smiled Dick. "Un flambeau, Captain. We've discovered some petroleum below here. We've pulled the plug out, and everything below is wet with it—smell it, can't you, from where you are? Thought so."
"Got-damn! Say that again!"
Dick translated into French for him. It did not suit his purpose to admit that he knew any Russian; the bitter truth, that he had failed for an examination by studying live Russian instead of dead Sanskrit, was sufficient in itself, and he did not care to revive the memory—until the memory were useful.
"You see, Captain, the ship's at our mercy." He was speaking very slowly, in very evenly spaced French.. "The point is, what's her safety worth to you? We came aboard expecting civil treatment, whereas you behaved like a brute beast—which of course you are—and treated us like dogs, which we are not by a long way. We propose, now, to travel as first-class passengers, or else to burn the ship!"
"There is no license to carry passengers. I may not," vowed the Captain.
"That's your end of the rope, my man. You're going to do it, or down goes this torch into the petroleum! I'm making terms, not you. Your job is to agree to 'em—and quickly, for we're hungry. Go back and fetch pen and ink, paper, and a witness!"
The Captain swore. He blustered. He threatened law at the first port. But at each new argument the torch went lower into the fore-peak. At last Andry disappeared, to pour new oil on his waste, and then the Captain capitulated; he thought that his hour and his ship's had come.
He brought a table and wrote out a manuscript, in French, at Dick's dictation; and Dick's details were specific. A mate was sent for to witness the signature, and the Captain had to read the whole document aloud to him before Dick would be satisfied.
An engineer's cabin was to be made over to them at once. They were to have their meals brought to them there, and to have the undisturbed use of it. They were to have a meal at once, and after that three meals a day—plenteous—and the best that the ship could provide, direct from the Captain's table. They had the run of the whole deck, but the poop was reserved, as first-class deck, for their especial use and benefit; and they agreed on their part not to trespass on the bridge.
Finally—though this was not stated in the written agreement—he, Dick, was to be given a revolver for their protection and to enable him to enforce the contract afterward. The Captain put up his greatest fight over this verbal clause; but he had to give way—Andry was reckless, and shook sparks down into the fore-peak. He gave up the one he carried, in the end—tossed it to Dick, unloaded, and threw the cartridges after it.
At the end of the document was a written statement that for the accommodation bargained for the charge would be ten pounds English. For that sum, of which the Captain thereby acknowledged the receipt, they were to be carried to Trebizond or to any other Black Sea port to which Dick and Andry might elect to travel. Dick pulled out a ten-pound note from the wallet stitched to a belt beneath his shirt, and paid him.
The Captain seemed relieved and satisfied. After all, ten pounds was a hundred rubles—better than a burned ship at the bottom of the sea, and a ticket endorsed accordingly. He seemed quite sure that, had he not agreed, the threat Dick made would have been carried out to the letter. Dick was a convincing player of a strong hand, when he held it.
"I think we shall part company at Trebizond," said Dick. "That will relieve you, Captain, of the necessity for explaining away the no-passenger-license business. We won't talk. You must do the rest of the muzzling yourself!"
They walked together down the deck, stared at stupidly by a crew who wondered where the leg-irons were. And such was Dick's charm when he chose to exert it that in spite of warfare not five minutes gone the Captain struggled already with an inclination to take his arm and support him to the cabin. It was the first time Dick had had a chance to talk to him civilly. He spoke, now, for perhaps two minutes, as fellow man to man in the open air; in that two minutes he undid all that the Princess had accomplished, and left the Captain wondering why in the name of Russia he had not treated this good fellow like an emperor from the first.
"In the name of God, of where are you a king?" he asked him; and Dick gave another of those strange, strong, unmusical laughs that always seemed to make men raise their heads and look him in the eye.
A HUNDRED times at the very least, up through the Sea of Marmora, on through the Dardanelles, into the Black Sea, Dick thought of demanding to be set ashore at the nearest port—and then thought better of it. It was a devil of a situation—horned and hot. Independence was the salt of life to him; he was self-contained, self-controlled, generous; the worst part of the experience was the sense of being interfered with.
He did not think of vengeance on her once. He could have forgotten his annoyance even, if he could but have lost sight of her. Being truly a gentleman, he loathed the thought of pitting his strength of mind or muscle against a weaker thing, and asked no more than to be allowed to take and keep his own line, in his chosen time and way. So he chafed, for there were bigger things in store for him than he would have believed, and Dame Fortune has a practical, rough way of teaching men who are men enough to butt their heads into the pricks and learn.
He wanted no Princess of Muskovy or any other land to mark out limits for him; but there she was, smiling, sunning herself on the bridge in a Paris hat—considering, he knew well, plans for a new attempt, and blissful meanwhile in the knowledge that she was drawing each hour nearer to her native land—he farther away from his.
If he had swallowed his stiff pride and gone home to face inquiry, as he thought more than once of doing, he would have saved himself a world of trouble; but Dame Fortune, when she means a man to win, lures him or drives him with any weapon to her hand, pride, fear and foolishness by no means excluded. He had a place in the world that a lesser man could never fill. It was waiting for him; so pride pricked him away from home.
Weaned on, educated in, dependent for her living on conspiracy, the Princess knew how to pick the weak place in a strong man's armor. She knew his weakness to consist in lack of plan. She knew that no plan of his own choosing would include herself, and that, once arrived at, he would see it through to an end or perish. She wanted him alive, not dead. Therefore her plan was to prevent him from making any until she could thrust one, ready-made, under his nose and make him mistake it for his own.
Her love for Dick, which was all of her life by this time, was not a "grand passion" of the sort that blinds to everything except passion. She loved him with the whole of her ferocious, feline heart, but because he was far more than good-looking; in fact, that tawny hair of his and those strange eyes obeyed no rules that artist ever recognized. She loved him because he was better than herself, infinitely nobler, because he was Dick Anthony, tawny and strong and clean—prouder than she, and resolute. She planned just now to undermine his resolution by making him change plans as quickly as he made them!
Without committing the belief to actual shape in her mind, she had come to believe; that she and Fate were sister servants of the Russian Empire; it was nothing to astonish her when Fate, arm-in-arm with Usbeg Ali Khan, who was a fatalist by birth and creed, conviction, necessity and inclination, produced an unexpected card and played it straight into her hand.
She was content to do nothing so long as Dick's aim was Trebizond, and Trebizond lay still ahead. But the Black Sea begins, these days, to be a Russian lake, and once they were in it, headed eastward, she began to work on the Captain to omit his call on the southern shore.
"Steam straight for Batumi" she urged him.
But Dick's strong personality had already too far undermined her influence. There was a consignment of tin-plate in the hold for Trebizond, and the Captain made that good enough excuse for firm insistence on his course. He quoted law. So she decided on a master stroke that would disarm Dick Anthony and leave him free apparently to go his own way, yet that would surely bring him to her goal.
"I have changed my mind," she told the Captain. "I, too, will leave the ship at Trebizond."
Her mind made up, she made no secret of her plan, but told the maid to drag the trunk out where Dick Anthony could see it, and to pack it in full view. Finally she bribed the steward to drop hints of her intention. Dick seemed indifferent to hints, so the steward told him outright, but he was not able to extract any return information to take back to the bridge. Dick's bag was locked and Andry had the key, but that was usual; there was no sign of any plan or of a change of plan.
Dick began to think that the end of interference was in sight; but, besides being golden-hearted and generous, he was young. He knew utterly nothing about women, and did not want to know. When they came in sight of battlemented Trebizond and the promontory that sticks out to catch the Black Sea silt, he was standing amidships, lost for a minute in amazement. The huge rocks and the age-old fortress perched on the summit of them struck a tender, appreciative chord in his memory. The Princess, coming softly down the bridge-companion, caught him unawares.
"Good-by, my enemy!" she smiled; and she held out a hand as Dick spun around to face her.
"Good-by!" There was humor—good-natured humor—in eye and voice and attitude. She sensed it instantly.
"I leave the ship here. I understand that you intend going ashore, but I don't expect we shall meet again—ever. I hope to get a lift on a gunboat to the Crimea. I'm sorry you won't let me be of service to you. I am glad I met you. Good-by, my enemy!"
She held out her hand, ungloved. She smiled, too. Her violet, velvet eyes looked a little moist, or so Dick thought. The disappointment in her voice brought to his mind the picture of a naughty little girl resigned to punishment. After all, who was he, Dick Anthony of Arran, gentleman, to judge a woman harshly—to bear a grudge against a woman? He could forgive—it was his privilege. He held out his hand instantly.
He was a man of men, and she a tigress among women; it was probably the sight of Andry that enabled her to draw her hand back and refrain from throwing both arms around him. Andry overshadowed his master from the rear, and was not looking pleased; dour and dry, his lips moved to the consonants of "Jezebel!" and his freckles twitched amid the wrinkles in a way that meant, "Han's off!"
"May we part friends?" she asked. "I mean to remember always that I owe my life to you and your servant." (Andry clucked dryly, like a hen that thinks of laying presently.) "I would like to remember you in your best mood; won't you do something characteristic, just to oblige me before I go? Won't you and your man get out your strange instruments and play a Scottish tune for me?" I have heard him play. I want to see you play—to carry it away in my memory."
Dick, too, was something of a sentimentalist. He had to admit it to himself sometimes, when his eye was wetter in one corner than it ought to be and there was neither dust nor wind to make excuse. He did not demur. It was a good excuse, too, for getting away from her. He and Andry went to their cabin, and two minutes later strode out together on the poop with that swing of the hips that a Scotsman keeps for bagpipe-music.
"Should Auld Acquaintance" was appropriate enough; it skirled across the water, very likely for the first time since the Highland regiments played it coming back from the Crimea. Dick's heart nearly burst inside him as the tune swelled, and he thought of his coming freedom from female interference; he played as he had never yet done, and between them they made melody enough to wake the dead. So a signalman on a near-by Russian gunboat came out of a day-dream—heard, looked, used his telescope—and understood.
Neither Dick nor Andry saw the Princess Olga's maid down on her knees by the bridge-rail on the port side, waving, waving, waving the same signal over and over again. But the gunboat lowered a motor-launch; and as the Nizhni-Novgorod dropped anchor half a mile out from the silted "harbor," the launch came alongside, flying a Russian ensign. Almost before the ship had lost her way a Russian naval officer was standing on the unwashed deck, talking earnestly to the Princess and making no attempt whatever to conceal the fact that Dick was the object of his conversation.
"Damn!" swore Dick. If he had to be arrested he would have preferred his own countrymen! Already a revulsion of feeling swept over him, and he regretted having shaken hands.
"I might have guessed she would betray me at the first chance!" he muttered.
But no arrest came yet. He watched them swing a derrick overside, saw the Princess, her maid, the trunk, and the officer all lowered into the boat, and saw the boat start off. He crossed, then, to the other side of the poop to watch its course, and he swore to and at himself again as he noticed that the Princess and the officer were both laughing.
"Laughing at me, no doubt!" he muttered.
Andry leaned on the other side, about amidships. He was interested in the bumboat coming out in the wake of a prehistoric tug, very much interested in a man in uniform who might or might not be a Turkish officer—light-olive-skinned, black-bearded, straight, who stood in the stern and peered through binoculars.
The bumboat came alongside, and the work began at once of lowering the tin-plate into it. The man in uniform came up the Jacob's-ladder slowly, like a landsman, and made amends for it by jumping the rail at the top as an active man might mount a restive horse.
He walked straight up to Andry and saluted him half ironically, smiling as an artist might to a master artist.
"I am from Alexandria!" he said in English. "I have come to offer my salaams to Mr. Anthony."
"Ye have, eh?"
"I am his friend. I have seven men in Trebizond who serve me. We all offer our salaams."
"Ye're his frien', ar-r-re ye? I ken y'r face weel. You an' I foucht on diff'rent sides a while ago, an' I'm his frien' surely. So, ane o' us twa's lying!"
"Present my compliments to him!" said the man in uniform, "and let me speak to him myself. Tell him I say I am his friend."
"Wait here, then!" commanded Andry, showing him a knotted, freckled fist. "Dinna move a foot till I come back!"
He hove himself up on to the poop and clutched the rail beside Dick on the other side of the ship.
"Mr. Dicky, ye ken that black-faced mon who led the cheerin' back in Alexandria—who called oot 'Sinbad,' or some such word, an' set t'ithers to yellin' for ye? Ye do? Ye remember him? Aweel, he's doon yonder an' wants to speak wi' ye."
Dick stepped across the poop and stared hard at the man who waited, then drew out of sight again.
"Is there no such thing as a lost scent—ever?" he asked. "So that's why they were laughing, eh? Pan-Islam movement, eh? Headquarters, I suppose, in Trebizond, Think they can drag me in here as easily as there! Tell the man I haven't a word to say to him, Andry!"
Andry obeyed. It was a task agreeable to himself, one that he knew he could perform properly.
"Gang awa'!" Dick heard him ordering; but the rest of Andry's monologue was interrupted by the Captain calling from the bridge in French, and one cannot listen to two different languages at once.
"If you're going ashore, the bumboat's going now, Mr. Anthony!" he called. "You'd better hurry!"
"I'm going on to Batumi with you!" answered Dick.
Ten minutes later Dick and the Princess stared at each other from the sterns of two different ships, and a third man swore as he stared in turn at each of them, through binoculars, from a bumboat loaded with tin-plate.
"Bismillah! Have I come thus far to fail?" he asked himself "Or may others, too, take steamer to Batumi—others and their servants? Allah! But he is a proud man, that Anthony!"
HE wireless apparatus on the gunboat crackled, and an argument went out that was borne on sparks enough to keep the Batumi operator on his mettle. No less than a lieutenant-governor was drawn into the discussion; his questions were curt, but the answers to them took twenty minutes each to send. Meanwhile the gunboat got her anchor up and steamed in a wide semicircle, making nearly two knots to the Nizhni-Novgorod's one. The gunboat was leading—out of sight—by the time that night fell.
So a procession steamed along—headed by the Princess—followed by Dick Anthony, who thought himself free at last—and brought up at a quite considerable distance in the rear by a third party of eight men on a coasting-steamer; they were swarthier than the other passengers, and differently dressed; they kept themselves very much aloof, talking only to each other and obeying without question one of their number who strode the deck restlessly and wore Eastern military garb.
It was a usual enough procession; there was nothing about it to excite comment on the Black Sea, where the West and the East are forever mingling, and nobody ever dreams of questioning the movements of a Russian gunboat. None of the parties to it knew how much history they would combine to make, even though one or two of them were innocent of peaceful motives.
Usbeg Ali Khan, for instance, was an optimist as well as a fatalist; he may have been dreaming of slit throats and the hewing of an empire. The Princess knew herself so well for a most important part of Russia's secret mechanism that she had ceased long ago to compare herself with other people or to think of any destiny unlinked with Russia's. Dick Anthony—much the most colossal figure on that stage, if he had known it—believed himself an ill-used gentleman, in search of peace and a place where he might forget and be forgotten. He felt very unimportant and very miserable.
At Batumi Dick gave the Captain his revolver back, with a laugh and a handshake, and drove straight to a shop where English ready-made clothes were on sale at most terrific prices. There he fitted out himself and Andry, so that they were at least presentable when they arrived at the hotel. A man in a blue suit made gestures to the hotel-keeper from behind Dick's back, and Andry made ready for reprisals; but Dick was permitted to register unquestioned—to sign himself shortly "Dick Anthony," and to write no more than "Scotland" in the second column of the page; he knew too little of Russia yet to wonder why the hotel-keeper did not demand his passport.
Later, after they had turned the hotel inside out and produced a bath for him, he left Andry behind and went off exploring in a cab; and though he was followed everywhere by a man in uniform in another cab, he was beginning to feel almost like the old Dick Anthony who did not care who watched him. When the other cab was stopped, and the man in uniform stepped out of it; when he climbed into Dick's own cab and invited him, very politely, to drive to the Bureau of Police, the sensation was like being plunged out of Summer into Winter.
He made no objection, of course, but his feelings as the driver changed direction are not to he imagined. Surely he regretted he had come beyond Trebizond Turkey-in-Asia, he told himself, would never have asked questions. As he followed his guide into the gloomy building he felt like a man walking to the scaffold. He might have felt less sad inside himself, and rather more really amused if he could have known what impression he produced; he was smiling, and his chin was high; given an ermine cloak and spurs he would have looked like a king going to his coronation.
To his amazement a very polite official presented him with a passport, ready made out to "Richard Anthony, Esquire, of Arran in Scotland—a gentleman of leisure, traveling for his own amusement, and accompanied by Andrew Macdougal, his servant." He was given a second passport as well, for Andry.
"How did you get the details?" wondered Dick.
The official smiled. "Systems," he said in French sententiously, "were devised for the convenience of gentlemen as well as for the inconvenience of rogues!" And Dick knew, from his voice and manner, that the system of police espionage had nothing in the world to do with it.
"Wireless!" he thought, and he made a new plan on the instant. He would solve the whole problem by returning home! This business of being hounded by police was not good enough!
"Thanks," he said, "but I sha'n't need this. I shall be leaving Russia by the first boat I can get passage on."
"Leaving for where?" asked the official, with a sudden change of voice. He was still polite, but the suavity was gone.
"For home," said Dick.
"I'm afraid not, Mr. Anthony! There is a charge against you. It must be investigated before you may leave Russia."
"Then what did you offer me a passport for?" demanded Dick.
"So that you might travel where you will, in Russia. On Russian soil you can be brought to account at any time for acts of yours committed on a Russian ship—piracy, for instance! There is no desire to inconvenience you more than necessary; but there is a—ah—a witness, whose deposition must be taken, who is not here. In the meantime you may go where you will in Russian territory."
"Is that witness in the Crimea?"
The official did not answer.
"Then you mean that I'm under arrest?"
"Since you elect to use that word."
DICK closed his lips and his chin assumed an angle that was far more eloquent than a thousand arguments. The official leaned forward conciliatingly.
"You overlook a few things, Mr. Anthony. Our attitude is very friendly—very considerate. We appreciate your position fully. We know what news of your arrest would mean to you, should it reach England. Our laws are not like yours; ours give us wide discretion in such matters, and we had hoped that you would have been cleared of this charge without even knowing of its existence. Hence the passports. Without them you can not travel about; with them you can amuse yourself where you will, while this investigation runs its course. You will understand that piracy is not a charge which can be lightly overlooked; however ridiculous, it must be investigated."
"Thanks," said Dick. "I'll wait at the hotel. I can't afford to travel about."
The official opened a drawer, drew out two cards, signed them, and passed them to Dick.
"Make use of these, Mr. Anthony."
"What are they?"
"Official passes on the main Transcaucasia Railway. Take a look at the Caspian and come back. Batumi is unhealthy."
Dick was prevailed on to accept the passes, for that did not imply the obligation to make use of them. He fully intended to return them unused, for he was thinking, now, only of racing back home to clear himself. The sudden switch from one plan to another was doing to him just what the Princess had intended. He drove back to his hotel in dreary dudgeon, too gloomy to observe that an Afghan gentleman was waiting for him on the steps.
"My name is Usbeg Ali Khan," said a voice. "Will you speak with me?" And Dick looked up into a pair of eyes that were as steady as his own.
The man was standing on the top step but two. Andry had pushed him off the top one, and was threatening further violence, but was restrained from it for the present by the owner of the hotel.
"I am listening," said Dick.
"Nay, sahib! I come offering a service; I demand your courtesy; I would speak where we can not be overheard!"
Dick hesitated. The man looked like a gentleman and stood like one; there was no ruffianly bravado about him, nor any sign of cringe. Service, at that minute, had a welcome sound. But Dick remembered him and where he had met him last.
"I have a servant," said Dick. "One is all I can afford." And Andry clucked on the step above with an air of having heard a final answer given.
"I have seven servants, sahib. We are eight."
"I haven't anything to offer you," said Dick, moving forward, and the Afghan, who was considered a nobleman beyond the Himalayas, had either to eat his pride or leave. He went with a courtly salute which Dick returned punctiliously; even Andry saluted him, for the Afghan looked, spoke, strode, and argued like a man.
"Pack the bag, Andry!" commanded Dick. "We've got to get away from these people or they'll give me no peace. I'll go and find out when the trains leave. We'll take a look at the Caspian and then come back."
So Dick took train to Baku after all, getting off to look at Tiflis on his way. But Tiflis was too civilized, with its tree-lined streets and ducal palace; Dick was becoming desperate—something like the Dick again who set his course for the open sea and fought with the fury of the whole Atlantic. He thought of taking the omnibus that plies over the mountains for Vladikavkaz, but that, too, looked too tame and too regulation-bound.He did not know that the finger of Destiny was beckoning him to be present at the birth of happenings; he knew only that the restlessness which had brought him away, from home was beginning to overcome the sense of being wronged. He was beginning again—and he did not know why—to care less what England and the clubs at home might think about him, and to care more for Dick Anthony's clean, clear-minded point of view. He got back into a train and journeyed farther eastward, chiefly because home was the other way and eastward there were open spaces—deserts, tablelands, that perhaps a man might gallop over into freedom.
So he and Andry came to Baku, and thought they had come to hell; for the light from a burning oil-well flared with a roar against a savage sky, outlined a ruined, battlemented township, shone on a silent, dreary waste of sea; and a din went up around them that was the voice of a dozen peoples and a dozen problems mixed in a Russian melting-pot. Dead fish, stale garbage, crude petroleum blended to make atmosphere. The traces of dead nations stood crumbling amid the hastily raised workshops of as many living ones. And something told Dick Anthony that this was the pushing-off place into worlds worth a strong man's while, where age-old chivalry was not yet dead, and a man might strike for what seemed good to him.
He forgave the Princess, whose interference sent him here; forgave his uncle, whose greed had been the severed leash that loosed him. As he stood staring at the Caspian he forgave Fate, who had seemed so cruel to him. Suddenly, and without knowing why, he knew himself for a free man, free to journey forward but never to retreat; free to be the man he sometimes dreamed himself, leading a million other men to a new, enormous freedom over the ruin of the ranks of them who blustered. God, how he hated bluster!
"What is it, Mr. Dicky, sir?" asked Andry.
"Nothing. Only—we're going on from here."
"Where to, sir?"
"Dunno, Andry. But we're going. I've got it in my bones."
"Ye ken weel I'll gang wi' ye to the end o' the world, Mr. Dicky, sir. Lead awa'! Lead on!"
Andry gripped the old claymore in its canvas bag, and shook both himself and it—as a hound shakes when he turns to sniff the wind. He, too, felt the sap of doings moving in his bones.
THERE, where the pipelines come together and the trains of oil-cars back down, screaming, to be filled—while a southeast hurricane played hell with the anchored shipping, and dyed the whole firmament dull red with the borrowed flame from a burning oil-well—the devil came and tempted Dick Anthony.
He had been in Baku days already, wandering about and wondering at the ebb and tide of West and East—of old and new, of raw, red Christian greed, and Islam, and idealism—not really caring where he wandered, so busy was he drinking in his first drafts of the Orient. Everywhere Andry followed, patient as Job but savagely distrustful. Nowadays—particularly since Dick's prophetic outburst—he did not even trust the locked bag behind, but lugged it everywhere, ready against all conceivable contingencies. Dick laughed at him, but Andry had his way; he, bag and sword were all Dick had except a sum of money, and Andry would have shepherded the money too, if Dick would have let him.
Dick stood, one evening, between two lines of oil-trains, watching to see how quickly they were filled; and a Persian in semi-Persian dress slipped underneath the couplings of two cars and spoke to him.
Andry closed in instantly, but a motion of Dick's hand sent him back again into the shadows.
"Who are you?" demanded Dick.
"I am from Muhammad Ali Mirza."
Even Dick, who knew no politics, knew the name of the exiled Shah of Persia, knew he was supposed to be living in Odessa, knew of the various attempts that he had made to recover his throne; and knew, as all the world knows, of the infamy the Russian Government has earned by "looking on."
"What about him?"
"His Highness sent for you. His Highness has an offer he would make you."
"Oh," said Dick, as noncommittally as though the man had quoted the price of a horse.
The man waited, and Dick looked at him from head to foot, and from foot to head again.
"I am not lying," said the messenger.
"Come along, Andry!" said Dick; and he made a sign to the man to lead the way.
Within ten minutes he and Andry stood in the dark courtyard of an old dismantled fortress. Two lanterns swung from the hands of men who looked like Cossacks, and threw a fitful light on about two dozen other men, some of them in Persian garb, who sheltered from the howling wind under one of the ruined walls.
"I am Muhammad Ali Mirza," said a voice; and Dick tried hard to see the man through the gloom, but he stood in the deepest shadow.
"I am Shah of Persia."
He spoke in French, though for the moment Dick did not stop to think what the language was. A world, and then another world of possibilities were streaking past his eyes in panorama. Then Dick answered him in Persian, speaking fluently and grammatically, so that some other men half-hidden in the shadows gasped.
"I know of you. I have heard more than a little of you. What do you want with me?"
"The use of that sword of yours," said the same voice, whose suaveness was so evidently forced and whose rasp so evidently real. The ex-Shah, too, spoke in Persian. Dick held out his hand, but Andry did not understand him; Dick had to take the sword by the middle. It had been in either his or Dick's possession ever since the night when they recovered it in Alexandria.
"My sword is my own!" said Dick, drawing it from the canvas cover. It was a wonderful old sword; even in the dark the shape of it seemed business-like, and the men in front drew back a half step. But eight men on the right closed in—they surged in—and one of them touched the sword-blade; he went down on one knee while he examined it. Then he looked up in Dick's eyes, and Dick recognized him—Usbeg Ali Khan!
"Are you in the service of the Princess Olga Karageorgovich?" demanded Dick in Persian.
"My sword is my own!" laughed the Afghan, standing straight; and Dick looked him in the eyes, by the light of a cheap oil-lantern, in the gloom of a storm-swept Caspian night—and liked him. Usbeg Ali and his seven took stand behind Dick then, and though Dick would have shown fight rather than let the men who faced him turn his rear, he had made up his mind in that second about Usbeg Ali Khan. The man had a dark skin—yes; but he was a gentleman. Andry was very restless and suspicious, turning the broad of his huge back to Dick and watching the eight Afghans as a tiger eyes his kill; but Dick looked straight ahead, and stood at ease.
"So, this is the pushing-off place, is it?" he was saying to himself.
Some other men might have been disposed to cringe a little in the presence even of exiled royalty. But Dick kept his hat on. He had doffed it once, when he was first addressed, and that was sufficient for all purposes. They had failed, yet, to lower his chin by a fraction of an inch, or to suggest to him the need for asserting his manhood either; his attitude was that of a man who is rather interested.
Whether the men in the dark beside the exiled Shah were Russian or Persian, they at least had studied men. They realized that Dick must be handled directly, and not indirectly—candidly, with no more lies admixed than were necessary for the saving of their souls. He was an idealist—any man could see that, even by lamplight—but his ideals were his own, not other men's. They saw that they had to make out a case, and a strong one, or they might as well talk to the raging Caspian as Dick.
So the ex-Shah—never, even in his dreams, more than a puppet of the Czar kept out of it, pacing up and down and letting himself be seen, but lending nothing more than moral weight to his discussion.
"LET me talk to him!" said a man in Persian uniform; but be spoke in Russian, and he pushed the other men aside with an authority that suggested the Cossack officer. Then he spoke to Dick in French, with enough Persian interlarded to create—perhaps—the impression of a Persian speaking French. He beckoned Dick close up to the wall, a little away from the rest, and began at the beginning—which surely was not Eastern, of the East. Nor was his knowledge of the situation limited to what a Persian might be expected to grasp within a day or two.
He knew all about Dick, it seemed, and as he shepherded him nearer to the wall under the watchful eye of Andry, he saw fit to recall, detail by detail, the incidents that had brought Dick to his present pass. And—since lies were in order, if Dick did not know the truth—he spoke of an extradition warrant that the British Government was now moving heaven and earth and the embassy to get.
"Your position is unthinkable!" he assured Dick sympathetically.
He went on to assure Dick that the Princess Olga Karageorgovich was so filled with regret at her share of responsibility for his position that she had used her influence to bring about this meeting with the Shah, who was now, for the third time, about to make a desperate attempt on Persia with the connivance of Russia.
"Once in Persia, with Muhammad Ali Mirza on the throne, the British Government can never extradite you!" he assured him.
"I know nothing about Persia," answered Dick, "and I care nothing about the ex-Shah. Why choose me for this attempt?"
"You saw in Alexandria, surely, what your personality and the legend of that sword of yours can accomplish? Here you see once more. That man—the Afghan with his seven—was on his way homeward. He had already chartered a sailing-boat in which to cross the Caspian with his men, and he refused point-blank to make one of us; but the moment we suggested you might lead the expedition he changed his mind! He is here, now, ready to throw in his lot with you."
"If he asked me to make him Shah," laughed Dick, "I might consider it. He looks something like a man."
"Listen, Mr. Anthony! Lend your sword to this attempt, and within three weeks you can have every fanatic in Persia howling to follow you. The Shah will be a figurehead; you the power behind the throne; Russia your firm friend."
Dick laughed, but said nothing. The picture was not uninviting.
"Consider the alternative."
"I have considered it. I intend to return to England, and face this matter of a warrant."
"Nay, nay, nay! First comes Russia, with her charge of piracy! Siberia, my friend! Siberia, for attempted arson on the high sea! Now! Will you lend your sword to the Shah of Persia?"
"No," said Dick; and he stepped back from the wall. He was thinking hard. The man who had argued with him went on speaking; there was a crack in the wall beside where Dick had stood, and the voice that whispered through it was a woman's.
"Are you thinking of going to Persia?" asked Dick, walking straight up to Usbeg Ali Khan.
"To Afghanistan, sahib, through Persia. First across the Caspian, by boat."
"Is the boat ready?"
"All is ready but the weather. No boat can start in this storm. Even the Russian gunboats dare not move."
Dick laughed again. "Will you start if I show you how?" he asked.
"Then you are for the ex-Shah?"
"No. I am against him."
"Then I, too! Sahib, I will start now for anywhere you name, and fight your enemies!"
"Come on, then!" said Dick. "Come on, Andry!"
"Arrest him before he gets away!" said a voice through the wall.
"Arrest him!" shouted the man who had argued vainly. Somebody blew a whistle, and there came the tramp of hurrying feet, in step.
"Cossacks!" swore Dick. "Are you armed?"
For answer Usbeg Ali Khan and his seven drew their swords.
"Our boat lies alongside the Katrinsky quay," said Usbeg Ali.
"Follow me, then!" answered Dick. They had tempted him with the prospect of a Shah's protection, with its corollary of wealth and license; but they had shown him the road to liberty! He would never have dreamed, but for that offer they made him in the night, of escaping into Persia where no king's writ could be made to reach. Now, though, the line of least resistance lay bright before his eyes, and he knew what his dream had meant!
"Forward!" he shouted.
"Comin', sir!" yelled Andry. And the ten—compact and swift—burst through the extended ranks of a Cossack regiment that was busy surrounding the ruined courtyard. In the heat of that moment somebody yelled the wrong order, and a volley ripped out. Another company of Cossacks, doubling up, halted to fire too—and Dick and his men went through them as an avalanche goes through the pine trees.
It took the Russians ten minutes to ascertain which direction the fugitives had taken, and twenty minutes more to get authority to act. An hour after the wounded had been gathered up, a pursuing party stood on the Katrinsky quay staring through the murk at a sailing-boat whose big, unwieldy sail was disappearing in the night.
To left and right the Russian gunboats ducked and reeled at anchor. The shore, a mile or two beyond, was a litter of splintered shipping, and the town behind—roof-ripped—was shrieking in the wind. But two good Scots seamen, trained in the kyles of Bute, had done what the gunboats dared not do—had put to sea, had worn to windward by dint of sheer, stark courage and good seamanship, and were headed now for Persia with a dead-weight cargo of eight Afghans who knew nothing about sailing-ships.
Ashore, a Cossack officer turned his back and made for shelter. "That man will make trouble for us!" be asserted.
On board the plunging lake-boat, wet through but too full of admiration to be aware of it, the Afghan Usbeg Ali Khan lent his weight to Dick's on the wrenching tiller-bar and swore in his ear, "Sahib—the man who gat thee was an ancestor!"
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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