Donovan Pasha and Some People of Egypt | Page 8

"Safe enough, or aw'm a Dootchman," said Holgate. Then they talked
in a low voice together. Down in the saloon, Dicky sat watching
Heatherby. At last the Lost One raised his head again.
"It's worth more to me, this night, than you fellows know," he said
brokenly.
"That's all right," said Dicky. "Have a cigar?"
He shook his head. "It's come at the right time. I wanted to be treated
like an Englishman once more--just once more."
"Don't worry. Take in a reef and go steady for a bit. The milk's spilt,
but there are other meadows. . . ." Dicky waved an arm up the river, up
towards the Soudan!
The Lost One nodded, then his eyes blazed up and took on a hungry
look. His voice suddenly came in a whisper.
"Gordon was a white man. Gordon said to me three years ago: 'Come
with me, I'll help you on. You don't need to live, if you don't want to.
Most of us will get knocked out up there in the Soudan.' Gordon said
that to me. But there was another fellow with Gordon who knew me,
and I couldn't face it. So I stayed behind here. I've been everything,
anything, to that swine, Selamlik Pasha; but when he told me yesterday
to bring him the daughter of the Arab he killed with his kourbash, I
jibbed. I couldn't stand that. Her father had fed me more than once. I
jibbed --by God, I jibbed! I said I was an Englishman, and I'd see him
damned first. I said it, and I shot the horse, and I'd have shot
him--what's that?"

There was a churning below. The Amenhotep was moving from the
bank.
"She's going--the boat's going," said the Lost One, trembling to his feet.
"Sit down," said Dicky, and gripped him by the arm. "Where are you
taking me?" asked Heatherby, a strange, excited look in his face.
"Up the river."
He seemed to read Dicky's thoughts--the clairvoyance of an
overwrought mind: "To--to Assouan?" The voice had a curious
far-away sound.
"You shall go beyond Assouan," said Dicky. "To--to Gordon?"
Heatherby's voice was husky and indistinct.
"Yes, here's Fielding; he'll give you the tip. Sit down." Dicky gently
forced him down into a chair. Six months later, a letter came to Dicky
from an Egyptian officer, saying that Heatherby of the Buffs had died
gallantly fighting in a sortie sent by Gordon into the desert.
"He had a lot of luck," mused Dicky as he read. "They don't end that
way as a rule."
Then he went to Fielding, humming a certain stave from one of Watts's
hymns.

THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE--AND THE DRUM
He lived in the days of Ismail the Khedive, and was familiarly known
as the Murderer. He had earned his name, and he had no repentance.
From the roof of a hut in his native village of Manfaloot he had
dropped a grindstone on the head of Ebn Haroun, who contended with
him for the affections of Ahassa, the daughter of Haleel the barber, and
Ebn Haroun's head was flattened like the cover of a pie. Then he had
broken a cake of dourha bread on the roof for the pigeons above him,

and had come down grinning to the street, where a hesitating mounted
policeman fumbled with his weapon, and four ghaffirs waited for him
with their naboots.
Seti then had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of
Ebn Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be
marched off to the mudirieh. There the Mudir glared at him and had
him loaded with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred
convicts arrayed themselves against myriad tribes which, killed
individually, made a spot on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit!
The carnage was great, and though Seti was sleepless night after night
it was not because of his crime. He found some solace, however, in
provoking his fellow-prisoners to assaults upon each other; and every
morning he grinned as he saw the dead and wounded dragged out into
the clear sunshine.
The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night
to the Mudir and said deceitfully: "Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I
have been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran that
a man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour's? What
should Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of
Allah, the Effendi Insagi, lives? What is honestly mine is eight feddans,
and the rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi."
Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of
offering backsheesh.
And the Mudir had due anger