Donovan Pasha and Some People of Egypt | Page 8

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 and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls. The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."
Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, "Now shall I sleep in peace, by the grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my people?" he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.
"But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?"
Abou Seti's glance fell and his hands twitched. His fingers fumbled with his robe of striped silk. He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his bitter humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with the