The Eye of Zeitoon | Page 9

best pleased his fancy.
Travelers make an early start in Asia Minor, but the yard was by no
means empty yet; some folk were still waiting on the doubtful weather.
Her own people kept to the tent. Whoever else had business in the yard
made common cause and cursed the girl for making the disturbance,
frightening camels, horses, asses and themselves. And she ignored
them all, unless it was on purpose that she brought her stallion's heels
too close for safety to the most abusive.
It was only for us two that she had any kind of friendly interest; she
kept looking up at us and laughing as she caught our eyes, bringing her
mount uprearing just beneath us several times. She was pretty as the
peep o' morning, with long, black wavy hair all loose about her
shoulders, and as light on the horse as the foam he tossed about,
although master of him without a second's doubt of it.
When she had had enough of riding--long before we were tired of the
spectacle--she shouted with a voice like a mellow bell. One of the
gipsies ran out and led away the sweating stallion, and she disappeared
into the tent throwing us a laugh over her shoulder.
"D'you suppose those gipsies are really of that Armenian's party?" Will
wondered aloud. "Now, if she were going to Zeitoon--!"
Feeling as he did, I mocked at him to hide my feelings, and we hung
about for another hour in hope of seeing her again, but she kept close. I
don't doubt she watched us through a hole in the tent. We would have
sat there alert in our chairs until evening only Fred sent a note down to
say he was well enough to leave the hospital.
We found him with his beard trimmed neatly and his fevered eyes all
bright again, sitting talking to the nurse on the veranda about a niece of
hers--Gloria Vanderman.
"Chicken in this desert!" Will wondered irreverently, and Fred, who
likes his English to have dictionary meanings, rose from his chair in
wrath. The nurse made that the cue for getting rid of us.
"Take Mr. Oakes away!" she urged, laughing. "He threatened to kill a
man this morning. There's too much murder in Tarsus now. If he should
add to it--"

"You know it wasn't on my account," Fred objected. "It was what he
wrote--and said of you. Why, he has had you prayed for publicly by
name, and you washing the brute's feet! Let me back in there for just
five minutes, and I'll show what a hospital case should really look
like!"
"Take him away!" she laughed. "Isn't it bad enough to be prayed for?
Must I get into the papers, too, as heroine of a scandal?"
The head missionary was not there to say good-by to, life in his case
being too serious an affair to waste minutes of a precious morning on
farewells, so we packed Fred into the waiting carriage and drove all the
way to Mersina, where we interrupted Monty's mid-afternoon game of
chess.
Fred Oakes and Monty were the closest friends I ever met--one
problem for an enemy--one stout, two-headed, most dependable ally for
the lucky man or woman they called friend.
"Oh, hullo!" said Monty over his shoulder, as our names were called
out by the stately consular kavass.
"Hullo!" said Fred, and shook hands with the consul.
"Thought you were due to be sick for another week?" said Monty,
closing up the board.
"I was. I would have been. Bed would have done me good, and the
nurse is a darling, old enough to be Will's mother. But they put a biped
by the name of Peter Measel in the bed next mine. He's a missionary on
his own account, and keeps a diary. Seems be contributes to the funds
of a Welsh mission in France, and they do what he says. He has all the
people he disapproves of prayed for publicly by name in the mission
hall in Marseilles, with extracts out of his diary by way of explanation,
so that the people who pray may know what they've got on their hands.
The special information I gave him about you, Monty, will make
Marseilles burn! He's got you down as a drunken pirate, my boy, with
no less than eleven wives. But be asked me one night whether I thought
what he'd written about the nurse was strong enough, and he read it
aloud to me. You'd never believe what the reptile had dared suggest in
his devil's log-book! I'm expelled for threatening to kill him!"
"The nurse was right," said the consul gloomily. "There'll be murder
enough hereabouts--and soon!"
He was a fairly young man yet in spite of the nearly white