A Soldier of the Legion Part 30

"I want to stay."

"Very well, then. I need a man like you, and I want you to stay, if you'll mind your own business."

"I will," Max promised fervently.

But as to what his business was, there might be different opinions.

As the long days pa.s.sed and the caravan toiled on through dunes and alkali deserts and strange, hidden mountainlands, it was hard to keep before his eyes the best way of "minding his own business"--the best way for Sanda. That which was highest in him prayed for peace between her and Stanton. That which was lowest wished for war. And it was war. Not loud, open warfare, but a silent battle never ceasing; and the one hope left in Sanda's heart for her own future was death in the desert. She had determined to go on, and she would go on; but blinding, blessed suns of noon might strike her dead; she might take some malarial fever in the swampy, saltpetre deserts through which the caravan must travel. There were also scorpions and vipers. These things she had heard of as among the minor perils of Stanton's expedition, and there were many more formidable, of course, such as Touaregs and Tibbu brigands. She made Max swear that, if they were attacked, and there were danger for the women, he would shoot her with his own hand. That would not be a bad solution.

And there were others. Her father had said that nearly all experts prophesied annihilation for Stanton and his men.

Sanda did not "behave herself." Nothing less than force could have dragged her to Stanton's tent, and the man openly found consolation with Ahmara; at first, perhaps, partly in defiance, but, as time went on, because such love as he had to give was for the "most fascinating creature since Cleopatra." For the men of the caravan there was nothing very startling in this arrangement. The law of their religion and country gave each of them four wives, if he could afford to keep them.

Ahmara, darkly beautiful and bejewelled, condescended to travel with the other women of her race, but when the camp was made she moved about proudly, like an eastern queen, and went wherever it was her will to go.

Sometimes she pa.s.sed nearer than was necessary to Sanda's tent, and turning her crowned head on its full round throat let her long eyes dwell on the rival who ignored her existence.

The life she had undertaken would have been impossible for Sanda without Max. If he had not been there, a self-appointed watchdog, Ahmara would certainly have insulted Stanton's white bride, or might even have attempted to kill her. But Ahmara was afraid of Max St. George. She had caught a murderous glint in his eye more than once, and knew that if she crossed a certain dead line which that look defined he would not hesitate to deal with her as with a wildcat.

As for Sanda, if she ever thought that Ahmara might stab her some night when Max was off guard, she told herself that she did not care. She longed for death as the one way out of the cage into which she had foolishly flown, and would have prayed for it, if such a prayer were not to her mind sacrilegious. She was too young to realize that to wish is to pray. Sanda was always hoping that something might happen to put an end to everything for her. She disregarded precautions which others took against sunstroke. If there came up a sandstorm she stole away and faced it while the rest sheltered, longing to be overwhelmed and blotted out of existence. But it seemed extraordinarily difficult to die. And then, there was always Max. Unfailingly he was on the spot to ward off danger, or to save her from the effects of what he called her "carelessness,"

though he must have guessed the meaning underneath alleged imprudences.

Sanda never confided in Max, yet she was aware that he could not help knowing why she refused to live with Stanton. She could not bear to speak of her humiliation, and Max would have cut his tongue out rather than let slip a word concerning it after his first vain appeal.

As time went on and the caravan advanced on its march across the desert, Stanton ignored the presence of Sanda as she ignored Ahmara's. She ate and slept in her own tent, which had been Max's. He it was who saw that she had good food and filtered water. Wherever fruit could be got, by fair means or foul, there was some for her, whether others had it or not. Max made coffee and tea for Sanda. He tended the camel she rode in order that it might be strong and in good health. When the caravan came into the country of the Touaregs he rode near her day by day, and at night lay as close to her tent as he dared. Sometimes he noticed that Stanton eyed him cynically when he performed unostentatious services for Sanda, but outwardly the only two white men were on civil terms. Stanton even seemed glad of Max's companions.h.i.+p, and discussed routes and prospects with him, asking his advice sometimes; and once, when the explorer was attacked by a Soudanese maddened by the sun and Stanton's brutality, Max struck up the black man's weapon; almost before he knew what he was doing he had saved the life of Sanda's husband.

"Why did I do it?" he asked himself afterward. Yet he knew some strange "kink" in his nature would compel him to do the same thing again under like circ.u.mstances.

Stanton, at his best, was an ideal leader of men. Many a forlorn hope he had led and brought to success through sheer self-confidence and belief in his star. But whether the failure of his mad marriage had disturbed his faith in his own persistent luck, or whether Ahmara's influence made for degeneration, in any case, a blight seemed to have fallen on the once great man's mentality. It had been a boast of his that, though he drank freely when "resting on his laurels" in Europe, he was strong enough to "swear off" at any moment. He had accustomed himself to taking tea and water only in blazing African heat; and since the serious illness that followed his sunstroke he had been forbidden to touch alcohol anywhere, in any circ.u.mstances. For a time he had been frightened into obedience to doctors' orders; but gradually he had drifted back into old habits; and after his quarrel with Ahmara at Touggourt he found oblivion in much Scotch whisky, his favourite drink.

Perhaps if all had gone well with Stanton, if Ahmara had not come again into his life and lost him Sanda's childlike wors.h.i.+p, he might have pulled himself together after the starting of the caravan. But, as it was, there were black thoughts to be chased away, and the simplest receipt for replacing them with bright ones was to fill his head with fumes of whisky.

When Sanda, riding behind her curtains, or shrinking in her tent, heard Stanton cursing the negro porters, and roaring profane abuse at the camels and camel-drivers, she did not know that he was drunk; but the men knew, and, being sober by religion, ceased to respect him. Among themselves, they began to question the wisdom of his orders, and suspect him of treachery toward themselves. Losing faith in the leader, they lost faith in the wonderful hidden oasis he sought, the oasis peopled by rich Egyptians who had vanished into the desert to escape persecution after the Sixth Dynasty. Arabs and negroes said it must be true after all that the "Chief" was mad, and they had been mad to trust themselves to him, or to believe in the mysterious city lost beyond unexplored mountains and s.h.i.+fting dunes which were but shrouds for dead men. He was either deliberately leading them all to death, for the insane pleasure of it, or else he had some plan for making his own fortune by selling his escort as slaves. Men began to desert whenever they came to an attractive stopping-place where there was food and water. They feigned illness, or fled in the night with their camels into the vastness of the desert, their faces turned once more to the west. For soon, if they stayed, they would pa.s.s beyond the zone of known oases, into the terrible land of mystery, charted by no man, a land where it was said the sun had dried up all the springs of water. So the caravan dwindled as slowly, painfully it moved toward the east; and even while he hated him, Max was sometimes moved to pity for the hara.s.sed leader. Stanton grew haggard as the desert closed in round him and his disaffected followers; but there were days when, instead of sympathizing reluctantly, Max cursed the explorer for a brute, and cursed himself for saving the brute's life. There were days when Stanton shot or whipped a Soudanese for an impudent word, or ordered a forced march because Sanda had sent to beg respite for some wretch struck down with fever whom she was nursing.

As the men lost faith in Stanton and his vision of the Lost Oasis they attached themselves fanatically to the wife of their Chief, the "Little White Moon," who seldom spoke to her husband save to defend one of their number from his fits of anger, and who, with her golden hair and her skin of snow that the fierce sun could not darken, was like the s.h.i.+ning angel who walks at the right hand of a good Mohammedan. They saw no wrong in Ahmara's presence; but she was haughty and high-tempered, and took part against them with Stanton. The whisper ran that the dancing-woman had brought bad luck to the expedition for so long as she was with the caravan; whereas, if fortune were to come, it would come through the white girl who nursed the sick and had a smile or a kind word for the humblest porter. This whisper reached Ahmara's ears through the wives of the camel-drivers, and at first she was anxious to keep it from Stanton lest it should prejudice him and put into his head the idea of leaving her at one of the far apart oasis towns where the caravan took supplies. But the more she turned over the thought in her unenlightened mind, the more impossible it seemed to her that Stanton would give her up. Besides, he was very brave, even braver than the great chiefs of her own race, for they feared unseen things and omens, whereas he laughed at their superst.i.tion. She used every art of the professional charmer upon Stanton for the next few days, while she asked herself whether to tell what she had learnt, or not to tell, were wiser.

When she was convinced that she had made herself more indispensable than ever, Ahmara put the story into the form that seemed to her very good.

She said that nothing which pa.s.sed in the caravan could escape her, because the life of the leader was her life. She wished to be for him like a lighted candle set at the door of his tent, the flame her spirit, which felt each breath of evil threatening his safety. The men who hated the Chief for his power or because he had punished them hated her also because she was true to him as the blood that beat in his heart.

"Those who are cowards and find the greatness of thy adventures too great for them, now they have tasted hards.h.i.+p, mutter in secret against thee," Ahmara said. "There are some who mean to band together and refuse to follow thee past the last-known oasis which is marked on thy maps.

They say, that from what they have heard, thou art indeed mad to think that a caravan can live in unknown deserts where there is no water. Once they believed in thee so firmly if thou hadst told them thou couldst cause water to spout from dry sand they would have taken thy word for truth. But now the white girl, who is too proud to be thy wife because thy faithful one followed thee into the desert, has bewitched the men.

They think she is a _marabouta_, a saint endowed with magic power, and that her spirit is stronger than thine. They will offer themselves to _her_ man, when we come to the place where the known way ends, if he will promise to lead them straight to Egypt, without wandering across the open desert to seek thy Lost Oasis."

"Her man!" echoed Stanton, the blood suffusing his already bloodshot eyes as in an instant it reddens those of an angry St. Bernard. "What do you mean?"

"Thou knowest without my telling, my Chief. The man whose idol she is.

There is but one man--the man who watches over her by day and night, and makes himself her slave."

"You're a fool, Ahmara," Stanton said roughly. "Don't you suppose I've got sense enough to see why you want to put such ideas into my head?

You're jealous of my wife. St. George and she are nothing to each other.

As for the men, like as not they growl in your hearing because they hope you'll repeat their nonsense to me and give me a fright. That's all there is in it."

"I know thou art a lion and fearest nothing," Ahmara meekly answered.

But next day she saw that Stanton watched Max.

On the following night they came to the oasis of which she had spoken.

It was called Darda, and lay between two danger-zones. The first of these--danger from man--was practically pa.s.sed at Darda, Stanton calculated, and knew that he had been lucky to bring his caravan through the land of the Touaregs (which he had risked rather than face almost certain death along the shorter, more northern way of Tripolitania) with only a few thefts from marauders and no loss of life by violence.

Perhaps the formidable size of the caravan and the arms it carried had been its protection, rather than the repute of its leader; but Stanton took the credit to himself. He told himself that, after all, he had triumphed over difficulties as no other man in his place could have done. It was monstrous and incredible that the spirit of the caravan should have turned against him. He said this over and over, but in his heart he knew that he had lost prestige through faults in his own nature, and because of mistakes he had made ever since the bad beginning. He knew that, although he had brought his followers through the first danger-zone without too many accidents, the second zone, the uncharted zone of Libyan desert which stretched before them now, had ten times more of danger in it than the zone of danger from men. Whisky could not chase away his gloom that night when he had come to camp from the house of the sheikh who had entertained him at dinner in the village, and to whom he had given valuable presents in exchange for help expected. But if the liquor could not cheer him, it made him conscious of his own bulldog tenacity.

"I'll show the ungrateful devils who is master," he thought as he looked out from his tent door to the glow of the fire round which his men had been watching some naked male dancers of Darda. The dancers had gone, but the watchers had not yet moved. They were talking together more quietly than usual, in groups. Stanton wondered what they were saying; and he stared, frowning, over their heads toward the east, where lay the Libyan desert. They were practically out of the Sahara now.

As he gazed, Ahmara came flitting across a moonlit s.p.a.ce of sand that lay like a silver lake between the tent and the rest of the camp.

"Thou art back, O master of my heart, from thy visit to the sheikh," she said. "Did it pa.s.s off well?"

"Well enough," Stanton answered mechanically. For the moment he was indifferent to Ahmara, though her strange face was tragically beautiful.

In the pale light the figure of Max St. George became suddenly visible to him. It moved out from behind the tents and walked over to the fire.

Stanton, on a quick impulse, called out to Max harshly:

"Come here, St. George! I want you; hurry up!"

Ahmara slipped behind Stanton, who took a step forward, and, as he forgot her, she darted into his tent.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SANDA SPEAKS

It was Max's policy, for Sanda's sake, never to give Stanton a pretext to send him away. He kept his temper under provocations almost intolerable; and now he obeyed the truculent summons.

"What do you want?" he asked stiffly when he had come near enough to speak in an ordinary tone.

"I'll tell you inside my tent," the explorer answered, stalking in first and leaving his guest to follow. Stanton was somewhat surprised to see Ahmara sitting on her feet, her ringed hands on her knees, her crowned head thrown back against the canvas wall; but on the whole, he was not sorry that she was there. She might be useful. He only smiled sarcastically when, at sight of her, Max stopped on the threshold.

"Don't be afraid to come in," Stanton laughed; "the lady won't mind."

"But _I_ do," Max returned, with the curt politeness of tone which irritated Stanton. "I'll stand here if you please."

"All right. My orders won't take long to give. I want you to go to your friend's tent with a message from me."

"My friend's tent?" Max's eyes sent out a spark in the dull yellow light.

"My wife's tent, then, if you think the name's more appropriate. I believe she's likely to favour you as a messenger, and she hasn't gone to bed, for her tent's lit up. Tell her from me, I find it subversive of discipline in this caravan for a woman to set her will up against the leader and live apart from her husband. Entirely for that reason and not because I want anything to do with her, after the way I've been treated, I've made up my mind that she and I must live together like other married people. I wish the change to be made with the knowledge of the whole caravan. Go and tell her to come here; and then give my orders to Mahmoud and Zaid to bring anything over she may need."

If eyes could kill, Stanton would have dropped like a felled ox. But Max would not give him the satisfaction of a blow or even of a word. With a look of disgust such as he might have thrown at a wallowing drunkard in a gutter, St. George turned his back on the explorer and walked away.

Before he could escape out of earshot, however, the Chief was bawling instructions to Ahmara.