“Perish me! Rot and wither my soul and eyes if it ain’t Sa?d!” exclaimed Captain Benjamin MacBride, hopping across the court, his square hand extended. “Sa?d, my bully, where d’you hail from?”
“I’m on the bodyguard at Rabat. The Sultan’s building there now. Skalas all round and seven new mosques are the order, I hear—we’ll all be carrying bricks soon. I rode over to see you.”
“You ain’t looking too proud,” said MacBride; “sort of wasted-like, and God ha’ mercy. Flux?”
Ortho shook his head. “No, but I’ve had my troubles, and”—indicating the sailor’s bandaged eye and his crutch—“so have you, it seems.”
“Curse me, yes! Fell in with a fat Spanisher off Ortegal and mauled him down to a sheer hulk when up romps a brace of American ‘thirties’ and serves me cruel. If it hadn’t been for nightfall and a shift of wind I should have been a holy angel by now. Bad times, boy, bad times. Too many warships about, and all merchantmen sailing in convoy. I tell you I shall be glad when there’s a bit of peace and good-will on earth again. Just now everybody’s armed and it’s plaguy hard to pick up an honest living.”
“Governor here, aren’t you?” Ortho inquired.
“Aye. Soft lie-abed shore berth till my wounds heal and we can get back to business. Fog in the river?”
“Thick; couldn’t see across.”
“It’s lying on the sea like a blanket,” said MacBride. “I’ve been watching it from my tower. Come along and see the girls. They’re all here save Tama; she runned away with a Gharb sheik when I was cruising—deceitful slut!—but I’ve got three new ones.”
Ayesha and Schems-ed-dah were most welcoming. They had grown somewhat matronly, but otherwise time seemed to have left them untouched. As ever they were gorgeously dressed, bejeweled and painted up with carmine, henna and kohl. Fluttering and twittering about their ex-slave, they plied him with questions. He had been to the wars? Wounded? How many men had he killed? What was his rank? A kaid rahal of cavalry. . . . Ach! chut, chut! A great man! On the bodyguard! . . . Ay-ee! Was it true the Sultan’s favorite Circassians ate off pure gold? Was he married yet?
When he told them the recent plague in Morocco had killed both his wife and son their liquid eyes brimmed over. No whit less sympathetic were the three new beauties; they wept in concert, though ten minutes earlier Ortho had been an utter stranger to them. Their hearts were very tender. A black eunuch entered bearing the elaborate tea utensils. As he turned to go, MacBride called “aji,” pointing to the ground before him.
The slave threw up his hands in protest. “Oh, no, lord, please.”
“Kneel down,” the sailor commanded. “I’ll make you spring your ribs laughing, Sa?d, my bonny. Give me your hand, Mohar.”
“Lord, have mercy!”
“Mercy be damned! Your hand, quick!”
The piteous great creature extended a trembling hand, was grasped by the wrist and twisted onto his back.
“Now, my pearls, my rosebuds,” said MacBride.
The five little birds of paradise tucked their robes about them and surrounded the prostrate slave, tittering and wriggling their forefingers at him. Even before he was touched he screamed, but when the tickling began in earnest he went mad, doubling, screwing, clawing the air with his toes, shrieking like a soul in torment—which indeed he was.
With the pearls and rosebuds it was evidently a favorite pastime; they tickled with diabolical cunning that could only come of experience, shaking with laughter and making sibilant noises the while—“Pish—piss-sh!” Finally when the miserable victim was rolling up the whites of his eyes, mouthing foam and seemed on the point of throwing a fit, MacBride released him and he escaped.
The captain wiped the happy tears from his remaining eye and turned on Ortho as one recounting an interesting scientific observation.
“Very thin-skinned for a Sambo. D’you know I believe he’d sooner take a four-bag at the gangway than a minute o’ that. I do, so help me; I believe he’d sooner be flogged. Vee-ry curious. Come up and I’ll show you my command.”
The Atlantic was invisible from the tower, sheeted under fog which, beneath a windless sky, stretched away to the horizon in woolly white billows. Ortho had an impression of a mammoth herd of tightly packed sheep.
“There’s a three-knot tide under that, sweeping south, but it don’t ’pear to move it much,” MacBride observed. “I’ll warrant that bank ain’t higher nor a first-rate’s topgallant yard. I passed through the western squadron once in a murk like that there. Off Dungeness, it was. All their royals was sticking out, but my little hooker was trucks down, out o’ sight.” He pointed to the north. “Knitra’s over there, bit of a kasba like this. Er-rhossi has it; a sturdy fellow for a Greek, but my soul what a man to drink! Stayed here for a week and ’pon my conscience he had me baled dry in two days—me! Back there’s the forest, there’s pig . . . what are you staring at?”
Ortho spun about guiltily. “Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing. What were you saying? The forest . . .”
He became suddenly engrossed in the view of the forest of Marmora.
“What’s the matter? You look excited, like as if you’d seen something,” said MacBride suspiciously.
“I’ve seen nothing,” Ortho replied. “What should I see?”
“Blest if I know; only you looked startled.”
“I was thinking.”
“Oh, was you? Well, as I was saying, there’s a mort o’ pigs in there, wild ’uns, and lions too, by report, but I ain’t seen none. I’ll get some sport as soon as my leg heals. This ain’t much of a place though. Can’t get no money out of charcoal burners, not if you was to torture ’em for a year. As God is my witness I’ve done my best, but the sooty vermin ain’t got any.” He sighed. “I shall be devilish glad when we can get back to our lawful business again. I’ve heard married men in England make moan about their ‘family responsibilities’—but what of me? I’ve got three separate families already and two more on the way! What d’you say to that—eh?”
Ortho sympathized with the much domesticated seaman and declared he must be going.
“You’re in hell’s own hurry all to a sudden.”
“I’m on the bodyguard, you know.”
“Well, if you must that’s an end on’t, but I was hoping you’d stop for days and we’d have a chaw over old Jerry Gish—he-he! What a man! Say, would you have the maidens plague that Sambo once more before you go? Would you now? Give the word!”
Ortho declined the pleasure and asked if MacBride could sell him a boat compass.
“I can sell you two or three, but what d’you want it for?”
“I’m warned for the Guinea caravan,” Ortho explained. “A couple of akkabaah have been lost lately; the guides went astray in the sands. I want to keep some check on them.”
“I thought the Guinea force went out about Christmas.”
“No, this month.”
“Well, you know best, I suppose,” said the captain and gave him a small compass, refusing payment.
“Come back and see us before you go,” he shouted as Ortho went out of the gate.
“Surely,” the latter replied and rode southwards for Sallee at top speed, knowing full well that, unless luck went hard against him, so far from seeing Ben MacBride again he would be out of the country before midnight.
While Ourida lived, life in Morocco had its compensations; with her death it had become insupportable. He had ridden down to the sea filled with a cold determination to seize the first opportunity of escape and, if none occurred, to make one. Plans had been forming in his mind of working north to Tangier, there stealing a boat and running the blockade into beleaguered Gibraltar, some forty miles distant, a scheme risky to the point of foolhardiness. But remain he would not.
Now unexpectedly, miraculously, an opportunity had come. Despite his denials he had seen something from MacBride’s tower; the upper canvas of a ship protruding from the fog about a mile and a half out from the coast, by the cut and the long coach-whip pennant at the main an Englishman. Just a glimpse as the royals rose out of a trough of the fog billows, just the barest glimpse, but quite enough. Not for nothing had he spent his boyhood at the gates of the Channel watching the varied traffic passing up and down. And a few minutes earlier MacBride had unwittingly supplied him with the knowledge he needed, the pace and direction of the tide. Ortho knew no arithmetic, but common sense told him that if he galloped he should reach Sallee two hours ahead of that ship. She had no wind, she would only drift. He drove his good horse relentlessly, and as he went decided exactly what he would do.
It was dark when he reached the Bab Sebta, and over the low-lying town the fog lay like a coverlet.
He passed through the blind town, leaving the direction to his horse’s instinct, and came out against the southern wall. Inquiring of an unseen pedestrian, he learnt he was close to the Bab Djedid, put his beast in a public stable near by, detached one stirrup, and, feeling his way through the gate, struck over the sand banks towards the river. He came on it too far to the west, on the spit where it narrows opposite the Kasba Oudaia of Rabat; the noise of water breaking at the foot of the great fortress across the Bon Regreg told him as much.
Turning left-handed, he followed the river back till he brought up against the ferry boats. They were all drawn up for the night; the owners had gone, taking their oars with them. “Damnation!” His idea had been to get a man to row him across and knock him on the h............