"Because," he said, "I have failed to act up to my principles."
"In what?" I inquired.
"In saving the life of a scoundrel at the risk of my own," he answered.
Then he told me his story. "I left Tangier," he said, "with four men in
my caravan, but it did not suit me to bring them into Fez, so I
dismissed them a day's ride from here, paying in full for the whole
journey and making a present over. My generosity was a blunder. The Moor
can not comprehend an act of disinterested kindness, and I saw the
ruffians lay their heads together to find out what it could mean. Three
of them gave it up and went off home, but the fourth determined to
follow the trace. His name was Larby."
_Larby! El Arby, my son? Did you say El Arby? Of Tangier, too? A Moor?
Or was he a Spanish renegade turned Muslim? But no matter--no matter._
"He was my guide," said the American, "and a most brazen hypocrite,
always cheating me. I let him do so, it amused me--always lying to my
face, and always fumbling his beads--'God forgive me! God forgive
me'--an appropriate penance, you know the way of it. 'Peace, Sidi!' said
the rascal: 'Farewell! Allah send we meet in Paradise.' But the devil
meant that we should meet before that. We have met. It was a hot moment.
Do you know the Hamadsha Mosque? It is a place in a side street sacred
to the preaching of a fanatical follower of one Sidi Ali bin Hamdoosh,
and to certain wild dances executed in a glass and fire eating frenzy. I
thought I should like to hear a Moorish D. L. Moody, and one day I went
there. As I was going in I met a man coming out. It was Larby. 'Beeba!'
he whispered, with a tragic start--that was his own name for me on the
journey. 'Keep your tongue between your teeth,' I whispered back. 'I was
Beeba yesterday, to-day I'm Sidi Mohammed.' Then I entered, I spread my
prayer-mat, chanted my first Sura, listened to a lusty sermon, and came
out. There, as I expected, in the blind lane leading from the Hamadsha
to the town was Larby waiting for me. 'Beeba,' said he, with a grin,
'you play a double hand of cards.' 'Then,' said I, 'take care I don't
trump your trick.' The rascal had thought I might bribe him, and when he
knew that I would not I saw murder in his face. He had conceived the
idea of betraying me at the next opportunity. At that moment he was as
surely aiming at my life as if he had drawn his dagger and stabbed me.
It was then that I disgraced my principles."
"How? how?" I said, though truly I had little need to ask.
"We were alone, I tell you, in a blind lane," said the American; "but I
remembered stories the man had told me of his children. 'Little Hoolia,'
he called his daughter, a pretty, black-eyed mite of six, who always
watched for him when he was away."
I was breaking into perspiration. "Do you mean," I said, "that you
should have--"
"I mean that I should have killed the scoundrel there and then!" said
the American.
"God forbid it!" I cried, and my hair rose from my scalp in horror.
"Why not?" said the American. "It would have been an act of
_self-defense_. The man meant to kill me. He will kill me still if I
give him the chance. What is the difference between murder in a moment
and murder after five, ten, fifteen, twenty days? Only that one is
murder in hot blood and haste and the other is murder in cold blood and
by stealth. Is it life that you think so precious? Then why should I
value _his_ life more than I value _my own_?"