"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But
stick--plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey,
illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.
"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in
broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers--beg the Bey to be
merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth--his
cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes
clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay--I can pay
him well! ..."
"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face
with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the
spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"
"By--telling--but I will tell no one but the Bey--where the money has
been hidden away! ..."
"Hidden money--and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes.
They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind
them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew--out with it!--where is
the money?"
"I will tell--I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice
between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the
door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of
English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni
priest--and coveting the money, buried it--where I will tell thee...."
"_Peki_! Very good,--all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and
dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then
kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the _anghareb_.
The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted
in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody
sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog!
Tell now--or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."
"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles
stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower!
Bend thine ear close! I buried--I buried it--"
"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning
teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? _Ai--y!_ ..."
The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat,
even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it--between
the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might
do--and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm
from under the chain that binds him down--and with a second wrench,
releases the other....
Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale
eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his
gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the
great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain
deluges the face and breast of his enemy.
"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in
Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought
thee a gift instead--the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death
at these hands of mine--murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist
yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!--this for
Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël--who takes
the head of the dog! ..."
The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax
their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head
bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull,
heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.